I sold a laptop on eBay once long, long ago. Someone did the "Buy it now" option but never paid. I'm trying to remember the exact situation (probably more than 10 years ago), but I had exchanged messages with him several times and he always had an excuse to not pay.
Then I noticed he was selling the exact same model of laptop so it was easy for me to realize that he had just "bought" my laptop to remove the listing so it wouldn't compete against his. I messaged ebay support to accuse him but they didn't do anything about it.
Since he had made the order, eBay did show me his shipping information so I ordered a "glitter bomb" which was basically glitter in a tube with a spring. I got a very nasty accusatory email from him, but it was very vague. He wouldn't specify what he received, but that he was smart enough to not open it. That's how I knew he got the full effect.
I just replied something to the effect of "You never paid me. Why would I send something to you?"
Just remember eBay has almost no way to report scam listings, hacked seller accounts, obviously fraudulent buyers, etc. They don’t want to clean up their act. Caveat emptor.
EBay doesn't care about fraud unless they think you're going to file a charge back with your card issuer, then they're pretty quickto protect their bottom line.
I do know for a fact that eBay can kick a seller off very quickly though. I bought a NES shaped raspberry pi a few years back as a gift. The day I got the item, I went to leave the seller glowing feedback, only to find his account was axed (he included NES roms on the SD card).
I'm banned from eBay since about 2010. Sold a cellphone which my sister shipped without requiring signature, guy just said he never received it.
My sister was working at a Telco so we just confirmed that he had actually received it because he put a SIM card into it, proof and everything eBay didn't care.
I withdrew the money from my PayPal account before they could claw it back. PayPal still works for me but eBay is amazingly impressive at immediately banning any new account I tried created since then.
Private companies have no limits on using illegally obtained information. It's very common practice. You're thinking about governments and law enforcement agencies.
This is an interesting thought experiment. If the buyer acts as though they did not receive the phone, then on what basis can they complain if you look up metadata of an IMEI that they contend they never took possession of?
But when the lookup reveals that they did activate the device, now maybe you've inappropriately accessed someone else's PII and you did believe beforehand that the results would show that it was no longer registered to you.
There must be at least some minimal way scam listings are handled. I stumbled across an RTX 4090 going for $600 the other day (actual selling price is $1-2k), seller claiming to have 10+ of them with 90+ watchers/in cart, but no reputation. Account was gone the next morning.
Curiously on Mercari, which seems to be more pro-seller, I've seen some GPU listings with "this is a scam" type comments attached to them. Very different way of handling the transactions over there it seems.
Seller reputation is the only reason I still use eBay (when no other options are available). Even when I am desperate, a seller with fewer than 10-100 relevant positive reviews (depending on how expensive the item is) is a deal breaker.
Last year, I accidentally canceled a return request after realizing I was being scammed by the seller. eBay refused to refund my money because the request had been canceled, even though the return address provided by the seller was fake. I wrote letters to two state consumer protection agencies and that worked. I eventually got my money back.
> The Steiners were harassed and threatened both online and physically in their home by deliveries of such things as a bloody pig mask, live cockroaches and spiders, a funeral wreath, and large orders of pizza.[5][1][6] Pornographic magazines with David Steiner’s name on them were sent to a neighbor’s house.
What alternatives are there to eBay? Craigslist seems sketchy and Amazon doesn't support the auction model as far as I'm aware. I want to use good alternatives and encourage my family, friends, and co-workers to do so as well. eBay seems unsalvageable and I think the best thing for us is for it to die due to economic starvation.
I had the exact experience selling an iMac on eBay about 10 years ago. Buyer clicked buy it now, my listing was removed, they never paid. They deleted their account shortly after (it was some .ru email address.) eBay had nothing to say other than “try again after X weeks”. Why, so it can just happen again? They admitted they have zero protection against it.
I deleted my account and sold it on Amazon instead. How anyone puts up with eBay I have no idea.
FWIW, eBay no longer works like this. When you put up a listing there’s now an option, enabled by default, to require payment at checkout.
This situation may still occur if you are taking offers on an item. In that case the buyer has to pay within 48 hours of the offer being accepted or the listing will become eligible for re-posting.
Our national buy/sell platform (aquired by ebay twenty or so years ago) has a similar system now where they will handle the payments and exchange of currency on confirmation of reception of items etc, I believe it's very successful, but they had to do something because nobody was trusting the site anymore for trading anything valuable.
I sold quite a few things on Amazon back in the day. Was great for getting things off my shelves collecting dust at a good price. At some point maybe ten years ago they started requiring very invasive identity validation to sell. My account from '98? and good selling karma does not matter apparently, not grandfathered in.
Long story short, don't expect Amazon to be more reasonable than Ebay these days.
How is this equivalent?!?
In fact, stronger seller identification is what makes the site safer for everyone.
I think you're really missing the point of stronger identification on commercial sites.
It should be done for sellers AND buyers alike. It would drastically decrease the number of bad transactions if people knew they were no longer shielded by anonymity.
ebay charges something like a 12.5% commission. It's easily over $100 in fees to sell a decent laptop on ebay. So, the seller would have to be charging quite a bit more for that to work out.
That’s what I was thinking too. There are whole subreddits setup to work this kind of hustle. These people see nothing wrong with what they do, even going so far as to claim that they’re doing a service to the world. In my eyes, they’re bottom-feeding scum no better than scalpers, car salespeople, or MLM huns.
"Pure" flippers and drop shippers who do none of the value adding work of buying large lots and retailing them, holding things over time, etc are both a worthless drag on the economy and a great argument against equivalent financial products.
>> buying large lots and retailing them, holding things over time, etc are both a worthless drag on the economy...
Like grocery stores? Department stores? Costco? Buying in bulk and selling smaller lots to consumers over time is the definition of retail sales.
If you want to eliminate middlemen and buy only from manufacturers, you better first know/learn chinese, japanese, french, german and spanish. And get a forklift. Most only ship product by the pallet.
I dont think so. We might not like dealing with them, but even the most horrible of middlemen still provide liquidity to a market. Amazon got its start as a middleman for books, and was hated for what it did to the retail bookshops, but it did inject liquidity to the betterment of consumers.
It’s astounding how bad FB Marketplace search is, though. For very popular things, it’s fine. For browsing and “huh, that’s interesting,” it’s fine.
But if I am looking for something specific, it is an incredible failure. It’s so bad I suspect they intentionally don’t want it to work well. That is, I think they only want to optimize for low-effort social buying, not picky people who know exactly what they want.
For this reason I have bought way more stuff off eBay than FB Marketplace recently.
It seems to just ignore filters like “date listed” sometimes too. And people will list items at nominal prices and give the actual price in the description. Generally a poor experience.
It also doesn’t seem to respect the distance filter.
I’m not one for conspiracy theories usually, but I’m pretty sure the state of Marketplace search is, if not ‘deliberate’, at least a result of metrics-driven development. The search results are _just_ useful enough to keep you scrolling and tapping, so the vagueness increases engagement :-(
ebay is still useful for obscure stuff. if you want to buy used servers, GPU, electronics, car parts, etc. I don't think ebay and FB MP really overlapped, MP ate craigslist. The closest thing to eating ebay is Aliexpress.
I found ebay more reliable, interesting and smoother than Amazon. Amazon screwed me over for 40 USD now they are nagging that I should sign up for "Prime"
(I ordered a bunch of stuff, maybe 800 USD. They decided the order is fraudulent, and canceled it, without ever telling me. When I moved into my new place, there was nothing. No sheets, no nothing from Amazon. That this order was "canceled" without any email seemed to puzzle Amazon support. They told me in the chat to reorder with fasted shipping, and that they would reimburse the shipping. Of course, they did not. And the chat protocols clearly stating Amazon would reimburse the express shipping were a "misunderstanding".
Last time I ordered from amazon, I repeatedly declined prime. My bank called me the next day about a suspicious charge for a year of prime. I had to cancel my card and get a new one. The banker told me they'd had dozens of similar problems where amazon was charging people for stuff they never ordered.
When I got the package a few days later, the $150+ set of cello strings I ordered, sold and shipped by amazon, were counterfeits (and damaged due to improper packing, not that it mattered). I had to do a charge back to get my money back.
Amazon is the American version of Temu, Aliexpress, etc nowadays; I wouldn't use it for anything but their own products (Kindle). For specialist items like the cello strings you mentioned, music shops are thankfully still a thing, both online/webshops as irl ones. I'd go there instead. Same with books.
It's borderline impossible for the high street to compete on fungible goods like art supplies and books. The only real value in those shops is knowledgeable and passionate staff who share your interests.
Agreed, I normally wouldn't buy strings from anyone but a reputable violin shop. The strings I wanted were new and none of the small shops could get them at the time.
The label looked like it was printed on a cheap ink jet printer. The colors on the label weren't the right shades either.
The strings were guitar strings rather than cello strings. They're too short for a cello. The winding metal is different too. A bow doesn't grip guitar strings as well.
Most counterfeiters send super cheap cello strings with a fake label. In those cases, the best way to tell is that the silk windings on the strings will be the wrong colors.
There's a huge difference in sound. Cheap/fake strings tend to sound metallic and harsh. They also tend to break quickly, while a proper set of strings can last over a year.
Btw, 'informal' agreements, even oral only, are legally binding, though it may (?) vary by state. For example an email is legally binding.
In a case like this,there's not even the need for small claims - if you just contacted the better business bureau, you'd have gotten reimbursed the shipping and then something reasonable on top as 'an apology for the misunderstanding.'
I would have to file in small claims court. And for 40 USD I am not willing to do this.
I think you don't need even an oral agreement for a contract to be valid. Conclusive action is enough. Take a newspaper, but 2 USD on the table, leave. No words exchanged but valid sales contract established.
BBB accreditation is a big deal for most major companies, and it includes an obligation to resolve issues (exactly like this one) with their arbitration. I've used them 3 times, with 3 positive (and rapid) outcomes.
Next time you have a straightforward 'they're wrong' issue with a company where you're getting outsourced flowcharts for support, try out the bbb. They're great.
Small claims would obviously also work, but that's a major investment in time/bureaucrazy, while a bbb complaint can be completed online in 10 minutes with maybe one or two brief follow-ups, but usually all it is, is them getting in contact with a human who can do things - and for cases like this, they obviously try to make it right.
yeah amazon is rly weird. did had prime and cancelled it but the cancellation was retracted 3 times in the background and i had to pay 3 months more prime… never ever.. now its only expensive aliexpress and some netflix
eBay and Facebook Marketplace don’t really compete. FB is better for normal fungible items. eBay is better for specialty stuff. Don’t forget that you have to pay to list and usually have to ship on eBay. It’s two totally different vibes.
If I wanted to sell a Dewalt angle grinder, I would go to Facebook first.
If I wanted to sell a Sony E-mount camera lens, I would go to eBay first.
Most used things I buy make more sense on Facebook. Most people I know use Facebook because they are usually looking for regular things.
FB marketplace is full of people wasting your time.
