eBay is not going anywhere. And they may shrink a little, but not by much. Even if ALL venues are forced to collect sales taxes, as long as it is across the board, eBay will be fine.
People have been predicting the end of eBay for years now. It hasn't happened and it won't happen. Like it or not, eBay has the eyeballs and it is where sellers want to be - even with all of their draconian rules.
Yes, the government MIGHT step in and regulate them to some degree. But be careful what you wish for, as that is a double edged sword. Let's say the government decrees that PayPal no longer hold any funds for more than 48 hours. Sounds great until PayPal responds by requiring all new users to undergo the same identity verification that a bank would and also requires a 700+ FICO score. The government cannot mandate that PayPal lose money by accepting all users regardless of risk.
Back in the day eBay was more fun and you could more easily sell whatever you wanted to sell. At that time, they were the only venue where you could sell in volume. Amazon had auctions back then, but very little volume compared to eBay. So did auctions.com, Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, MSN and several others. They are all gone now.
These days, Amazon's Marketplace has volume comparabale to eBay and in some cases is even BETTER than eBay. So, at least there is an alternative. The world of online selling has changed quite a bit and will continue to change in the future. Some of those changes will be for the better, some for the worse. And they will affect different people in different ways.
For example, eBays new TRS requirement that all TRS must use tracking will not affect most of us, as we were already doing so. But that is of little comfort to the people who cannot realisticially meet that requirement because their items weigh very little and are usually sent in an envelope with a stamp. Or that cannot always ship within 24 hours because their items are alive (plants or animals) and they have to take the weather into consideration (trucks are not air conditiuoned, at least not the cargo area). Of course, eBay just responded to their concerns by restating the new policy and saying how great it was going to be.
But, most of them will adapt, prices will just rise to compensate for it.
Nobody knows, myself included, what online selling will look like in 10 or 20 years. We can try to predict it, but that is all speculation. The only thing we can be 100% certain of is that it will be very different from what it is today. But then again, what in this world DOESN'T change?
Last edited by jeffweico; 03-25-2012 at 10:24 AM.
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