Category Archives: Opinion - Page 3

eBay Declares War on Collectibles

Posted by on 5 June 2013 Comments Off on eBay Declares War on Collectibles

World’s largest garage sale no longer interested in garages and/or sales

If you got up this morning and tried to run a few searches on eBay for your favorite collectibles, chances are you got this error message:

Yes, eBay, one of the largest e-commerce sites on the planet, home to millions of items up for sale, can’t deal with more than “around 100” characters in search strings.  Why, with more than 100 characters, you might actually be able to figure out which of those millions of items you might be interested in!  Imagine that, using words to narrow down a list of choices to the most relevant ones.  How quaint.  Nobody ever got rich through text boxes and search strings.

If you haven’t checked in on eBay in the last ten years, you may be a bit surprised to see what the beast has evolved into.  Back then, eBay had just acquired PayPal, an electronic payment service that was quickly becoming the norm for eBay purchases.  Unlike postal money orders, fees on PayPal payments were paid by the seller, making things easier and cheaper for buyers.  Six years later, eBay unveiled a plan to make PayPal the exclusive payment option for all eBay transactions.  Consumer groups cried foul and eBay softened its position, only mandating that sellers accept PayPal (which had largely the same effect).

Earlier in 2008, eBay had updated its fee structure to encourage more sellers to list items.  In exchange for lowering the insertion fee on most items by 5 cents and eliminating fees for adding pictures, eBay would take a slightly larger cut of the sale price, 8.75% of the first $25 (up from 5.25%), 3.5% of the next $975 (up from 3.25%), and 1.5% (no change) on the amount over $1,000.  This was spun as a reduction in fees even though the total fees would go up for any item that sold for more than $1.50.  At the same time, eBay took away the option for sellers to leave negative feedback.  While this feature had been abused by many sellers, it gave unscrupulous buyers leverage to squeeze top sellers for bonuses and discounts under threat of retaliation-free negative feedback.

In 2010, eBay made the most radical change to its fees, eliminating the tiered pricing structure and instituting a flat 9% fee on the total sale price (including shipping) with a $50 maximum.  Also included in this change were the reduction or elimination of listing fees in many cases (a 15 cent value!) and new incentives to use stores and/or fixed-price listings.  eBay was trying to turn itself into Amazon, pushing individual sellers and rare/unusual items aside to focus on high-volume sellers and commodity items.

And now in 2013, the fee structure has changed a little bit more.  Fees are now a fixed 10% of the total sale price, capped at $250.  Everyone gets 50 free listings per month, but if you pay for a store, you can get up to 2500 “free” listings per month.  More fees for smaller sellers, more discounts and incentives for high-volume sellers.

So, assuming that you list an item at 99 cents with a $2.50 shipping cost (a typical price for sports cards) without a store and within your 50 free listings per month, here’s how the rates (listing fee + final value fee) compare over the last five years:

eBay fees for an item with a starting bid of 99 cents, 2008-2013

While fees on a $1 item haven’t gone up by too much over the last five years, everything above $2.50 has had a fee increase of at least 50%.  If that $1 item is your 51st listing of the month, the fee increase balloons to 150%.  50 items might seem like a lot, but you can reach that with just the short printed (2 or fewer per box) cards from a case of cards.  With already slim margins on dollar cards (I make less than 75 cents on a card that sells for 99 cents with no listing fee), there is no incentive to list anything even remotely common.

But hey, the economy, blah, blah, times are tough for everyone, etc.  Fees go up all the time and eBay has no real competition, so they’re going to squeeze their captive audience until we burst.  You don’t offer deals to the customers you already have, you offer deals to the competition’s customers and hope you don’t lose too many of your own in the process.  This is how business works.  I can understand the fee changes, but some of eBay’s other recent changes are truly baffling.

eBay’s search system is a critical part of its business.  While you can stumble on things by browsing categories, there’s just no way to build a hierarchy to organize millions of items in a way that will be easy for buyers and properly followed by sellers.  As Google has shown, a good search system can make all the difference.  So you would think that eBay’s search would be the best of the bunch.  It would need to be.

And in truth, eBay’s search system was pretty good up until a couple of years ago.  It had some advanced features that I didn’t even know about until they were removed.  And that’s where the problem lies – the advanced features that made eBay’s search useful (and profitable) are being removed.  eBay’s search feature peaked a few years ago when pictures became the default in search results.  Prior to this, having an item photo show up in search listings was an optional feature with an added fee.  Third-party browser add-ons were developed to enable pictures in search listings for all items and not just the ones that paid for it, possibly influencing eBay’s decision to make it a standard feature.  With pictures for almost every listing, it had never been easier to scan through hundreds of items to find the ones you were interested in.  Until eBay broke it.

One of eBay’s many “upgrades” to the search experience was an option to change the size of the photos shown in search listings.  While this sounds like a useful feature, it was implemented with the largest setting enabled by default.  Logic would dictate that, if the previous standard size was at the Small setting, selecting Medium as the new default would be sufficient to alert users to the new feature.  Instead, they went with Friggin’ Huge, which, while useful for some items and with a short list of search results, becomes a bit cumbersome with a list of 200 items.  But at least it was user-configurable, meaning that I can tell when I’ve been logged out by when the search result pictures get huge.

Until eBay made a few more changes to their search feature in 2012 and decided that everyone should see photos in the largest possible size, regardless of their user preferences (and the photo size preferences were still there, they were just ignored).  After the usual round of complaints that follows any change to eBay’s search system, this bizarre change was corrected.  But the rest of the changes remained in place.

Most of the 2012 changes to eBay’s search function were cosmetic and confusing.  The Completed Listings function was moved around between several different locations, some buried under links, before eventually settling in plain view, except when it changes place for no apparent reason.  The option to search by title and description, rendered largely unusable by keyword spammers, was changed from a simple checkbox under the search string into an option that could be disabled but apparently not enabled.

One of the biggest changes to eBay search in 2012 was the removal of support for wildcards in search strings, supposedly because they trust their fancy new software’s ability to tell what you want more than they trust your ability to specify it.  A wildcard is a placeholder that allows you to specify only part of a search term and will return all matches with that part.  Since eBay’s search only works (reliably) on full words, searching for “auto” will not give you a match for “autograph” without the use of a wild card.  The search term “auto*” would return all listings with the words auto, autograph, autographs, autographed, automatic, automobile, autonomic, etc.  With that feature gone, searches would require longer search strings with more words.  Which could make things a bit hard to read with the new shorter text entry field for searches, which also featured a larger font for decreased visibility.  This new text entry field could only display about 50 characters, making it a bit trickier to navigate search strings that could be up to 250 characters long.

Because who needs to see more than 50 characters?

And that’s where today’s change comes in.  No need to scroll very far in the search box if it can only contain twice as many characters as it can display.  Brilliant!  Unless you have search strings that start with (auto,autograph,autographs,autographed,signature,signatures,signed) because of the lack of wildcard support (while eBay would assure us that some variants should still show up in search results without the use of wildcards, it has been my experience that this is not always the case), which leaves you with about 30 characters.  That’s not even enough to fit the Mets starting rotation, unless you shorten “Matt Harvey” to just “Harvey” and skip all over the unwanted results for every player named Harvey.  There are about 500 Mets players and prospects with certified autograph cards.  Good luck finding more than a handful of them.

eBay’s current search “feature” simply doesn’t work for collectibles, or for anyone who knows what they are looking for really.  It is meant for the clueless and the confused who only know that they want a toaster and will just buy the first thing that comes up, only to wonder what Battlestar Galactica has to do with heating bread.  The geeks, dorks, nerds, fanatics, and otaku can just pound sand as far as eBay is concerned.  Your overly specific and detailed search strings and the money that comes with them are not wanted.