"Is this still available?" Yes it is - never heard from again.
I stopped giving out my address. I will give a general area where we can meet so they can gauge how far it is for them. When they are on their way, I give them the public location to meet. Only serious people will meet me. On some occasions, I still get ghosted. But ghosting has become more and more common. I don't recall it being this bad when Craigslist was huge.
I miss the olden craigslist days sometimes. Even responses that sounded like scams were somehow real people at times. I once sold a PSP Vita hours after listing it on Craigslist. The response had superbroken english and was insistent they had to buy it in the next two hours at X location. That location happened to be about a mile down the road from my job so I humored them. Turned out it was just a guy from out of country that was only there one more day for oil field training. Paid me in cash and didn't even hassle the price.
Yeah, FB marketplace is the worst for that. I end up putting up with it, though, because it also has a lot of legitimate buyers and no fees.
I usually just give folks my home address and a time I'm going to be home anyways, and ask them to send me a message once they're on their way. Then I generally forget about it until I get a message from them. If they ghost me, oh well.
I don't take the ad down, and if anyone else asks, I just tell them to ask me again after the scheduled time.
eBay has had to reinvent itself. For me, I don’t trust eBay for legit merchandise, I sorta assume it’s knockoffs now, probably wrong. I’ve never used them but I was under the assumption that offer up and what not are popping off as eBay disrupters.
My wife uses Vinted (UK) for selling hers and the kids clothes, usually single-to-double digit values at most (or she uses Oleo to just give it away). It works _fairly_ well from what I've heard, but she does have the occasional issue with people complaining about things and sending them back for obtuse reasons, often hardly worth it because the value was so low, the cost of the shipping there and back eclipsed the value of the item.
I wonder at times whether this is their game, hoping people will just tell them not to bother sending it back and they get a refund anyway.
As for ebay, I stopped selling anything on there years ago, well over a decade, when someone tried to scam me out of a laptop but failed. If something is valuable enough for me to sell, I sure as shit am not selling it on eBay.
More often than not, I give away my valuable tech that I'm done with, because I'd rather get nothing for it, and give it to someone who'll appreciate it than risk being scammed by some scumbag.
This way, friends and family get my hand-me-down PCs, laptops, phones, etc for nothing and they're still, by the time I'm done with them far better than something they'd buy with their budgets. When I buy something, I factor its lifetime in my possession into it's cost, I effectively expect £0 value left in it when I'm done or I don't buy it; everybody wins.
I have what I think is probably a weird mindset that practically everything I own, short of maybe a car or a house, I assume is worth £0 after I've owned it.
Probably indicative of not having a very good business brain. However, it always seems strange to me when when people buy things and keep track of their used values the whole time they own it - expecting at some point to trade it in.
Vinted seems popular amongst people who never used eBay for buying and selling commodities like clothes. Is it any good for selling higher value specialist stuff like electronics, musical instruments etc?
For higher value goods people usually prefer others, I think Backmarket.com is one of the main ones (it's definitely the main option for electronics in France) but there's also Refurbed (know it from Belgium but I think it's German) or Rebuy (know it from the Netherlands but it's German as well) for example.
Each of those three claims to be the largest one in some metric.
They cleaned up their act substantially in the past 3-4 years. There are still scammers, of course, but they seem to be taking action that favors buyers as well. I just don't see how they can protect everyone from all the various scams. If they accept all the risk, it will be exploited by scammers.
That's the point. They want to drive off amateurs who are trying to liquidate dads old tools in favor of the guys who are doing that stuff in professional volumes and the professional dealers and importers who are buying lots of stuff and breaking them up for retail sale and "real businesses" who run an eBay store alongside their other ecommerce stuff. They were pretty transparent about their motives IIRC.
imo it's slightly more pro-buyer than it was a couple of years ago. If only because unreasonable buyers have killed off most of the value of having 100% positive feedback.
Remember losing it a few years ago when an obvious scammer tried to bully me into a partial refund for an item he had already resold at a 50% markup.
Yes I have a 25+ year old account with 100% feedback, but I don't think it matters nearly as much anymore. Also clearly some subset of buyers understands they can abuse high feedback sellers who want to maintain their feedback rating.
In a way I like the more conversational forum buy & sell system where I have feedback, but also each purchase starts with a DM. I usually can suss out from a few DMs if a buyer is going to be a tire kicker wasting my time, or a perfectionist who will be a pain to sell to. In either case I let those buyers pass and wait for someone worth doing business with.
FWIW I don't hear of nearly any of the horror stories I used to. From my recollection, 2011 was about the peak of it, where buyers were claiming to never get their stuff, getting liberal refunds at the expense of the sellers. Sellers were getting their accounts locked by Paypal, sometimes with tens-of-thousands of dollars at stake, only to get it back 6 months later if they begged and screamed.
I opened a seller account in about 2020 to unload some server gear and almost got scammed, but I googled the buyers name and saw he was accused of fraud by several other people. I re-routed the package and although I didn't get reimbursed for that fee, ebay made me right and paypal (I think) gave me a small credit. They even had a phone call with me which seemed like they actually investigated it (I dont remember many details, it was 1 transaction 5 years ago).
There's just no way that any online auction can control fraud. I was on ebay yesterday as a buyer, looking for a tape backup drive. The seller clearly had been burned and (bitterly) warned that the sale was final, because previously he had sold a working drive which was parted out, replaced with broken parts (heads) and returned as defective. there's no way a third party can protect against it because either way the fraudster wins. 1) sell a bad drive, claim it was good, but accuse the buyer of fraud. Or 2) buy a good drive, swap it out with bad parts and return it. how could anyone (like ebay) solve this problem?
Nina Kollars gave an interesting talk on scammers selling coffee through eBay using stolen credit cards. Signature way of knowing is they're shipped direct from nespresso and the purchase price is 40-50% cheaper than retail. I ordered some keurig pods and experienced the same direct shipping and cheap prices.
It is somewhat surprisingly (still) a $500m+ revenue[1] company, with very minimal employees and expenses. They're printing money on house and car listing fees.
eBay is interesting. It has consistently high profit margins, but no upward movement in revenue or profit, which peaked over a decade ago, and its returns heavily lag SP500.
I’m guessing investors don’t see much opportunity for growth in the online auction business to make it worth dumping a bunch of money just to take market share from eBay.
eBay I think had their growth capped once you had Etsy, Amazon FBA, and other options on the field.
Your average normie has no interest in the hassle of selling their used stuff (which has, if anything, got harder in my 25ish years using eBay), nor of buying random used staff from anonymous individual sellers.
Etsy covers the arts & crafts coded goods (though much is now China dropship).
Amazon allows the big merchants to sell to normies who just want to click "buy" without thinking about seller rating risk, when something will arrive, etc. Basically most people have no idea they are buying from not-Amazon, because it says amazon.com and that's good enough. eBay never had the smarts to create that user experience.
Because you're a used <pick niche> dealer or a dealer of something that is on the large end of what you can send in "normal" mail. Tires come to mind, even on Amazon very few of them are actually FBA.
From my perspective, eBay has a solid niche of older items, and they tried to break into the buy new items market too, but the hassles of selling mean for the most part only scalpers sell new items on eBay. Although there's some niches where it's not unusual: new auto parts seem common, I guess it's easier for a dealer parts counter to run an eBay store than otherwise.
I find that for a lot of "cheap junk from China" gets cheaper when you eBay it directly from China and cut out the cost of the Amazon middle man.
Recently I bought a chainsaw tool on eBay from China as I didn't want to buy a 6-pack for $10. I was able to buy a couple for about $0.20 more per unit. Sure, higher unit price and they'll be here slower but it's several $6ish saved.
I mostly use eBay for buying computer and bike parts - e.g. my most recent purchase on my work (tax-exempt) account was a batch of a specific model of 40Gbit NIC, and a specific type of bike seat post on my personal account.
The eBay search function isn't great, but it's vastly better than Amazon, where search results are polluted by large numbers of garbage sponsored results - this may be related to its success in these niches. (although in my case it's partly because I can avoid paying for Amazon Prime, and still choose things based on prices that include shipping)
Do they even do it nowadays? I was under impression it turned into an ordinary marketplace, probably with a bit more focus towards small/private sellers.
“Then I noticed he was selling the exact same model of laptop so it was easy for me to realize that he had just "bought" my laptop to remove the listing so it wouldn't compete against his”
If he got the laptop but didn’t pay, then he is probably selling it.
If he didn’t get the laptop, then he was trying to sell it on (for a profit) before he even got it from you?
I don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market".
Therefore I feel vindicated when a moderately-upvoted post says the quiet part out loud, namely, "Yeah, we made a fake post and just lied to everyone on the internet. I'm not sorry, because not only was it popular - it became the top post of the day."
Remember, kids: lying is only wrong when it's unprofitable.
>I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market".
This product is actually an ideal case for marketing, because most people weren't aware that a product like this existed. The best ads notify you about something you genuinely want to buy.
What you're really complaining about is astroturfing, not marketing.
The more dubious sort of marketing is Coca-Cola style marketing, where people already know that the product exists, and the ad just makes them feel vaguely good about it. But I suspect even this sort of marketing is surprisingly beneficial, because it incentivizes companies to make quality products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578277
My argument for Coca-Cola style brand marketing would go something like:
It's very silly to invest $billions in brand awareness and building market share, if your product is junk and customers will eventually find out. Marketing spend could be seen as the "peacock's tail" of the business world -- a credible signal that the company stands by their product.
If I see an ad for Acme Corp, it's statistical evidence that Acme won an auction for that slot against other players in its industry. Acme won the auction because it was able to bid more. It was able to bid more because it has better lifetime value per customer, i.e. it does a better job of satisfying customer needs.
There are a lot of old consumer brands, and there are a lot of brands known for junk, but there aren't a lot of old consumer brands that are known for junk.
> There are a lot of old consumer brands, and there are a lot of brands known for junk, but there aren't a lot of old consumer brands that are known for junk.
This is why repeatedly buying old consumer brands and then turning them to junk is so insanely profitable. It takes years or decades for consumers to realize that a trusted brand is junk. The consumer never knows that the corporation that turned their brand to junk is currently looking for more brands to acquire.
> Acme won the auction because it was able to bid more. It was able to bid more because it has better lifetime value per customer, i.e. it does a better job of satisfying customer needs.
This is obviously not true. What if they are backed by investors? And there are a gazillion other reasons why they could spend more on that ad ...
I'm mostly against the marketing where the company lies or misleads the customer. While this is bad if the product is new or existing, lies are easier if the audience based is uninformed about a subject. The major issue with marketing is that it's hard to trust someone when so many people marketing have a short term finical interest in stretching the truth as much as possible.
In this situation it's mostly harmless, but we see terrible examples of this in the health/supplements space.
I mean Coca-Cola is junk food, it's unhealthy and we know it is. They advertise to maintain the illusion that it leads to success and happiness. They can't afford for scientific understanding to win over the brainwashing of 'brand advertising'as that would be the death knell for the company (or 99% of it).
