Does Anyone Find It Difficult to Shop at eBay?

Tsort on 14/09/2023 - 18:06

I used to buy stuff from eBay many years ago, but these recent years / for a long time I shopped at physical stores or only when they are in Ozbargain (a happy member, as you can tell), but recently I found myself in need of many things, so I started scrolling Amazon and eBay. To my dismay, I find eBay is really unpalatable now.

  • It's hard to filter for exact items (harder than Amazon anyway), everytime I got bombarded by irrelevant items with obscure description offered in duplication by so many unknown and dubious sellers, more on below.
  • Unreliable sellers, for example, it happened several times already that I added items that are marked as free shipping or free shipping on click and collect, then after I obediently picked the local click and collect location and tried to pay on checkout, suddenly a $10 shipping fee was added there. Should have said if they mean click and collect at the seller's house????
  • I accidently subscribed to eBay Plus, and finding the button to cancel it takes quite a while as it's cleverly hidden in plain sight in a drop down menu. I find it unpleasant.

On the other hand, I have no interest in Amazon Prime's offering of movies and books, I only want to shop a few items, thus the $10 monthly fee is making me crazy, too much to ignore as spare coins, but not subscribing make me feel wasteful on the shipping fees I paid.

eBay Plus' $5 a month looks good, but in the end it's money down the drain since most of the time I get to eBay I got so frustrated that I closed it without buying,

/rant

General Discussion

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Comments

  • singingwolf on 14/09/2023 - 18:20
    +1

    I used to sell on ebay. I stopped 6 months ago. What I used to sell everyday day was taking weeks to sell. No one on it anymore

  • Jimothy Wongingtons on 14/09/2023 - 18:20
    +2

    Nah

  • ihfree on 14/09/2023 - 18:38
    +1

    Yeah, it's difficult to use.

    Multi item listings and out of stock items make filtering impossible. The search defaults are useless in a browser and need to be changed every time.

  • Protractor on 14/09/2023 - 19:26
    +2

    They don't care. It's mainly for money laundering.

  • PeterA07 on 14/09/2023 - 19:26
    +4

    There are some issues with shopping on eBay. Searching for items can be difficult. But your second and third dot-points just sound like user error or a lack of familiarity with the interface.

    On the second point, the seller has no ability to hide postage. If there is a fee, it will be visible on the product page. There are no hidden postage fees that are only visible at checkout.

    On the third point, I don't understand how you can "accidentally" subscribe to eBay Plus, or why that is eBay's fault. Moreover, it is not difficult to cancel a membership. You can get to the cancellation page in four clicks from the home page.

  • Nugs on 14/09/2023 - 19:39
    +2

    I get better hits on ebay in comparison to amazon fwiw
    .

    • Switchblade88 on 14/09/2023 - 20:39
      +2

      At least on eBay I can sort price + postage then filter with -[keyword] to reduce unwanted results. Neither of which I can do on Amazon.

      Even when I do find an equivalent item on Amazon, it's almost always more expensive. Not to mention fast shipping doesn't exist outside of capital cities so eBay sellers have always been consistently faster overall.

  • payless69 on 14/09/2023 - 20:27
    +1

    Way to do it is throw anything of interest into the cart.
    Once you have 99 items in there the desperate ones lower their price.
    Yeah it is messy but the only way to fight tease is with equal tease.
    Buy ONLY when item is what you really want and the price justifies it!

  • bmerigan on 14/09/2023 - 22:06
    +1

    Search tip:
    You can prefix search terms with a - to exclude those words.
    For example if you need a complete headlight assembly: headlight -globe

  • Sinnerator on 15/09/2023 - 08:53

    search results for both amazon and ebay are complete crap, the only time i ever bother to look is when a direct link is posted on this website

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