Thursday Morning – What Am I Bid?
Has anybody checked out eBay lately? I don't hear as much about people bidding in the online auction sales as I did several years ago. If you want to point out somebody who really fumbled the ball when it comes to running an internet business, eBay has to be right at the top of the list. They took their success and tried to turn it into some sort of control over their sellers with the result of many of them leaving the dynamic sales room.
It was going so good for a while there, anything you wanted seemed to be available and not just one of them, but dozens of the same type of item giving you lots of choices and chances to win. There was a real thrill of the chase when I would be trying to win a contested auction with several bidders. At one time I was trying to build up a good collection of pre-1940 postcards of my hometown for my father, so not a lot of money was involved in playing the "game" of winning the item. And when I would win one, I would simply drop a check in the mail for the 5 or 6 dollars to the seller and in a few days the postcard would arrive. Simple, efficient and satisfying for both the seller and the buyer. After delivery, I would post a rating on the seller about their promptness and veracity of their product, and the seller would do the same for me as I built up a good public record of purchasing ethics. Everybody was happy. Except for the eBay people, though.
With their remarkable success and fast growth, a strong surge of corporate greed set in and eBay began a gradual change of their rules that were inexplicably designed to take away any safeguards that the sellers had from unscrupulous buyers. One of the biggest was the changing of the rating system. The sellers were no longer able to rate the buyers, so that other sellers were not able to learn that so-and-do refused to pay, for instance. The buyers were still permitted to rate the sellers though, and some malicious-types were able to zing an honest seller with no recourse. Nobody ever knew why they did that, but it started the exodus of the higher-quality and the volume sellers leaving mostly 2nd-rate merchandise for sale.
And then not long ago, eBay made it a requirement that all sales be completed using PayPal (which is owned by eBay). Since PayPal takes a set percentage of the selling price, the people selling all those $3 and $5 goodies were suddenly losing money on every sale, so they dropped out, too. Just think, if only eBay had done a better job of protecting their sellers, they would have continued to grow much like Facebook has been doing lately. Instead it has become largely a retail site with most items available on the Buy It Now option, which is the only type of purchase I have been doing from them for at least five years now. And even that has slowed down considerably for me. No more of those late-night vigils with the eBay Clock in one window and the filled-out bid form in another, as I try to time the button punching to arrive at the last second and shut out the competing bidders. It was fun while it lasted, but the digital world spins rapidly and we move on.
Now we need to move on to the apparatus and get the equipment checked out for today. I'm heading for the Bunn-O-Matic and where I will press the Brew It Now button. See you back in the day room in a little while.
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