There were 'strong' rumours a couple of years ago that Tesco were going to launch an online marketplace to buy-and-sell to rival ebay, but nothing came of it. Well.. it did, it was Tesco market place. But seems like a bit of fudge in what was expected. Tesco sell plenty of stuff on ebay themselves. Maybe they didn't understand the market well enough and backed down. However with their global reach and distribution network they could make serious inroads into something like ebay if they really felt it would be profitable. They could also take on the international monopoly post of Royal Mail IMO. But do they need to? A case of if you can't beat them, join them.
Ebay is such an established brand that its part of the internet vernacular. I'm going to google that, Facebook me, tweet me, stick it on ebay.. youtube etc. Theres plenty of good rivals to those but they are top of the charts by a long way. I wonder how many millions were spent by microsoft to get bing out to a wider audience...
Ebay are often a bunch of c*nts... and they could listen more often to the people who use it day to day, I get surveys sent and so far I've never said on it I would ever recommend anybody to use ebay, which results in a follow up asking "why?", the reason is that I feel sellers aren't given much protection and its extremely easy to become a fraud on the site. I reported a buyer who implied he was going to leave me a neg if i didn't do what he wanted (he purchased an item on a friday afternoon, demanding he got it saturday and didn't use the next day delivery option with saturday surcharge). We specified this and he said it "wasn't his problem", it was ours, he needs it saturday.. but why should we fork out the best part of £10 in extra post. We informed him his 'free post' included in the item was an economy post (as stated) i.e 2nd class so will likely get there tuesday or later. Then he neg'd us on communication, which was utter bilge but he knew it wouldn't get removed because ebay always state that "its the buyers opinion" - he knew what he was doing, a clever git. But he waved "I will reflect what you do in the feedback I give" in our faces. I reported him to ebay on the basis that he was trying to use the feedback system to get extra, but they didn't do anything despite an operator initially agreeing with me but a senior staff member supposedly over ruling because he was "clever in the terms he used" - which to me was a admission that the guy was using the system to play us, they knew it but would have been hard to prove. So, "you're right, but we have to go with the cunty buyer".
Those sort of things are anger inducing, such as ebay refunding when they see a postage receipt but the item may very well never get back here. But we have to build that in to our business plan.
