@kaibacorp* wrote:
"do you truly think that eBay or the sellers can afford to? In eBay's case... for $49 a year?"
Amazon have managed it somehow, and I believe if eBay don't act soon Amazon will fully roll out here in Australia and then there will be little chance for eBay. If I'm not mistaken, Amazon has crushed eBay in the US.
As far as the returns go. The major problem with online shopping as I'm sure many will realise is that we cannot examine the physical items.
It's not as if I'm someone who can't make up their mind or has some kind of problem. The problem is lack of information about the product due to the online format. That's why I think the free returns are a great idea.
There might be better ways to go about it, such as projected 3D images, but we are some time away from that...
There's a really big difference between Plus and Prime, with eBay doing nothing logistical with the post-sale process, and Amazon doing everything (AFAIK).
On ebay, for the time being*, individual sellers all hold and dispatch their own stock (I will leave out dropshippers here for the sake of ease). With Prime, the vast majority of eligible items are shipped to Amazon's own distribution centres, then packed, dispatched and delivered by Amazons own network. (The other key difference is that sellers have to volunteer their items to do that, and physically ship their inventory to A's warehouse, thus they can work all of their costs into their prices - that is, when a seller is fully prepared to offer such service standards, they charge for it, "free" is not quite an illusion, but something that is genuinely free in ecommerce is so darn rare that it has unicorns and fairies as best friends)
There's an economy of scale involved in things like this. One eBay seller sending out 100 parcels a week is absolutely nothing compared to Amazon sending out packages on behalf of thousands of sellers a day. The eBay seller may be able to access some minor postage discounts with an Australia Post contract, and in their market they might also be able to afford to price their items competitively while offering buyers certain service standards, but Amazon's costs would be significantly reduced by sheer volume, and investing in their own infrastructure / delivery network.
As a seller, I actively want to reduce instances of impulse purchases - many ecommerce sites / sellers want to do the opposite, and I guess that's their choice, but I really don't want people purchasing on a whim purely because it doesn't matter to them if they don't want to keep it afterall. Yes, I accept change of mind returns, I think that's an important option to provide if it's needed, but I don't want it being used as a crutch for impulse buying, or otherwise bad purchase decisions. Encouraging people with this kind of "don't think, don't worry, just buy! Spend money now!" approach is a recipe for disaster.
If you ask Amazon sellers who have opted into Prime, most (in not all) of them will have many stories about buyers who do things like use it for free hire of products (thus the seller doesn't get back a saleable item), or they buy several of the one product (maybe in different colours and / or sizes) try them on at home and pick out the ones they like best, then send all but one back at the seller's expense. Both you and I are already paying for buyers to have that privilege when we purchase from a seller who chooses to offer such things.
Me, I'd like to keep my prices low, and my buyers making carefully considered decisions. Not being able to see or touch an item is a concession of online purchasing - if people want all of the convenience but none of the concessions, they will need to be preapred to pay a lot more for the products they purchase online, moving forward.
*eBay are apparently setting up distribution centres, so a few things might change on that front in the coming months, depending on how many sellers find this option appealing or workable.
