What Happen To Ebay ?

As a buyer, I can attest to the belief that competition has been down on this end, at least for the material on which I bid (revenues, taxpaids, and the like). I've ended up having to pay far below what I thought I would for quality items the last six months, and certainly much, much less than I would retail.

Frankly, if this is a downturn in ebay buyer activity, I welcome it. I understand that sellers might be hurting here, but I've been getting good stamps at half of what I was willing to pay.

when I originaly signed up for paypal it was so long ago not only did they not charge any fees but actualy paid you 5.00 to join, I never could figure out how they made money back then but nobody would use ebays pay thing since paypal was free then ebay bought them and they got a pile of money and we started getting charged. In the begining of ebay we bought stuff with no pictures because cameras cost 1000 bux and most people didnt have one.

Just got put through the hoops with a paypal account that lay dormant since Feb this year.

I knew I was in trouble 10 mins after talking to the paypal lady when yes said " if your are who you say you are ". Instantly terminated that contact gracefully.

It took me 10 days to get my new paypal account working. It would of been longer if they could not have sent me a pin number though my other account's email.

I have yet to have a waitress ask for, and walk off with, my paypal username & password.

Best to focus on the real vulnerabilities, eh?

Battle - that is the problem. Quite a few buyers browse rather than do a narrowly targeted serach, and they end up drowning every time the listings swell when they offer those list a bazillion for free promos. Teher are certain sellers in one category I browse that trot out all their overpriced stuff during these promos. If it costs them nothing they will keep on clogging the category.

Exactly my point ! If I wanted to look at the same overpriced stuff over and over I'd go to BidStart of Delcampe. No listing fees = no need to price to sell. I know because I'm a seller too. I take advantage of the free listings. I can't recall the last time I paid a listing fee.

One more time: Charge a fee to list and reduce the final value fees. Even if it's just refunding the listing fee when an item sells. Let's keep this an auction site.

As the words roll off the keyboard, I realize that the stamp category on ebay is small stuff compared to their overall picture, probably doesn't make sense for them in most of their other categories. We're probably beating a dead horse here.

Why do you think this same principle would not apply to, say, all other collectibles?

eyeonwall: Free listings or not, there's always millions upon millions of items listed. If the number of listings even doubles from say 10 million to 20 million it really doesn't make a difference. ebay is not like sitting at one dealer's table sorting through a red box. It's like sitting at all the dealers' table at every show on the planet at once. You just have to deal with it or start using a refined search.

Those sellers who sell overpriced items will do the same at any web site regardless of listing fees although they might limit them if there were scaled listing fees like before - they might think twice to list a "$1000" item for $10 instead of the current 30 cents. At physical stamp shows if you raise the table prices the dealers don't drop their prices, but instead they bring out their more expensive items and leave the more affordable, cheaper items at home.

Regardless of listing fee or not, a seller should be motivated to sell otherwise they are just wasting their own time. I usually don't pay listing fees on ebay either, but I'm highly motivated to sell thus I start everything at 99 cents and it doesn't matter what it is. I don't want to waste my time, but I like to lower my risks too. I like the auction format too and the lack of listing fees motivate me to list more and keep the starting price at 99 cents. I think this is a good thing for both sellers and buyers. ebay I guess is trying to make sellers more motivated to sell with the refundable listing fee if an item sells. Not sure how much of an impact that has had on the site.

Delcampe has a retroactive listing fee - a fee on items that sell (12 to 18 cents depending on subscription). There's no motivation to sell there as there's not much traffic compared to ebay.

BATTLE .......There are two things wrong with your "a seller should be motivated to sell" . First there are a lot of sellers looking to unload stuff to the "clueless crowd of buyers" and those who don't understand catalog pricing to real market prices . The second group of sellers that you don't seem to understand are those people who are paying top dollars at auctions for inventory so they can break down a huge lot and resell sell it for a profit on ebay . Not everybody can list stuff at 99 cents and hope that it gets a lot better price ,they don't want the risk losing money on a sale .

