It's a shame eBay got their "marketplace" lunch eaten by Amazon.
I remember when shopping at eBay was sort of sketchy to normies and Amazon was the trusted retailer. In the intervening decade Amazon has done everything to dilute their marketplace to be as wild wild west with fake goods / junk / stolen good fencing / disappearing sellers no better than eBay.
eBay remains the only reliable place to find good quality broken things, which is really important for reuse, repair of electronics.
It's also surprisingly good for niche items like a fan for a particular out of production CPU board.
A coworker once bought an old iMac to use to benchmark some satellite code because the old iMac and the RAD750 are pretty close (up to a factor 2 througout I guess). All eBay.
Indeed. It is possible to find particular vacuum tubes with specific construction on eBay as opposed to most dealers. Often times you spend more with eBay but at least you know what you are getting. eBay is the best place to find obscure items or even particular versions of obscure items.
As long as you buy from sellers with a decent history and non-fake reviews. And not but anything “too good to be true”. I bought a powerful mini PC for cheap from someone with hundreds of I guess fake reviews and got a keychain instead. They got fairly quickly banned and I got my money back
> marketplace to be as wild wild west with fake goods / junk / stolen good fencing / disappearing sellers no better than eBay.
My home is half full of things from flea markets where all of the above apply a lot. Yet they're still a great place to shop with caveat emptor shields on high.
Amazon has just become the biggest best flea market ever and the other half of my things are from there. So while all you say is true it is still a tremendous value to me. Sure you can't trust the sellers. So I don't, and it still works over all.
At least you can personaly inspect an item before buying it in a flea market. Last time I bought a tablet in Amazon the seller sent the right box with a completely different cheap product inside that had no serial number anywhere. Since the serial is absolutely required there was no way to return this thing. I left a 1 star polite review with pictures that was quickly removed with an automated message about "focusing too much on the seller", edited the review to remove any mention of the seller and it got quickly removed with no reason at all. What a great scam.
Unlike with flea markets, I've always been able to return such items bought from Amazon. They've never given me a hard time about it. That's happened frequently enough that I plan for it. I still don't like it of course. But if an Amazon-with-zero-scams opened up I'd only be willing to pay a little more for that service.
I try not to buy third-party shipped, and certainly wouldn't for something not very cheap. The returns/customer service experience is just so much worse, Amazon will eventually get involved (sounds like it didn't help in your case) but you have to suffer through it with the third-party and reach an impasse first.
And without painless returns, Amazon loses a lot of appeal (over the high street, John Lewis online, etc.) for me.
That's not relevant here, it doesn't affect the customer service; what does 'actually came from them' mean in the context of who is the seller in the transaction?
If somebody put something bad into the supposed-to-be-fungible warehouse pool, and I'm the unlucky recipient, then that's one example of where the better customer service comes into play.
If you buy sold by BESTWAREZ-FOR-U and despatched by Amazon, then you get it shipped from the same pool but crapper service when you get the same amount of unluck and receive the dodgy one. (And if it's despatched by them and you've not heard of them before, even crapper, and it probably won't take nearly as much unluck for it to pan out poorly in the first place.)
> Since the serial is absolutely required there was no way to return this thing.
If you have prime, just contact support. My experience is that it is a fairly fast painless process and they either just credit you right there, or allow you to free return the item for credit.
Not a shame at all when eBay still feels like 2004 but not in a good way. I'm honestly perplexed it's only 9% because it's such a terrible service in 2024. I recently tried to sell a small item on my >10 year old eBay account with loads of reputation and had to go through a dozens of KYC hoops and was still declined. Not to mention the ungodly UX.
For real. Recently re-activated my eBay account after 10 years to buy a relatively obscure item and amazingly it is almost exactly the same site that it was 20 years ago.
I guess there's something to be said for not chasing infinite growth, but eBay and Craigslist having their lunch eaten was entirely predictable. Not sure how many employees eBay has, but it feels like they could lay off 90% and nobody would notice. They're already coasting off the grid.
