I have been trying to use Amazon's visual search for the past week or two and out of many trials, it has only worked once.
I wonder whether eBay will beat Amazon in this category as the types of photos they have access to (amateur/home vs. professional/stock) are very different. Either way, I am not confident that taking a picture is a better solution than just typing in the name for the vast majority of items.
That seems like a rare case to me. Typically there's a company name or model number somewhere on the item, and often that identifier returns a very specific item.
Looking around my house, I only see a few items that don't have unique identifiers like furniture or plates/utensils. However, I suspect the majority of things sold through Amazon/eBay are more likely to be video games, books, toys, etc. with very visible and highly unique names.
Consider fashion or home goods. Frequently you see something you like based on pattern, texture etc that cannot be easily described in words. Image search is the perfect fit for these kinds of purchases.
In case of goods from China brand name and model can be useless because a lot of products are just the same thing but just with a different fly-by-night Chinese firm logo on top.
Image search could be useful if you want to find all the listings for a specific Chinese product and compare prices or revisions.
> I am not confident that taking a picture is a better solution than just typing in the name for the vast majority of items
I call this the Minority Report effect. When an idea seems cool but in practice is much less usable and practical. And tries to solve a problem that never existed. Do I want to wave my hands in the air to control an interface or rest them on a table? Obviously the latter. It's worked very well for decades.
It seems like ebay would have a ton of user-provided photos which would be a possibly huge corpus for machine learning to help identify objects like this. It will be interesting to see how well this works!
I'm pretty sure Taobao in China has had this for ages. Search suggests[0] since as early as 2011. To test it, go to Taobao[1] and click the photo icon at the right of the search box (previously only available in some countries and product categories, now apparently global). If this was the other way around it would be "OMG China is copying the west!" No such discussion the other way around. Just sayin'...
Sort of; they also have links to visually-similar items if you hover over a listing, if there are the 'right' amount of matching products.
I mean, how many relevant listings are you going to find for a stock photo of a 7x7mm QFP32 chip? Still, that's a risky thing to buy on taobao anyways, and it is useful for things like specifically-shaped buttons, connectors, etc.
Some brilliant mind who lurks on HN should create a competitor to eBay. Not some online yard sale where you have to meet people in person for the exchange, but a nice online marketplace for people to sell their stuff.
If this already exists, do tell.
In my opinion, eBay for sellers (outside of maybe the power sellers. I've sold <100 items) is a nightmare.
I sold a Tiffany necklace a few months back. The buyer reported to eBay it was fake and I was ordered to refund the seller and they could keep the fake item. Long story short, over a span of a few weeks, I was lucky enough to get an original receipt from Tiffany and supply it as evidence, which almost still did not work.
More recently, I listed an old iPhone with a "buy it now". Sold in like 30 minutes to someone with an "@god[dot].com" email requesting I send the phone first and then he will pay me. It took a week or longer for me to challenge this. I even have settings to disallow certain types of eBay users based on ratings etc. eBay still charged me a listing fee.
I had success doing a non buy it now sale after that. Maybe that is my only option now.
I don't even feel like getting into how slow their seller admin tools are ...
I agree completely, also their platform is just so slow and full of bugs. It simply looks like they havn't changed anything in the past 10 years.
Edit: Forgot to mention that their search is so bad, they mix search results with search phrases previously so it's impossible to find things I am looking for.
This is a real hard problem. Bad people make everything bad for everyone else. The problem is more about the US market laws and scalability I think.
Large companies like eBay have to take fraud and customer support costs and weight it against their company vs you as a seller. It would take a company that cared more about sellers than their own bottom line.
The customer is always right. Middle men like eBay have two customers though: the buyer and the seller. They support the one that helps them the most and let the other get burned occasionally.
The only purchase I ever done on eBay was in 2002 for a PocketPC. It never came. I reported the seller. They said 22 others were scammed and PayPal, their partner in crime, said that they couldn't reveal the seller's personal detail unless by court order. That was the only UX data point I needed. Never used eBay again.
