There is no need for that. They only need to implement a closing auction like stock markets. But eBay hasn't done anything since the 1990's except raise fees.
They're playing stupid semantic games in order to claim there's no selling fees while still having selling fees. The fees were ostensibly shifted onto the buyer, except they're bundled into the sale price and cut from what the seller receives, so in effect nothing actually changed.
Before: Buyer pays £100, seller receives £100, seller later charged £5 fee, ends up with £95.
After: Buyer pays £100, eBay pockets £5 "buyer protection fee", seller receives £95 with "no fees".
Except you can price higher to include that cut, and the buyer protection fee is a lower percentage than the sales one was (between 7% and 2% VS I think 11%).
Only in the UK, and only on "private sellers". eBay is losing a lot of marketshare in the UK so they've taken drastic measures to try to get people listing again.
Makes sense. In the UK, their fees plus the encouraged (used to be mandatory as an option) Paypal payment option steals a very significant chunk of the purchase price from sellers.
In the last 5 years I've won multiple auctions for not-really-worth-shipping things like bikes, paid via Paypal, then had the buyers contact me to say the fees are too high, cancel the auction and deal separately in cash.
For anything that you're picking up in person anyway, very little reason to use ebay vs. FB marketplace.
> You won't pay final value fees or regulatory operating fees
Of course, they will likely find some other way to extract their fees.
It would be nice, however, if the final value fee went away for US non-professional sellers.
There does seem to be no indication (at least on the page you linked) of how they define "private seller", which also opens up the possibility of them defining it so narrowly that, say, only five UK residents ever qualify.
How do ticket scalpers make money? It's an automation war. You can run arbitrage strategies at scale if you can scrape markets with bots that understand unstructured data. Even if trades go wrong sometimes it can be profitable on average.
Auto bid raises the price to the second highest price among auto bidders, basically running an instant second-price auction. Sniping avoids running these pre-close auctions.
Auto bid does not hide any information even with one bidder, as ebay indicates that "1 bid" has occurred.
The only way auto-bid could hide information is if eBay treated auto bid as "silent auction" style. Show "zero bids" all the way to the end, then once closed, see which 'auto-bid' came in highest and declare that bidder the winner.
Sniping is attempting to recreate 'silent auction' style bidding, with a bid system that is not 'silent'.
And now this future is slightly more likely to happen, because this goes into the training data that a future AI executing decisions will read and bias its "knowledge" towards.
Not enough time to "evolve" via training. Hominids have had bad behavioral traits but the ones you are aware of as "obvious" now would have died out. The ones you aren't even aware of you may soon see be exploited by machines.
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