By: Jerry

Jerry — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 19:06:00 +0000

Richard nailed it on all counts. I still buy rare items of interest to me on eBay, and usually by using the ‘make offer’ option when available. Since sales are down and prices are up, sellers are more inclined to accept a fair offer now than in the past.

By: Richard Wood

Richard Wood — Sat, 05 Mar 2016 05:24:00 +0000

EBay is still the best place to find important collector’s items, especially unique items. But the price we are paying for that privilege, in time and in absolute frustration, is a very high price to pay. If you follow any of the eBay forums you will know that the eBay sellers are constantly complaining that their sales are way down and there aren’t the buyers that there used to be. As a collector-buyer I have stopped running 80% of my weekly eBay searches. I faithfully ran these searches since 1997. Two years ago I had to stop when John Donahoe gave us the nearly unlimited free listings, and free listings allow a seller to set unrealistically high prices on items because if there is no sale, they just relist it for free. This encourages sellers to start out with an unrealistically high price, and sell-through rates plummet. From then on I could only run the searches that were the most important to me. I know that I’m missing a lot of things to buy, but when one search gives 5 pages of results, and a large proportion of those are relisted items I’ve seen for many months, I don’t have the time to look at everything. I am a very careful searcher. I’m not going to miss an item in the categories that I follow, and in the keyword searches that I bookmark and then run every week. If I see an item and don’t purchase it, there is zero chance I will ever purchase it unless the price drops at least 50%. So eBay, why make us see the same unique items over and over and over again in the antiques and vintage collectibles categories? All we ask for is a filter to prevent us seeing relisted items, or a filter that segregates the relists to the bottom of the page. It would be easy to code for. Because there is so much stuff on eBay, and so many relists, we buyers who have hung around all of these years are ready to throw in the towel. I had a friend call me nearly in tears. She has 10,000 eBay feedbacks, nearly all from purchases, and she asked me if I didn’t know of some way for her to run her keyword searches and have them return only the items that had never been relisted. I told her the relists were also driving me crazy. I’m sure we aren’t the only buyers who can’t stand searching on eBay anymore. And they ask where all of the buyers have gone.

Comments on: Best eBay Alternatives

By: Jerry

By: Richard Wood