Not a single human being alive in the world believes that drinking Coca-Cola "leads to success and happiness."
Coke advertises so that when you're in the store or a gas station and you think "maybe I'll get a soda" you think of Coke before Pepsi. They advertise so that someone starting a restaurant thinks to buy the Coke syrup before they think to buy the Pepsi syrup.
You need to follow that chain of thought a little further. The unfortunate weak spot in a capitalist economy is that it's basically a Darwinistic system where the fittest survive, and "fit" means willing to do anything to make a dollar. Morals therefore become a weakness, and those who are guided by morals will be stomped out by those who don't really care. The guardrails are made of laws, not morals, and those who make the laws are often benefiting from the status quo. Like it or not, this is the jungle we find ourselves in.
The guardrails that work are made of brand awareness and reputation.
Laws are there to stop the company from harms that are too severe for waiting for people to suffer them and from harms to third parties that don't get a say on the decision.
Both of those kinds seem to be completely broken nowadays, everywhere. Getting the law back into working form seems easier, but it's not a viable alternative for most of the things you'll want companies to have morals about.
IMO there is a tension between tolerating gray areas and stomping out the faintest shadow with prejudice. In the long term societies with no trust or accountability will fall to those with higher trust and cohesion because the latter can be more efficient.
I don’t see ruined value in fables telling though, usually the meaning and mind perspectives provides a benefit to the reader. Same with portray and most images shown in museum.
I am not talking about fables, I am referring to lying in order to sell one’s self, perhaps for business, or love, or networking, or even just for a laugh. Maybe even because people are lying to themselves.
It's not unusual to do this. Especially when they're trying to get a retailer to carry their items. They'll create fake buzz. Stuff like getting all your friends to go to a store asking "Do you carry X?" soon after you've pitched X to the store is a method that's worked for over a century.
Maybe that's why I'm not rich? Because I am honest?
I think this culture of normalizing lying means that more and more humans are just garbage. Because being able to trust someone is telling the truth is just a fundamental part of integrity. Without integrity we have.. well I guess the world we live in.. dangerous, full of trash. Everything is bullshit.
Our big brains actually evolved because of lying - research by scientists like Robin Dunbar shows that figuring out who was lying and how to lie better may have driven the explosion of human intelligence. The same brain power that helped our ancestors outsmart each other is what lets us do amazing things today.
You're right that trust matters - that's why we created rules and systems to encourage honesty. But lying is as old as humanity itself.
I think a few years back someone examined the JS of one of those "XX people are looking at this product right now" or "ZZZ from YYY just purchased this product" and saw that it was basically randomly generated.
> I don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market".
I mean, on some level, everything is marketing. People don't like marketing when it's fraudulent and morally suspect, which of course makes sense - I don't like tech when it's morally suspect, either!
But literally everything you know about, every product you use on any kind of basis, every service you use, every creator you follow, is something you know about because of some marketing, directly or indirectly.
And I'm certainly happy about a lot of new products/services/etc that I use, and think my life is richer for it.
> something you know about because of some marketing, directly or indirectly.
That’s a broad and vague truth. Parent critics direct marketing.
Also as exceptions makes the rules: the best item I ever bought was a second hand bike on the local Craigslist. Super cheap (repair included) and commuted +10000km with it. The « marketing » was the descriptive pictures and honest description, I guess.
Making something available to purchase is all I want from marketers, but then the other 99% of marketers want to make money too so it's just a game of who can lie most convincingly
While I understand your perspective, I don't follow the vindication. Viral marketing is a marketing strategy, it is taught in marketing classes. Isn't it naive to believe everything you see on the internet?
It is naive, yet it is still read, believed and scored (and score gives it more trust). The medium still seems trustworthy but the individuals within it are not. And as the internet has progressed, the percentage of trustworthiness has slipped, but can also not be intuited directly from the medium as there are no signals that have meaningfully changed in the medium.
Only anecdotes from outside the medium can inform us to be less naive. Or doing an analysis which takes effort, skill, and time per-person
Teaching young people to be dishonest in a school setting doesn't somehow make it legitimate. It makes those classes bad. Science classes aren't telling their students that they could advance their career a lot faster and with less work if they just make up data for their experiments. They acknowledge it happens, condemn it, and tell students they'll be failed or expelled for doing it.
If people on an entertainment site and entertained by the viral marketing, and they order a product knowing what it is and get the product they ordered, then what is the problem exactly?
That reminds me of the toilet paper calculator during peak covid.
He put up a site in about half an hour and it ended up getting coverage on TV which led to ~10 million visitors and it making $5,000 a day in ads for a while. The core logic of the app is 6 lines of JavaScript to take a few inputs and do basic math on them.
Listened today. Nice work, I really like these kind of stories (small time internet success stories). I don't know if your podcast has others, as it seems like you're mostly focused on the tech stack of sites. Some of my favourite HN posts are the common "What's your tech side hustle?" posts. I love hearing the stories of people making a bit of side cash on small little sites. Some examples I can think of (however, both are much bigger now) is the Vileda Onions guy, bingo card creator and the wedding table name tag site.
Thanks. If I had to estimate, I'd say about 2/3rds of the episodes are solo developers putting up some type of site (SAAS app, selling a product, etc.).
A guy I worked with was fired for sending this to a woman we worked with that he had a grudge against for some reason or another. Apparently he sent it from his work computer, which wasn’t the brightest idea. He sat in the next cube over from me and I wasn’t surprised in the slightest when I heard about it.
I've had to let a few reports go for inappropriate statements. Without exception, whatever they got in trouble for saying they prefaced with "I probably shouldn't say this, but..."
For the love of God if you can put that into words just don't say whatever the thing in question was
Imgur used to be an image hosting service for reddit for many years. Without reddit, it wouldn't be. However like any image hosting service this wasn't very profitable.
So Imgur made itself a social network like Reddit and which then started removing the ability to direct-link to images. The link you clicked than redirected to their own platform of image and comment discussion.
Reddit then caught on and shunned Imgur out of Reddit and Imgur expanded to it own social media thing.
What's ironic is that when Imgur was first created, it branded itself as the image host that doesn't suck.
The enshittification was inevitable. Being an image host, especially one that allows direct linking, is expensive.
Side note: RIP Gfycat. They join the ranks of ImageShack and Photobucket of causing millions of links on the Internet to suddenly become dead. Imgur did a purge of porn, which now means a whole bunch of images on the porn subreddits are now dead.
Sometimes I think about the years of hard work that I put into building a SaaS business and wondered whether I should've just done something silly like this instead.
About 10 years ago it was possible to make a living from silly Android apps. I made several of farts, meme sounds, and even politicians that were funny to laugh at. One of my fondest memories as dev is making apps for little kids and getting back long strings of hearts, kisses and smiles in the reviews.
OPs story is like winning the lottery. The rest of us have to get up and work 80 hour weeks building our business. The latter is more fulfilling and longer lived in my opinion.
But there’s an important lesson here. The structure is the same as a successful serious business. Build something people actually want to buy, build it so you can fulfill it cheaper than cost. Get a little ahead of yourself (but not a lot)
It is still inspiring for someone like me who wouldn’t even know where to start for something like this—-that is can be done by an individual nobody.The author knew a few important things, but more, did their research, asked questions, and pushed forward. I myself would love to move beyond web apps to a physical product.
Fun fact: I got one of those in the mail from a friend a couple days after my dad died.
He felt terrible for the timing, but it wasn't his fault. He placed the order, and the next day I announced that my dad was in the hospital after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke. A couple days later, he passed, and then a couple days after that, I got the bag of dicks.
I get that this is all fun and I don’t want to jump on the purity spiral but the letter accompanying the glitter prank really is really horrible.
If I received one of those I would definitely give serious consideration to finding the nearest bathroom and having a good cry.
When it’s impossible to know whether you’re exacting glitter justice or amplifying a bully, why not just take a neutral stance? (For all I know though, send your enemies glitter is running an arbitration service and only sends glitter to the truly awful?)
Every couple of months I cycle back to a similar but digital-only idea I have for prank service but always worried about being sued for causing some kind of mental or psychological stress, especially from an anonymous source. I see now that with enough sugar, you can get all up in any one's mandibular pocket and just chill til you're done with it
Not so amazing, you're essentially earning money by helping people bully others anonymously. Probably some collateral damage (i.e. delivery) as well. Its just mean. OPs product is much better in that it can be seen by the recipient as funny, and edible at the least.
> Yeah, we made a fake post and just lied to everyone on the internet. I'm not sorry, because not only was it popular - it became the top post of the day.
this is why we need better societal guardrails in place against lies... people will just do this kind of crap otherwise. I mean look at politics right now, it's a complete disaster in terms of information accuracy.
lies are too powerful to be (un)regulated by the free market.
Perhaps I missed it, but at what point the author sets an LLC or something similar? For me, that’s the main blocker: in Europe it costs money to start a business, some paperwork and taxes is involved, even if you don’t make a single sale. Also, for selling online you kinda have to show in your website your “business id” (or tax id or similar)… otherwise how do people know you are a legit business? For example, I’m not giving my credit card details to any random website to buy silly stuff unless they are properly identified
Trying to do things 100% properly isn't necessarily good.
I know it's sort of a difficult shift in mentality especially for anyone with a programming background, but not doing anything at all for fear of doing it incorrectly, or delaying doing the thing because of all the setup seem much higher risks to me.
In my experience, you can just start doing the thing. It probably won't make any money anyway, in which case you can just stop. If you make some money, then you give some (say ~$1k) of that money to a bookkeeper who will then figure out how to declare it properly.
I get your fear though, as I used to have it. But this world is not like an API call that completely fails if you have one thing wrong. Instead it's people, who talk with you and figure things out with you.
Certainly doesn't in the UK, are you sure that's true where you are? Here incorporating as an ltd (limited liability) costs I think £25, but you can start a business as a sole trader without any kind of fee or registration (just a de facto status requiring declaring the income on your personal tax return).
I had to fill in like 5 fields (who, what, bank account) in a 2-page form to start a basic business in Germany of all places - and was legally allowed to start operating the moment I submitted that. It cost nothing and I received a tax ID a short time later. Wasn't an LLC, but you don't need that for every little temporary thing you set up.
Setting up an LLC is not a big deal either, even if the process could be quicker. People who think that too complicated aren't competent to run a lasting business anyways. If that is hard, how are you not gonna fuck up accounting and your other legal obligations?
> For example, I’m not giving my credit card details to any random website to buy silly stuff unless they are properly identified
You might be putting more thought into this than the average person looking to anonymously send someone a bag of penis candy.
More seriously though, setting up an LLC cost me well under $1000 each in two different states. No, I don't have some elaborate tax dodge going; I moved.
> otherwise how do people know you are a legit business? For example, I’m not giving my credit card details to any random website to buy silly stuff unless they are properly identified
I do not care so much, as long of amounts are tiny - in case of fraud it is bank's problem
On paper, yeah. Sadly the threshold is very low, and you get hit with a brutal regressive tax immediately after you pass it (obligatory lump-sum social security tax).
