Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin will not be the only factor, but it will be the main factor. Ebay has to deal with companies like Alibaba, Amazon, and now possibly Apple taking market share from it. They don't innovate and they won't innovate/change their PayPal unit because they're too scared. It has been suggested that eBay incorporate bitcoin, but they won't do that because bitcoin is still in its early stages. By the time bitcoin expands and is widely used PayPal will be unable to take the lead in digital currencies. This is without the hacking revelations that recently surfaced, which are likely to get worse. I used to like Ebay, but they charge fees that make resorting to bitcoin look like heaven. Their stock has lagged too in 2013, where everything went up. Bitcoin won't be the only factor in their demise, but it will be the main one.

Article that explains this in detail: http://www.panture.com/why-bitcoin-will-force-ebay-to-go-bankrupt/

If you think so then short the stock

Nice. Ebay completely blows atm. Charging 10% fees for everything plus Paypal fees, Paypal 21 day funds hold, and Ebay "Indefinitely suspended" my account for selling digital currency. I hope they go bankrupt this year.

yeah they peaked and arrived at the top probably in the mid or early 2000's, and since then they've either sought to buy out competition (like craigslist) or stifle it. on top of that, they charge exorbitant fees to sellers and protect the buyers, so there will be less incentive for using them.. and i'm glad for this. taking 13% of the revenues is ridiculous.

If ebay fails as a business model it will fail because of outrages fees, a broken feedback system, or a competitor, not because of a currency.

I agree that ebay fees are outrageous, I mean check out this thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=596509.0

Honestly, I see ebay accepting bitcoin if it ever became mainstream. Adapt or die in this sort of situation. No company wants to just die.

Paypal and ebay together are good companies... but they are far surpassed by bitcoins. Also, they charge much to high of fees. How can one make a profit if the fee is 12.5%?

Say what you want about eBay.  When you are trying to sell some shippable crap it works better than Craigslist & Amazon

Ebay owns paypal, they are not separate companies.

Also ebay's net worth is just shy of 20 billion (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ebay+net+worth) while bitcoin's market cap is under 7.4 billion (https://coinmarketcap.com/)

Ebay does own paypal, but they are *technically* two different companies...

I was hoping for a better solution between the two. A more free and open ebay type auction site. Honestly, I could see a layout such as the silkroad surpassing ebay in the next 20 years.

But silkroad still charges fees. We need a marketplace that charges as LITTLE fees as possible... maybe a vendor one-time fee and then no "commission" fees

it's *technically* a subsidiary but who's getting all *technical* about it?

Hosting servers aren't free. It's pretty expensive to host servers. Honestly, I was thinking a market place with maybe 1-2% of fees of the TOTAL sale. Say you're processing $10MM, that's at least 100-200k to pay for servers and such. That's pretty reasonable imho.

Fees are absurd, and this is not entirely (or even mostly, I think) a symptom of fiat's inferiority. Their fees were much lower even after a few years of operation, but they scaled to mainstream very poorly and are now bloated beyond reason. What they spend their money on, I have no idea... low-key buyouts of potential competitors, maybe. I was quite fond of BitMit, but haven't found any of the newcomers particularly appealing. I'm pleased to keep the sale of depreciating goods on this forum and bump the thread every week or two than feed that grotesque beast. Speaking of which...

we should get bonanza.com (http://bonanza.com) to take btc

Only if there is no back office.  It might be something like Craigslist though

A lot of small sellers run their business on EBay and they need some of EBay's tools

I'm someone that actually lives off selling on Ebay and Amazon and I have no problem with the fees at all. No other sites promote my sales with advertising and search engines as well as Amazon and Ebay. Doesn't matter what the fees are if you aren't making sales. I'll happily pay even more (I pay around 30% to Amazon to take care of nearly everything). I do have a problem with the restrictions - like only being able to accept PayPal (or do my own credit card processing) I used to accept checks on Ebay before the restriction and never had a problem and would now love to accept Bitcoin. Or the fact that I can't sell clothes or cell phones on Amazon.

I want Dark Market (or Open Bazaar) to get going. That will be the shit. Assuming, of course, search engines index it.

i guess you make enough margin to cover the exorbitant fees.. in which case, that's cool and all. but for me, it gets more and more difficult.. especially with USPS raising prices.

Hey, just went to http://openbazaar.org/ after mentioning it and see they have a donation button. I donated! So can you!