I am not sure Amazon has become as bad as everyone seems to suggest it is. I still buy from amazon frequently and never have a problem.
The thing with Amazon is there customer service is great, so if something does go wrong then you can sort it.
The other thing is to avoid the more dodgy looking listings and to buy only from amazon direct or shipped by Amazon and a fairly trusted brand.
Not sure if Amazon US is much worse than Amazon UK though. Ebay can be a bit more annoying to talk too, it takes much longer, amazon can be sorted in a quick 5 minute chat on there website.
> I still buy from amazon frequently and never have a problem.
> The other thing is to avoid the more dodgy looking listings and to buy only from amazon direct or shipped by Amazon and a fairly trusted brand.
Amazon's problem is that it commingles inventory in such a way that counterfeits get mixed with legitimate products across sellers. In light of which I have to ask why you think you've never been bitten (and keeping in mind that counterfeits aren't always obvious; ex. lead looks like any other metal)
That 'obfuscation' though is showing you the cheapest product+shipping price by default, even if Amazon-as-seller is not it (and is one of the slightly hidden more expensive ones).
Fair enough if you want the available sellers to be clearer, I'm just saying I think there's only good intentions there.
If I am buying a big name product that is likely to have a counterfeit problem, the seller is usually going to be amazon direct or the manufacturer anyway as big products are stocked by Amazon directly, the stuff that isn't, is usually more generic or niche and not usually a type of product that matters since it's something fairly generic anyway, i.e a dish cloth, tape etc.
I am not sure if it's just less of an issue buying from Amazon UK or it's the type of stuff you are buying, but from what i've read it seems like it's mostly an Amazon US issue. Most things in the UK are not from third party sellers unless you are buying a generic item that is effectively dropped shipped from AliExpress like a fancy dress dinosaur costume.
But for a lot of the items, the only sellers are official.
Look at the Apple Lightning cable, a typical fake product, here in the UK the only place you can get it from is amazon or amazon warehouse, so what products are there to get mixed up? Again, this seems to be more of an Amazon US issue, the reddit post you linked yet again just uses US sources.
I've not experienced this with Amazon, even when buying highly faked items, items that i have purchased from ebay however have been clearly fake. Sure I could have missed a fake product or two, but i've not been obviously scammed where it matters, but on ebay this has happened pretty much every time I buy a highly counterfeited product.
Apple specifically has deals with Amazon such that Amazon is the only allowed seller and there is no third party inventory to commingle. Most brands do not do this, apple is an exception and has the clout to demand such an exception.
I'm pretty sure the level of counterfeits on Amazon varies massively by region. I'm in the UK and don't recall ever getting a counterfeit, and I buy ~1 thing per week from Amazon on average.
Actually I did get some Phillips LED bulbs that were a bit suss, but I'd still probably put my money on them being crap rather than counterfeit.
Counterfeits aren't always obvious but most are; if you've never seen any obvious counterfeits then it's unlikely you've missed high quality ones.
I was buying a high end soap product from Amazon and when we used one from a hairstylist we realized ours were consistently fake.
Bottle and everything looked the same. But then we started buying direct from Dermalogica and it was clear the Amazon products are all fakes. Worst part is the store name on Amazon is Dermalogica products or something very similar to the real name.
> I am not sure Amazon has become as bad as everyone seems to suggest it is. I still buy from amazon frequently and never have a problem.
Example, I bought a new high end camera on Amazon and what I received was a beat-up used camera with parts missing! Had to drive to a Whole Foods to return it and reorder the camera from a proper camera shop, wasting more than a week.
They also substitute junk quality for what was advertised as something else. I bought a power strip clearly advertised as UL Listed and what I received was some homegrown piece of junk that definitely was not. Threw that away taking the loss, not worth the drive to Whole Foods for a return.
At other times, I get the correct item. So you never know, Amazon is a probabilistic shopping site and the probability of getting what you ordered seems to be getting lower.
Very large % of stuff on Amazon US is 3rd party sellers.
