Ebay

[DrFaroohk]

I remember being in high school and hearing about this new thing called Ebay...and it was awesome! I could find almost anything I wanted and relatively easy.

Now? I'm not evne sure it's the same website. I just went on looking for computers, and the first hundred results at least were either old XP computers or ADS for computer sales. Everyone lists these .99 cent auctions and then it just says "COME TO MY WEBSITE AT PIECEOFSHITCOMPUTERS.COM TO GET A GREAT DEAL!"

they should not allow this. It should be "sell your shit here" not "Advertise for your business here." They should make people have legitimate auctions, not all this extraneous wholesale bulk inventory third party crap. I want to search for something used, get it from John Doe in Anytown, USA, and have it mailed to me in exchange for a sum of money.

Trade Chat in WoW is more productive than this.

[Andara Bledin]

While I can understand your frustration, it is what it is.

You don't like the spammy listings, find the ones that don't belong and report 'em.

Otherwise, refine your search (like excluding sellers) and move on. There are still a lot of great deals to be had.

^-.-^

[AdminAssistant]

I've had the same problem on Etsy. Well, that and the stores that are fronts for Chinese businesses.

[HYHYBT]

I've had a bit of a different problem. How do you search for, say, a *computer,* not computer parts or accessories or whatnot? For example, I'd like to replace a nine-year-old G4 Powermac with most any model of desktop Mac less than about five years old. But the category setting for computers includes all sorts of junk, from dead machines to bits and pieces to cables, memory, keyboard covers, etc., much of which shows up in a search for, say, "mac mini," along with expensive new or near-new machines. To make things worse, the navigation system doesn't allow skipping forward or back by many pages at a time. (I think it will allow two.) So a broad search and then skipping to the part where the prices are about right, while a sensible approach otherwise, doesn't work either.

[Boozy]

Craigslist tends to be better for non-collectibles these days, as long as you aren't into the auction thing.

[Andara Bledin]

You exclude terms. It works the same as including them, you just put a minus before the term you don't want.

You can also set the minimum and maximum prices to keep it within your budget and to avoid the obvious crap, although some auctions will start ridiculously low because they know the bidders will push the price up to where it should be.

There's an entire sidebar dedicated to narrowing things down, and if that's not enough, then you can take it to the advanced search options.

^-.-^

[AdminAssistant]

Craigslist tends to be better for non-collectibles these days.

I might be the only one, but I find Craigslist to be incredibly sketchy. I was looking for a couch a while back, and all of my friends said, "try Craigslist!!" Everything listed there was either as expensive as something new or complete crap. Plus, going to some strange person's house? Too paranoid for that.

[HYHYBT]

Exactly. I much prefer going through ebay where there's a third party involved and the item is shipped to meeting a stranger who knows I've got a pocket full of cash.

Thanks; I'd forgotten the price range thing, but didn't originally use it because of those with prices of $1. I still think they ought to separate working equipment from accessories and parts, though, as a category; excluding terms too easily means *missing* items you want. For example, I don't want to buy RAM, but it's very likely that listings for working computers will mention it.

I also wish they'd make it easier to search for *sold* items. (It may, of course, *be* easy to do, and I'm just a complete idiot, but I'm going to complain anyway.) What's wrong with getting a good idea of how much that thing you're looking for is likely to cost? What's wrong with finding out how much those things you want to be rid of are selling for? But the only way I've found is to bookmark items that *haven't* sold, and come back to them after their time has expired.

I'm not actually looking right now; I was a few months ago for curiosity, and probably will be again in a few months for serious, but not now.

[Andara Bledin]

If you're after a Desktop that's not a Mac, then you would start HERE. If you find anything in there that isn't a desktop computer, then report them. It's actually fairly easy to do from a link at the bottom of the page.

From there you can narrow it down to specific brands, specific speeds, condition, memory, processor, etc. And these are all checkbox categories, so you can make multiple choices.

It gets harder when you're trying to find more obscure items that don't have such specific categories.

It turns out that they've made some change that you can search Completed Listings without having to log in. This may not work across the entire site, but for items with categories and checkboxes, it appears to work like a charm.

^-.-^

[Dreamstalker]

Reporting listings for valid reasons doesn't do shit...and yet competitors can report all day and the good sellers get dinged.

The new CEO has said many times that he wants to get rid of the 'flea market' sellers (which made ebay what it is) and become a Wal-Mart-like entity. From a seller's POV, his policies are working (no negs for bad buyers, worthless dispute system, increasingly high fees, free or unreasonably low caps on shipping being dictated, ridiculously high 'standards' that sellers need to meet but nobody's sure what they are, etc). Most of the good sellers I had favorited are gone and I'm finding that I need to come up with new ways to weed out 'undesirable' listings (thanks to new and inventive methods of keyword spamming, excluding terms no longer works the way it should).

[Andara Bledin]

Actually, I've had whole rafts of auctions pulled for various violations.

One thing to know is that they have thousands of reports to go through, so it's best to catch them early. If there's less than a day left, don't bother. But if the listing's fresh, you can get them axed. And enough of those shenanigans will get a seller reprimanded anywhere from lost listing fees to full on suspension.

^-.-^

[MrsEclipse]

There was this flea market in Jacksonville I used to love going to- I don't know if I've mentioned it here before. But we used to go every summer, and I found lots of great things. Now, though, all the stalls are permanent rented businesses and it's a dirty mall for cheap, off-brand crap and collectibles priced just a bit too high for their rarity.

That is the exact reason this is a place where we *used* to go. If eBay is actively trying to get rid of the "flea market" aspect, then soon eBay will just drop out of the radar of my life. A new website business will probably pop up with the flea market ideal intact, be awesome for a few years, and then go Wal-Mart on us. Lather, rinse, repeat.

[Dreamstalker]

The same thing happened to a flea market outside Santa Fe after the pueblo took it over. Before, you could find all sorts of unique stalls and a lot of them were individuals just selling what they had made or found; crafts, jewelry, foodstuffs, bones and skulls, assorted artifacts, etc.

When the pueblo got it, I think they started charging much higher fees to the vendors so the smaller 'cool kids' packed up and went elsewhere and I started to see the standard rug and clothing stalls. The whole vibe just got a bit more 'corporate' so it's nowhere near as interesting as it was.