Not everyone shares your rigor to not buying from strangers.
Pieter Levels is a one-person show that has started multiple businesses with just a single page & a Stripe Checkout earning millions per year and I don’t believe he’s incorporated.
Why would you believe that? He was incorporated in Singapore last I spoke to him. Looking back 8 years ago, to last time I bought something from him, it's from an NL company with a VAT number.
A stripe account requires a legal entity of some sort behind it.
This can be a "physical person" (eg a freelance activity), depending on the country, but that still requires registration -- and if it's millions per year, it's usually a terrible idea to do it as a freelancer.
The money has to go somewhere. That somewhere needs to be banked. That banked entity needs to be incorporated, or treatable as a corporation.
It's a terrible idea because in most countries, it's much more expensive to pay yourself as a freelance than operate a corporation than can easily reinvest profits into itself.
It's not even "hiring a firm like Appleby". It's "hiring an accountant". Paying $1-2k a year to save yourself hundreds of thousands in difference.
And yes if you're hoping to process payments on Stripe, you need to be banked, and the banked entity will undergo KYB. I have no idea why you're denying this. Is this some sort of gaslighting nonsense?
> in most countries, it's much more expensive to pay yourself as a freelance than operate a corporation than can easily reinvest profits into itself.
Maybe. I've found people in my country tend to assume a corporation has stuff to spend on and/or be doing expenses fraud, and actually if you're doing things properly the all-in tax rate is potentially worse for a corporation by the time you actually have the money in your personal account.
> if you're hoping to process payments on Stripe, you need to be banked, and the banked entity will undergo KYB.
Perhaps, but you absolutely don't need to be a corporation for that. You give them your name and (personal) tax number and maybe a one-line description of what business you're in and that's that.
It doesn't cost anything to create a simple limited company in Norway but you do have to declare the initial capital and say which bank account holds it and submit annual accounts with quarterly estimates. But that can be as little as 30 kNOK, about 3 kUSD. You can also register as a sole trader which has neither of those requirements but you are then personally liable for any debts.
In France, for very small business with only you in it (and revenue cap), you can create a micro entreprise (aka micro entrepreneur / auto entrepreneur) and it's free.
You don’t have to set up a corporate form to do business like this in the U.S. You can just start selling things and as long as you properly report your taxable income, you’re fine.
In many US states it can cost at little as $200 to $300 to form an LLC. The person says they used an integrated, hosted shopping cart/checkout and payment system. This means they didn't have to go through any of the hassle of doing something like even setting up a "business" bank account, getting credit card processing services and integrating the card payment portal system into their own self-hosted shopping cart checkout workflow. Shopify is used by a bunch of very non technical arts and crafts people.
That doesn't make it legal to operate. In every EU country you need to register to legally conduct business activity. It used to be an expensive and long hassle but nowadays it's simple and quick, usually online and cheap.
A fair number of years ago now, I had a business idea and bought a domain. Within a couple hours I had a person email me offering me $250 for the domain. I countered with $2,000 saying I would have to rebrand. I'd really done literally nothing but buy the domain at that point, but I wasn't interested in selling and it was a "Go Away" price. They accepted.
Used a well known Escrow site. Took a couple days to settle. Quickest $2,000 I ever made. I found out later they were some crypto company with a similar name. They bought it from me just to squat. They still squat it.
I probably could have made way more if I had pushed the issue, oh well.
Never really built much more than a proof of concept for my business idea and never found another domain I liked enough to buy for it.
I really hate Imgur these days. It's yet another site that treats landscape mode as some alien thing that no one uses.
More importantly, whoever bought them is so focused on "showing the next thing" that the wrong swipe in the wrong area just obliterated whatever you're looking at or trying to read. It's just a giant bag of dicks in terms of poor interface programming and testing.
Seriously wish the author published this story as a GitHub readme or Wordpress blog. At least it would be readable without fighting the website to view the current damned content I'm trying to look at.
If I recall correctly Imgur was initially the de-facto image host for Reddit, if you wanted to post an image on Reddit, you had to post it on Imgur and share the link. It had a great interface for that, super easy, and you could get links that go straight to the image, no in-between bullshit.
I'm not sure how they made money though. And I think there was some drama between Imgur and Reddit, with Reddit going off doing their own thing in terms of image hosting. I think they went as far as breaking Imgur links in Reddit as well?
This left Imgur in the lurch a bit, scrambling to find a reason to exist. It's like asking the pass-the-butter-robot from Rick&Morty to find something else to justify it's existence with. They just tried to become another social media site a-la 9gag et al and the weird part for me is there are people that actually use it non ironically.
I'll let you know once I degrade to making dick sites and calling them "successful businesses":)
But if we stop with trolling yeah I have some ideas that could benefit from instant $10k and I don't have a rich dad or credit and I gotta live with it as one does!
I sold a laptop on eBay once long, long ago. Someone did the "Buy it now" option but never paid. I'm trying to remember the exact situation (probably more than 10 years ago), but I had exchanged messages with him several times and he always had an excuse to not pay.
Then I noticed he was selling the exact same model of laptop so it was easy for me to realize that he had just "bought" my laptop to remove the listing so it wouldn't compete against his. I messaged ebay support to accuse him but they didn't do anything about it.
Since he had made the order, eBay did show me his shipping information so I ordered a "glitter bomb" which was basically glitter in a tube with a spring. I got a very nasty accusatory email from him, but it was very vague. He wouldn't specify what he received, but that he was smart enough to not open it. That's how I knew he got the full effect.
I just replied something to the effect of "You never paid me. Why would I send something to you?"
Just remember eBay has almost no way to report scam listings, hacked seller accounts, obviously fraudulent buyers, etc. They don’t want to clean up their act. Caveat emptor.
Two executives were recently imprisoned over harassing a journalist, to give you an idea of the corporate culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
EBay doesn't care about fraud unless they think you're going to file a charge back with your card issuer, then they're pretty quickto protect their bottom line.
I do know for a fact that eBay can kick a seller off very quickly though. I bought a NES shaped raspberry pi a few years back as a gift. The day I got the item, I went to leave the seller glowing feedback, only to find his account was axed (he included NES roms on the SD card).
I'm banned from eBay since about 2010. Sold a cellphone which my sister shipped without requiring signature, guy just said he never received it.
My sister was working at a Telco so we just confirmed that he had actually received it because he put a SIM card into it, proof and everything eBay didn't care.
I withdrew the money from my PayPal account before they could claw it back. PayPal still works for me but eBay is amazingly impressive at immediately banning any new account I tried created since then.
Sounds like your sister got that information illegally. It’s hard to blame EBay because they can’t use that.
Private companies have no limits on using illegally obtained information. It's very common practice. You're thinking about governments and law enforcement agencies.
But you also can't blame Ebay for letting the guy steal? Ebay just can't be blamed ever, seems like a great position to be in.
This is an interesting thought experiment. If the buyer acts as though they did not receive the phone, then on what basis can they complain if you look up metadata of an IMEI that they contend they never took possession of?
But when the lookup reveals that they did activate the device, now maybe you've inappropriately accessed someone else's PII and you did believe beforehand that the results would show that it was no longer registered to you.
Situations like these really annoy me. And the platform's complete disregard is infuriating.
Ebay effectively enables mail fraud - it's surprising the postal inspector's haven't taken notice.
The world of coin selling on ebay is just mostly scams and fakes. It's sad.
There must be at least some minimal way scam listings are handled. I stumbled across an RTX 4090 going for $600 the other day (actual selling price is $1-2k), seller claiming to have 10+ of them with 90+ watchers/in cart, but no reputation. Account was gone the next morning.
Curiously on Mercari, which seems to be more pro-seller, I've seen some GPU listings with "this is a scam" type comments attached to them. Very different way of handling the transactions over there it seems.
Seller reputation is the only reason I still use eBay (when no other options are available). Even when I am desperate, a seller with fewer than 10-100 relevant positive reviews (depending on how expensive the item is) is a deal breaker.
Last year, I accidentally canceled a return request after realizing I was being scammed by the seller. eBay refused to refund my money because the request had been canceled, even though the return address provided by the seller was fake. I wrote letters to two state consumer protection agencies and that worked. I eventually got my money back.
> The Steiners were harassed and threatened both online and physically in their home by deliveries of such things as a bloody pig mask, live cockroaches and spiders, a funeral wreath, and large orders of pizza.[5][1][6] Pornographic magazines with David Steiner’s name on them were sent to a neighbor’s house.
Wow, what disgusting human beings..
And one of the execs then went on to lead a Boys and Girls club per Wikipedia. Wild.
To which party are you referring?
What alternatives are there to eBay? Craigslist seems sketchy and Amazon doesn't support the auction model as far as I'm aware. I want to use good alternatives and encourage my family, friends, and co-workers to do so as well. eBay seems unsalvageable and I think the best thing for us is for it to die due to economic starvation.
Facebook Marketplace has dried up craigslist, not saying it's better for scams, but I feel like it's the only game -in town- now.
Some niche markets have alternatives - like Reverb for music gear - but other than that eBay still has the best selection, unfortunately.
I had the exact experience selling an iMac on eBay about 10 years ago. Buyer clicked buy it now, my listing was removed, they never paid. They deleted their account shortly after (it was some .ru email address.) eBay had nothing to say other than “try again after X weeks”. Why, so it can just happen again? They admitted they have zero protection against it.
I deleted my account and sold it on Amazon instead. How anyone puts up with eBay I have no idea.
FWIW, eBay no longer works like this. When you put up a listing there’s now an option, enabled by default, to require payment at checkout.
This situation may still occur if you are taking offers on an item. In that case the buyer has to pay within 48 hours of the offer being accepted or the listing will become eligible for re-posting.
Our national buy/sell platform (aquired by ebay twenty or so years ago) has a similar system now where they will handle the payments and exchange of currency on confirmation of reception of items etc, I believe it's very successful, but they had to do something because nobody was trusting the site anymore for trading anything valuable.
I sold quite a few things on Amazon back in the day. Was great for getting things off my shelves collecting dust at a good price. At some point maybe ten years ago they started requiring very invasive identity validation to sell. My account from '98? and good selling karma does not matter apparently, not grandfathered in.
Long story short, don't expect Amazon to be more reasonable than Ebay these days.
How is this equivalent?!? In fact, stronger seller identification is what makes the site safer for everyone. I think you're really missing the point of stronger identification on commercial sites. It should be done for sellers AND buyers alike. It would drastically decrease the number of bad transactions if people knew they were no longer shielded by anonymity.
Not worth it to me to sell an occasional ~fifty dollar item. Would rather leave on the sidewalk or throw in the trash if need be.
unless you are a regular seller, Amazon is completely not worth it, right?
I wonder if he was trying to resell your laptop and wasn't going to pay until he got an order for your laptop
ebay charges something like a 12.5% commission. It's easily over $100 in fees to sell a decent laptop on ebay. So, the seller would have to be charging quite a bit more for that to work out.
