Ebay has been desperately searching for a way to salvage its diminished reputation. From being known as "America's flea market" to "America's junk dump" has taken years of hard work. To earn a reputation as bad as Ebay's is now, requires devotion.
Devotion to letting Chinese sellers rip off Ebay customers with fake designer merchandise. Devotion to shutting down the small sellers that made Ebay so popular when it began. Devotion to progressly stripping sellers of their rights, including the inability to realistically be rated by buyers, unable to leave feedback about bad buyers, unable to respond to unrealistic expectations by buyers. Unless it's Express Mail, no package can be counted on to be reliably delivered within two days of payment.
Devotion to further undermining the smaller sellers by running ads by large companies for similar merchandise on the same pages as the listings. By making the search engine virtually impossible to use. By giving preferential treatment to sellers who list in the thousands rather than the dozens.
Devotion to letting Paypal, its subsidiary, arbitrarily withhold the sellers' money under a series of rules that grow increasing more Byzantine by the year. Which included banning cash and money orders and setting up as competition payment systems that both cost more and were harder to use.
Despite a phony claim to being "just a venue," Ebay treated the sellers, its CUSTOMERS, as if they had no right to be there. Ebay started as a democracy and gradually became a dictatorship, first under the leadership of the vicious Meg Whitman, and later under the unconscionable rule of John Donahoe.
As an Ebay seller from 2002 until 2010, I am in a position to know all too well what I am writing about. A major problem is that no venue has been able to compete for Ebay's visibility in the larger marketplace. For years sellers have hoped that Google would set up a competing site. But that apparently is not in the cards.
And now, major designers are selling their collections on Ebay. This is a foul thing to do. Derek Lam is merely the latest designer to spread his legs for Ebay.
His collection will be "voted on" in the same way that American Idol votes on its contestants. Previous prostitutes for Ebay have been Norma Kamali and Narciso Rodriguez.http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2010/10/derek_lam_is_launching_a_colle.html
If you want to bring "affordable fashion" to Americans, sell your collections at Target, which has the honesty to call itself a commercial retailer.
Shame on you, Ebay, for helping to further destroy what was once a viable source of income for so many ordinary Americans. All the while baying that you believe that "people are essentially good."
People, perhaps, but certainly not your management.
Ebay is a disgrace to the values you pretend to promote, and you are a disgrace to America.
Ciao,
Elisa & Bucky the Wonderdog
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