This is something that has been obvious to me for quite a while now, especially through dealing with the main online sales channels on a daily basis.
But last week I bought something on the same day from Amazon and eBay, both small items that would both fit in a small package (Unfortunately I didn’t think to do a direct comparison and see if I could find the same seller on both channels. This is however on my to do list in the future)
I ordered and paid for both items before 10:30 in the morning.
So I had received both of my order confirmation emails that same day. Now here comes the difference. The item I bought on eBay came with a FREE next day delivery, paying the same amount for delivery on Amazon I got the Free Super Saver Delivery, also known as 3-5 days. So delivery is a noticeable difference already.
The next big difference is communication. eBay make it incredibly easy for the buyers to get in touch with the sellers. Whereas not so much on Amazon. In my experience you get a much more complete service from not just eBay but the individual sellers than from Amazon or their third party sellers.
When I sit and think about it the customer service I get from buying on eBay compared to Amazon is quite large. (I do realise that it is much easier to sell on eBay and as such you can get more cowboy sellers…but if you know what. To look for in sellers these are easily avoided). So what is the main reason for this? In my opinion, it all boils down to Feedback!
EBay have been incredibly clever by nurturing the feedback system, like they have. It used to be the buyers that were scared on eBay. Now it is the sellers. EBay offer so many benefits to encourage sellers to sell well on eBay and these benefits can be very quickly lost if you get a couple of low dsr’s. It all boils down to a power change on eBay, it used to be the buyers that should of been scared and the sellers held the majority of the power. This has now changed and the buyers and sellers both no the power is firmly in the buyers hands. So the only way to avoid low dsr’s is to be the best seller you can be.
Needless to say Amazon don’t have this problem, they don’t have the same feedback culture and as they are largely a retailer themselves they have a slightly more seller oriented position on sales. So although you will get better customer services on eBay, why then is Amazon still so popular? The next part of this post will look at the differences between buyers and why both Amazon and eBay can co-exist in the same field.
So if your going to be there and want to meet up and have a chat then let me know either in the comments below, or on Twitter: @dave_furness
You see eBay has come a long way over the years and they have been keen to cast aside the image of them being purely or even predominantly an auction house. This is becoming more and more the case thanks to eBay’s marketing and ever popular Deals pages, as well as the ever expanding outlet offerings by high street retailers and manufacturers.
I am at least 99% sure that currently there are no such provisions in place for eBay to have massive warehouses scattered around the UK, or have any staff in place to offer customer service support on a retail selling level. As always with all things eBay we would most likely see this happen first in the USA but from a logistics point of view the UK would be a much easier nut to crack first.
Me discussing would be both boring and pointless as I’m sure there are many more places on the web covering the importance of this. Instead I’m going to give you a list of ‘facts’ that got posted on Twitter taking advantage of Wikipedia being down. Some of these were fantastically witty so m going to share them here. I am on twitter so if you use it feel free to follow me @dave_furness