It's not commission free for private sales here in Germany.
That’s what I was thinking too. There are whole subreddits setup to work this kind of hustle. These people see nothing wrong with what they do, even going so far as to claim that they’re doing a service to the world. In my eyes, they’re bottom-feeding scum no better than scalpers, car salespeople, or MLM huns.
"Pure" flippers and drop shippers who do none of the value adding work of buying large lots and retailing them, holding things over time, etc are both a worthless drag on the economy and a great argument against equivalent financial products.
>> buying large lots and retailing them, holding things over time, etc are both a worthless drag on the economy...
Like grocery stores? Department stores? Costco? Buying in bulk and selling smaller lots to consumers over time is the definition of retail sales.
If you want to eliminate middlemen and buy only from manufacturers, you better first know/learn chinese, japanese, french, german and spanish. And get a forklift. Most only ship product by the pallet.
> who do none of the value adding work of buying large lots and retailing the ...
I think they're saying that is the value added work, which they don't do.
I dont think so. We might not like dealing with them, but even the most horrible of middlemen still provide liquidity to a market. Amazon got its start as a middleman for books, and was hated for what it did to the retail bookshops, but it did inject liquidity to the betterment of consumers.
I think you need to re-read the posts you're replying to. Everyone is specifically saying warehousers add value to the chain. Drop shippers do not.
You might want to re-read that post you quoted, your snipped quote inverts the intended meaning.
…or financial assets arbitrage! (Not /s)
I cant believe ebay hasnt been disrupted yet...
In my kids’ generation (college aged) they all use Facebook Marketplace.
It’s astounding how bad FB Marketplace search is, though. For very popular things, it’s fine. For browsing and “huh, that’s interesting,” it’s fine.
But if I am looking for something specific, it is an incredible failure. It’s so bad I suspect they intentionally don’t want it to work well. That is, I think they only want to optimize for low-effort social buying, not picky people who know exactly what they want.
For this reason I have bought way more stuff off eBay than FB Marketplace recently.
It seems to just ignore filters like “date listed” sometimes too. And people will list items at nominal prices and give the actual price in the description. Generally a poor experience.
Was looking for car, and found out they mentioned down payment lolz. FB marketplace is very bad.
I know some car listing sites (used to, at least) offer ad products to dealerships that would post their inventory on FB Marketplace as well.
It also doesn’t seem to respect the distance filter.
I’m not one for conspiracy theories usually, but I’m pretty sure the state of Marketplace search is, if not ‘deliberate’, at least a result of metrics-driven development. The search results are _just_ useful enough to keep you scrolling and tapping, so the vagueness increases engagement :-(
ebay is still useful for obscure stuff. if you want to buy used servers, GPU, electronics, car parts, etc. I don't think ebay and FB MP really overlapped, MP ate craigslist. The closest thing to eating ebay is Aliexpress.
I found ebay more reliable, interesting and smoother than Amazon. Amazon screwed me over for 40 USD now they are nagging that I should sign up for "Prime"
(I ordered a bunch of stuff, maybe 800 USD. They decided the order is fraudulent, and canceled it, without ever telling me. When I moved into my new place, there was nothing. No sheets, no nothing from Amazon. That this order was "canceled" without any email seemed to puzzle Amazon support. They told me in the chat to reorder with fasted shipping, and that they would reimburse the shipping. Of course, they did not. And the chat protocols clearly stating Amazon would reimburse the express shipping were a "misunderstanding".
Last time I ordered from amazon, I repeatedly declined prime. My bank called me the next day about a suspicious charge for a year of prime. I had to cancel my card and get a new one. The banker told me they'd had dozens of similar problems where amazon was charging people for stuff they never ordered.
When I got the package a few days later, the $150+ set of cello strings I ordered, sold and shipped by amazon, were counterfeits (and damaged due to improper packing, not that it mattered). I had to do a charge back to get my money back.
Amazon is the American version of Temu, Aliexpress, etc nowadays; I wouldn't use it for anything but their own products (Kindle). For specialist items like the cello strings you mentioned, music shops are thankfully still a thing, both online/webshops as irl ones. I'd go there instead. Same with books.
It's borderline impossible for the high street to compete on fungible goods like art supplies and books. The only real value in those shops is knowledgeable and passionate staff who share your interests.
Agreed, I normally wouldn't buy strings from anyone but a reputable violin shop. The strings I wanted were new and none of the small shops could get them at the time.
It's much worse than aliexpress. Ali won't send you used items or returned bricks.
Out of curiosity, how did you realize that they were counterfeits and is there a big difference? FYI: I don't play cello.
The label looked like it was printed on a cheap ink jet printer. The colors on the label weren't the right shades either.
The strings were guitar strings rather than cello strings. They're too short for a cello. The winding metal is different too. A bow doesn't grip guitar strings as well.
Most counterfeiters send super cheap cello strings with a fake label. In those cases, the best way to tell is that the silk windings on the strings will be the wrong colors.
There's a huge difference in sound. Cheap/fake strings tend to sound metallic and harsh. They also tend to break quickly, while a proper set of strings can last over a year.
Please be understanding. Bezos needs the money!
If there was ever someone worthy of getting a bag of glittery dicks, it's Bezos.
The Amazon HQ address is public knowledge, but I doubt he opens his own mail:
Mr. Jeff Bezos, CEO
Amazon dot com, Inc.
410 Terry Avenue North
Seattle, Washington 98109-5210
(206) 266-1000
Bezos has not been the CEO for 3+ years, and he moved to Miami a while ago.
amazon is so bad about counterfeits and people listing products from different brands as the same article
Btw, 'informal' agreements, even oral only, are legally binding, though it may (?) vary by state. For example an email is legally binding.
In a case like this,there's not even the need for small claims - if you just contacted the better business bureau, you'd have gotten reimbursed the shipping and then something reasonable on top as 'an apology for the misunderstanding.'
I would have to file in small claims court. And for 40 USD I am not willing to do this.
I think you don't need even an oral agreement for a contract to be valid. Conclusive action is enough. Take a newspaper, but 2 USD on the table, leave. No words exchanged but valid sales contract established.
The Better Business Bureau is a private organization with zero power to enforce any agreements or judgments. At most, it was Yelp before the internet.
BBB accreditation is a big deal for most major companies, and it includes an obligation to resolve issues (exactly like this one) with their arbitration. I've used them 3 times, with 3 positive (and rapid) outcomes.
Next time you have a straightforward 'they're wrong' issue with a company where you're getting outsourced flowcharts for support, try out the bbb. They're great.
Small claims would obviously also work, but that's a major investment in time/bureaucrazy, while a bbb complaint can be completed online in 10 minutes with maybe one or two brief follow-ups, but usually all it is, is them getting in contact with a human who can do things - and for cases like this, they obviously try to make it right.
yeah amazon is rly weird. did had prime and cancelled it but the cancellation was retracted 3 times in the background and i had to pay 3 months more prime… never ever.. now its only expensive aliexpress and some netflix
It’s quite good for jewelry and fashion items — their certification program is legitimate from all the digging I’ve done.
eBay and Facebook Marketplace don’t really compete. FB is better for normal fungible items. eBay is better for specialty stuff. Don’t forget that you have to pay to list and usually have to ship on eBay. It’s two totally different vibes.
If I wanted to sell a Dewalt angle grinder, I would go to Facebook first.
If I wanted to sell a Sony E-mount camera lens, I would go to eBay first.
Most used things I buy make more sense on Facebook. Most people I know use Facebook because they are usually looking for regular things.
FB marketplace is full of people wasting your time.
"Is this still available?" Yes it is - never heard from again.
I stopped giving out my address. I will give a general area where we can meet so they can gauge how far it is for them. When they are on their way, I give them the public location to meet. Only serious people will meet me. On some occasions, I still get ghosted. But ghosting has become more and more common. I don't recall it being this bad when Craigslist was huge.
Rather go back to yard sales.
I miss the olden craigslist days sometimes. Even responses that sounded like scams were somehow real people at times. I once sold a PSP Vita hours after listing it on Craigslist. The response had superbroken english and was insistent they had to buy it in the next two hours at X location. That location happened to be about a mile down the road from my job so I humored them. Turned out it was just a guy from out of country that was only there one more day for oil field training. Paid me in cash and didn't even hassle the price.
Yeah, FB marketplace is the worst for that. I end up putting up with it, though, because it also has a lot of legitimate buyers and no fees.
I usually just give folks my home address and a time I'm going to be home anyways, and ask them to send me a message once they're on their way. Then I generally forget about it until I get a message from them. If they ghost me, oh well.
I don't take the ad down, and if anyone else asks, I just tell them to ask me again after the scheduled time.
Local classifieds are great if you live in a dense area. But I've tried using them when visiting rural family and there's absolutely nothing for sale.
You must be kidding. No kid uses facebook anymore.
"ewww, facebook is for moms" - every kid born after the first gen of facebook
"old-person tiktok" is what my kids call instagram
Lots of people have a Facebook account just to use Marketplace, at least in my area.
Depends on the country.
or adults for that matter. outside of Marketplace.
eBay has had to reinvent itself. For me, I don’t trust eBay for legit merchandise, I sorta assume it’s knockoffs now, probably wrong. I’ve never used them but I was under the assumption that offer up and what not are popping off as eBay disrupters.
For those in europe - check out vinted.com
Isn't that just ebay anyway?
My wife uses Vinted (UK) for selling hers and the kids clothes, usually single-to-double digit values at most (or she uses Oleo to just give it away). It works _fairly_ well from what I've heard, but she does have the occasional issue with people complaining about things and sending them back for obtuse reasons, often hardly worth it because the value was so low, the cost of the shipping there and back eclipsed the value of the item.
I wonder at times whether this is their game, hoping people will just tell them not to bother sending it back and they get a refund anyway.
As for ebay, I stopped selling anything on there years ago, well over a decade, when someone tried to scam me out of a laptop but failed. If something is valuable enough for me to sell, I sure as shit am not selling it on eBay.
More often than not, I give away my valuable tech that I'm done with, because I'd rather get nothing for it, and give it to someone who'll appreciate it than risk being scammed by some scumbag.
This way, friends and family get my hand-me-down PCs, laptops, phones, etc for nothing and they're still, by the time I'm done with them far better than something they'd buy with their budgets. When I buy something, I factor its lifetime in my possession into it's cost, I effectively expect £0 value left in it when I'm done or I don't buy it; everybody wins.
I have what I think is probably a weird mindset that practically everything I own, short of maybe a car or a house, I assume is worth £0 after I've owned it.
Probably indicative of not having a very good business brain. However, it always seems strange to me when when people buy things and keep track of their used values the whole time they own it - expecting at some point to trade it in.
My wife is also on Vinted. We use it also for young children clothing. It is great if you use cheap shipping options, and combine items.
For old computer stuff, I gave away quite some stuff to people driving to Ukraine. This then goes to kids or their cause.
Vinted seems popular amongst people who never used eBay for buying and selling commodities like clothes. Is it any good for selling higher value specialist stuff like electronics, musical instruments etc?
