“…So does ebay. I’ve made a lot of complaints about it but they haven’t fixed it, nor even bothered to reply and acknowledge the complaints. Its getting pretty bad on ebay— if you shop there, beware!”
I’m curious what specific problems folks have had at eBay? If I ran the circus I might want to change a few things there, but they’d be mighty few and mostly format related. The OP mentioned swapping stuff as well as buying and selling, and of course eBay isn’t much good as a swapping forum, so I’m glad there are other options. But for buying and selling I don’t know of anyplace that has better selection, searchability, photos, convenience, or speed. After hundreds of transactions, both purchases and sales, over about ten years I can only remember two problems:
-
One buyer finked out on me and didn’t pay for a fairly valuable item I was trying to sell, so I had to go through the frustrating and time-consuming process of trying to contact him, waiting unsuccessfully for a response, and then re-listing the item.
-
One seller shipped a couple of items to me in a flimsy package which was torn open in shipment, and one the items got lost.
eBay can’t prevent stuff like that, nor can they prevent people from listing their stuff in the wrong category or asking too much for shipping or using poor-quality photos or whatever. But those have been the exception and I’ve been happy with the huge majority of my transactions.
I do get annoyed with the flood of commercial stuff on eBay when I just want to browse and see what individual people might be selling. On the other hand I like having commercial vendors sell on eBay since I can then compare their prices to those of other on-line stores, and since if I’m searching for a specific item I like having lots of options.
I don’t do the back-and-forth one-upping bid thing, since eBay items sell for just over the second-highest bidder’s maximum bid regardless of when bids were placed.