Tag: ebay

Ebay Reputation

EBay has been struggling for some time with growing discontent among its members, and it has rolled out a series of new controls and regulations to try to stem the erosion of trust in its market. At the end of last month, it announced sweeping changes to its feedback system, setting up more “non-public” communication channels and, most dramatically, curtailing the ability of sellers to leave negative feedback on buyers. It turns out that feedback ratings were being used as weapons to deter buyers from leaving negative feedback about sellers.

the downfall of the web preeminent reputation system

Alibaba

“We are lucky the business was not started in Beijing or Shanghai,” there, it might have evolved to serve the sophisticated multinationals nearby. Instead, it has aimed at the kind of small businesses that cluster around Hangzhou.

2014-05-22: Alibaba has had massive growth

Alibaba’s transactions totaled $248B (more than eBay and Amazon combined)
Alibaba delivers 5B packages a year. UPS delivers 4.3B
Alibaba’s money market fund went from 0 to 4th largest globally, in 10 months

eBay Scam

Why would eBay erase all traces of a scammed auction like this? Maybe to hide the fact that there’s so many scams going on? I think so.

it should be quite easy to do better than the puny anti-scam technology ebay has.

eBay architecture

seems everyone is converging on the same architecture, more or less?

Randy Shoup and Dan Pritchett gave a talk on scaling eBay, “The eBay Architecture”. The slides are available (PDF). The parallels with Amazon are remarkable. Like Amazon, eBay started with a 2-tiered architecture. Like Amazon, they split the website into a cluster in the late 1990’s, followed soon after by partitioning the databases. Like Amazon, they soon encountered poor performance and difficulty compiling their massive, monolithic binary (150M for eBay, Randy and Dan say). Like Amazon, they started a major rewrite of their monolithic binary around 2001, eventually building a services architecture on top of partitioned databases.

No bargains

When I checked the emails for my sister today, I learned to my surprise that she is an avid ebay user, with ebay toolbar installed and all. Then I learned that the recent ebay user conference drew 10K attendees. I never paid attention to ebay and its ilk, but these data points alerted me to the volume and the relevance of efficient auctions.

  • there are 400M transactions on the ebay backend per day
  • 69M users (11% of global internet users)
  • annualized sales at $21B

if ebay and its competitors manage to capture a larger share of the $1.8T global market for their kind of products, there will be enormous efficiency gains that should easily be detectable in the GDP. of course, with efficient markets, there are no bargains anymore:

We passed a booth with a beautiful, extensive assortment of fountain pens for sale when my son, Adam, 15, decided to take a look. So we stopped, and the gentleman who owned the pens started showing us his stock.
This one’s a Parker from 1972, he explained, and this one’s a Waterman … Then he started talking prices.
You can have this one for $250 US, and look, it sells for more than $300 on eBay.
He pulled out a Web screenshot showing an eBay sale for that particular model pen. For me, the nature of the antiques market suddenly changed. No longer was it a local fair on the streets of Sao Paulo, where Paulistas could haggle over a painting, table or kitchen set. Now it was just another cog in the global antiques marketplace, facilitated by eBay and the Web.