For higher value goods people usually prefer others, I think Backmarket.com is one of the main ones (it's definitely the main option for electronics in France) but there's also Refurbed (know it from Belgium but I think it's German) or Rebuy (know it from the Netherlands but it's German as well) for example.
Each of those three claims to be the largest one in some metric.
in my experience it's good for buying them (i.e. people not knowing items will go for multiples of what they've listed on ebay)
Honestly ebay is currently a notch better than amazon, IME
They cleaned up their act substantially in the past 3-4 years. There are still scammers, of course, but they seem to be taking action that favors buyers as well. I just don't see how they can protect everyone from all the various scams. If they accept all the risk, it will be exploited by scammers.
It was always fairly pro-buyer, but it's moved so much more in that direction it's somewhat hazardous to use as a seller.
For a lot of stuff, as a seller, I'll just trade-in or use random hobbyist forum buy&sell sections which ad-hoc reputation systems.
That's the point. They want to drive off amateurs who are trying to liquidate dads old tools in favor of the guys who are doing that stuff in professional volumes and the professional dealers and importers who are buying lots of stuff and breaking them up for retail sale and "real businesses" who run an eBay store alongside their other ecommerce stuff. They were pretty transparent about their motives IIRC.
imo it's slightly more pro-buyer than it was a couple of years ago. If only because unreasonable buyers have killed off most of the value of having 100% positive feedback.
Remember losing it a few years ago when an obvious scammer tried to bully me into a partial refund for an item he had already resold at a 50% markup.
Yes I have a 25+ year old account with 100% feedback, but I don't think it matters nearly as much anymore. Also clearly some subset of buyers understands they can abuse high feedback sellers who want to maintain their feedback rating.
In a way I like the more conversational forum buy & sell system where I have feedback, but also each purchase starts with a DM. I usually can suss out from a few DMs if a buyer is going to be a tire kicker wasting my time, or a perfectionist who will be a pain to sell to. In either case I let those buyers pass and wait for someone worth doing business with.
On eBay you have no choice in who your buyer is.
FWIW I don't hear of nearly any of the horror stories I used to. From my recollection, 2011 was about the peak of it, where buyers were claiming to never get their stuff, getting liberal refunds at the expense of the sellers. Sellers were getting their accounts locked by Paypal, sometimes with tens-of-thousands of dollars at stake, only to get it back 6 months later if they begged and screamed.
I opened a seller account in about 2020 to unload some server gear and almost got scammed, but I googled the buyers name and saw he was accused of fraud by several other people. I re-routed the package and although I didn't get reimbursed for that fee, ebay made me right and paypal (I think) gave me a small credit. They even had a phone call with me which seemed like they actually investigated it (I dont remember many details, it was 1 transaction 5 years ago).
There's just no way that any online auction can control fraud. I was on ebay yesterday as a buyer, looking for a tape backup drive. The seller clearly had been burned and (bitterly) warned that the sale was final, because previously he had sold a working drive which was parted out, replaced with broken parts (heads) and returned as defective. there's no way a third party can protect against it because either way the fraudster wins. 1) sell a bad drive, claim it was good, but accuse the buyer of fraud. Or 2) buy a good drive, swap it out with bad parts and return it. how could anyone (like ebay) solve this problem?
Nina Kollars gave an interesting talk on scammers selling coffee through eBay using stolen credit cards. Signature way of knowing is they're shipped direct from nespresso and the purchase price is 40-50% cheaper than retail. I ordered some keurig pods and experienced the same direct shipping and cheap prices.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2IT2oAzTcvU
they actually were disrupted -- craigslist
You can't be "disrupted" by something that existed before you...
Is Craigslist still a thing? In my area, was the vice city classifieds. The hookers are gone, but so much obviously stolen stuff was posted there.
It is somewhat surprisingly (still) a $500m+ revenue[1] company, with very minimal employees and expenses. They're printing money on house and car listing fees.
1: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/craigslist-revenue-...
still had good successes with CL as far back as 2019 for selling a car, and picking up used servers.
that said, general consensus at least where I am in WA and Canada is FB Marketplace is the new CL. which is a same because FB sucks
I quite like places like /r/HardwareSwap or the like.
eBay is interesting. It has consistently high profit margins, but no upward movement in revenue or profit, which peaked over a decade ago, and its returns heavily lag SP500.
I’m guessing investors don’t see much opportunity for growth in the online auction business to make it worth dumping a bunch of money just to take market share from eBay.
eBay I think had their growth capped once you had Etsy, Amazon FBA, and other options on the field.
Your average normie has no interest in the hassle of selling their used stuff (which has, if anything, got harder in my 25ish years using eBay), nor of buying random used staff from anonymous individual sellers.
Etsy covers the arts & crafts coded goods (though much is now China dropship).
Amazon allows the big merchants to sell to normies who just want to click "buy" without thinking about seller rating risk, when something will arrive, etc. Basically most people have no idea they are buying from not-Amazon, because it says amazon.com and that's good enough. eBay never had the smarts to create that user experience.
Amazon fulfillment, That’s the killer. Why bother with another marketplace when vertically integrated Amazon does it all
Because you're a used <pick niche> dealer or a dealer of something that is on the large end of what you can send in "normal" mail. Tires come to mind, even on Amazon very few of them are actually FBA.
From my perspective, eBay has a solid niche of older items, and they tried to break into the buy new items market too, but the hassles of selling mean for the most part only scalpers sell new items on eBay. Although there's some niches where it's not unusual: new auto parts seem common, I guess it's easier for a dealer parts counter to run an eBay store than otherwise.
I find that for a lot of "cheap junk from China" gets cheaper when you eBay it directly from China and cut out the cost of the Amazon middle man.
Recently I bought a chainsaw tool on eBay from China as I didn't want to buy a 6-pack for $10. I was able to buy a couple for about $0.20 more per unit. Sure, higher unit price and they'll be here slower but it's several $6ish saved.
ebay seems relatively competitive with aliexpress, sometimes even cheaper. amazon everything seems to cost much more
Amazon has free returns on almost everything, so if comparing prices for the same item, the cost of free returns has to be added.
I mostly use eBay for buying computer and bike parts - e.g. my most recent purchase on my work (tax-exempt) account was a batch of a specific model of 40Gbit NIC, and a specific type of bike seat post on my personal account.
The eBay search function isn't great, but it's vastly better than Amazon, where search results are polluted by large numbers of garbage sponsored results - this may be related to its success in these niches. (although in my case it's partly because I can avoid paying for Amazon Prime, and still choose things based on prices that include shipping)
> online auction business
Do they even do it nowadays? I was under impression it turned into an ordinary marketplace, probably with a bit more focus towards small/private sellers.
Yeah of course they do. And it’s still used by people looking to get deals.
I just use Craigslist. Yeah, that greatly limits the pool, but eBay is scummy and so is FB.
Ebay entered polish market and lost to allegro. Then ebay basically quit.
As far as I remember ebay hand waved at everything, especially scam.
Allegro is getting enshitiffied nowadays since it was bought by VC.
“Then I noticed he was selling the exact same model of laptop so it was easy for me to realize that he had just "bought" my laptop to remove the listing so it wouldn't compete against his”
If he got the laptop but didn’t pay, then he is probably selling it.
If he didn’t get the laptop, then he was trying to sell it on (for a profit) before he even got it from you?
It’s a shame eBay didn’t help out at all
Just 'buy' his and also don't pay. And the resell the one he has.
I don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market".
Therefore I feel vindicated when a moderately-upvoted post says the quiet part out loud, namely, "Yeah, we made a fake post and just lied to everyone on the internet. I'm not sorry, because not only was it popular - it became the top post of the day."
Remember, kids: lying is only wrong when it's unprofitable.
>I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market".
This product is actually an ideal case for marketing, because most people weren't aware that a product like this existed. The best ads notify you about something you genuinely want to buy.
What you're really complaining about is astroturfing, not marketing.
The more dubious sort of marketing is Coca-Cola style marketing, where people already know that the product exists, and the ad just makes them feel vaguely good about it. But I suspect even this sort of marketing is surprisingly beneficial, because it incentivizes companies to make quality products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578277
My argument for Coca-Cola style brand marketing would go something like:
It's very silly to invest $billions in brand awareness and building market share, if your product is junk and customers will eventually find out. Marketing spend could be seen as the "peacock's tail" of the business world -- a credible signal that the company stands by their product.
If I see an ad for Acme Corp, it's statistical evidence that Acme won an auction for that slot against other players in its industry. Acme won the auction because it was able to bid more. It was able to bid more because it has better lifetime value per customer, i.e. it does a better job of satisfying customer needs.
There are a lot of old consumer brands, and there are a lot of brands known for junk, but there aren't a lot of old consumer brands that are known for junk.
> There are a lot of old consumer brands, and there are a lot of brands known for junk, but there aren't a lot of old consumer brands that are known for junk.
This is why repeatedly buying old consumer brands and then turning them to junk is so insanely profitable. It takes years or decades for consumers to realize that a trusted brand is junk. The consumer never knows that the corporation that turned their brand to junk is currently looking for more brands to acquire.
> Acme won the auction because it was able to bid more. It was able to bid more because it has better lifetime value per customer, i.e. it does a better job of satisfying customer needs.
This is obviously not true. What if they are backed by investors? And there are a gazillion other reasons why they could spend more on that ad ...
I'm mostly against the marketing where the company lies or misleads the customer. While this is bad if the product is new or existing, lies are easier if the audience based is uninformed about a subject. The major issue with marketing is that it's hard to trust someone when so many people marketing have a short term finical interest in stretching the truth as much as possible.
In this situation it's mostly harmless, but we see terrible examples of this in the health/supplements space.
That's a fairly accurate assessment of marketing theory. Rory Sutherland's Alchemy talks about this in more depth.
I mean Coca-Cola is junk food, it's unhealthy and we know it is. They advertise to maintain the illusion that it leads to success and happiness. They can't afford for scientific understanding to win over the brainwashing of 'brand advertising'as that would be the death knell for the company (or 99% of it).
Not a single human being alive in the world believes that drinking Coca-Cola "leads to success and happiness."
Coke advertises so that when you're in the store or a gas station and you think "maybe I'll get a soda" you think of Coke before Pepsi. They advertise so that someone starting a restaurant thinks to buy the Coke syrup before they think to buy the Pepsi syrup.
Just makes me more cynical about everything I see posted. Marketers ruin everything eventually
>Marketers ruin everything eventually
You need to follow that chain of thought a little further. The unfortunate weak spot in a capitalist economy is that it's basically a Darwinistic system where the fittest survive, and "fit" means willing to do anything to make a dollar. Morals therefore become a weakness, and those who are guided by morals will be stomped out by those who don't really care. The guardrails are made of laws, not morals, and those who make the laws are often benefiting from the status quo. Like it or not, this is the jungle we find ourselves in.
> The guardrails are made of laws, not morals
The guardrails that work are made of brand awareness and reputation.