Naively, alert his bank that he was stealing money from everyone and share the PayPal email with them. I wasn't aware at the time that I could take the matter to small claims court. PayPal offered no assistance as far as laying out what my options were. They were fine with it, it seemed. Zero on actual customer "care."
For the payments layer, yes, but not for storing the actual marketplace data. Blockchains aren't great for storing data apart from maintaining a transaction ledger.
When we started building OpenBazaar we specifically avoided using a blockchain apart from Bitcoin for payments. It was the right call I think. There are plenty of other decentralization tools to use apart from blockchains, like IPFS, which OpenBazaar 2.0 is built on top of.
1. A direct order. The Bitcoin goes directly from buyer to vendor. There are no protections. This method is only used for small value transactions or transactions where the buyer trusts the vendor.
2. A moderated order. The Bitcoin goes into an escrow account (a 2-of-3 Bitcoin multisig address) and there is a third party moderator who will resolve a dispute if one of the parties feels wronged.
Note that if there is no dispute opened in a moderated order, the buyer and the seller can release the funds without the moderator even knowing they were chosen for an order.
There's nothing to prevent listing flooding, but the rest of the network will just ignore nodes that are abusive. There are also third party search engines that crawl the network, and they'll block spam themselves for their users. Rawflood is an example:
Currently the vendor selects a list of moderators they are comfortable working with, and then at the time of a sale the buyer selects the one they prefer. If a dispute is opened the moderator the buyer picked from the vendor's list will resolve the dispute.
What's in it for the moderator? I assume they get a cut of the escrow?
How is the moderator's reputation visible to a buyer? If there's some kind of rating system, why would the reviews be useful at all? After all, any situation where the moderator has to act will leave one party pissed off.
This seems like a lot of complication just to buy something on the internet... unless what you're buying is heroin. In which case the whole 100% p2p thing starts making more sense.
But how do moderators become moderators in the first place? How do I, as a prospective buyer, know that all the moderators aren’t all pre-chosen by big sellers (by fair means or foul) to be sympathetic to them?
Regarding “reputations”: Remember Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
You're right. We're about to launch a mobile app and working on getting it working on browser as well.
Bitcoin is a barrier but our goal is to eventually be currency agnostic. It does enable us to do escrow properly though with 2-of-3 multisig, and it also ensures that people control their own money.
it is certainly a barrier, but if sellers recognize that sales over bitcoin has lower costs (cost of fraud) - certain items should show up on these marketplaces and people knowing about that tech will be really happy to get bargains... or so it should work :)
OpenBazaar looks like a great project, but with $4.25 million in backing from VCs, it does not look like a charity project. How do you plan on monetizing your work? It was not clear to me from the OpenBazaar or OB1 websites. I only ask because many great products work well when VC money is supporting it, but then are seriously degraded when the company needs to start showing revenue and then a profit.
In an ideal world, maybe from selling consulting to commercial sellers? In reality, I see absolutely no overlap between the kind of business who would ever consider paying for FOSS consulting and the kind of business who would trade on a more chaotic version of eBay.
But could an IPFS distributed system provide reasonable search, e.g. competing with eBay's new search-by-image?An open, distributed market can be worked by closed, centralized search engines. If they design the market they are a prime candidate for becoming the dominant search engine layered on top.
I never understood how this works. How does a16z, USV, and BlueYard make their money back? That's why I've been hesitant to deal with this stuff because I don't understand the business model.
They didn't invest in OpenBazaar, they invested in OB1, the company who is leading development on OpenBazaar. I'm a co-founder of OB1 and we monetize by offering services to users on the platform, not by monetizing the platform directly (no fees).
The contracts between users are all cryptographically signed in a system called Ricardian Contracts. At any point each party has a digitally signed copy of all the information they need to proceed with the trade.
Because this is a protocol for decentralized trade, and a network to engage in trade, there's really no terms of service or privacy policies that can be enforced between users. They connect to each other completely P2P, the devs or anyone else can't enforce anything between them (and don't even know a transaction is happening).
Is this a sorta "we had no idea so much of our revenue was derived from pirated content" play sorta like Youtube, then, but for an active marketplace that's actually maybe just filled with fraud?
