NYT: Seeing Fakes, Angry Traders Confront EBay
Posted: January 28th, 2006 | Author: alicetiara | Filed under: Uncategorized | 9 Comments »eBay full of fakes
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I’ve long heard of Chanel, Balenciaga, Louis Vuitton and other luxury brands keeping track of how fakes are selling on eBay. I figured that this was a practice that eBay was fairly strict about, as they frame the site as a great place to buy high-end goods for cheap and are always flashing around brand-names in their ads. But apparently not. This article starts out talking about some jewelry dealers who’re trying vigilante-style to smoke out a group of fakers, but Tiffany and Co. are also apparently angry about the amount of ugly fake heart toggle necklaces being sold on the site.
What I think is interesting here isn’t that eBay isn’t doing anything. I’m never surprised when a corporation won’t take responsibility for something within its own borders. No, what’s interesting is that it’s the features of the system itself that makes this possible. No oversite from eBay and very few mechanisms for user-user policing.
I’ve written before about how the reputation system doesn’t work. the harm of retaliation for leaving negative feedback is greater for buyers than for sellers, so people generally don’t do it. But eBay can’t police all the thousands of transactions that happen each day either. So this means you have a marketplace full of faked or misrepresented items, and few options for users who are aware of these practices. They can’t leave messages for other users, they can’t request the items be removed unless they themselves have bought them and found them to be fake, and the sellers usually won’t bother responding to emails.
Obviously the danger is that rival sellers will sabotage each other’s stores. But in practice I haven’t really seen anything like that, whereas I’ve seen a great deal of people puffing up their positive feedback and driving up their bids by using multiple accounts or friends and family. The high-volume pirates from Hong Kong and China who sell low-quality Marc Jacobs jackets for $25 are organized and professional. If the site actually does care about keeping down piracy, they need to look at alternate models of policing, perhaps organized around community moderation rather than a top-down authoritarian approach.
Yeah, I have a few friends that were buyers that were harmed by the scam-artist seller retaliating through the reputation system. You’re very right about that set-up being a failure.
Community moderation is sort of working where I’m blogging now… what do you think the drawbacks to it are? (I have some issues with it, but that’s a another story.)
I actually got accused of having a swelled head for banning splogs & openly plagiarized (and I don’t mean an article here or there, but an entire blog) blogs.
That doesn’t mean I don’t think the swelled head danger is real. People who get heavily involved in a site tend to think of it as theirs, and want to snuff out competitors. Of course, competitors aren’t the people spamming or contributing troll-type comments. Competitors are people who have thoughtful things to say.
I’ll let you know how the community policing at my site goes, as I do more of it, and discover its pitfalls. Honestly, one problem is that I don’t get any reward other than the satisfaction of seeing my site be better. While I love that, the “glory” part of this policing thing seems to be the only benefit, and I can understand how people get carried away.
I had to look up “splogs” – interesting. It’s so fascinating to me how there’s this whole industry that’s grown up simply based on how Google does their search rankings – that if they didn’t use PageRank, none of these things would exist.
Anyway. The “glory” thing can be a huge motivator for people – if you look at the studies done on why people contribute to Usenet, for example, it usually comes down to the prestige of being seen as an authority.
Good point on the rivalry between site contributors.. I wonder if there is a moderation model that could overcome these factors. Unfortunately, since they are very much human factors, I doubt it.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
It’s probably a safe bet that a lot of bloggers want to see their name up in lights. A larger urge for “glory” creats the (relatively) secure mechanistic politics of Constitutionalism; same urge, albeit in smaller quantities, should be able to create incentives for proper community policing, it would seem.
Then again, it might not be a quantitative change in terms of ambition I’m dealing with, but a qualitative one. If it is qualitative, then we’re dealing with petty people with inflated heads, and that’s just how it is. To try and fix that would be too much effort for too little reward, probably.
btw, I know you probably know this, but Jeff Jarvis’ “Buzzmachine” takes on similar issues of “How do we get the most of the Internet?” You might want to comment there.
I’ve been wondering about ebay’s response to fakes ever since they really seemed to crack down on Kate Spade fakes a few years ago, but didn’t seem to crack down on anything else. Did Kate Spade make some sort of deal ($) with ebay? How did that happen that their auctions were policed more than any other brand?
But ebay has its uses – I’m currently bidding on a pair of Frye Campus boots that are at about 1/4 of their retail price.
I totally agree. TWoP is set up to fail. The rules are strict and people can get warnings for things like not capitalizing or improper use of punctuation. Yet, there are some posters who get banned for having an opinion contrary to most people on the board. Isn’t that the point? Isn’t variety the spice of life? Seems to me that some of their mods are fairer than others, but that others can be easily coerced by overbearing posters to warn and ban people with little cause or for offenses they themselves have committed. Doesn’t seem fair. But then again, life isn’t fair.
Sounds like you’ve experienced this yourself! I think what sites like TWoP need are very clear, very codified policies on who gets banned for what. And there should be an appeals process. Not like I think Wing and Sars would ever implement anything like that. Those girls do work very hard, but they also have a very autocratic perspective.