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kxeron wrote:
eBay's sole purpose is commerce.
Coming to eBay's site with the knowledge that you won't be purchasing anything due to an unaccountable, over-expensive programme like the GSP is in play is a fool's errand. A pointless visit, a waste of time.
I too am conservative on my purchasing, it's one of the reasons I oppose the GSP in whole in its current form because I can't hold it accountable immediately, I can't say "break this down for me" and get the exact taxes and exact duty, I can't know if I'm being duped by eBay's constantly malfunctioning estimates.
People's time is worth something and that valuable time that could be spent with friends or family is being spent instead on educating sellers on something that should be eBay's job to educate. eBay has created an atmosphere where there is no world outside of eBay, where to get things done right you must spend significant amounts of time on the site doing things that should not be.
eBay is an example/victim of a phenomenon called "Feature Creep" where something simple and convenient becomes complicated and twisted in the belief that it is an improvement. the GSP is part of that feature creep. This feature creep has resulted in more and more of people's time being spent trying to work around and fix eBay's failings. This very thread is a gigantic monument of epic proportions to the amount of time people have spent working around, trying to figure out eBay's failings of the GSP and how to work around those failures, when people could be instead talking to their family about that new thing they purchased in less than an hour and excitedly await its arrival.
Online shopping was at one point easy — was at one point easier than going to the store physically, it doesn't seem that way with eBay anymore.
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I fully agree with what you are saying, when I first started buying it was simple, straight forward and very enjoyable but over the last few years more specifically since the GSP came into existence it has become more troublesome especially with the addition of this additional unnecessary cost. Because the marketplace much like nature abhors a vacuum it does explain how within the last 18 months or so there has been an explosion of very similar sites that strongly resemble what EBay use to be including alternatives to PayPal. I don't know if these sites will eventually be successful in the long term but the fact they do exist and are presently growing should be telling Ebay that the current revenue generation path they have chosen may work in the short term but with more and more buyer dissatisfaction they will possibly lose revenue in the long run. Most of us buyers will be driven by our bottom line which means if we can get the items we want from other sites that are just as secure but cheaper then we probably will and EBay will lose business and if US sellers don't start pushing back to EBay and opt out of this program then they too will lose.
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