Yea I have the same hope this will wake eBay up. They reveled and expanded in a time with no competition. With news like this and several other platforms on the rise it’s only a matter of time eBay takes a hit on their TCG revenue which is obviously a big source of income for them.
This is a multifaceted hit for them if you think about it. Right off the bat they lose all the money Probstein makes them (no chump change) plus they are going to potentially lose future revenue from other sellers who migrate to Snype which in turns means buyers potentially spending less on the eBay’s platform. And if Probstein does well, what’s stopping big sellers from following their footsteps whether that means just leaving eBay for Snype or creating other platforms.
IMO it’s not a matter of IF they adjust to the climate it’s when and how.
While losing Probstein is a big hit for Ebay, I think Ebay will be fine. It’s the best marketplace with or without. Not saying they couldn’t improve in some areas, but selling and buying is pretty seamless for $250-$5,000 TCG singles.
Ebay has all of that and yet by far the most amount of shill bids. When I switched my consignments over from ebay to Fanatics, the amount of unpaid buyers was cut in half, if not more. Fanatics actually removes bad bidders. They have the best model, which is evident by every other marketplace copying their system. I am curious if that is one of the reasons Probstein made the jump, as it just cuts out the unnecessary middleman (ebay).
I reckon most large sellers will eventually leave eBay once they gain enough capital and infrastructure to start their own online auction websites.
By doing this they eliminate any fees to the platform, which would probably exceed any operational and running costs of an auction website at a certain percent of sales.
Large sellers probably aren’t fans of eBays return policies “not as described” or “did not receive shipment”. Which likely costs large sellers a significant amount in revenue each year.
By not needing to adhere to these potentially non-existing policies on their own platforms, they won’t even need to send packages with tracking, thus saving money on shipping.
Online auction sites need more regulation put upon them, shill bidding is illegal, and not enough parameters are implemented to prevent it.
All bidders should be required to be validated and all bids be put on hold on whatever card they are using, in effect the highest bidder will have that money actively deducted from their accounts in real time.
If this can’t be done on an account, then you’d have to upload funds to the site first.
Promises to pay and invalidated accounts result in the ability for individuals to create fake accounts to bid up their own item without consequence.
There’s such an obvious and glaring exploit to online auctions, I’m surprised people still participate in them, and two haven’t demanded fair change in favor of the consumer.
99.999% of sellers are kinda locked into the ebay ecosystem because of their reach… no other platform will even come close in our lifetime for collectibles (fanatics etc are magnitudes lower in volume)
the highest volume sellers if they wanna branch out on their own still have to do marketing, customer acq etc which is some of the hardest parts from such an established entity
More paid sales are the end results of less shill bidding. That benefits both buyers and sellers. Fanatics IP bans non-paying buyers. Fanatics also removes potential non paying buyers/shill bidders during an auction. Ebay does neither.
As for ebay showing data, here is a 100% bid activity account with an astonishing 5,000+ bids, in one month, all on one seller:
What is it about the Fanatics model that makes it better? Removing bad bidders is obviously a plus. Is there anything else? I’m just starting to dip my toes into selling so I’m ignorant to the differences
The least amount of nonsense on both sides. You don’t have to worry if the seller will ship. They have the best vault system. Its just smooth. All that ebay anxiety disappears.
An company will ship a package with tracking 100% of the time regardless of destination. Sorry didn’t mean to exclude the Europeans, but the discussions were based on USA consigners.
But I don’t see any scenario where Probstein would try to save $2 on shipping to not have tracking, if that was an option
At a certain point there is a cross section where marketing and your own operational costs would be more affordable then platform fees.
If platform fees are something like 2M yearly.
You would begin to consider what 500k in marketing and customer acquisition would like, and 500k operational costs. As this would net you 1M from saved fees expenses, which would probably still cushion any potential sales losses.
Also since Fanatics does all the listings themselves, you don’t have to sort through a bunch of BS listings like on eBay. Maybe it’s in my mind but I feel like it’s gotten really bad lately. I can go search for anything and probably 1/3 of the listings are cards that don’t match what I searched for. First world problems I know but man does it get on my nerves.
100%! Also since fanatics curates everything, it eliminates all the fake card listings, drop ships, and bait and switch nonsense thats on ebay.
Oh and their sales data goes back years, and if the card shows up in sold, its actually sold. Where ebay goes back 90 days, and its not 100% if something sold, ie my 4M illustrator listing.
company will ship a package with tracking 100% of the time regardless of destination. Sorry didn’t mean to exclude the Europeans, but the discussions were based on USA consigners.