Rokjok777

eBay's Skype Fiasco: What Were They Thinking?

"Giant-killer" PayPal competitor is about to be announced. Watch for the announcement this fall. Look out below for eBay.


On Aug 03 12:03 PM Philip Cohen wrote:

> The eBay Marketplace is clearly going down the toilet.
>
> “Noise” Donahoe and some market analysts seem to believe that PayPal’s
> manning of the pumps will keep the good ship “eBay” afloat. I certainly
> would not put my money on the “clunky” PayPal for the long term.
> Assuming that the parties don’t have some agreement to not compete,
> I have no doubt that eventually those other well known “loan sharks”,
> the major credit card companies, will get off their butts and introduce
> a similar universal card/terminal-less on-line payments system that
> the participating banks can incorporate into their internet banking
> systems—and they, at least, will do it properly—and that, my friends,
> will undoubtedly be the end of PayPal outside of the Donahoe-dwarfed
> eBay marketplace ...
>
> I recall that Donahoe has been quoted somewhere as saying that the
> door is slightly ajar for a potential spinoff of his company’s online
> payments unit. If this is correct it will be the first logical thought
> that this guy has ever had; he otherwise clearly has no idea of what
> he is doing at eBay. If that MBA taught him anything then he should
> be using whatever skills he does possess to negotiate with the banks
> to take PayPal and integrate it into their online payments system—in
> exchange for an appropriate interest in the consolidated business,
> of course. Because, the more successful PayPal is, the more likely
> it is that the banks will finally get off their butts and introduce
> a like system; if and when that happens the banks will do the job
> properly and will exterminate PayPal for being the “irritating insect”
> that it is.
>
> Is that blood that I can see in the water? And are those sharks that
> I can see circling?
>
> For anyone with an interest in watching eBay, a detailed case study
> of shill bidding and the abuse of eBay’s proxy bidding system—all
> exacerbated by eBay’s introduction of “hidden bidders”—plus a detailed
> general criticism of eBay’s “clunky” auction platform and policies,
> at
> www.auctionbytes.com/f...
>
> Synopsis:
>
>  very little of the auction system security, that eBay claims to
> offer buyers, exists in fact;
>
>  contrary to their claim, it can be demonstrated that eBay has no
> “sophisticated” nor “proactive” system in place for the detection
> of undisclosed vendor (“shill”) bidding and indeed appears to do
> nothing about such criminal activity except as a reaction to a user’s
> report of suspicious bidding activity;
>
>  eBay appears to have no effective matter-of-course verification
> of users; unscrupulous users can apparently have as many user IDs
> as they may have email addresses;
>
>  many of eBay’s “rules”, concerning the retraction of bids, cancellation
> of auctions, etc, are nominal only and are no bar to the machinations
> of the unscrupulous seller;
>
>  as a result, eBay’s “proxy” bidding system is so open to abuse
> by such unscrupulous sellers that to use it, as eBay intends it to
> be used, can be an invitation to pay your maximum;
>
>  the lack of any such effectual security effectively “aids and abets”
> unscrupulous shill-bidding sellers to defraud naïve buyers;
>
>  the masking of user IDs with non-unique, absolutely anonymous,
> bidding aliases serves little other purpose than to obscure such
> shill bidding;
>
>  the quarterly changing of even these non-unique, absolutely anonymous,
> bidding aliases serves absolutely no other purpose than to stop experienced
> eBay users from tracking suspicious bidding activity over time;<br/>
>
>  the anonymous, individual bidder Bid History Detail pages, supposedly
> supplied to offset the absolute masking of bidding IDs, can present
> an ambiguous view and are therefore of dubious value;
>
>  anyone naïve enough to “nibble” bid on a seller-elected “private”
> auction (ie, “User ID kept private”), on the balance of probability,
> is going to be defrauded;
>
>  when suspected fraud is reported, and is found by eBay to be proved
> to their satisfaction, eBay will conceal that fact from the victim
> of the fraud; this then is the concealing of a crime after the fact,
> surely, a crime in itself;
>
>  eBay will never acknowledge to a victim that a fraud has been perpetrated,
> nor indeed will they acknowledge that such fraud is even a problem
> on eBay; eBay therefore sees no reason to provide any mechanism to
> aid in the recovery of any monies so defrauded;
>
>  if eBay did have any truly sophisticated and proactive system in
> place for the detection and control of shill bidding, we undoubtedly
> would not now be having this debate; and
>
>  for those buyers (and honest sellers) who embrace eBay believing
> that eBay acts as an “honest broker” between buyer and seller, I
> can only say that there are fairies at the bottom of your garden
> too.