I used to work at eBay Trust and Safety. The place is a nightmare and will not improve. The culture was destroyed by Meg Whitman and never recovered.
This kind of fraud sticks out like a sore thumb in click stream. I had no trouble finding fraud and building algorithms to automatically detect it but I did find it impossible finding someone at eBay who cared enough to do anything about it. eBay still gets paid so no one wants to be in charge of a revenue hit. I doubt that's changed.
Mark Carges tried to turn it around in 2008 and failed.
I have high hopes Facebook can move into this space.
> The culture was destroyed by Meg Whitman and never recovered.
She joined with 30 employees and was CEO until 15,000 employees. I fail to see how she could have destroyed the culture or do you excpect a 30 person company culture to remain static? Am I mising somehting?
Meg was before my time. I got to see the aftermath and I heard many of the stories. eBay's success was in spite of Meg Whitman. It was a money printing machine. The first employee was hired to be the full time check casher. In the early days managers and engineers got along - then management gave themselves a ton of options and cut out the engineers. She then hired in a bunch of professional management (Harvard people) and outsourced the engineers to India. That was a disaster so they insourced the Indians to the US. This continued to be a disaster. The Indians are very tribal so not only is there office politics there is also tribal politics. Certain casts will refuse to work with each other. So yeah, pretty toxic.
I was there during and after Whitman. When Ebay was power diving into the ground. The story above about Ebay engineering is right on the money. So much politics, and jockeying to get to Sr Director or VP to get more stock grants. Ebay brought in a lot of ex Anderson consulting and outsourcing like there was no tomorrow. Trained Cognizant on the ecommerce business on their own dime, by paying outrageous fees for people with zero background in ecommerce or internet scale or data center ops. When times got tough they fired most contractors and insourced as described above. Very Game of thrones there. Toxic.
I was a very early eBay employee in one of their non-US locations.
The company culture definitely changed between 1999-2002. By 2003 I was gone, mostly due to friction with management, somewhat to do with my immaturity in dealing with it.
In those early years, powersellers were already being actively courted, but there was still a strong recognition of the small collectable buyers and sellers.
This attitude changed as more MBA holders were brought in to run the show. Fees were constantly creeping upwards and largely irrelevant advertising was introduced. There was always a real focus on the quarterly earnings announcement and trying to hit the numbers no matter what. This introduces friction between shareholders and customers, with shareholders almost always winning because the employees all held options and obviously wanted the share price to continue to rise.
Having said all that, I had a mostly very fun three years working there. Just the last 12 months were not such a happy time.
Subsequently, I bought and sold a lot on the platform, including reasonably high value motor vehicles. I haven't bought or sold in over 12 months now.
Facebook can easily do better will ultimately fail for the same reasons. As long as the marketplace has incentive to alter the perception of buyer/seller reputation, it's doomed to become another ebay.
They attempt to solve the problem with "moderated payments" where the buyer pays into an escrow account which is jointly controlled by the buyer, the vendor, and a third party called a moderator. In order for the funds to leave the escrow, any two of these parties need to agree how to release the funds.
This is actually how some Bitcoin transactions take place, on the white, grey, and black markets. People build a reputation for honesty as an escrow, take a small fee, and facilitate transactions. They arbitrate disputes, and decide who to release the funds back to.
I guess it's more the acceptance that buyer/seller is an adversarial relationship so you need to at least be able to trust the system or framework to be impartial and enforce honesty.
No, escrow is trust-as-a-service. That is, it's a means of removing the need for trust between the transaction principals by hiring a mutually-trusted third party.
I have won on amazon as a seller by videoing the boxing of the original (playstation3) and unboxing the "return" (a broken VHS recorder).
Its simple just to pull out your phone and grab a few seconds of sealing the box and putting on the label. Keep it for a few weeks until the transaction "settles" then delete.
Fufilled by Amazon is much safer and more reliable. I wouldn't spend money I would miss on an item from 3rd party sellers who handle their own shipping on Amazon.
FBA takes a huge chunk out of the sale's proceeds. It easily converts what would otherwise be high-margin items into losers. That's not really a scenario that your average person trying to sell a used phone would expect. The seller is also responsible for collecting (done by Amazon) and remitting sales tax (NOT done by Amazon, afaik) on FBA transactions.
The best option is to go local as a parent commenter already said. Ask the person to unbox and demo the item before you pay. If the product doesn't clearly work, leave without paying.
Yard sale groups on Facebook, Craigslist, and an active region-specific classifieds site if there's one in your area are good places to make such arrangements.
Don't meet at either party's home. The police station parking lot is best. Some police stations even have parking spots reserved for people who are performing transactions arranged online.
From what I've heard from others Amazon is worse than ebay in terms of scam buyers. I can't talk from experience because I've never been personally scammed on either platform and I've sold a lot of expensive stuff on both: MacBooks, laptops, iPads, etc. EDIT: Now that I think about it, that's not entirely true. I was "scammed" on eBay by someone who claimed their PayPal and eBay accounts were hacked. I only send to PayPal confirmed addresses so PayPal's seller protection took care of me for that because the address was confirmed by PayPal.
However, I've gotten a LOT of scam Amazon messages. They are all the same "plz send me pictures at [poorly obfuscated email address]." I'd get 3-4 a day for a used Macbook. The scam is they get your email address by getting them to email them and then they send you a fake "shipped send now" email. Some people even go as far as just sending "shipped send now" as an Amazon message! I've reported all these and Amazon doesn't do anything about them. All they did was ding my seller account for marking too many messages as "no response required."
