Sunday, September 28, 2014

Ebay irrelevance

I was introduced in ecommerce and ebay sometime around 2003. Was awesome. So much selection and bargain prices at the grasp of my arm. I also enjoyed the auction style. I woke up in the middle of the night multiple times to bid and snipe on an item. And could easily find replacement parts for almost anything electronic.
At some point as my pockets became slightly deeper, the auction style wore off in me. Now I was about buying now the item I wanted with the lowest price.
I could easily source items all over the world in the various ebay websites. I could log on the German ebay to buy things from germany, to the US ebay site to buy things from the US.
And then shit changed. Ebay started demanding extra fees for customs and clearance, and the last blow has been the fact that I can no longer view items from the US ebay in US prices when logging into ebay.com. I can only see prices in euro currency missing all the 0.99$ bargains from asian stores aimed to the US market, but also available to Europe.

I have a few grievances about Ebay and some sad "horror" stories, but Ebay has becoming less and less relevant over the years and its latest implementations doesn't help at all IMHO. Now that Alibaba went public, I might as well give it a chance.

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