There are plenty of reports of 3rd party sellers subbing in rebranded/relabelled goods like SSDs/HDDs/SD cards where you take a cheaps/low one and re-market it as a high speed high price one.
Agreed Amazon absolutely has great customer service for buyers.
I recently built a media-server so was purchasing HDDs. Every single online retailer I purchased from, including Amazon, delivered one that was refurbished or taken from an OEM system and therefore out of warranty. I ended up buying one in-person in a computer store that was about 10% more expensive. For what its worth, Amazon had the easiest return process.
At a macro level Amazon has usurped eBay's marketplace, but at a micro level FB marketplace has really hit its stride.
I will often wait until someone on FB is selling what I want within an hours drive, rather than buy the same thing to be shipped from afar. Skis, bikes, fermentation gear, Ring cameras, etc.
Mainly this is the result of being repeatedly burned on Amazon/eBay, but it's also related to the fact that I can often get the same thing cheaper when the competition is local.
I know a site like this can never be accurate, but the non-tech company I work for had a significant reduction in tech workers and isn't on the list. I really think that sound count.
For folks who are not in tech, check out WARNtracker.com which tracks US layoffs from all companies through mandatory government reporting from the WARN act of 1988, which requires layoffs above a certain size to be reported to state governments.
A good complement for Layoffs.fyi (Sometimes the source of a layoffs.fyi entry will be an article written by a journalist who saw the WARN notice on WARNTracker)
It's not as bad as last year, but if you look at the layoff.fyi graph that goes back further (https://layoffs.fyi/#tabs_desc_471_2 ), I remember feeling that around September of last year that the huge amount of layoffs from late 22/early 23 had stabilized: a lot of my dev colleagues on LinkedIn that were previously laid off had found new jobs (but non-IC-eng roles definitely didn't fare as well), and there were even reports of companies that had had big layoffs rehiring.
So I'd say I was surprised by the big layoff numbers from the likes of big names like Google, Discord, Twitch, Instagram, etc. this January. To me it had seemed like we had already hit bottom WRT layoffs but apparently not.
This is pretty normal for the start of a downturn. There's probably a bunch of forced vacation going on (or will be), too. I remember a lot of that from the healthier companies in the 2002 time frame and a friend of mine at a more hardware-oriented company told me his company is doing that.
Despite what EMT fundamentalists will tell you, the stock market is only loosely correlated with fundamentals and 100 pts is nothing. Besides, there's no reason a company's profit _must_ decline during a downturn: for example, if they perfectly predict the downturn and reduce expenses (like laying people off) just before it hits.
It's going to be normalised in the coming years, across small and huge companies. Not sure how all the web devs will adjust.
Also we aren't in 2010. You don't need to build as much in house anymore or patch up tech that doesn't scale. Modern frameworks, cloud, and open source tech makes things at least 10x easier than they used to be. We will only improve in this regard.
Only if the rate of newer services/companies keep up and outweigh the ease of development we should eventually reach. People are currently still maintaining jQuery PHP and other tech that makes doing anything much more complicated than it needs to be.
might be a naive take but i think LLMs will improve the ease with which maintenance can happen.
one of the major problems with older tech is finding people who are willing to work in that ___domain for cheap - LLMs seem to trivialise that.
How do you think they trivialize it? I've found them to be good for writing short scripts or answering a specific question. I've never seen one that you point at your own code base and have it do things like write a new endpoint that takes into account all the existing database and authentication code. If such a thing exists I'd like to know about it.
Your first sentence is describing the web based LLMs. There are others that operate against the project structure and has read all the files. But a lot of CRUDs also involve a much easier modular ___domain structure.
LLMs amplify you quite a bit in productivity if you're doing CRUD which is what most people are doing. You just clean up the code and clarify potential improvements.
That's entirely possible. eBay is a very mature product, and it has been like this for years. Among the e-commerce platforms, it's still one that empowers the little people and serves a goal. I hope they won't "disrupt" it.
