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Saturday, March 14, 2009 12:00 AM

What’s It Going to Take to Fix eBay?

I have a theory about eBay. Everything was going great for the company until that grilled-cheese sandwich came along.

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  • Sunday, March 15, 2009 10:09 AM

    the problem with eBay is PayPal

    What is PayPal? Is it a bank? They move money, maintain accounts and issue credit and debit cards.

    PayPal sure doesn't seem to be regulated like a bank. Everything they do is a criminal conspiracy to hold as much of your money for as long as possible.

    PayPal has barely improved their phone support, but for years they did not even publish their mailing address or phone number. I read recently that RIM, the BlackBerry manufacturer, is going to designate PayPal its exclusive online payment processor.

    Great - that should help kill the BlackBerry once and for all. Which corporate "genius" decided to combine two of the worst customer service models, cellphone providers and PayPal, and use it to torture the early adopters.

    The problems at eBay are a shame, because for sellers, you can usually get a better price selling something on eBay than on Craigslist.

    For buyers, it's the opposite. I buy tech gear of all kinds, used and new, and eBay is a great place to find stuff, but if I can find it on Craigslist first, I don't bother with eBay.

    Plus on Craigslist you can haggle downward over the price, which a seller cannot do on eBay. Of course, I could find my own sister for sale on Craigslist - there are some really scummy operators there.

    I regularly report inappropriate Craigslist ads for pirated software and sellers who want you to send them a money order beforehand so you can pick up an item locally, because they are a student who is "temporarily overseas".

    I agree with the posters here that eBay needs to go back to its roots as a service for non-corporate sellers.

    They should have started a separate site for the corporate sellers, left the little guys like they were, and done much more to address corruption in the overall system.

    Someone will eventually file a class action suit against them, which raises another interesting point: eBay and especially PayPal and its associated financial companies are an intricately interlinked hodgepodge of shadowy offshore companies. Do a little digging and you'll be amazed - try and find out the physical address of PayPal, Inc.

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