I do a little bit with eBay every now and then, when I need to clear a load of stuff out, or pick up a gadget cheap. I signed up for my account about six years ago and, after the initial excitement, came to think of it as the de facto resource for buying and selling on the web. But something has happened this week to bring to my attention something that I should have realised a long time ago:
eBay is shit.
Seven or eight years ago, it was the bees knees. There was really nothing like it around and it seemed like an exciting way to go about things. There was always a surge of adrenaline when buying or selling at auction, which went some way to replacing the retail thrill of bagging a bargain, or skillfully screwing a sale out of somebody. Every so often eBay would add to or augment the site and each change would enhance the experience, like the addition of eBay shops, the selling tools and the community features. In truth, the whole thing felt quite.....indie! You could buy or sell practically anything, and when some smart arse listed his soul (starting at 0.01p) or his shiny kettle with a reflection of him doing something perverse on the item photograph, it merely served to increase eBays profile in the mainstream.
But, honestly, can you think of a single thing eBay has done in the last three years to improve the experience of using it? In fact, haven't they become the bloated corporate blandbags that they seemed to be the antithesis of in the first place?
This week, I was selling a Nokia N80 mobile phone. It was selling really well at auction, because I had taken the time to really put across in the description what it was about the item that I liked. When I checked on the progress of the auction, I discovered that it had been removed. This was because someone (probably a competing seller) had reported my item's title as contravening his Intellectual Property Rights. Apparently, this person has sole use of the term 'as new'.
Ridiculous, right? But eBay, fudgepacking pussies as they truly are (isn't there some 'French' in that company somewhere?) arbitrarily removed the item (and so took away an hour of my life that I will never get back) and are so far refusing to refund the listing fees. I am so furious that they could not simply apply some common sense to the issue and not cave in to fraudsters on the grounds that nobody ever got sued for taking the cowards way out.
And I am not by any means alone. If you use eBay on a regular basis, chances are you will have been sniped, defrauded, let down, dissatisfied or otherwise cheated at some point. Gangsters regularly use the site to launder funds and many of the eBay shops that are allowed to trade would be shut down on the High Street for their practices. What is eBay doing to protect you from this?
Well, the answer is........nothing. Rather than assign some of the billions of dollars that eBay rakes in every year from your listing (and now 'completion') fees, eBay has decided that it is far too much like hard work to go after the fraudsters and will simply punish the honest people that will probably never cause a fuss anyway. It pumps tens of millions of dollars into advertising on television and countless promotional emails. PayPal, which is owned by eBay, has taken your banks scammy practice of holding on to YOUR money for up to three working days during a transaction and improved on it threefold. But what are they doing to stop the phishing scammers, the Romanian fraudsters and the other undesirables? Nothing.
eBay is shit. It's too big to change its ways now, but when people like I was last week don't demand an improvement, why should it?