Every year or two Ebay rewrites their UI and makes it slightly worse. I kind of wish they'd laid off a good chunk of their designers/developers three or four UI's ago.
Some much this. If executives were held accountable and terminated for performance failures resulting in layoffs rather than rewarded with earnings bonuses I would feel more sympathy.
I think it was expected after Musk let go of so many people and technically speaking twitter is still functioning as it was with a bunch of extra features (half baked some might be).
> AI is a buzzword that allows the layoffs to happen
Not a single public layoff announcement has mentioned AI as the reason. In fact the current round of layoffs have been going on since before ChatGPT or Github Copilot even launched publicly.
These reports are dominated by retail, farm, warehouse, construction, manufacturing etc. 20-50K highly paid tech workers being laid off won't even cause a blip in the unemployment numbers, but will still have a huge effect on that particular segment of the market (aka the people reading this post).
Tech is small in general I think. I remember always reading about how SF was over run with tech employees. I went and looked up the stats for employment. It was like over half service related employees, the next biggest sector was finance.
Largely because work force participation is at an historic low.
Retirements, "gig" economy, etc are not reflective in the current government unemployment stats, so they do not paint a good picture IMO.
We still have not returned to pre-pandimic levels for Work Force Participation, or Employment-Population Ratio, which where already in a slump since the 2008-2010 Recession.
The employment picture is not as rosey as people citing unemployment numbers likes to believe, but it supports their narrative that the "economy is good" and it also supports government debt spending which right now what is driving inflation more than consumer demand.
We are in very unusual and troubling times economically, and the people at the switch are not looking at the correct numbers to make good decisions
Why? I think this would only be true if negative inflation is the goal. Since the inflation rate is computed relative to last year and as long as salaries do not increase, after a year or two of inflation the average employee has less and less disposable income left, so they can spend less unnecessarily and accordingly the inflation could go down to zero despite full employment.
As an example, if I can buy 2 units of a good this year (so demand is high) and then high inflation persists for two years and now I can only afford one unit (so demand is low) - my salary being the same, then an inflation rate of 0 in year 3 would mean everything stays the same. I can still only afford one unit and that should push prices down or at least keep them steady which is what zero inflation would mean.
Maybe the assumption is that decreased demand will necessarily cause unemployment, but this seems to be true only for domestic demand (questionable for the software industry) and in any case following this line of thought would mean the more employment the more inflation which seems absurd.
That's why the overall unemployment rate changes the population-wide behavior.
You, as an individual, might be forced to remain in that situation but in an environment with low overall unemployment, lots of your peers won't be so forced and so will demand either a raise or will change jobs to self-service the raise. That will tend to get you a non-zero raise (at least on a population-wide basis). If overall unemployment was quite high, employees are less willing/able to make such changes.
Yeah, it does seem like the basic premise is worth questioning. The start of inflation in this cycle looked like a supply shock. Why is the discouraging investment the right response to that?
Raising rates still helps to maintain price stability even if it is a supply shock, it just does it via demand destruction.
The aim is to stop inflation i.e. achieve price stability. Keeping unemployment low is a nice bonus if it can be done.
Also although the start of the inflation seemed to have been a supply shock due to the pandemic, whether that has continued to be the cause vs. the pandemic spending, isn't so clear now. Of course, the war in Russia and now the Middle East isn't helping the supply side either.
Yeah, and that last part is where it gets confusing to me. If it is no longer just a short term supply shock, you'd actually want investment and production expansion. Those pressures seem to be in tension with interest rate increases that have the effect of deferring investment.
Presumably there is some point where raising the cost of investment is not desirable, despite relatively high prices.
I'm sometimes amazed by how many people work at some of these companies.
Nine percent is about 1,000 jobs. So, a back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that about 11,000 people work there. I don't doubt that running eBay is more complex than it appears, but it's just a web site to buy and sell goods. That's an army of people!
This comes up every time a company’s employees is listed, in the software world.