No awareness by the company and no easy ability to enforce terms before users make me wonder why the heck I'd ever want to try to sell or buy something on that platform. Seems like craigslist but with too high a bar of entry for the good-intentioned non-fraudster non-tech-savvy users.
They are built on top of those technologies, but the user isn't exposed to any of the technical complexities. Seriously, go to openbazaar.org and download it, see for yourself.
No, I'm not going to install software just for accessing a marketplace. That's just silly, because now I have to worry about compatibility with my OS and a wealth of other problems that comes with running applications natively (e.g. is it compromised by a 0-day, since I doubt it gets as much attention as one of the big browsers)
OP has relatively specific bad experiences with ebay. How does OB exactly prevent similar cases? Being decentralized and based on bitcoin does not help against fraudulent buyers or buyers wasting time by attempting to negotiate unreasonable terms.
Lollipuff (YC W'13: https://www.lollipuff.com/) does exactly this for higher-end women's fashion -- to directly address the issues you had with your Tiffany necklace (though I don't think they support Tiffany today). All the items get authenticated before listing by professional authenticators, without needing to take items in hand. This provides more-than-ample evidence in the event of a dispute (the authenticators are well known in the field!). Then Lollipuff walks buyers & sellers through the process to ensure a safe transaction -- including instructions on shipping, which can also be a frequent gotcha for high-end items.
I wonder how much eBay has been impacted by this type of "wedging". I would use eBay primarily to buy/sell musical instruments but Reverb took a pretty big chunk of that market and provides a better and more trustworthy experience than eBay, at least in my experiences there.
I know there are a few fashion-related sites like this out there and I'd guess there are other "Reverb for X" sites as well.
I'm sure there is still a fortune in the long-tail but specialty sites seem to be more of a concern than a direct competitor.
"In my opinion, eBay for sellers (outside of maybe the power sellers. I've sold <100 items) is a nightmare."
I wouldn't argue too strongly with you there. I've sold loads of stuff on eBay (about £50k worth over the years, apparently!), and there are problems too often. People try it on, so I have to send -everything- via recorded mail, which is expensive, so then people complain about the postage cost, even though I always put them up front.
I've had quite a few completely fatuous claims made against me when selling, one of which said there were parts missing, when I'd actually said those parts were missing in the listing. eBay refunded him and let him keep the item.
Whenever I have an issue now, I just say 'send it back, I'll refund it' as this is invariably the path of lowest friction. Dealing with muppets is a cost of selling on eBay that has to be factored into the equation, alas, and it's worse than it ever has been; here in the UK around 2000 it was pretty 'niche' and only serious people seemed to be on there. But after a few years (and a few newspaper articles along the lines of 'quit your job and make a living on eBay') it started getting like it is now.
Non paying bidders are a pain to sellers, but it means nothing to eBay so they don't do anything about it.
The upside, at least, is that when you buy on there, you're well covered. Had a dodgy 'reconditioned' cylinder head turn up a few weeks ago. Returned it without even having to pay postage, which was a relief - in the past that would have been £400 I'd never have seen again.
I had a summer of eBay nightmares in college. I was supposed to help a relative sell an attic full of old clothes and knick knacks. Nothing was buying because I was a new seller, so I put some old video games on to bolster my score with quick sales. Everything went well until one person reported me for not including the box & manual (which was never mentioned in the listing) while another claimed the disc was counterfeit. After these two headaches, my relative complained about having to give some costume jewelry up for $7. At that point I decided it wasn't worth the trouble. Final profit was $97
There are definitely ways to improve the process. Maybe a "middleman" has to provide an appraisal or validation for the jewelry/electronic before making the listing. The true obstacle with any new competitor is network effect. When normal people want to sell local, they use Craigslist, when they want to sell nationally, they use eBay. Any chaff has already been taken by the big guys, and what is left isn't worth the fight.