Erm? What? Hosting an API / creating a webapp isn't that expensive. I mean, if you're doing say $10MM in sales, estimate each seller is only selling say $1000. That's only supporting 100k sellers. Say there's 900k buyers (just trying to make the numbers even). That's only 1 million hits, if the average size of each page is a few kilobytes, and the average time on the size is around 20 pages, that's still a very small imprint. Would cost maybe $10k to host the servers. The other 90-190k can go to the cost of employees (maybe 40-70 employees for this sort of operation).

Edit: That's monthly figures by the way.

Horseshit.

That is correct. When Paypal no longer exists and the dollar is crashing in value, eBay will have no choice. That company won't go out of business because those who profit from it are rationally self-interested.

It's the dollar that's going out of business, not eBay.

Horseshit.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y115/Kowulz/tinfoilhatsignbb.gif (http://media.photobucket.com/user/Kowulz/media/tinfoilhatsignbb.gif.html)

http://i885.photobucket.com/albums/ac55/Tanith2009/tinfoilhat.jpg (http://media.photobucket.com/user/Tanith2009/media/tinfoilhat.jpg.html)

I don't think business scale like that.  You can look up eBay's 10-k and read there financials since they're public

I would be willing to put a large sum of money that Ebay will not be bankrupt in 10-15 years, but the bet would be too long for it to be any fun... 

If/when they feel they will be more profitable by adding BTC, they will definitely do so.  For the time being, honestly...why would they add something that could make them less money?  Would you if it were your business model?

Correction: Crypto will be largely to blame
Jury still out on whether BTC will survive 10-15 years

Bitcoin will survive, just because there is no competition for it from the other alternatives. All the worthless shitcoins are counterfeits and copycats, who don't have any advantage over the Bitcoin.

get in now because they could have the leg up on comeptition.. this is like a wild west or gold rush version of computer technology and currency/finance.

its time for a decentralized ebay using bitcoin

They would have to also use coins to actually go along with the trend and prevent bankruptcy. As far as I know amazon is currently using crypto.

Not to mention they are already preparing to embrace Bitcoin. How they will implement it will be interesting to see, but I don't think Bitcoin has anything to do with killing eBay or PayPal. If anything it will help strengthen their marketplace.

i wonder if there's an actual userbase that would be open to dealing with bitcoin through ebay. i know most of us early adopters are completely against paypal/ebay, but there are future btc users who might use their services.

eBay/PayPal are mainstream, whereas Bitcoin isn't. That means they have a MASSIVE market to bring Bitcoin to and they will achieve that easily. The question is more along the lines of how badly they will hurt Bitcoin in the process (bringing it mainstream through those companies may not be what we want, but it's hard to tell. It's either going to be great or it's going to be one of the worst things to happen).

sure, but i can't foresee ebay integrating some function of bitcoin that fiat/credit cards can't do. maybe they'll come out with some great ideas.

I say bitcoin taking out those big companies would be great. People may be mad, but hey, they can just switch over to bitcoin! Bitcoin taking out eBay/Paypal would be postitive media coverage because it will show how efficient bitcoins really are.

We need something big to happen again in order for me to believe that Bitcoin will be somethign incrediable in the future.

Does amazon accepting bitcoin or more winklevii-like investors investing in bitcoin count as something incredible happening? Because I'm sure that would drive the price up sky high!

If amazon or some company like amazon would start accepting Bitcoin that would boost the price up a bit but I don't think that would be enough to substain high numbers.

With amazon or other big companies the bitcoin will be widely accepted in all the world, they will contribute to spread the word about it.
I don't know what do you think "high numbers" will be, but in my opinion $1000 is just the baseline for the coming years.

For high numbers to come and stay there would have to be a massive increase in the ease of use for bitcoin, along with a lot more people speculating/investing in bitcoin. Ideally bitcoin would be as easy to use as a debit card.

Adoption of bitcoin will be the backbone of it though since it will by nature cause deflation, leading to higher prices.

There would also need to be a reason to use it. Right now it's a novelty. Three has to be a reason for the average person to say "it's worth converting my cash into BTC to make this purchase." Discounts would help with this, but most sites that take BTC still aren't offering anything.

Right now it seems like we pay a premium for using bit coin at a lot of sites but that will change. The Dish Network announcement is big. Hopefully DirecTv and other providers follow suit. 