Interesting that you mention Facebook. Only decent experiences I've had lately has been posting something in closed "for sale" groups on Facebook and buying/selling something in person in my local area.
My little sister tried to buy an iPhone on Facebook a year ago only to have the seller (a 15yo kid living in a village 6 hours drive away) try to scam her. Unluckily for this scammer she had used a real name and had a reasonable amount of public information on her profile. 6 hours drive away probably seems a world away to a 15yo but unfortunately for her my parents had relatives living only 20 mins away and they knew many people in her village. They simply went down to the local supermarket where they determined her mother worked and told her what happened (they also knew the kids address/school and social clubs but decided the mother was better to approach). Suffice to say the money was returned in full with an apology and a 15yo scammer hopefully learnt a valuable lesson. Nothing like this could ever happen on eBay and it was able to happen without access to the private information that Facebook would have if they implemented a reputation system.
Anecdata: I am the administrator of a ~12k person "Free & For Sale" FB group for the college that I graduated from. It's very high traffic, people are able to buy and sell a whole host of things very easily.
I think Facebook has the potential to combine eBay and Craigslist as a platform to sell more "common" items. They won't be able to get your broken laser pointer to a broken laser pointer collector, but if you want to get rid of a bed/desk/cell phone/microwave, it's much easier to sell it to someone that lives 10 minutes away than to ship it across the country, and the risk of fraud is much lower.
I know they have plans to scale this out and improve the experience of buying and selling things (I've been messaged by a few FB staff asking for feedback as they've added new features), but it definitely does not have the critical mass that CL has, and discovery (getting into the right group) is much harder.
By emphasising local and by using the other details that they know about people to filter out fraudsters. Plus the long tail is filled with interest groups. Facebook already manages many of these groups and getting kicked out of such communities can be very costly.
Right now much Facebook commerce is local. Sit in front of a target or supermarket on a Saturday afternoon and you'll see a half dozen Facebook mom transactions.
Interestingly this comment was voted up a bunch and then voted down a bunch.
'fake news' can be easily detected, not by the content but by those who share it. I've built similar stuff before but obviously can't talk about specifics without outing myself.
> eBay still gets paid so no one wants to be in charge of a revenue hit. I doubt that's changed.
That sounds like a class action suit waiting to happen. Or, a RICO lawsuit, where the government can pretty much prove that eBay is in cahoots with hordes of scammers.
"You and eBay each agree that any and all disputes or claims that have arisen, or may arise, between you and eBay relating in any way to or arising out of this or previous versions of the User Agreement, your use of or access to eBay's Services, or any products or services sold, offered, or purchased through eBay's Services shall be resolved exclusively through final and binding arbitration, rather than in court. Alternatively, you may assert your claims in small claims court, if your claims qualify and so long as the matter remains in such court and advances only on an individual (non-class, non-representative) basis."
[...]
"Prohibition of Class and Representative Actions and Non-Individualized Relief
YOU AND EBAY AGREE THAT EACH OF US MAY BRING CLAIMS AGAINST THE OTHER ONLY ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN ANY PURPORTED CLASS, OR REPRESENTATIVE OR PRIVATE ATTORNEY GENERAL ACTION OR PROCEEDING. UNLESS BOTH YOU AND EBAY AGREE OTHERWISE, THE ARBITRATOR MAY NOT CONSOLIDATE OR JOIN MORE THAN ONE PERSON'S OR PARTY'S CLAIMS, AND MAY NOT OTHERWISE PRESIDE OVER ANY FORM OF A CONSOLIDATED, REPRESENTATIVE, CLASS, OR PRIVATE ATTORNEY GENERAL ACTION OR PROCEEDING. ALSO, THE ARBITRATOR MAY AWARD RELIEF (INCLUDING MONETARY, INJUNCTIVE, AND DECLARATORY RELIEF) ONLY IN FAVOR OF THE INDIVIDUAL PARTY SEEKING RELIEF AND ONLY TO THE EXTENT NECESSARY TO PROVIDE RELIEF NECESSITATED BY THAT PARTY'S INDIVIDUAL CLAIM(S). ANY RELIEF AWARDED CANNOT AFFECT OTHER USERS."
Seconded. @jcranmer, lawsplainer links to a "RICO case statement" which reads a bit like a checklist. While the checklist makes it obvious why lawsplainer's examples aren't RICO, to my untrained eye the checklist seems to match the proposed claims against ebay fairly well. Could you cite the specific items for which you think the case is weakest?
For one thing, you couldn't sue Ebay itself. From the link above:
"Wait. Isn't the defendant the enterprise?
No. In fact the defendant can't be the same as the enterprise.
An enterprise is a legal entity or group of people. So, for instance, the Gambino Crime Family can be an enterprise, or Prenda Law. But the enterprise has to be different than the defendant for a RICO claim. Instead, the defendants have to be people and entities who run the enterprise."
This kind of fraud sticks out like a sore thumb in click stream. I had no trouble finding fraud and building algorithms to automatically detect it but I did find it impossible finding someone at eBay who cared enough to do anything about it. eBay still gets paid so no one wants to be in charge of a revenue hit. I doubt that's changed.
Mark Carges tried to turn it around in 2008 and failed.
I have high hopes Facebook can move into this space.