Ebay doesn't charge a listing fee for the first 50 items per month. If the buyer never pays you should open an unpaid item claim after three days, then call ebay after four days and have the claim closed in your favor. If more sellers did this the buyers would get filtered out of ebay. In the future you can use buy it now and require immediate payment to prevent this entirely. Verifying the authenticity of commonly faked items does not have an easy solution and I would not buy or sell anything like that on Ebay. Any place that allows the sale of items like this will have tradeoffs.
Some alternatives to Ebay are Ebid, Etsy, Rakuten/buy.com, Amazon, Bonanza(allows cross listing with Ebay), Swappa for phones, uBid, Jet.
I've actually thought about that idea and even did some initial prototyping for a mobile app. But the idea I had was a more usable/less scammy version of craigslist specifically for local commerce. Initially, I was thinking of limiting the goods to electronics and then expanding slowly to other items.
I have the same problem with Amazon. Both of them favor the buyer because customers trusting their platform is a huge selling point for them. As a seller most people are honest, but enough of them are not for it to be extremely annoying.
Problem is you have plenty of scammer sellers too.
Amazon is the worst for a seller, much worse than eBay. It's completely in favor of the buyer over there, and can easily be gamed. Saying something is damaged, waiting to the absolute last second of a 30 day "trial" to return it. It's horrible. I will never sell anything on there again.
Seems like Facebook would be best positioned to do this. They already more transparency than Ebay/Amazon with regards to who you're dealing with. They also have regional buy/sell groups already. Integrate with some shipping platforms and they'd be on their way.
The thing I miss most about ebay are the independent sellers of "crap" - not sure how else to put it, but basically the random people who dig out stuff from the their "attic" and put it up for people to bid over.
You know - what Ebay was originally set up for.
I mean - one time I found a bucket of bolts for auction; just a bunch of random rusty bolts someone had in the back of their shed, they decided to auction off. And wouldn't you know it, a bidding war happened. That bucket of bolts went for close to a $100.00 by the time it was all over.
Those are the kind of stuff I like to see, and the kind of stuff I like to bid on and/or buy. Not the mass-produced junk from China - if I want that, I'll get it from Amazon or Ali Express (and I do).
You can still find this on Ebay, but it isn't as ubiquitous like it was in the beginning. I personally think their decision to compete with Amazon instead of sticking to their core users really changed perceptions and user base. Maybe it's better for them, but for users who like auctions, finding something similar that is trusted as much hasn't been easy (there are a few).
What platforms do you suggest as alternatives for finding your aforementioned independent sellers of valuable items? I think OfferUp and LetGo seem viable.
Years ago I sold an ipod on ebay after Christmas. My parents bought me one and a family relative also bought me one.
My account was suspended for fraud even though I provided proof of purchase for the item. I left ebay/paypal and stopped using it when I realized that they could arbitrarily hold my money for 6 months even though I provided legit proof they were wrong.
As long as there a dishonest people, you're either going to be a nightmare for sellers, a nightmare for buyers, a random nightmare, or you're going to have a lot of overhead to have competent people in a scalable organization arbitrate everything.
Sellers and buyers can now use eBay Authenticate to get independent confirmation that goods are as authentic. It’s starting out just focused on certain types of handbags and luxury items but expected to expand over time. https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2017/10/16/ebay-...
Interesting how we built a raw prototype about eight months ago (https://imgur.com/OIaQu7x), but it never took off (at least for the customer whom we've pitched).
To add to other's comments, the visual search can be quite useful comparing to terms search specifically for non-native speakers and people who are not skilled in fashion terms (i.e., the name of the material, pattern).
As for how accurate it is, this is indeed an existing problem. If you product set is significant (>10k products), then the visual search results can be entirely off the target, not surprised Ebay is dealing with the same problem.
Seems like a great way for eBay to undercut brick and mortar stores (and for consumers to save money) on cheap junk from China that people would rather pay $0.99 and wait 3wk for than pay $4.99 and have right now.
Can anyone recommend a good tutorial or reading on how to setup content-based (visual) image searching using a CNN to process images. I'm looking to build a POC of a reverse image search trained with in-house product data. In the past I've used the imgSeek but it is dated and not using neural nets.