Laws are there to stop the company from harms that are too severe for waiting for people to suffer them and from harms to third parties that don't get a say on the decision.
Both of those kinds seem to be completely broken nowadays, everywhere. Getting the law back into working form seems easier, but it's not a viable alternative for most of the things you'll want companies to have morals about.
IMO there is a tension between tolerating gray areas and stomping out the faintest shadow with prejudice. In the long term societies with no trust or accountability will fall to those with higher trust and cohesion because the latter can be more efficient.
> The guardrails are made of laws, not morals
damn.
But untrue - or at least very incomplete. Reputation is a huge guardrail which operates downstream of collective morality.
You can extend that to stories people tell and images they portray in real life.
I don’t see ruined value in fables telling though, usually the meaning and mind perspectives provides a benefit to the reader. Same with portray and most images shown in museum.
I am not talking about fables, I am referring to lying in order to sell one’s self, perhaps for business, or love, or networking, or even just for a laugh. Maybe even because people are lying to themselves.
Oh ok i didn’t read your comment that way. That makes sense. NLP is a form of self marketing I guess. "Sell" yourself ideas you want to buy on!
Dishonesty is rampant in our world.
That's why Merlin says honesty is the most important virtue.
I listen to How I Built This.
It's not unusual to do this. Especially when they're trying to get a retailer to carry their items. They'll create fake buzz. Stuff like getting all your friends to go to a store asking "Do you carry X?" soon after you've pitched X to the store is a method that's worked for over a century.
Maybe that's why I'm not rich? Because I am honest?
I think this culture of normalizing lying means that more and more humans are just garbage. Because being able to trust someone is telling the truth is just a fundamental part of integrity. Without integrity we have.. well I guess the world we live in.. dangerous, full of trash. Everything is bullshit.
I hope the machines take over soon.
Our big brains actually evolved because of lying - research by scientists like Robin Dunbar shows that figuring out who was lying and how to lie better may have driven the explosion of human intelligence. The same brain power that helped our ancestors outsmart each other is what lets us do amazing things today.
You're right that trust matters - that's why we created rules and systems to encourage honesty. But lying is as old as humanity itself.
I think a few years back someone examined the JS of one of those "XX people are looking at this product right now" or "ZZZ from YYY just purchased this product" and saw that it was basically randomly generated.
"6.02214076×10^23 other people are looking at this room right now".
> I don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market".
I mean, on some level, everything is marketing. People don't like marketing when it's fraudulent and morally suspect, which of course makes sense - I don't like tech when it's morally suspect, either!
But literally everything you know about, every product you use on any kind of basis, every service you use, every creator you follow, is something you know about because of some marketing, directly or indirectly.
And I'm certainly happy about a lot of new products/services/etc that I use, and think my life is richer for it.
> something you know about because of some marketing, directly or indirectly.
That’s a broad and vague truth. Parent critics direct marketing. Also as exceptions makes the rules: the best item I ever bought was a second hand bike on the local Craigslist. Super cheap (repair included) and commuted +10000km with it. The « marketing » was the descriptive pictures and honest description, I guess.
Making something available to purchase is all I want from marketers, but then the other 99% of marketers want to make money too so it's just a game of who can lie most convincingly
While I understand your perspective, I don't follow the vindication. Viral marketing is a marketing strategy, it is taught in marketing classes. Isn't it naive to believe everything you see on the internet?
It is naive, yet it is still read, believed and scored (and score gives it more trust). The medium still seems trustworthy but the individuals within it are not. And as the internet has progressed, the percentage of trustworthiness has slipped, but can also not be intuited directly from the medium as there are no signals that have meaningfully changed in the medium.
Only anecdotes from outside the medium can inform us to be less naive. Or doing an analysis which takes effort, skill, and time per-person
Teaching young people to be dishonest in a school setting doesn't somehow make it legitimate. It makes those classes bad. Science classes aren't telling their students that they could advance their career a lot faster and with less work if they just make up data for their experiments. They acknowledge it happens, condemn it, and tell students they'll be failed or expelled for doing it.
It looks like the author was eventually able to fulfill the orders in the end. What does the “lying” refer to?
I believe they made a fake post about someone documenting their experience getting mailed the bag of candies.
Bravery is just stupidity that worked.
Seems like a no harm no foul sort of situation.
If people on an entertainment site and entertained by the viral marketing, and they order a product knowing what it is and get the product they ordered, then what is the problem exactly?
If you go by youtube, the problem is that the entertaining marketing wasn't labeled "sponsored post".
That reminds me of the toilet paper calculator during peak covid.
He put up a site in about half an hour and it ended up getting coverage on TV which led to ~10 million visitors and it making $5,000 a day in ads for a while. The core logic of the app is 6 lines of JavaScript to take a few inputs and do basic math on them.
I ended up chatting with the creator on how he built and hosted it back in 2020: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/35-determine-what-yo...
Listened today. Nice work, I really like these kind of stories (small time internet success stories). I don't know if your podcast has others, as it seems like you're mostly focused on the tech stack of sites. Some of my favourite HN posts are the common "What's your tech side hustle?" posts. I love hearing the stories of people making a bit of side cash on small little sites. Some examples I can think of (however, both are much bigger now) is the Vileda Onions guy, bingo card creator and the wedding table name tag site.
Thanks. If I had to estimate, I'd say about 2/3rds of the episodes are solo developers putting up some type of site (SAAS app, selling a product, etc.).
Thanks for sharing, just downloaded and will listen today.
A guy I worked with was fired for sending this to a woman we worked with that he had a grudge against for some reason or another. Apparently he sent it from his work computer, which wasn’t the brightest idea. He sat in the next cube over from me and I wasn’t surprised in the slightest when I heard about it.
> sending this to a woman we worked with that he had a grudge against for some reason or another
Sometimes I wonder what the hell is going on in people's head.
I've had to let a few reports go for inappropriate statements. Without exception, whatever they got in trouble for saying they prefaced with "I probably shouldn't say this, but..."
For the love of God if you can put that into words just don't say whatever the thing in question was
Translated from Moron to English: “look at how brave I am, admire me and despair at how pathetic you are for censoring yourself.”
A happy person and an upset person meet. Their emotional statuses are wildly different, therefore drama ensues.
The profane joke in the bag of dicks made me think which head he was thinking with.
I'm not sure it had any sexual relevance, so that does not make sense to me.
This really surprised me: from a paragraph near the end:
It's one of the reasons I've stuck around Imgur so long - there's an extremely diverse, and supportive community.
I had no idea that there was this kind of community on Imgur.
Imgur is basically an image based social media site now, similar to Instagram but with a more Reddit style lean to it.
Imgur is Instagram, but selfies are banned (with specific exceptions on xmas day, injury images, or improving health / rehabilitation images).
Because of that one single rule, most of the vain attention seekers don't stay on imgur.
It's so much better without them.
Imgur used to be an image hosting service for reddit for many years. Without reddit, it wouldn't be. However like any image hosting service this wasn't very profitable.
So Imgur made itself a social network like Reddit and which then started removing the ability to direct-link to images. The link you clicked than redirected to their own platform of image and comment discussion.
Reddit then caught on and shunned Imgur out of Reddit and Imgur expanded to it own social media thing.
Some History: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595212
What's ironic is that when Imgur was first created, it branded itself as the image host that doesn't suck.
The enshittification was inevitable. Being an image host, especially one that allows direct linking, is expensive.
Side note: RIP Gfycat. They join the ranks of ImageShack and Photobucket of causing millions of links on the Internet to suddenly become dead. Imgur did a purge of porn, which now means a whole bunch of images on the porn subreddits are now dead.
Sometimes I think about the years of hard work that I put into building a SaaS business and wondered whether I should've just done something silly like this instead.
About 10 years ago it was possible to make a living from silly Android apps. I made several of farts, meme sounds, and even politicians that were funny to laugh at. One of my fondest memories as dev is making apps for little kids and getting back long strings of hearts, kisses and smiles in the reviews.
Ah, the golden age of Android where any app could make you money.
OPs story is like winning the lottery. The rest of us have to get up and work 80 hour weeks building our business. The latter is more fulfilling and longer lived in my opinion.
But there’s an important lesson here. The structure is the same as a successful serious business. Build something people actually want to buy, build it so you can fulfill it cheaper than cost. Get a little ahead of yourself (but not a lot)
There’s only so many low hanging fruits to exploit (by a LUCKY few). Keep working on your business.
Media likes to all cover some random silly hot story periodically, and they constantly need new ones.
So I’d say it’s actually not limited, although being the one they happen to cover this week would need some luck for sure.
That's like saying "this guy won the lottery, so maybe I should quit my job and just buy lottery tickets."
and you would not actually be the first person to do that
It is still inspiring for someone like me who wouldn’t even know where to start for something like this—-that is can be done by an individual nobody.The author knew a few important things, but more, did their research, asked questions, and pushed forward. I myself would love to move beyond web apps to a physical product.
>did their research, asked questions, and pushed forward
I think the real lesson is they "just started".
Done something silly, or done the same thing with a false advertisement that was more viral?
Fun fact: I got one of those in the mail from a friend a couple days after my dad died.
He felt terrible for the timing, but it wasn't his fault. He placed the order, and the next day I announced that my dad was in the hospital after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke. A couple days later, he passed, and then a couple days after that, I got the bag of dicks.
I still appreciated it. I thought it was funny.
Time to try harder to monetise fullofcr.app
Maybe I could ship these to people with "Someone thinks you're full of crap."
https://chocolate-shop.co.uk/products/novelty-chocolate-stin...
I get that this is all fun and I don’t want to jump on the purity spiral but the letter accompanying the glitter prank really is really horrible.
If I received one of those I would definitely give serious consideration to finding the nearest bathroom and having a good cry.
When it’s impossible to know whether you’re exacting glitter justice or amplifying a bully, why not just take a neutral stance? (For all I know though, send your enemies glitter is running an arbitration service and only sends glitter to the truly awful?)
I must say I quite enjoyed reading up on this great business idea. It speaks to that 14 year old that's still inside us, regardless of age.
I love eating a bag of Dicks on a sunny summer day.
https://keyw.com/dicks-burgers-changes-french-fries/
Part of me was hoping the guy with the offer that fell through would receive the product on the mail at the end.
I suggest edible hats for your next project.
Every couple of months I cycle back to a similar but digital-only idea I have for prank service but always worried about being sued for causing some kind of mental or psychological stress, especially from an anonymous source. I see now that with enough sugar, you can get all up in any one's mandibular pocket and just chill til you're done with it
SHIPYOURENEMIESGLITTER is amazing idea!!! I already hav a list of people who would really "enjoy" such a letter!
Not so amazing, you're essentially earning money by helping people bully others anonymously. Probably some collateral damage (i.e. delivery) as well. Its just mean. OPs product is much better in that it can be seen by the recipient as funny, and edible at the least.
The Gummi Lighthouses are infamous for looking more like dicks than the products actually sold as such.
As featured in the The Ballad of the Malheur Patriots (Song of the Oregon Wildlife Refuge Standoff) @3:25
The perfect treat to storm a building surrounded by ducks . . .