If someone mentions that Walmart employs more people than the US Military, nobody blinks an eye. We can “Richard Scarry” imagine what they are doing, because there are lots of stores and we see what they do. (Reference: https://www.comicsbeat.com/if-your-job-wasnt-performed-by-a-... )
But a company like eBay or Google; we only see a website and can’t imagine what they’re doing. And Xitter continuing to not be completely on fire lends to this.
What do those balls of employees do? Sales, marketing, localization, etc. You can get some 50-80% of the total with a smallish group, but to get it all you need more and more people. And then you need management on top to keep everything moving. At some point it turns from “what do we need to do X” and becomes “do we get more revenue from this hire than it costs”.
I think Walmart is a bad example because there are thousands of giant stores across the United States full of employees. I think most people assume they also do their own distribution/fulfillment shipping of goods to their stores and customers, which requires warehouses also full of employees.
eBay doesn't do fulfillment, or payment processing, or really anything other than running the website/mobile apps/api, customer service, marketing, etc. There has to be a lot of waste there.
The way people bring up "X is basically fine" on this site (not you, other comments) drives me insane. It's gone through multiple seriously breaking issues, its valuation has plummeted, and there's no indication that it's solved the bot and misinformation issue Musk was very loud about before purchase (but some indication it's worsened.) Regardless of your political leaning it's hard to imagine the site being a better experience than it was three years ago (unless you were chronically moderated for posting ToS-violating content.) Maybe nobody can speak with certainty yet that the layoffs have contributed to those issues. It's not hard to imagine that some of this carnage could have been avoided by not slicing out everyone with ___domain knowledge so the new owner could go on some extreme ideological warpath. Yes, the ___domain resolves to an IP address and renders a page in the browser. If this is the baseline to justify laying everyone off, we've gotta expect more from the web.
> I don't doubt that running eBay is more complex than it appears, but it's just a web site to buy and sell goods. That's an army of people!
It's interesting that I had the opposite reaction. eBay is a _worldwide_, multi-billion dollar institution. They've been around for about 28 years (~1995) - since the start of it all...
I really thought the number of employees would be higher.
I turned to Wikipedia for some numbers (apple to oranges comparison, I know... but I was curious).
Walmart : 2,300,000 : Jan 2022
Amazon : 1,684,853 : Nov 2023
Target : 440,000 : ??? 2023
Microsoft : 238,000 : ??? 2023
Alphabet : 181,798 : Jun 2023
Best Buy : 90,000 : Jan 2023
B&N : 24,000 : ??? 2019
eBay : 11,600 : Dec 2022
(People really have the audacity to compare eBay to Amazon)
I didn't realize that eBay was so small. Now they lost 1k. I haven't visited eBay in eons but a 9% reduction in their workforce from such an already low number is devastating (to me).
Are we looking at the end of eBay? They may have become staid... old in their thinking.
I constantly see Amazon, for example, open up new territories in other areas. They went from eBooks to general ecommerce to servers to hardware to voice AI to home gadgets. There seems to be nothing this company won't consider. They think like a startup.
eBay may be another Xerox (or Mozilla...) unless they can get their management team thinking outside their comfort zone.
Replying to myself. I wanted to include other companies that are somewhat similar to eBay as far as what OP implied. I only looked at companies between 6k - 22k employees.
Ubisoft : 20,665 : video games
Yandex : 18,004 : search
Equifax : 14,000 : credit bureau
Autodesk : 13,700 : software
EA : 13,400 : video games (electronic arts)
Netflix : 12,800 : video streaming
Shopify : 11,600 : eCommerce
eBay : 11,600 : Dec 2022
Unity : 7,703 : video games
GoDaddy : 6,910 : domains, websites
It's hard to make sense of these numbers without lots more info but it's interesting - as a first pass - to match number of employees with expectations.
And it's quite a horror show to use, click around your settings/profile/account type pages in particular and it seems that your thrown through 3+ different apps from different eras.
I think about this a lot as well. The massive value multiplication provided by software allows companies to become insanely bloated. At most companies where I've worked you could do it 20% layoff of the tech staff and not notice it. Lots of dead weight.
