It might help to bring up some of those warm, fuzzy feelings right now as the latest rash of changes that have brought great upheaval to eBay take effect. This week, the big controversial change is massive changes to one of the bedrocks of the eBay system--changes to feedback. The original feedback system put in place by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar assumed that "all people are good" which is a far cry from the new "no negatives or neutrals for buyers" system that instead seems to proclaim only that all buyers are good. But, I digress, and I feel those warm, fuzzy feelings quickly slipping away, so back to our reminisces...
I've been on eBay a long time...I registered my current user ID on eBay in 1996, back before eBay was eBay...back when it was AuctionWeb. Those early days were amazing! You could browse the entire few pages of the dolls category easily in one evening. It was a thrill to sit in your pajamas at home and bid on a doll (yes...it was all auctions back then, my young friend...hard to believe!) Or, if you sold dolls, you could sit at home in your pajamas and sell a doll. Different strokes for different folks, but the thrill was the same on either side of the transaction.
If you were lucky enough to be a high bidder on a doll, you would eagerly send off your check or money order the very next day (yes, yes, calm down, PayPal didn't even exist back then!) and impatiently wait for your doll to arrive.
It was all so simple and uncomplicated. And fun. Lots of fun. It wasn't just the aspect of at-home auctions that was fun--the community was amazing also, and you always got the feeling that the eBay management "got it," that they were on the side of and working with the community.
But when did the dark clouds of corporate doom arrive? When did eBay go from being a thriving community to a dictatorship of the corporate-minded? Well...one could say the dark clouds first gathered when eBay went public in 1998, but the site was able to retain the fun and the community for some time after that.
It's hard to put your finger on exactly what changed and when it changed to make eBay the impersonal, unresponsive gigantic monster that it is today. Was it the arrival of fixed prices to the site? Was it the arrival of scam artists and spam artists in droves? Was it the maturing of the Internet and the marketplace? Was it simply that the thrill of auctions got old? Hard to say. What is easy to say is that the recent decisions of the current eBay management, each one which seems to make eBay less like eBay and more like Amazon.com have certainly not helped. The world doesn't need another Amazon.com--the world needs eBay to try to BE eBay, even if it is an improved, somewhat different and mature version of itself.
You can read the pain from all the changes on the eBay Discussion Boards right now. All devoted eBay buyers and sellers really put themselves out there. Many sellers depend on eBay for part of their livelihood and many sellers spend countless hours daily on their listings and serving their eBay customers. Many buyers send off hundreds of dollars to people they've never met. So, when eBay makes major, major changes, it hits those buyers and sellers hard. The feedback changes have done that, especially to the sellers, and I don't think that eBay really thought out all the effects of these changes fully--it is as if every time eBay management tries to fix one perceived problem on eBay (in this instance, perceived retaliatory feedback problems) they create 10 more that are as bad or worse (remember when they hid bidder IDs for high priced dolls? Now, many don't feel comfortable bidding and it pretty much sapped whatever auction-fun remained in auctions, but I'm digressing again...)
I'm not sure where eBay will be five or ten years from now. I hope they can weather this storm. As a collector who sells and buys extensively on eBay, I also hope that eBay will be able to right itself from this mess, and go on and thrive. Perhaps we cannot turn back the hands of time to the early days of eBay, but I know that many doll collectors would be lost without eBay, and I think eBay management would be wise to learn from their community and the things that were right and good about eBay's past.
