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The Death of eBay and the Rise of Craigslist

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It used to be that you could post your item on eBay pay small fees and sell your item without barely a question. Today if you are a regular person selling on eBay you have to treat it like a business. Why? Simply because a large cross-section of buyers on eBay, buy in a hostile manner and do so like they are buying from a business not a individual. It starts with 20 questions on the details on the cheap item you are selling from color, how it is to be used, how quickly it will be shipped. Somehow you are assumed to be a business owner when you are posting, maybe thats because there are so many businesses selling on eBay. Most people’s experience is one of consumer to non-caring and non-personal business. By proxy of Joe’s warehouse selling an item and not shipping it for a month, you because you answer your emails and phone calls, become a target for the high maintenance buyer. Afterwards you become a customer service person. How does this item work? Can you send me a driver download? I wasn’t expecting a scratch there? This isn’t exactly what I expected. All of this is fine except for the fact that you sold your item (as is) online to recover extra cash. All the while you were charged exorbitant fees by both eBay and Paypal for your trouble and transaction. Your time to package and ship the item also factors into the amount of cost to rid yourself of the offending object. It seems buyer beware has been forgotten, replaced with a easy way to hassle you into helping. If you balk at the repeated and rude emails you are likely to loose some of your feedback. This of course is the ultimate weapon. Regular scammers flip eBay accounts like Pancakes at the House of Pancakes but for you your feedback is like your credit. The hostile buyer would just a soon leave bad feedback as send a email.

It seems that eBay is no longer the online garage sale that had made it so popular. After all you wouldn’t have all these home business owners getting rich on eBay if it were a internet garage sale. The problem is, that was the attraction of it all. You easily post an item you no longer want and someone buys that item. It also used to be that everything was used on eBay not just one more e-commerce site. Now its the first stop for your new Nintendo Wii purchase. Why is this? Sure there’s deals to be found and used items that are inexpensive on eBay but lately a quick search of amazon will show you that the deal you thought was so great may not be a deal at all. So as a buyer you get ripped off and don’t get the service and support that comes from a reputable dealer. For instance if you buy your Nintendo Wii for $275 from BestBuy you at least have a multi million dollar corporation to go to when the Wii fails to work instead of Nintendoboy1984’s virtual shrug. It makes you wonder what people are thinking when they are making a purchase.

This brings us to Craigslist, a quick look at the Alexa rankings of Craigslist.org compared to eBay shows some strange activity over the last 5 years. Now I know that Alexa is constantly gamed and it not a accurate depiction of traffic but when you are dealing with such huge sites such as Craigslist and eBay the numbers get very hard to fudge. Basically it reads that Craigslist traffic is accelerating and eBay’s numbers are deflating. Why might this be? The easy answers are money and hassle.

I had the opportunity to sell on both eBay and Craigslist in the last week. The experience on Craigslist was one of quickly posting an item, someone nearby coming to get the item, and getting paid in cold hard cash without giving anyone one extra dime. The experience on eBay was post the item, wait several days, get asked a million questions as to where the item can be shipped to, can I end my auction early, and tons of details questions asked. The after purchase feeling was less bright also as you get to ship the item and then respond to impatient buyers wanting to know “where there item was” after one day. My feelings sunk yet again when I added up how much I actually made from all that trouble and how much Paypal and then eBay sucked out of the transaction.

At the end of the day I just cannot justify using a service such as eBay to post items unless I am actively running a business. This from former huge fan of eBay, it would be like me lamenting over a Apple product. The thing is if Apple products became a pain to deal with AND costly I would no longer be a fan of their product either. So eBay I bid Adieu to you, no more guilt of feedback and wasted money, Craigslist has won my heart with its simplicity and price (free). I have found that I can sell nearly anything worth selling on Craigslist and I can spend only a couple of minutes to do it. The best part is when I sell to someone buying off of Craigslist I am selling to a person looking to get a good deal and willing to take a chance but better yet I selling an item not a contract to devote my time.