eBay's recent decision!

[blob]

OK, I know most of you already hate eBay, but just wondered how you'd been getting on after the recent consolidation of 'classic car parts' with general 'car parts'. All good if you own an MG, but try finding rare pieces when trawling through a category littered with modern, kit and hotrod bits. Anyway figured if enough people emailed them maybe they'd reinstate the category. Or maybe not, people power and all that, or am I the only fanatic on here?  

[stiffy]

  Having used E bay since a time when you had to explain to folks what E Bay was I to am a little disgruntled.

 At one time you could sell Cd's using different criteria like pop classical etc. These could be broken down into sub section's. Alas no more. Its been like this for months and has been discussed on the E Bay forums.

 The company are not doing themselves any favours as it makes selling a lot harder and finding a list of Cd's that you may like a lot harder.

[richard]

well i can amuse you all by declaring i didnt even know there was a classic section !!!!! why have i never found it ? as for hating ebay i just don't get it - if you dont like it dont use it - i have no complaints at all about ebay . you can always go back to trawling the small ads . autojumbles are losing there place as people like ebay - shame but true

[Big Al]

Just accept that eBay has moved from a techie based business that valued its position as much for being a socially responsible trading club as well as a business to that of an irresponsible money hungry machine for greedy owners who bought it out some years ago. It has moved from a pleasant sniff round other peoples garage to a risk assessment exercise based on arbitrary rules and a population of conmen who want to have the advantages of Amazon without the responsibility. It is no more than a tool to a sale rather than the selling medium of choice for many honest folks. Private websites are back as are classifieds for larger items. Ebay is best used to advertise/find those sites and avoid fees and geezers by going direct to source. It is always worth looking at what other sales a seller has as this tends to sort out proper sellers from twisters. Feedback is now pretty meaningless. It leaves the occasional seller/clearance Lister in a poor position though. It is now a choice if you want to spend time trawling for the chance bargain these folks might be listing. My experience is unless you can accurately place your items they do not sell well now so I do not bother. So no Classic Spares is a damaging change to trading. I am already back to outing several boxes at a time to car booters/auto jumblers after a clearance session though. It tends to be more efficient use of time/money. So the failure was already upon us before they changed the categories. It is a recognition of their own poor management that there is not enough stuff entered to fill a bona fida category.

I still feel eBay are following Exchange and Mart before them. E&M had the market sown up but a series of daft decisions and overpricing lost them their niche and they are no more than a bit player in a flooded market now. There are other web based sales sites forming up and the net starts having to be cast wider to cover the whole market place and not miss stuff for sale. That might be healthy competition but it makes the one stop buying/selling difficult as you no longer hit the whole market with one advert. For example how many magazines do you need to buy and advert in to cover the majority of the market and sell a car? Used to just bung it in E&M and job done. We are just approaching this point with the internet I fear.

I wonder if the next big thing will be a techie producing a search engine that will ferret out all adverts on the net for a given item but able to recognize and reject all the pethering links that the current search engines fill your search list with which have next to no link with what you asked for. Such a programme would sidestep all listing rules and much silly bollocks and get us back to the subject in hand rather than wading through erroneous froth like 'Sante Fe pile cream' being listed as third choice under 'heavy duty car driver seat' search etc.

[wilksie]

With ebay being a commercial organisation, it would make sense if they listened to their customers. I would imagine if enough people complained about the disappearance of the classic parts section, they would re-introduce it. I have 'sort of' noticed it was gone, although I have to say first I thought I had inadvertently changed my settings. I'll give you an example. My other interest are Panhards, so I always look for spare parts. Click on it and you'll find about 250 mostly new Panhard rods. I'll scroll down to 'condition' and choose 'used'. That weeds out most of the useless stuff.

[richard]

Sante Fe pile cream !! i've looked everywhere for it !  thanks for the tip

[blob]

It's completely useless, eBay stated: "a large number of buyers are unsure whether the item they buy will fit their car, by assigning the
compatible cars from a Master Vehicle List, buyers will find the parts they're looking for" that's good if you have an MG, but if you're looking for something obscure from a vehicle not on the list, under the old regime you could simply search 'handle' for instance, within 'classic car parts' and in return you get vintage handles, now you're supposed to go to 'car parts', sub category 'interior', search classic, classic car, or even vintage and hope the seller has included this in their title, otherwise you get 0, don't even bother putting 'old' as you get old parts for new cars!

In reality, eBay wants sellers to use all the available title space encouraging them to use an additional title, thus increasing the revenue for eBay, crafty!  

[Big Al]

I "a large number of buyers are unsure whether the item they buy will fit their car, by assigning the compatible cars from a Master Vehicle List, buyers will find the parts they're looking for" t

In reality, eBay wants sellers to use all the available title space encouraging them to use an additional title, thus increasing the revenue for eBay, crafty!  

So eBay believe that owners of Classic Cars do not know what parts fit their cars. Unlikely. Their answer to this is to add it to a classification where it is a given that many buyers do not know what parts fit their cars and bury them in an amorphous collection of inappropriate listings. Clearly a lot of people will not bother looking, sales will have less yield and it will not be worth advertising for some. They are gambling on uplift in advertising yield against returns from % take on sales. Exactly what you would do in a market where sale prices are dropping as one is a % the other a fixed fee thus protecting your overall margin at the expense of service. Crafty, yes. Greedy, certainly.

Questions. Is this being done on other Ebay sites like eBay Germany? Is this rip off Britain again? Answer might be to list from abroad.

[Jim Janecek]

Questions. Is this being done on other Ebay sites like eBay Germany? Is this rip off Britain again? Answer might be to list from abroad.

USA eBay still has a "Vintage Car & Truck Parts" catagory.

For now.

[Rusty Chrome (Malcolm Parker)]

I rarely bother browsing categories although I'm not contending that the recent changes have been for the worse. So many things get put in the wrong category, or with some feeble description I usually search "all categories" and put a tick in the "include description" box then narrow things down with the various search commands:

http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/buy/search_commands.html

[wilksie]

The German ebay retains its classic car parts section. Go into 'Auto & Motorrad: Teile' choose 'Spezielle Fahrzeug-Teile' and scroll down to 'Oldtimer-Teile'. It always makes me smile that in Germany a classic car is labelled an oldtimer considering the slightly different meaning over here.

I am guessing that ebay France has also retained the classic car parts section. 'Voiture Ancienne: Pieces' means something like that or am I mistaken?

 

[Big Al]

So add this to other differences like not being able to reclaim credit card fees, VAT etc and eBay UK is a distinctly bad venue to sell from compared with the other countries sites. Think I might switch to France since I have banking facilities there. Then again eBay's crap search engine seems incapable of accurate world wide searches. You cannot win.

[wilksie]

Here's some good news: Ebay has now listened to customers and will re-introduce the 'classic car parts' section, perhaps as early as next week.

http://community.ebay.co.uk/topic/Search-Categories/Feedback-Classic-Car/1700019927?start=144

[blob]

I'll believe it when I see it. All the more reason to voice ones opinion to eBay, as the UK may have been a test bed for something that was soon to be rolled out globally!

[blob]

Here's some good news: Ebay has now listened to customers and will re-introduce the 'classic car parts' section, perhaps as early as next week.

Where does it actually mention they're going to reinstate it?   Looks to me like they're standing firm with the new scheme! Although someone has put a poll up on the Motors forum: http://community.ebay.co.uk/topic/Ebay-Motors/Ebay-Bring-Classic/18000412622 suggesting to bring the category back, pity eBay themselves didn't devise such a poll!