Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category
I’m done selling on eBay. I don’t need the drama.
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Essays, Literature, Thoughts
Unless you’re cleaning out your basement, in a hurry to unload your autographed whatchamacallit, or have a high-margin or specialty product that lends itself to the auction format, my advice is to avoid eBay. As a market, it’s expensive, overrun with competition from drop-shippers and small retailers, and your customers will have you over a barrel if they even imagine you made a mistake.
Why should you listen to me?
I speak from experience. I’ve sold thousands of items on eBay, both personally and professionally, with a total in sales in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are a few things I’ve come to understand about this marketplace in the years since I created my first account there in September of 2000. For the record, my own personal account is currently a Top Rated Seller, with all-time 100% positive feedback rating, and a Power Seller. I believe this status is about to disappear since I quit selling there.
eBay: The good times
When eBay first appeared, one of the revolutionary features it offered was a feedback system by which buyers and sellers could gauge each other’s reputations. You could read a seller’s feedback, and if you were smart, you would take a look at the feedback history of those who had left them negatives, as well. This was a brilliant system. It rewarded discerning users with a better experience, and punished rude users with frustration and ostracism.
No one wants a black mark on their reputation. This created an incentive to both sides to seek some kind of resolution before resorting to negative remarks. The beauty of this system is that it complies with economic reality: all transactions have two sides, both of them human, and both of them with equal rights not to be abused.
eBay: Tilting in favor of buyers at the risk of losing sellers
In May 2008, sellers lost the ability to leave negative feedback on bad buyers. This eliminated a key dynamic to gauging whether or not a buyer or seller was reputable. eBay claimed the reason for this change was, according to Bill Cobb:
…that buyers are more afraid than ever to leave honest, accurate feedback because of the threat of retaliation. In fact, when buyers have a bad experience on eBay, the final straw for many of them is getting a negative feedback, especially of a retaliatory nature. [emphasis mine]
Now, we realize that feedback has been a two-way street, but our data shows a disturbing trend, which is that sellers leave retaliatory feedback eight times more frequently than buyers do … and this figure is up dramatically from only a few years ago.
From that point on, only sellers could be rated negatively. This tipped the market drastically in favor of the buyers, and needlessly antagonized many sellers. Don’t get me wrong; the free market is automatically tilted in favor of the consumer at all times. Whenever it isn’t, that’s evidence of some very unfair intervention from an unjust third party. That’s just its natural tendency.
I’ve observed two things under the new regime. eBay has succeeded in removing some of the fear in buying on eBay. They have also given buyers room to be downright belligerent. I have seen too many buyers in the last year resort immediately to threats the moment they detect a problem with their purchase. In the old environment of mutual feedback, such automatic vitriol was discouraged.
I don’t doubt for a second they’ve increased buyer traffic to the site. I also suspect eBay will continue to lose prestige as an online marketplace. Cobb laments that some buyers leave eBay because they receive one bit of negative feedback.
What about the sellers who do that?
After nursing a perfect feedback score for nine years, I left eBay because of one negative feedback. I got the buyer to reverse it because it was a misunderstanding, but I realized then just how easy it was for a single buyer to damage my margin, my reputation, and on top of it all, waste my time, over something that wasn’t even a problem to begin with.
Negative feedback is inevitable for sellers, but not inevitable for buyers
As a buyer, it’s easy to get positive feedback. Pay for the item on time.
As a seller, it’s much harder. In any item description, there is going to be some term or phrase someone finds ambiguous. The Internet is filled with people with bad tempers, short fuses or unrealistic expectations. Some of them win auctions. The Web’s veil of anonymity doesn’t help matters. This is a medium where it’s easier than ever to view the other person as some kind of unthinking goblin. The old feedback system at least humanized both sides because the risk of bad feedback was mutual.
Sellers with any kind of volume are going to run into these rage-prone outliers, and are now completely defenseless against them. Once he pays for the merchandise, the buyer is completely immune. He has the seller completely at his mercy, no matter what he misunderstands, misinterprets or wrongly assumes. Should the buyer choose to vandalize the seller’s feedback rating, the seller’s only recourse is the dim possibility that an appeal to eBay might undo the damage.
In Cobb’s January 2008 letter, he said “sellers leave retaliatory feedback eight times more frequently than buyers do.” I want to call attention to the fact that calling a line of feedback “retaliatory” is a value judgment. Based on your metric for calling feedback “retaliatory”, Bill Cobb’s number could have been just about anything. I’m not privy to eBay’s data or methodology on that one, and I don’t doubt they’re doing their best to be accurate, but this principle is still true.
“Retaliatory” feedback isn’t always a bad thing
If “retaliatory” is defined as leaving bad feedback in response to bad feedback, this is not in and of itself a bad thing. What it could mean is that a higher proportion of bad feedback left by buyers is pure nonsense that must be righted by a response. The higher likelihood is no surprise. Feedback integrity is far more important to the seller than to the buyer, so sellers would naturally be more defensive.
“Retaliatory feedback” is perhaps a bad thing for eBay if the number of people capable of handling online commerce with maturity is too small for their traffic hopes, but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the health of the market.
