noam's blog.a.lish

spanish french italian german 1/5/2008 10:47:39 AM

My Love-Hate Relationship With eBay

I've been searching for a new game to buy for my Playstation 3 for the past two weeks. During this period I have been downloading demo's (which is pretty cool in and of itself) of a couple of games. The whole concept of being able to play the demo at home and not at a GameStop (where you would have to fight over the controller with a 12 year old) is as close to perfect as can be. The big problem with demo's are that they are not the complete game (duh). So after finishing a demo of a game that you're enjoying you end up running to a GameStop and buying the game.

Prices for new PS3 games are in the $50-$59.99 range (for the good games at least) while the used games run a mere $5 dollars behind (at GameStop that is). One might wonder the internet convinced that they could find a better deal. This is where my gripe with the all mighty eBay comes in. I'm sure all of you have complaints about eBay but I'd like to list my top 5 problems with this god forsaken service:

Even with their new design eBay still looks and feels like crap. With all their money you'd think they could come up with a better design and get some damn usability people to figure out what's wrong with eBay.
So much stuff to buy but still isn't organized in a completely intuitive way. I think that Amazon is much more organized than eBay, so why doesn't eBay use the Amazon model?
Scams suck and it's quite easy to get a friend to bid on your item to drive up its sale price, that's really annoying and in many times I have been offered a second chance when it was obvious that a friend of the seller was trying to drive up the price... are there no consequences for such behavior?
Spam! Why can people see my email address and spam me? isn't this some sort of privacy issue? I have received many fake second chance emails for items I've searched for and never bid for... so someone must be sniffing! While that seems like a pretty interesting idea I am quite pissed that it happened.
Feedback. This whole system seems to be wrong to me. While it is supposed to enforce some sort of trust system I feel like it does exactly the opposite. As a buyer you are on the short end of the stick when it comes to feedback. If you have something bad to say about a seller they will (and have) respond that you're a newbie (even if your account exists from 2000) and that you are a disgrace to eBay... really?? That's all you got?

So while I have problems with eBay I still end up buying there because I can't find any service that can really compete with the variety and prices of eBay. Amazon provides a different model in which used games are simply more expensive than eBay, craigslist is ok but kind of difficult to manage (can't they put some effort into it... come on! same shit for so many years), and now even facebook has a market for buying and selling stuff but it is nowhere near what eBay, Amazon, or Craigslist have to offer.

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here except to point out the fact that eBay sucks but there really aren't many options out there for replacing what we get from eBay (both as buyers and as sellers) and that sucks even more. Anyway the games I decided to get are: