Doesn't eBay make enough buying and selling your crap?
I recently ordered some vitamins on eBay and received a notice that the item had been shipped. Within the email as a notation to "click here" to track the package. So I clicked there and it logged me into the eBay site and at the top of the page was a huge banner (above) saying "click here to track your package." I thought this was odd, and I looked at it more closely and realized it was an advertisement. In the upper right hand corner was the tiny X with the notation "close."
It was an ad for an "app" to add to your phone (or extension for your browser) for "freetrackerforpackages" which is another one of those unnecessary services and apps that does what the shipping companies (or indeed eBay or Amazon or Walmart) already does for free. The fact they are trying to trick you into loading the app by putting this ad on the top of the "track my package/check status of order" page on eBay says volumes. Any business relationship you get into predicated on a lie, no matter how trivial, will go downhill from there.
And these are not the first people to try this scam. I wrote before about "Route" which is another "app" that takes your tracking data away from you and requires you view it through their window. It sucked and it is totally unnecessary.
What was going on here? More eBay shenanigans. I guess they feel they have to follow Amazon and start being deceptive to make money. It's not like there aren't enough shenanigans online as it is!
So why would someone be offering some sort of half-assed tracking app or extension for your browser? Well, of course the answer is they want to harvest your data and sell that to other people. Also, no doubt, they have an opportunity to put more ads in front of you while you're trying to track your package.
But the real question to me is why eBay is putting ads on its pages. I mean I understand that they put ads for products that you search for, to promote some sellers ahead of others. This is annoying of course, and often a problem with any online retail site. Certain products are elevated above others, and oftentimes those products have the worst prices or are not, in fact, even what you're searching for.
It seems that every e-commerce site is trying to squeeze every last penny out of the consumer as possible. And I guess this is how capitalism is supposed to work.
In a related event, I was searching online for some boots for Mark. I found some on a military surplus site, and Mark suggested I also try Walmart as he read online about some inexpensive boots from there. I went on the Walmart site and found a plethora of boots for sale. I saw an inexpensive pair for around $30 which was the pair he was interested in. I decided to rank the search results based on price, lowest to highest. Oddly enough, the $30 pair disappeared and the so-called lowest price boots were now $80. I switched back over to "relevant results" and the $30 boots reappeared. How odd that the lowest priced alternative disappears when you rank by price, lowest to highest.
It does turn online shopping into something of an Easter egg hunt. And usually when I search for something online I have several windows open at different retail sites and have to scour those sites to see if I can find hidden bargains. And maybe this too, is by design. People who are in a hurry will click on the first thing that pops up, no matter what the price is. Those who are interested in finding a real bargain will dig deeper through the website much as people dig through the piles of clothes at Fileen's bargain-basement.
You'll notice I didn't mention Amazon. Amazon, of course, is the worst of the lot, pushing promoted items above the basic products almost every time. And again, they're counting on people being in a hurry just clicking on the first hit they get. These are the sort of people to sign up for Prime and don't realize what it is their are paying for, if in fact anything.
I pretty much stopped using Amazon lately only because I'm finding prices much better at other sites such as Walmart or eBay or even from the sites of various manufacturers and retailers. I think the old model of manufacturers steering you away from their own site to retailers is falling by the wayside. Companies are realizing they're turning away business by suggesting you go to a retail outlet. As I noted before, the Bissell people sell products on their own site for the same price - if not less than - Amazon, eBay, Walmart or any brick-and-mortar store.
So why bother dealing with a middleman? And that's all that Amazon (or the others) are, just middle men.
I've mentioned before they buying and selling things is probably one of the worst kind of jobs in the world. You live on razor-thin margins and have to cut costs down to the bone. That's why if somebody promotes some sort of scheme to you that involves buying and selling products, you should just walk away. There's literally no profit to be had in being a merchant, unless you have a niche market, or can dominate the market and cut costs to the bone.
And that's probably why eBay has to put ads on their website.
