I’ll admit, I used to be practically addicted to eBay. I looked every day. No, strike that, every couple of hours, on my searches to see if something had changed. At the time I also sold off unwanted and used equipment for my day job on ebay so it was easy to be there and nobody knew I wasn’t doing my job. I was supposed to be there (my first year on eBay for my job I grossed over $100,000). Just to be clear, I didn’t have a problem with eBay buying. Yeah, I know, that’s what an addict says, but I didn’t have a problem with it.
Then came the iPhone and the eBay app. Now I could search even more frequently, and just look at the newest listings, AND get alerts to when items were ending. I was in heaven. I amassed a good number of pens in those early days and my searches were tight. Every non pen item or unwanted seller was removed from my search. It was nice. Couple in services like Auction Stealer and JustSnipe and it was a veritable feast of deals to be had.
Fast forward to modern times. Yes, deals are still to be had, but now the competition has advanced. We all have better tools. We all have smart phones and netbooks and iPads. It’s easier to see what is out there. Even the infamous seller with the crappy camera photos, usually takes better pictures these days. My problem? The lack of an initial listing fee. Even when it was a quarter, a seller had some investment in their listing. In fact, if they wanted $100 for their pen, they had to think long and hard about how to price it, as the initial listing fee went up the higher the initial start price went. Buy it Now? Add more on to the fee. So, they could be cheap and start under $9.99 to get the lowest listing fee and hope it went to where they wanted (potential deal in the works as a buyer), or they priced it higher and risked getting fewer bids and paying higher fees (Also a potential deal in the making. Mid priced item gets lower bids).
Today it’s anything goes. You sell the item, then you pay. My searches have filled with $300 Chinese pens with IPG (or worse) nibs, and $75 Wearevers. Now, before you go and yell at me that I don’t have to include those terms in my search, or even include those sellers in my search parameters, I know that. The problem is, there still isn’t an easy way to exclude multiple sellers. One of my searches excludes 36 different sellers because I don’t want to see their junk, yet it is still not enough.
What all this boils down to, at least for me, is that it is difficult to navigate my searches and difficult to find the good deals. They’re there, but I have to work really hard to find them, to the point, it is almost no longer worth my time to do so. Since I can go to shows (I know some people can’t), it’s easier to buy there, both for inventory and for my personal collection.
So, how do you feel about eBay these days, love it or hate it? What tips or tricks have you come up with to help separate the wheat from the chaff?
Cheers!
Brian