Conclusion
As a company, eBay’s success is dependent on the success of the sellers. They know this. eBay collects its fees exclusively from sellers. They have a difficult job: the consumer eBay must satisfy to stay in business is the eBay seller, yet those very sellers depend on their buyers. For the best results, eBay’s managers have to figure out how to best satisfy two groups whose self-interests are often opposed. I don’t envy their position. Maybe I’m completely off-base and they have done the right thing, but the eBay stock price has so far not regained the high it was at the month before this policy went into effect. I suspect eBay is over-thinking their problems. The fee and rule system has become a bloated morass of variables that could change at any moment, and often do.
No wonder sellers are switching to the stable, predictable world of selling on Amazon, and the much more civil Etsy experience.
This seller at least is through with eBay. I just don’t need the drama.
Avatar sucked, and here’s why.
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Literature, Thoughts
I just got back from watching James Cameron’s Avatar and I’d like to brace you for some bad news and a truckload of spoilers: The reason they advertise the bajeezus out of it based on its special effects is that there’s not much else going for it. The characters are flat, the story predictable, and the message is shallow. (more…)
Can We Really “Vote Out Poverty?”
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Economics, Liberty, Thoughts
I received another email today from Sojourners. No matter how many times I unsubscribe, I seem to stay on their mailing list. No matter. They provide good food for thought, if only because Jim Wallis is Doing It Wrongtm.
The email in question implored me to join their campaign to “Vote out Poverty”, which is some vaguely-articulated voter pledge to put overcoming poverty at the top of your priority list when you vote in November. The pledge reads as follows:
Dear candidates,
Because of my faith, I pledge to make overcoming poverty central to how I cast my ballot in 2008. I want to hear your commitment and plans for achieving the following goals:
-Cutting the number of Americans living in poverty in half over the next 10 years.
-Help end extreme global poverty by achieving the Millennium Development Goals.I want to see your leadership on these important issues and will inform my friends and family of your positions.
Sincerely,
(Your Name)
At first, I used to be afraid that the Jim Wallis brand of Christian socialism would transform or overtake the “Christian Right”, thus arraying a huge American demographic behind ideas that would exponentially increase poverty, death and destruction worldwide through massive government anti-poverty and foreign aid programs. But that fear has subsided because of campaigns like this.
First of all, it’s easy to ignore. It’s a voter pledge and a request for information. There is almost nothing confrontational about that pledge. It makes no demands on the politician. All sentences begin with the word “I”, placing focus on the voter and what they want to see. What they want to see is described in abstract terms: commitment, plans, leadership. It asks for nothing specific and almost none of the focus is on the politician. This has got to be the most limp-wristed communication to a politician I’ve ever seen.
Second, it’s easy to pander to. The only two concrete objects in this voter pledge are in that short bulleted list. Cutting the number of Americans living in poverty by half? This is the government you’re lobbying. They get to decide the definitions. Cutting the number of people under the poverty line is as easy as legislating a new poverty line. George W. Bush has provided America with 2 million new jobs since he came to office, simply by creating a vast make-work program called the TSA. Now hordes of otherwise unemployed people rifle through your luggage for a living. The Millennium Development Goals are a set of pie-in-the-sky goals formulated by a UN committee including worldwide elementary education, worldwide AIDS treatment, and an end to world hunger. These are great goals to have, but the UN’s pursuit of them would produce tragic consequences at best, and none of them are phrased in concrete terms.
Government can solve any problem just by changing a few definitions, or exerting some token effort and then absolve itself of responsibility.
Worst of all about the first of the two items is that 10 years is longer than any United States election cycle. Senators do not think any farther than 6 years ahead, a Congressman’s horizon is 2 years away, and presidents, at best, only worry as far as 8 years into the future. Anything longer than that, and whichever political party the politician isn’t from will be his scapegoat as to why he never accomplished what you asked. He is free to make whatever promises you desire so long as failure doesn’t threaten his cushy job. There’s simply no accountability. It leaves too much up to the candidates. How will they cut poverty in half? How will they accomplish the UN’s goals? They could come up with almost anything and when it fails, they can shrug and say they tried, and the excuse will be perfectly legitimate.
But lastly and most importantly, look at who they’re asking! Here we have a group that presumes to be Christian, and they are lobbying the government to accomplish the tasks Christ charged the Christian Church with fulfilling?! America’s Christian Right is still by and large a deluded lot of uncritical lambs that applaud the growth of the state and ignore their own dying Church. The attempts of Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, and other silver-tongued socialists to create a Christian Left have been fortunately ineffective so far, but even if they are successful, the Christian Left is just as obsessed with government power as today’s Christian Right.
Whether you’re demanding the government overturn Roe v. Wade or insisting that it curb poverty, your error is the same. The State is inherently sinful. The thing that distinguishes government from other kinds of organizations is its universal and unilateral deployment of aggressive force. An appeal to government is an appeal to force. Jesus Christ was an emissary of love, not of coercion, so the Church and State are at opposite ends of the spectrum. If Christ wanted us to use guns and violence to get our way, he would have said so.
The Church is the domain of God, and the government is the domain of Satan, just as much today as it was when he tempted Christ by offering him the governments of the world. There is only one thing government can do to help further the cause of Christ, and that is to get out of the Church’s way.
Groups that appeal to the State to solve society’s problems have apparently lost their faith that the infinite power of God is sufficient to change the world. They must believe instead that worldly forces and violence are the only tools available.
I, as a Christian, have to insist that the Church, backed by God Almighty, has much more potential for good than the State can ever dream. If that is the case, then why bother lobbying government, the one organization guaranteed to not take those goals seriously?