Taking Middle Road to eBay

Some of Saipan’s techies will call me Captain Obvious today. But one guy’s obvious is another guy’s mystery. This even applies to a common service like eBay. Never mind obvious, I’m being sneaky here: I’m sometimes on the hook to buy stuff for relatives who aren’t eBay-savvy, and from now on I am going to direct them to this column and they can do their own shopping.

This is no fringe market. Last year, $62 billion worth of stuff was sold on eBay.

I had zero interest in eBay until I wanted to solve a specific little problem. I was driving down Middle Road one afternoon and I heard a tune on the radio from my halcyon college days. Ah, memories. This triggered a search for a record by a New Wave group called The Waitresses, although “New” Wave is mighty old these days.

How old is that? So old that some of it never made it to CD format. The song I heard on the radio made it. Alas, the album I wanted never did. Naturally, I long ago lost that album after college. So I was in search of a true relic: an obscure vinyl record.

On Saipan? Not a chance.

So I tried eBay. The result? Bingo!

eBay (eBay.com) calls itself an “electronic marketplace.” It’s a cross between a garage sale and a shopping mall. Well, maybe more accurately, it’s both things at the same time. People who collect stuff (baseball cards, stamps, whatever) like to buy and sell on eBay. But it’s not just for knickknacks, and many eBay vendors are virtual stores that sell new merchandise.

Many items, probably most, are sold on eBay via an auction process. But other items are listed for a flat (“By It Now”) price.

As for the auction process, it is easy. However, it is not for the unwary. Why? Because each auction stops at a fixed, pre-determined time. This gives an advantage to those who only bid at the last second, bidding so late that nobody else has time to up the ante.

That technique is called “sniping” and there are electronic services that do just this, automatically bidding as paid proxies for the buyer. I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t snipe. I’m not making moral judgments here. I’m just telling you what’s going on out there in the real world so you don’t get clobbered. Me? I got painfully clobbered until someone told me what was going on. So if you find that you keep trying to buy stuff, only to discover that a second before the auction ends somebody sweeps in to score before you can react, you might be running up against this factor.

As for the actual payment side of things it’s easy via a service called PayPal. It’s now owned by, you guessed it, eBay. Makes sense, since eBay and PayPal were like peanut butter and jelly, they just naturally went together. PayPal is an intermediary that holds your credit card data, but it doesn’t give that data to the eBay seller. It’s a little like a virtual escrow concept I guess. Incidentally, the buyer typically pays up front. And, not so incidentally, the buyer pays no commissions to PayPal, the cut comes out of the seller’s take.

How can eBay work if it’s just a bunch of strangers selling stuff? Won’t the unscrupulous rip people off? From my experience it’s surprisingly rare. Whenever you place an order on eBay, you are allowed to post “feedback” about the seller. So sellers accumulate a reputation based on their feedback ratings. They can’t escape it. It’s their free-market report card. In summary, community feedback is the mechanism to steer people away from the stinkers. PayPal, for its part, has various safety mechanisms for buyers as well.

The biggest snafus I’ve seen are in the shipping realm. I don’t expect anybody to ship anything to the CNMI unless they specifically say that they will do it. Most won’t. Most folks I know from the mainland simply have things shipped to U.S. addresses of relatives or friends, who in turn have the honor of re-shipping it to Saipan. There’s nothing sneaky about that; it’s just the nature of the logistics. This insane runaround is, of course, yet another reason to buy from local stores in the Commonwealth whenever possible. But, well, sometimes it’s not possible, like when a drive on Middle Road triggers a nostalgic impulse.

Overall, with the exception of the sniping issue, eBay is entirely intuitive and is easier done than read.

As for The Waitresses, singer Patty Donahue passed away in 1996 at the age of 40. But thanks to eBay her voice is still very much alive in my house.