NY Times article today about Ebay counterfeiting problem

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Posted By: Cat

I believe the good that could come out of this lawsuit is that EBay finally admits that there is a problem. My personal view by seeing interviews with the CEO and spokespersons is that they portray EBay as "one big happy problem-free community." I can understand them having this public persona...it's good for business, but there business model fails to admit (behind the scenes) that there is a problem...even if they don't want to admit it publicly.

I believe cards are a huge part of EBay's revenue stream...I wouldn't venture a guess as to a percentage...but it is material. There are a couple of little things that they could do to cut down on the fraud, at least in the card market. Failure to do a few simple things over the years tells me they do not care. Perhaps Tiffany's will force them to care.

1. Do not allow private listings. It is so easy to help fellow buyers out if you have a mechanism to contact them. But when you do not know who the bidder is, the system falls apart and there is no way to inform an uninformed bidder/purchaser that the card is a fake.

2. Do not allow people to hide their feedback. What is the use of having a feedback system if you can't see it.

3. Stop retaliatory feedback. Why can someone leave me, as a buyer, negative feedback when it is proven I have paid through PayPal. As a buyer, my responsibility is to pay. If I do that I should never have to worry about negative feedback and therefore can leave accurate feedback without retribution. Since EBay owns PayPal now, this would be such an easy change for them to make. It may actually move more people to pay with PayPal.

4. Change the feedback system to categorize the issues. Feedback that is either a global "A" or "F" just doesn't cut it. Sometimes I read where a seller got poor feedback just because they didn't use quite enough bubble wrap in the buyers opinion. SHEEESSSHHH. Perhaps there could be feedback categories such as this: Speed of shipping, quality of packaging, product accurately described, etc. etc. Grade all these on a one to five basis.

5. In the feedback system leave the product listing description available for eternity...this would take just one extra line in the feedback system. You can get into a sellers feedback and read every feedback comment since they joined EBay, but you have no idea what those items were. If I am bidding on a $2,000 card and the seller has 150 feedback it doesn't do me any good to know that if I can't determine what those feedbacks were based on. Big deal if they have 150 feedbacks if they were based on selling 99 cent Yu-gi-oh cards. I would think most honest sellers would actually appreciate this change. I have sold many high dollar cards in my past, but you can't tell this necessarily by my feedback, because many of them were years ago and those listings are long gone out of the system...only a comment with no description as to the card remains. A dollar price of the item sold may help too.

I am sure there are 50 more simple changes they could make to fix their problem, but I'll leave that to someone else.

Edited to correct typos unless otherwise noted.