It’s Time to Replace eBay
To me, eBay is more and more becoming a useless product as it totally fails to take care of what is so important to me and many others: the social aspect of a transaction. I believe eBay is one of the last big Web1.0 players that really has to start an innovation cycle, as they keep on focusing on business and barely on any social aspect of a selling/buying activity. Yes they have a nice rating system which even gives me a rating of 48, but that still barely ever guarantees me a pleasant experience with any user.
Basically I can think of a whole list of things that are wrong with eBay, and I thought I would just put them here to inspire some people that can or want to make a change:
- Make it possible to publicly comment on a listing or on a person. This would allow for far quicker and more natural protection against scams.
- Don’t remove a listing until the seller approves that it is sold. All those scammers out there make it too annoying to have to re-list stuff over and over again.
- Allow for real listings instead of auctions. Sites like GumTree.com and Marktplaats.nl prove that this works. An auction is a very business-like concept, and for most people a worth-of-mouth-deal with a personal-local-delivery will do fine.
- Integrate the social side of eBay with the listing side. EBay already has some social parts like a community and a forum, but they are simply not directly bound to the real social objects of the site: transactions.
- If you make your site social, than you should yourself be social too. The eBay community forum is a good of example of how NOT to do it, as no eBay employee reads the forum to give feedback.
- Don’t use the help/faq as a measure against complaints. If I report a scammer, don’t send me an email with a printout of the help page about what a scammer is. This is what most annoys me about eBay: respect your smart users in a way that they can make a constructive contribution.
All and all pretty simple ideas, and I think that most of you might have another 100 ideas. If I wasn’t studying I might have made my own eBay clone, using PayPal AND Google checkout. Anyone else up for the task?
Will http://15meanings.com
July 24th, 2007I second your appeal. It is time for a fresh look at a stale marketplace. Give it time, one will come, one will come.
Will
noah kgan http://okdork.com
July 24th, 2007i hate when people say it but a trusted environment would likely be facebook where identities are linked to another. plus some other goodness. the challenge for all book exchanges, auctions, etc… is the people problem. Now that it is solved the question is who will get it done first…
Will http://15meanings.com
July 24th, 2007@Noah,
The race is on indeed, only time will tell who gets there first
Will
Bob
July 24th, 2007Have you checked “eBay MyWorld”? It’s eBay’s “social” section:
http://myworld.ebay.com/
Cristiano Betta http://cristianobetta.com/
July 24th, 2007Yeah I did, but it is so clearly created as a “we have to do something social” measure. There is no true relationship between ebay and the MyWorld page. It should be FAR better integrated than it is now.
mmj http://Ebay
July 25th, 2007I think Ebay does do a lot of those things that you say it does not. Have you thoroughly checked out EBay?
Rob Manson http://vbay.info
July 25th, 2007I think you raise some interesting points - especially the one about personal local delivery.
We’ve been working on a mashup called Visual eBay.
http://vbay.info
We released it with a very basic UI so we could see how people used it. The goal is to extend it with a range of location and social features (all suggestions welcome).
eBay is a massive and very useful system. So why “replace” it? I think their API let’s you create really interesting new systems on top of it.
milty
July 25th, 2007It’s time there was some serious competition for ebay. Without any rival to challenge them they are content to do nothing to fix the gaping holes in their service.
My biggest gripe is the total unusability of ebay for the newcomer. That coupled with the arrogance of the company in not bothering to offer practical help options for the user who comes unstuck.
Aaron Bassett http://foobr.co.uk
July 25th, 2007Why does every site now have to have a ’social side’
eBay is a store, plain and simple. Yes the sellers might be ordinary people just like you…but guess what so are the other people who run any other kind of service.
People go to ebay for 2 reasons: 1) to buy stuff, 2) to sell stuff.
Want to make friends, go to facebook or one of the other hundreds of sites designed for social networking.
The social networking idea wouldn’t help you to better judge sellers and avoid getting ripped off either. Hey I can be your best friend in the world while waiting for you to payup for a non-existent laptop or other fake listing.
Of all the ideas I’ve heard about what ebay should do next, this is probably the dumbest - sorry.
Cristiano Betta http://cristianobetta.com/
July 25th, 2007@Aaron: I think you are missing the point. I don’t want eBay to become a social network, hell no. But in my vision, people go to eBay to make a deal, not (as it is now) to comply with the eBay protocol of trying to sell an item.
It is just sad that it is SO hard to make a normal deal on eBay where I can make a personal deal with another user, instead of an automated deal with some other virtual user.
@mmj: I also think that you don’t understand that although Ebay already “does” alot of this stuff, they do it as a sort of “we have to do it because everyone asks so” option which just doesnt work. The integration that makes it really valuable just isn’t there. I think @milty probably understands my issue there.
Rob Manson http://vbay.info
July 26th, 2007Hi Cristiano,
perhaps someone at eBay’s german site saw your post
“eBay hopes to retain and draw in more users by getting them better connected into an online community” – specifically, it intends to experiment with turning the community section of its German site, ebay.de, into a full-blown social networking platform.”
http://www.socialcomputingmagazine.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=517
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2007/07/25/fool-on-call-ebays-social-salvation.aspx
Joe Entrepreneur http://www.onista.com
July 29th, 2007we are about to release a “Social Marketplace” called Onista.com and it has almost all the features suggested in above article plus some more cool features.
Our application is in final stages of development and it will be launched in next 7-8 weeks. http://www.onista.com
Onista.com has almost all the features described as needed improvements on eBay
Like
# Make it possible to publicly comment on a listing or on a person.
# Don’t remove a listing until the seller approves that it is sold.
# Allow for real listings instead of auctions.
# Social Network
We also have some other cool features like “Price Negotiation Ability”, “Purchase Wishes” & “Price Quotes”. Onista.com will also be social network and hence it is a Social Marketplace.
BTW, No Auction.
Please visit http://www.onista.com for more information.
master resale rights http://www.resale-rights.com
March 9th, 2008Joe, I just checked http://www.onista.com/ as you said it should be up and running by October and it doesn’t appear to be going. Do you have any alternatives that we could sell our resale rights software from http://www.hotresale.com Unfortunately ebay seems to have a small monopoly.