Paul - There's about as many clueless sellers as there are clueless buyers and neither are my problem, but one nice thing about the internet is that any buyer with a smidge of sense should know that they can shop around and find better prices and items. If used properly one can also find information and opinions pretty fast and easy on the net. A buyer just has to put out the effort. There's a wealth of knowledge out there.

I do understand the second group - I'm part of it, but I find my methods to be very competitive against other sellers. I'm motivated to sell as having material sitting around doesn't earn interest. It's best to have material to come in the door and out the door. Maybe it's different for stamp sellers versus cover dealers like myself, but the system works well for me.

Ah, the CCB ("clueless crowd of buyers") Narrative.

Nice story, but how much can it matter?

Are we really to imagine a world in which folks with credit cards and zero knowledge of some field of collectibles sit in front of their computer spending hundreds of dollars on they-know-not-what?

Are we really to believe that they do this, again, and again, and again, so as to fuel an entire mini-industry?

Are we to convince ourselves that they do not figure it out PDQ (pretty darn quick)?

(Even if they don't like shopping, sooner or later they are going to notice that prices vary.)

If one thousand dolts spent one thousand blind dollars each, in one year, they'd spend one million dollars.

Is one million dollars per year gonna ruin the hobby? ebay?

Are the sort of people who would spend money blind gonna turn on a dime, re-invent their personalities, and start spending hundreds of hours each year to learn the hobby?

If not, who have we lost?

I think that the real suckers are the folks furiously scanning their gems, and laboriously describing & listing them at ridiculous prices, and sitting around waiting for their suckers to show-up.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I've been watching this thread with great interest. I've been buying and doing some selling on ebay for over 15 years. It's definitely changed over time, but more importantly it's changed our industry. The unfortunate side effect is that anyone can sell and the "common" items can easily flood all the listing making it harder and harder to find some of the more "unique" items that make collecting interesting. Before ebay simply completing a used US collection from 1940-2000 could be difficult. Now we are flooded with these issues and finding there are more copies of most of these stamps than there are collectors! This is not unique to stamps - I do know the rare book industry had been turned on their head due to ebay as well.

Most of my purchases these days are from small sellers outside the US. I purchased a small lot of Roo's from a seller in Tasmania. Our of curiousity I looked up his address on Google maps finding a small rural house on a dirt road. ebay is essentially connecting collectors from around the world - prior to ebay there was little hope that a collector from rural Tasmania would be able to sell directly to a collector in metropolitan NYC.

This new global online economy has pushed brick and mortar stores out of business as well as our local stamp shows. It's also flooded the market with more common items, making it harder to find some of the more specialized items. There are over 1 million stamp listings on ebay as I write this. Trying to find the items I want is getting harder and harder. I tend to spend most of my time browsing known sellers while spending less time searching through the millions of other listing. I also use sites beyond ebay including auctions and retailers.

Finally, the NobleSpirits and NYStamps of the world have become the "Walmart" of stamp dealers. They move large volumes of material at prices the current market will support. I stop by their stores from time to time, but it's hard to find the truly good lots in their listings. Every item is described with over the top adjectives such as "valuable, desirable, scarce, fantastic, etc..." making the descriptions utterly useless. Add to the fact they both list single stamps leads me to believe they cull the best stamps from some of the collections.

I don't simply got to the main Stamps category and try to wade through it all and I doubt a significant number of people do, so your figure of 10M (if accurate) is not relevant. I go to certain subcategories, such as Stamps-US-Back of Book-Booklets, and if I select auctions only, then I get no more than about 500 listings during a non-free listings promo period, and wading through that many is doable, but during one of the free listing promos it can swell to 1200, and that makes a big difference.

In one category I visit, the swelling is mainly in the form of overpriced items, but in other categories it is loads of very common stuff. Either way, little of it sells and it makes it harder for a buyer to find decent stuff that other sellers are selling.

The amount of dollars that the stamps create would be an interesting figure to know

I buy the majority of my stamps from ebay Germany. There's a lot of competition, but very interesting items on offer. I've pretty much given up on the US site because of the difficulty in finding what I'm looking for. If I want individual stamps, I find it much quicker to just to buy on Delcampe.