Bundy apologists in the wild? Insane.
Who, the downvoters?
There was a lot of up/down votes on that comment .. clearly some laughed and others cried.
Glitter, poop, and now a bag of dicks can be easily sent anonymously. What other similar services exist? Asking for a friend.
Found this: https://prankpackage.com/collections/all
You can mail a message on a potato
https://potatoparcel.com/
HAHAH! Loved this. I am so looking forward to replicate this in my country
> Yeah, we made a fake post and just lied to everyone on the internet. I'm not sorry, because not only was it popular - it became the top post of the day.
this is why we need better societal guardrails in place against lies... people will just do this kind of crap otherwise. I mean look at politics right now, it's a complete disaster in terms of information accuracy.
lies are too powerful to be (un)regulated by the free market.
What you need is a ministry of truth to tell what's true and what's not.
You mean ban advertisement?
The rare Imgur-as-an-independent-social-site post.
you've got to have the eye of a hawk to achieve something like this
Haliey Welch showed us there's profit to be had. VCs funding genitalia joke cryptocurrencies and ecommerce sites is my prediction for 2025.
Perhaps I missed it, but at what point the author sets an LLC or something similar? For me, that’s the main blocker: in Europe it costs money to start a business, some paperwork and taxes is involved, even if you don’t make a single sale. Also, for selling online you kinda have to show in your website your “business id” (or tax id or similar)… otherwise how do people know you are a legit business? For example, I’m not giving my credit card details to any random website to buy silly stuff unless they are properly identified
Trying to do things 100% properly isn't necessarily good.
I know it's sort of a difficult shift in mentality especially for anyone with a programming background, but not doing anything at all for fear of doing it incorrectly, or delaying doing the thing because of all the setup seem much higher risks to me.
In my experience, you can just start doing the thing. It probably won't make any money anyway, in which case you can just stop. If you make some money, then you give some (say ~$1k) of that money to a bookkeeper who will then figure out how to declare it properly.
I get your fear though, as I used to have it. But this world is not like an API call that completely fails if you have one thing wrong. Instead it's people, who talk with you and figure things out with you.
Certainly doesn't in the UK, are you sure that's true where you are? Here incorporating as an ltd (limited liability) costs I think £25, but you can start a business as a sole trader without any kind of fee or registration (just a de facto status requiring declaring the income on your personal tax return).
> Here incorporating as an ltd (limited liability) costs I think £25
They've increased it to (a still reasonable) £50, I assume to help fund the new legal obligations that Companies House has been given.
unfortunately in the UK it's considerably more complicated to dissolve a company than it is to start one, even if it has few very assets and no debt
I had to fill in like 5 fields (who, what, bank account) in a 2-page form to start a basic business in Germany of all places - and was legally allowed to start operating the moment I submitted that. It cost nothing and I received a tax ID a short time later. Wasn't an LLC, but you don't need that for every little temporary thing you set up.
Setting up an LLC is not a big deal either, even if the process could be quicker. People who think that too complicated aren't competent to run a lasting business anyways. If that is hard, how are you not gonna fuck up accounting and your other legal obligations?
> For example, I’m not giving my credit card details to any random website to buy silly stuff unless they are properly identified
You might be putting more thought into this than the average person looking to anonymously send someone a bag of penis candy.
More seriously though, setting up an LLC cost me well under $1000 each in two different states. No, I don't have some elaborate tax dodge going; I moved.
> in Europe it costs money to start a business, some paperwork and taxes is involved, even if you don’t make a single sale
not everywhere - in Poland it is fine to run a tiny-scale business without registration
https://www.biznes.gov.pl/pl/portal/00115 - among requirements, scale must be less than 75% of a minimum wage. Enough to test it.
> otherwise how do people know you are a legit business? For example, I’m not giving my credit card details to any random website to buy silly stuff unless they are properly identified
I do not care so much, as long of amounts are tiny - in case of fraud it is bank's problem
Wth? That's a great system you guys have.
On paper, yeah. Sadly the threshold is very low, and you get hit with a brutal regressive tax immediately after you pass it (obligatory lump-sum social security tax).
Oh, I am not claiming that overall system is friendly. I am paying some absurd taxes myself.
But at least "I want to test run a business idea at tiny scale, without violating law" is solved.
Not everyone shares your rigor to not buying from strangers.
Pieter Levels is a one-person show that has started multiple businesses with just a single page & a Stripe Checkout earning millions per year and I don’t believe he’s incorporated.
https://x.com/levelsio
> and I don’t believe he’s incorporated
Why would you believe that? He was incorporated in Singapore last I spoke to him. Looking back 8 years ago, to last time I bought something from him, it's from an NL company with a VAT number.
A sole proprietorship probably needs to register for VAT in EU countries after exceeding some yearly sales threshhold.
Lots of small companies (hairdressers, small shops) were not really incorporated.
A stripe account requires a legal entity of some sort behind it.
This can be a "physical person" (eg a freelance activity), depending on the country, but that still requires registration -- and if it's millions per year, it's usually a terrible idea to do it as a freelancer.
The money has to go somewhere. That somewhere needs to be banked. That banked entity needs to be incorporated, or treatable as a corporation.
> This can be a "physical person" (eg a freelance activity), depending on the country, but that still requires registration
Not necessarily. Many countries do not require sole proprietors to be registered.
> if it's millions per year, it's usually a terrible idea to do it as a freelancer.
In the US with its liability lawsuit culture yes. Elsewhere operating as a sole proprietor is not always such a terrible idea.
> That banked entity needs to be incorporated, or treatable as a corporation.
It really doesn't.
>In the US with its liability lawsuit culture yes. Elsewhere operating as a sole proprietor is not always such a terrible idea.
It's a terrible idea because as a non-American you can easily hire a firm like Appleby to evade nearly all taxes if you're rolling in millions.
It's a terrible idea because in most countries, it's much more expensive to pay yourself as a freelance than operate a corporation than can easily reinvest profits into itself.
It's not even "hiring a firm like Appleby". It's "hiring an accountant". Paying $1-2k a year to save yourself hundreds of thousands in difference.
And yes if you're hoping to process payments on Stripe, you need to be banked, and the banked entity will undergo KYB. I have no idea why you're denying this. Is this some sort of gaslighting nonsense?
> in most countries, it's much more expensive to pay yourself as a freelance than operate a corporation than can easily reinvest profits into itself.
Maybe. I've found people in my country tend to assume a corporation has stuff to spend on and/or be doing expenses fraud, and actually if you're doing things properly the all-in tax rate is potentially worse for a corporation by the time you actually have the money in your personal account.
> if you're hoping to process payments on Stripe, you need to be banked, and the banked entity will undergo KYB.
Perhaps, but you absolutely don't need to be a corporation for that. You give them your name and (personal) tax number and maybe a one-line description of what business you're in and that's that.
It doesn't cost anything to create a simple limited company in Norway but you do have to declare the initial capital and say which bank account holds it and submit annual accounts with quarterly estimates. But that can be as little as 30 kNOK, about 3 kUSD. You can also register as a sole trader which has neither of those requirements but you are then personally liable for any debts.
In France, for very small business with only you in it (and revenue cap), you can create a micro entreprise (aka micro entrepreneur / auto entrepreneur) and it's free.
You don’t have to set up a corporate form to do business like this in the U.S. You can just start selling things and as long as you properly report your taxable income, you’re fine.
In many US states it can cost at little as $200 to $300 to form an LLC. The person says they used an integrated, hosted shopping cart/checkout and payment system. This means they didn't have to go through any of the hassle of doing something like even setting up a "business" bank account, getting credit card processing services and integrating the card payment portal system into their own self-hosted shopping cart checkout workflow. Shopify is used by a bunch of very non technical arts and crafts people.
Not sure if it's still the case now but you could perfectly open a Stripe account in the EU without the need for any business documents.
That doesn't make it legal to operate. In every EU country you need to register to legally conduct business activity. It used to be an expensive and long hassle but nowadays it's simple and quick, usually online and cheap.
It’s not a random website, it’s backed by Shopify!
A fair number of years ago now, I had a business idea and bought a domain. Within a couple hours I had a person email me offering me $250 for the domain. I countered with $2,000 saying I would have to rebrand. I'd really done literally nothing but buy the domain at that point, but I wasn't interested in selling and it was a "Go Away" price. They accepted.
Used a well known Escrow site. Took a couple days to settle. Quickest $2,000 I ever made. I found out later they were some crypto company with a similar name. They bought it from me just to squat. They still squat it.
I probably could have made way more if I had pushed the issue, oh well.
Never really built much more than a proof of concept for my business idea and never found another domain I liked enough to buy for it.
I really hate Imgur these days. It's yet another site that treats landscape mode as some alien thing that no one uses.
More importantly, whoever bought them is so focused on "showing the next thing" that the wrong swipe in the wrong area just obliterated whatever you're looking at or trying to read. It's just a giant bag of dicks in terms of poor interface programming and testing.
Seriously wish the author published this story as a GitHub readme or Wordpress blog. At least it would be readable without fighting the website to view the current damned content I'm trying to look at.
I liked Imgur when it came up as a free, simple image hoster. It still kinda works as that.
This is the first time I've seen a blog-type entry there. I understand the appeal, though, as it doesn't even require an account to create it.
If I recall correctly Imgur was initially the de-facto image host for Reddit, if you wanted to post an image on Reddit, you had to post it on Imgur and share the link. It had a great interface for that, super easy, and you could get links that go straight to the image, no in-between bullshit.
I'm not sure how they made money though. And I think there was some drama between Imgur and Reddit, with Reddit going off doing their own thing in terms of image hosting. I think they went as far as breaking Imgur links in Reddit as well?
This left Imgur in the lurch a bit, scrambling to find a reason to exist. It's like asking the pass-the-butter-robot from Rick&Morty to find something else to justify it's existence with. They just tried to become another social media site a-la 9gag et al and the weird part for me is there are people that actually use it non ironically.
Also the default image host for stackoverflow.
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TL;DR it's great to have a dad who can "borrow" you 10k bucks on very short notice!
I can guarantee that you have an instant >$10K line of credit from every major bank in the country. Where are all your successful businesses then?
I'll let you know once I degrade to making dick sites and calling them "successful businesses":)
But if we stop with trolling yeah I have some ideas that could benefit from instant $10k and I don't have a rich dad or credit and I gotta live with it as one does!
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> submorons (who don't even know who you are).
Ahem.
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None of that holds a candle to proper British insults.
Consider, for example, being called a third rate bank clerk. That kind of burn is never going to heal.
Isn't this the premise of Silicon Valley (the show)?
I feel like the origin of this joke is a Louis CK stand up routine IIRC but I’m unable to locate the source.
The routine is here https://youtu.be/jgcGEIfE9kE but I don't think that's the origin of the phrase and doesn't mention mailing candy ones to people
I'm pretty sure I head that phrase sometime in the 90s, maybe early 2000s. It's been around a while.