Seems to me like eBay’s primary purpose for some time now has been to cater to bulk sellers out of Asia. It would be nice if someone else stepped in to provide for those looking to offload their old junk to wherever in the world there’s someone who needs it – but I expect that’s just not a profitable business.
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That was exactly my thought: ebay’s interface has worked well for 20 years, there’s no reason to make it all flashy and javascriptey it except to slow down the website.
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I thought he meant that eBay was pretty toxic in this day and age, facilitating graft, theft, and fraud. But yeah, he could have meant that too.
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Ebay, on the other hand, is the internet capital of technical debt, with the digital equivalent of lead paint peeling through every layer of latex applied atop it.
Specificity is the soul of comedy, this made me grin ear to ear.
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The only thing I understood about this entire article was that eBay was going to stop using PayPal, and that apparently lead paint is bad.
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Technically, specificity is the sould of comedyd. 
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whoopsd fixed that
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Thank you. That was the part i needed.
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W2s
what are they?
eBay may be old fashioned looking, but it works well enough for what it does. Craigslist looks like 1995, and you can probably use it with the original Mosaic browser, but it also works. Why fix what isn’t broken?
On the positive side, it is good to see some competition in the payments business. Paypal and a handful of majors own it, and small businesses have had to put it with all sorts of nonsense lest they get cut off and have to shut down. Sometimes they get cut off and have to shut down anyway, but having alternate providers might help with this. Good for eBay. This might be a change that makes a difference. (Though probably it won’t.)
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I use eBay a fair amount. I mostly buy things that are no longer made, that have been cluttering up shelves and basements across America (like for example Peerless tractor transmissions, cast iron heat vents, classic car parts, dishwasher and clothesdryer parts, etc.) and things that were bought in bulk and are being resold under unit cost (like for example high quality florescent light ballasts, high current solenoids, etc.) and occasionally domestically unavailable things like obscure Russian military flashlight bulbs.
I don’t buy anything from bulk sellers out of Asia on eBay. Isn’t that what Amazon is for?
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It would be mighty nice if there was a better interface for building auction listings. Yahoo and GMail offer practically unlimited storage, so why shouldn’t I be able to keep my old listings forever and ever?
I presume the answer is that eBay needs to cater to the big-time bulk sellers who have set up their own elaborate toolchains for managing listings, and that eBay does not have sufficient clout in the marketplace to update their APIs or whatever – because then said bulk sellers might just go and set up their own solution. But perhaps that presumes too much.
It’s easy enough to decompose, imho, but what it basically means is that Ebay is so big and so successful that they don’t need to adapt the latest cool framework.
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Because no one actually uses YaHoo and Gmail is basically paid for by your data and cross financed by Google’s ad business. Ebay, OTOH, has actually to make money and your old listings don’t make any.
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Strange. I have no problem in finding privately sold “old junk“ on Ebay. Mostly kids toys these days, that Playmobil stuff sure is sturdy.
Also, haven’t had any problem selling my stuff on eBay, either, for prices well above would commercial buyer would be willing to pay. (I don’t mind at all that they need to make a profit, but when I basically get only ⅓ on what I’d on eBay because they need to finance their slow moving stock, the cut is too large.)
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You can thank your government for it. At least it was just a PayPal account, it could as well have happened with a bank transfer. Those are monitored, too, both by the banks, when it’s mandated, and by grey channels. PayPal isn’t the exception here.
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yeah, it’s just odd there’s no way to fix it a year later. And it was only $10 and I could have just left the word off the payment note.
Should point out that Paypal is not all bad (did anyone say that, or did I assume that). As a Canadian/Kiwi, I hated it - annoying, intrusive and not as user friendly as other payment services.
That said, Paypal is great for developing nations. As an example, Malaysia was essentially refused ecommerce credit card services by Master Card and Visa about a decade ago. The reason for this move was that Malaysian merchants where selling products that violated US copyright / trademark / patent law. Ironically, US IP law doesn’t apply here (not an ACTA signatory), but none the less Visa and Master Card decided to charge merchants an inflated security fee that essentially increased payment gateway services costs 10000%. Overnight Malaysian ecommerce was shut down. To this day only large merchants can afford the insane payment gateway fees (usually multinational companies - SEA wide) while average merchants are restricted to local payment gateway solutions.
So essentially Visa and Master Card destroyed Malaysia’s (and probably other developing nation’s) ecommerce industry overnight for breaking laws that do not exist in their nation. Pay pal on the other hand is the equaliser. It is the only payment service available within this developing economy for international transactions that does not cost exorbitant amounts of money.
So part of me is glad to see Pay Pal become irrelevant, part of me is sad as it is one of the few companies that practically (if not annoyingly or inadvertently) works to smooth the digital divide.
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Medievalist…are you hoarding vintage junk?
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Not anymore really. Google stopped scanning emails for ad data. Theoretically they are still running ads in Gmail but I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen one.