My pet startup idea, going back I suppose 15+ years is a service that does this:
You have something. You like it. You want another one. The service gets it for you. This doesn't have to work from a picture -- it could use a UPC barcode or a text description.
Idea originally inspired by a school friends of mine who wore the exact same type of boots for years and years. When the old pair wore out, he'd buy another pair the exact same.
Over the years I've noticed many instances where I really want another one of something I have but it turns out to be either painful or impossible to find. You know however that somewhere someone has a warehouse full of the things.
Also like the electronics industry brokers who can track down an old component for you to repair gear or re-start manufacturing on some old product. Those have existed since at least the 1970's.
A few years ago I tested Amazon's visual product search feature to see if it would do what I wanted. It didn't. I showed an image of some brown boots I was wearing, and certainly the suggested products were also brown boots, but not the same kind.
I would use a service like this. I am similar to your friend... When I find a product that I like I'm good with getting more of the exact same in future vs. bouncing around through other brands. I have another Bluetooth headset still in box for when this one dies for example. Usually when this happens it's eBay I turn to (or Google image search) and so I am hopeful for this new system.
I would totally use this. 8 years ago I bought a pair of Nike shoes in Paris. I loved those shoes. I tried millions of things to buy a similar pair but I was unsuccessful at finding them.
Maybe the service should be like FlightFox, but for people who are really good at finding stuff. You pay a commission to the individual who helps you find the item.
I've been building an automated service very similar to this for womens fashion (mens fashion soon) in my free time over the past 5 months using deep learning. The goal is to index existing items, and then expand to items that are no longer available. So you could take a picture of your shoes/shirt/hat/etc and it would ideally find the same one. If it doesn't find the same exact item, it would find similar items at different price points that you could buy. Getting similar items isn't that hard -- getting the exact item is much trickier though. With the pace of improvement in these types of models, there will probably be a lot of these types of apps popping up over the next few years.
I know a bunch of sites has this feature already but I'm pretty excited to try it out since eBay is probably the website with the best dataset. I do not think any other site has as many home taken pictures as eBay. This would definitely make the image recognition much more robust. I'm guessing the problem with Amazon or TaoBao is that most of the pictures are studio pictures and does not scale well when a person takes a picture in a random environment.
That being said though, the eBay buying and selling experience is a hit or miss. It sucks how there is group of people preying on the site to rip people off. I had an selling experience so bad that I vouched never to sell anything via eBay anymore. Craiglist tends to be a much better transaction.
Can someone explain to me why eBay is trading only at 5.5x P/E? I fully understand that it isn't growing tremendously but with all its classified assets, I can't help but feel that it should be trading at a much higher market cap.
Funny I noticed this also on yesterday's the Show HN stock viewer. Seems like ebay is ready to be bought or acquired with a stock transfer and cash deal. I would think Walmart would be in a damn good position to pull this off even though I'm no fan of walmart in general.
Interesting point. But p/e so long, and they are never paying dividends, what is happening with that money?
I don't think of ebay highly, desides what they did to Craigslist.
They had Skype. They could have been Facebook, but no. They had Paypal. With Skype and paypal they could have easily made micropayments on cell phones, but no. I hardly ever see a company with so many wasted chances. They are in a "winner takes it all" niche but sooner or later someone (Open Bazaar?) will challenge them and I don't see any innovation from this company.
"Fashion-MNIST is a dataset of Zalando's article images—consisting of a training set of 60,000 examples and a test set of 10,000 examples. Each example is a 28x28 grayscale image, associated with a label from 10 classes. We intend Fashion-MNIST to serve as a direct drop-in replacement for the original MNIST dataset for benchmarking machine learning algorithms. It shares the same image size and structure of training and testing splits."
I have made a browser extension[1][2] for those looking to perform reverse image searches with multiple engines at once. It's more reliable than Chrome's built-in image search, which appears in the context menu only for <img> elements, while this extension parses the clicked area to extract images. Support for shopping sites may come in the future.
Last weekend, my dad needed new printer cartridges and so we went sifting through the internet for different offerings. By chance, we got onto a page on the manufacturer's website, which had images of all their cartridge packs. Among those, we also found an XL version of what we initially thought to buy.