Even if paypal adopted bitcoin on the back end it would still charge the same fees but make even more profit, they don't charge those fees because that's how much it actually costs them, the they charge what they can get away with. The correct title should be "How bitcoin will make ebay even more profitable"

Alibaba is in China, China hates bitcoin.

Apple hates bitcoin (you can't even get any bitcoin apps from the apple store, since apple banned them all)

Not sure about amazons stance on bitcoin

Ebay/paypal are the only ones who have shown interest in bitcoin out of the ones you have listed. Maybe they're not as stupid and anti-bitcoin as you think. Maybe they'll actually change their course much beofr ethe others and by making that move they might survive and take an even bigger market share.

ebay and alibaba are differant. 15 years ago they didn't have all the cheap chinese stuff on ebay, or the resellers of it. it was just people selling crap.but yeah.

I am not sure about Alibaba's stance on Bitcoin. They operate in other countries such as Hong Kong and Singapore also. So I don't think that the Chinese ban will affect them. Yes... Apple hates Bitcoin, and it is not going to change. Regarding Amazon, I have heard that the Amazon WS is about to introduce Bitcoin payments. Ebay / Paypal, not sure about them.

paypal = blockbuster....it is doomed.

Horseshit.

If Apple's (assumed) upcoming payments system tanks in the marketplace, then Apple's stance on Bitcoin will indeed change.

My colleagues and I have had issues with ebay in the past. And being that sites like ebay and amazon survive off fees mostly it will be interesting to see how they adapt or fall off as bitcoin becomes more mainstream and then more preferred as a payment option. Though this is probably another five years away or more. I am really  hoping both ebay and amazon choose not to accept bitcoin for a long while; which will  hopefully allow other smaller start-ups a decent share in the market.

Truer words have never been written.

Amazon has no reason not to accept Bitcoin payments. But the case with Ebay is different. A lot of opposition will come from Paypal, if Ebay accepts Bitcoin as a mode of payment. A compromise might be reached in the end, I hope. Probably Paypal will also integrate Bitcoin to its system.

Bitcoin will compete against PayPal.  Maybe a dark online exchange will beat up eBay..  someone will start a decentralized auction like how Nxt has an asset exchange.

I doubt ebay will ever allow themselves to get anywhere near bankruptcy. They'll just change their business practices if they're feeling the heat or start to struggle.

I agree with Balls.
Ebay is massive. Bitcoin is still to complicated for the average person.
most people struggle with Paypal haha

I dunno why but that made me chuckle. But I also agree with you and Balls  :D. If bitcoin is taking away some of their business they'll just implement it and reduce their fees accordingly. They'd rather lose a bit of profits than go completely bankrupt or become redundant.

True.

eBay and bitcoin do not really compete with eachother.

eBay is a centralized marketplace where people can buy and sell goods with a number of payment methods.

Bitcoin is a P2P payment network that is decentralized.

Paypal is the entity that really competes with Bitcoin.

I would find it likely that Paypal would become so unprofitable for eBay in the future that they essentially shut it down and stop offer the "service" of paypal

With the introduction of payment processors such as Bitpay and Coinbase, Bitcoin is no more complicated when compared to Paypal right now. But safe storage of the coins seems to be out of reach for the non-tech savvy users.

Coinbase IS safe storage of the coins! It's also extremely user-friendly. Unfortunately it's mostly limited to American users, at least for now.

I'd have to agree the BTC could play a huge part in the fall of Ebay.  If you consider the amount of mom and pop ebays that pop up when a new altcoin comes along then you can imagine how the future will have many more of these ebay like online storefronts.

It's must me annoying watching the control of their market shrink as time progresses.  Maybe they will do the smart thing and slowly accept BTC and other cryptos that are worth investing in..

Wait until the Digital Goods Store and Physical Goods Store of Nxt will go beta

ebay and all other such sites will adapt or die.

It is the way of things.

how much are ebay fee;s ? I recently sold something and it seemed like fee's were 11-12%
thats a shitload if you ask me..

also I havn't had tme to look into this yet so I figured Id ask quckly.. when you owe ebay fees... do they just auto take it from your paypal and thus auto take from bank acct (if linked to bank acct) ? Pretty wrong if that if that is what they do, if it is indeed hat happened to me.

I am sure its all legal and above board but a shity move to just take funds after sneding you the invoice for like 2 hours...