11,000 people can’t make a database/schema that can store their data such that they stop purging listings! They literally have to purge listings due to their design. It’s so annoying
I wonder if it includes the groups that did all these lousy seller redesigns.
I swear, the new selling pages were made by people who never sold anything on eBay.
It's gone from functional to a clunky buggy mess.
Just simple things - like what qualifies for media mail, is profoundly broken. I'll see things like computer parts getting the option and books not. They're in the right categories, that's not it, it's just broken.
Then there's these comically bad features, like the generic AI description (a book description will be something like "dive into the tantalizing tale of adventure and excitement" as opposed to the condition of the book). It's such terribly unhelpful garbage. Whoever thought polluting the listing with paragraphs of generated bullshit was a good idea?
And the new templated shipping costs interface is thoroughly broken. You have to reload the page sometimes to get it to accept the values.
Then there's the api speed. Updating things like the price has gone from under .5 seconds to more like 5. If you want to do a bulk price update it's sluggish and exhausting now.
They also broke the image widget. Rotations and crops sometimes don't stick nor does rearranging the images. I'll do the work then come back days later to see it didn't actually save the edits.
If you try to void a label, not only is this now multiple extra clicks, if you try to do it from mobile, it now takes you to a broken part of the app.
I don't want to exhaust you, but this is only about 1/3 of the issues.
I mean really, it's a bunch of bugs, system slowdown, and features that will do nothing but kill your sales. New things are fine. Broken things are not.
I stopped getting phone notifications for offers recently.
I'm basically only catching them by chance. Yet another thing broken.
I'm sorry people have lost their jobs but I hope it's the right kind of cut here - my sales this time last year was about 8x what I'm doing now - these updates have killed things pretty bad
How many of us can reasonably say our job isn't bullshit.
I make AAA video games, my industry does not add anything to society.
I used to make eCommerce websites, what does that add to society? Easier access to consumerism? Most of the eCommerce sites were selling "bullshit goods" like toys, kitsch gifts or pranks.
Very few among us do something substantial that actually improves or saves lives.
> I make AAA video games, my industry does not add anything to society.
The culture of society is what we live for! Many games are art and bring joy and purpose to many people. It's tough having a job abstracted away from the people you affect, but you can bring a lot of joy to many people after a stressful day.
"I make AAA video games, my industry does not add anything to society."
How can you say that with a straight face? You literally create art for the enjoyment and pleasure of people, literally the point of life after food, shelter, exercise and employment needs have been fulfilled.
tens of millions of us work in pharma, constructions, aviation, infrastructure, logistics, healthcare, transportation and contribute to society. Just because half of SF is just siphoning VC money doesn't mean most of society isnt
Entertainment has always been a part of society, even if the philosophers deemed it low on the totem pole.
The real bullshit jobs are the jobs that are doing things that don’t need to be done even given the products - like people filing compliance reports for useless metrics.
And eBay would also fall into similar because from an engineering side, there's been no real changes for years (not that any product changes are needed).
A good game developer provides entertainment at least. Contrasted to Twitter who under Dorsey&co shipped NFTs and 1 redesign in 10+ years. They had thousands of engineers sitting doing nothing. Imagine firing 90% of a school staff or 90% of a McDonalds staff.
Not to say that moving forward with development constantly is worthwhile either. Zuckaberg spent billions on a Metaverse which is somehow objectively much worse and buggier than VRChat.
I mean would only people working the most crucial jobs be better for some reason? That would mean something like over 50% unemployment - possibly much higher. Most of modern economy is unnecessary bullshit if you want to go down that rabbit hole. ER nurse? Keep. Gelato factory? Shut it down
I remember when shopping at eBay was sort of sketchy to normies and Amazon was the trusted retailer. In the intervening decade Amazon has done everything to dilute their marketplace to be as wild wild west with fake goods / junk / stolen good fencing / disappearing sellers no better than eBay.