So, there we were, needing exactly this feature. If I didn't know that it's impossible for them to have developed this in such a short time, I'd be a little freaked.
Thankfully, though, TinEye served the exact same purpose...
It would be interesting if they'd use this tech to deduplicate the gazillion listings for many cheap (chinese) goods which seem to use common set of images with maybe varying watermarks etc.
I thought the title said "let you STOP using photos (when selling)", which is what has basically already happened due to the prevalence of stock images and CGI items on a white background.
I'm still looking for the browser extension that lets you filter out any listing with a pure white or gradient background from your eBay, etsy, pinterest, etc. searches.
Would be a HUGE indicator of an actual real used item sold by a human, vs. a new dropshipped item from China. You know, what I want to use eBay to buy.
Amazon for example requires you to put picture on white background. They do not actively enforce it, but if someone complains - they will remove picture which does not fit their requirements.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadI wonder whether eBay will beat Amazon in this category as the types of photos they have access to (amateur/home vs. professional/stock) are very different. Either way, I am not confident that taking a picture is a better solution than just typing in the name for the vast majority of items.
It's a great solution for "I want another one like this one but searching for it returns 10000 different items"
Looking around my house, I only see a few items that don't have unique identifiers like furniture or plates/utensils. However, I suspect the majority of things sold through Amazon/eBay are more likely to be video games, books, toys, etc. with very visible and highly unique names.
Image search could be useful if you want to find all the listings for a specific Chinese product and compare prices or revisions.
I call this the Minority Report effect. When an idea seems cool but in practice is much less usable and practical. And tries to solve a problem that never existed. Do I want to wave my hands in the air to control an interface or rest them on a table? Obviously the latter. It's worked very well for decades.
[0] https://www.chinainternetwatch.com/1189/taobao-imagine-an-im...
[1] http://www.taobao.com/
I mean, how many relevant listings are you going to find for a stock photo of a 7x7mm QFP32 chip? Still, that's a risky thing to buy on taobao anyways, and it is useful for things like specifically-shaped buttons, connectors, etc.
If this already exists, do tell.
In my opinion, eBay for sellers (outside of maybe the power sellers. I've sold <100 items) is a nightmare.
I sold a Tiffany necklace a few months back. The buyer reported to eBay it was fake and I was ordered to refund the seller and they could keep the fake item. Long story short, over a span of a few weeks, I was lucky enough to get an original receipt from Tiffany and supply it as evidence, which almost still did not work.
More recently, I listed an old iPhone with a "buy it now". Sold in like 30 minutes to someone with an "@god[dot].com" email requesting I send the phone first and then he will pay me. It took a week or longer for me to challenge this. I even have settings to disallow certain types of eBay users based on ratings etc. eBay still charged me a listing fee.
I had success doing a non buy it now sale after that. Maybe that is my only option now.
I don't even feel like getting into how slow their seller admin tools are ...
Edit: Forgot to mention that their search is so bad, they mix search results with search phrases previously so it's impossible to find things I am looking for.
Large companies like eBay have to take fraud and customer support costs and weight it against their company vs you as a seller. It would take a company that cared more about sellers than their own bottom line.
The customer is always right. Middle men like eBay have two customers though: the buyer and the seller. They support the one that helps them the most and let the other get burned occasionally.
Note: I mostly buy "buy-it-now" items on ebay
When we started building OpenBazaar we specifically avoided using a blockchain apart from Bitcoin for payments. It was the right call I think. There are plenty of other decentralization tools to use apart from blockchains, like IPFS, which OpenBazaar 2.0 is built on top of.
Yes, it does exist, and it's completely open source. It's called OpenBazaar, and it's a fully decentralized marketplace. There's no middlemen at all.
https://www.openbazaar.org/
It's backed by the OB1 company, which has raised $4.25 million from a16z, USV, and BlueYard.
It uses IPFS so that stores don't go offline, and all payments are settled in Bitcoin.
