Why Do You Think We Need An Alternative To Ebay?

Amazon could have turned a profit much earlier, but instead chose to invest in growing faster.

Middle management trting to justify their existence.

Besides the problem with Germany mentioned earlier (and the same problem for France), for the Brit Commonwealth countries, they split up the countries by pre and post independence, with the pre under CW and the post by the part of the world they are in, so you have to look in 2 places and some sellers don't split their listings the way ebay has those categories, so it is a total mess.

"The role of "middle management" is simply to create crises, which they can then solve, thus drawing attention to themselves by Upper management".

I can't recall in which management text I read this some years ago, but thought it hit the nail on the head.

As a Buyer: Too many FREE listings. Without a listing fee we get too many overpriced items that never sell and fill up the searches. Add back a fee to list based on the start price and reduce the final value fee to offset.

As a seller: I love FREE listings

Although I am primarily a postal history collector (that is, covers, not stamps), I continue to find ebay to be a "target rich" environment for shopping. I rarely go a day without encountering an item which would fit into my collection when the budget allows. And I've spent three days at a major show with virtually no success.

I'm also solely a buyer at this point, although the itch to become a seller often arises...

I would estimate that 75% of the $dollar value my purchases (mostly in the $10 - $50 per item range) are from ebay. About 10% come from Delcampe, another 10% from dealers at shows, and occasionally a high dollar item is purchased from a major auction house. I gladly play the field.

Some of the items I collect: mostly ephemera related to the US post office, have been acquired solely from ebay. These were items like Postmaster appointment commissions and Account Books which I had never seen through traditional paper ephemera sources. In this case, ebay opened an entire world of opportunity to me.

I agree with the sentiment that the loss of wildcard searching with ebay was a inconvenience, but its impact simply forced me to break my searches into a series of date related searches to find what I was looking for. I doubt ebay saved many CPU cycles from me.

I also agree that both ebay and Delcampe have way too many inexpensive but overpriced listings that just go on and on and on without possibility of sale. Why anyone thinks that offering 50 individual listings for copies of the same contemporary US commemorative stamp at $0.99 will make them rich is beyond my comprehension. I would like to see some form of a more "expensive" listing fee approach to limit this behavior.

MAD Magazine.

IkeyPikey:

You're probably right. Most of the places I worked seemed to be guided by their philosophy.

Although by the end of my career, I think DILBERT had taken over.