We love code reviews and pull requests. The back end is done in Go:
https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-go
The front end is an Electron app:
https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-desktop
1. A direct order. The Bitcoin goes directly from buyer to vendor. There are no protections. This method is only used for small value transactions or transactions where the buyer trusts the vendor.
2. A moderated order. The Bitcoin goes into an escrow account (a 2-of-3 Bitcoin multisig address) and there is a third party moderator who will resolve a dispute if one of the parties feels wronged.
Note that if there is no dispute opened in a moderated order, the buyer and the seller can release the funds without the moderator even knowing they were chosen for an order.
There's nothing to prevent listing flooding, but the rest of the network will just ignore nodes that are abusive. There are also third party search engines that crawl the network, and they'll block spam themselves for their users. Rawflood is an example:
https://rawflood.com
If a vendor only offers unknown moderators a buyer just won't buy from them, or will ask them to add a moderator they trust.
How is the moderator's reputation visible to a buyer? If there's some kind of rating system, why would the reviews be useful at all? After all, any situation where the moderator has to act will leave one party pissed off.
This seems like a lot of complication just to buy something on the internet... unless what you're buying is heroin. In which case the whole 100% p2p thing starts making more sense.
Regarding “reputations”: Remember Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Bitcoin is a barrier but our goal is to eventually be currency agnostic. It does enable us to do escrow properly though with 2-of-3 multisig, and it also ensures that people control their own money.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15561370
But could an IPFS distributed system provide reasonable search, e.g. competing with eBay's new search-by-image?An open, distributed market can be worked by closed, centralized search engines. If they design the market they are a prime candidate for becoming the dominant search engine layered on top.
How do things like privacy policies, terms of service, contracts between parties work?
Because this is a protocol for decentralized trade, and a network to engage in trade, there's really no terms of service or privacy policies that can be enforced between users. They connect to each other completely P2P, the devs or anyone else can't enforce anything between them (and don't even know a transaction is happening).
No awareness by the company and no easy ability to enforce terms before users make me wonder why the heck I'd ever want to try to sell or buy something on that platform. Seems like craigslist but with too high a bar of entry for the good-intentioned non-fraudster non-tech-savvy users.
No, I'm not going to install software just for accessing a marketplace. That's just silly, because now I have to worry about compatibility with my OS and a wealth of other problems that comes with running applications natively (e.g. is it compromised by a 0-day, since I doubt it gets as much attention as one of the big browsers)
I know there are a few fashion-related sites like this out there and I'd guess there are other "Reverb for X" sites as well.
I'm sure there is still a fortune in the long-tail but specialty sites seem to be more of a concern than a direct competitor.
There isn't any marketplace without fraud on iPhone and jewelry.
I wouldn't argue too strongly with you there. I've sold loads of stuff on eBay (about £50k worth over the years, apparently!), and there are problems too often. People try it on, so I have to send -everything- via recorded mail, which is expensive, so then people complain about the postage cost, even though I always put them up front.
I've had quite a few completely fatuous claims made against me when selling, one of which said there were parts missing, when I'd actually said those parts were missing in the listing. eBay refunded him and let him keep the item.
Whenever I have an issue now, I just say 'send it back, I'll refund it' as this is invariably the path of lowest friction. Dealing with muppets is a cost of selling on eBay that has to be factored into the equation, alas, and it's worse than it ever has been; here in the UK around 2000 it was pretty 'niche' and only serious people seemed to be on there. But after a few years (and a few newspaper articles along the lines of 'quit your job and make a living on eBay') it started getting like it is now.
Non paying bidders are a pain to sellers, but it means nothing to eBay so they don't do anything about it.
The upside, at least, is that when you buy on there, you're well covered. Had a dodgy 'reconditioned' cylinder head turn up a few weeks ago. Returned it without even having to pay postage, which was a relief - in the past that would have been £400 I'd never have seen again.
There are definitely ways to improve the process. Maybe a "middleman" has to provide an appraisal or validation for the jewelry/electronic before making the listing. The true obstacle with any new competitor is network effect. When normal people want to sell local, they use Craigslist, when they want to sell nationally, they use eBay. Any chaff has already been taken by the big guys, and what is left isn't worth the fight.
Some alternatives to Ebay are Ebid, Etsy, Rakuten/buy.com, Amazon, Bonanza(allows cross listing with Ebay), Swappa for phones, uBid, Jet.
Problem is you have plenty of scammer sellers too.
That being said, its not really in their lane.
You know - what Ebay was originally set up for.
I mean - one time I found a bucket of bolts for auction; just a bunch of random rusty bolts someone had in the back of their shed, they decided to auction off. And wouldn't you know it, a bidding war happened. That bucket of bolts went for close to a $100.00 by the time it was all over.
Those are the kind of stuff I like to see, and the kind of stuff I like to bid on and/or buy. Not the mass-produced junk from China - if I want that, I'll get it from Amazon or Ali Express (and I do).
You can still find this on Ebay, but it isn't as ubiquitous like it was in the beginning. I personally think their decision to compete with Amazon instead of sticking to their core users really changed perceptions and user base. Maybe it's better for them, but for users who like auctions, finding something similar that is trusted as much hasn't been easy (there are a few).
My account was suspended for fraud even though I provided proof of purchase for the item. I left ebay/paypal and stopped using it when I realized that they could arbitrarily hold my money for 6 months even though I provided legit proof they were wrong.
mercari.com, swappa.com, letgo.com, offerup.com, snapsale.com, wish.com local, varagesale.com, listia.com, carousell.com, shpock.com, 5miles.com
Believe it or not, eBay has even made their own local selling app close5.com
[1] https://www.trademe.co.nz
Your reply should have been 'oh really, why is that?'.
Disclaimer: I did both of them so, I'm a little bias :)
https://www.mirrorthatlook.com/
You have something. You like it. You want another one. The service gets it for you. This doesn't have to work from a picture -- it could use a UPC barcode or a text description.
Idea originally inspired by a school friends of mine who wore the exact same type of boots for years and years. When the old pair wore out, he'd buy another pair the exact same.
Over the years I've noticed many instances where I really want another one of something I have but it turns out to be either painful or impossible to find. You know however that somewhere someone has a warehouse full of the things.
Also like the electronics industry brokers who can track down an old component for you to repair gear or re-start manufacturing on some old product. Those have existed since at least the 1970's.
A few years ago I tested Amazon's visual product search feature to see if it would do what I wanted. It didn't. I showed an image of some brown boots I was wearing, and certainly the suggested products were also brown boots, but not the same kind.
Maybe the service should be like FlightFox, but for people who are really good at finding stuff. You pay a commission to the individual who helps you find the item.
That being said though, the eBay buying and selling experience is a hit or miss. It sucks how there is group of people preying on the site to rip people off. I had an selling experience so bad that I vouched never to sell anything via eBay anymore. Craiglist tends to be a much better transaction.
I don't think of ebay highly, desides what they did to Craigslist.
They had Skype. They could have been Facebook, but no. They had Paypal. With Skype and paypal they could have easily made micropayments on cell phones, but no. I hardly ever see a company with so many wasted chances. They are in a "winner takes it all" niche but sooner or later someone (Open Bazaar?) will challenge them and I don't see any innovation from this company.
"Fashion-MNIST is a dataset of Zalando's article images—consisting of a training set of 60,000 examples and a test set of 10,000 examples. Each example is a 28x28 grayscale image, associated with a label from 10 classes. We intend Fashion-MNIST to serve as a direct drop-in replacement for the original MNIST dataset for benchmarking machine learning algorithms. It shares the same image size and structure of training and testing splits."
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-by-image/cn...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_ima...
So, there we were, needing exactly this feature. If I didn't know that it's impossible for them to have developed this in such a short time, I'd be a little freaked.
Thankfully, though, TinEye served the exact same purpose...
I'm still looking for the browser extension that lets you filter out any listing with a pure white or gradient background from your eBay, etsy, pinterest, etc. searches.
Would be a HUGE indicator of an actual real used item sold by a human, vs. a new dropshipped item from China. You know, what I want to use eBay to buy.
If I'm buying vintage/antique items on etsy or eBay I want to see the real item, not a stock photo.