Or maybe this isn’t all part of a grand conspiracy to scare off an entire market segment.  Could I be overreacting to a string of changes over the last five years that have the collective effect of disenfranchising an industry?  Well, as an engineer with over a decade of experience in government acquisitions dealing with the development, analysis, and testing of requirements (résumé available upon request), I think I have a good idea of how this could happen without any malicious intent, not that the alternative is any prettier.  It looks to me like there were no requirements and there was no plan.  Someone just bought new software without a proper acquisition program and without analyzing the impact of the changes it would bring.  The reality may be that all of these changes are being made on a whim and not based on goals, data, and evaluation metrics.  That may be the scariest possibility of all.

A misguided option on a search feature isn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things.  You can just fix it and move on.  But the process behind how such features come to be can be an indication of systematic failures throughout a company.  Ideally, a company should have a set of goals outlining its plans for the future – operating strategies, markets to work in, products and services to develop, etc.  These goals work their way down the organizational structure into the programs and projects where people take actions to achieve the goals.  These actions are driven by specifications, usually with specific performance requirements developed from research and evaluated with quantifiable metrics.  Evaluations then work their way back up the chain to show how the company is meeting its goals.

I’m not sure whoever is in charge of eBay’s search feature, a critical program element, is following this process.  Surely, any research would have revealed that searches of more than 100 characters are common, especially in collectibles categories.  A reduction in the size of search strings would make no sense as a requirement for any new search software.  Then again, neither would the removal of wildcards.  These would be key elements that should be retained through any updates to the underlying search software unless there is a technical limitation with no practical workaround (an almost absurd possibility given the features of just about any search engine).  This tells me that there is no requirements document for the search function, possibly no requirements document for any feature on eBay’s site.  No requirements means no measures of performance and no link to corporate goals.  It all falls apart from there.  Either the framework upon which corporate success is based isn’t present or it isn’t being followed.  This is a disaster in the making.

But i don’t have the insight into eBay’s inner workings to know any of this for sure.  Maybe everything is working just fine and they really do want to scare off people like me who buy and sell collectibles.  Maybe they don’t care about the negative consequences of the changes they’ve been making.  Maybe they don’t even consider them to be negative consequences.  We’re stuck between two bad options and I’m not sure which one is worse.  But neither is good for the future of eBay.

The Good Pitcher Effect

Posted by on 7 April 2013 Comments Off on The Good Pitcher Effect

A better way to predict pitcher injury and regression

You know, I’m tired of being a nobody blogger. As I’ve pointed out numerous times, I’m just as qualified as the big shots. The only thing keeping me back is the lack of an ego large enough to shout absurdities and get them accepted as truth. It’s time to change that. We’re going for the big time with this article by revealing the secret to predicting which pitchers are due for injury and regression. I call it the Good Pitcher Effect (GPE).

You may be familiar with the “Year-After Effect” from a so-called sportswriter who will remain nameless. It is also known as the “Verducci Effect,” named for someone whose name I won’t mention. On the surface it sounds logical: young pitchers who increase their workload too much are likely to have trouble the next year. Some may point out that picking names out of a hat is just as likely to get you the same results, but we can all agree that these stat nerds are ruining baseball with their bizarre measures of greatness that are far more complicated than simple stats like batting average and earned run average. I mean, how hard is it to count up at-bats and earned runs? It’s not like there are arcane rules governing what does and does not count.

I don’t want to rely on stats to predict who is at risk this year, they’re just too unreliable. Instead, let’s look at something much more meaningful, voting by baseball writers! These guys know baseball, so they should be the experts we listen to. Unfortunately, they don’t vote on which pitchers will be injured next. All we have to work with is the Cy Young Award voting, so let’s go with that.

Here’s how the GPE works: if a pitcher gets a vote for the Cy Young Award, he is at risk for poorer performance in the following season. That’s it. No complicated math, no comparisons between seasons. Age doesn’t matter, body type doesn’t matter. If you get a vote, you’re at risk. Does it work? Let’s look at what happened to the 2011 Cy Young vote recipients in 2012:

Name ERA11 ERA12 + .5 1 2 IP11 IP12 – 15 30 45
Justin Verlander 2.40 2.64 X 251.00 238.33 X
Jered Weaver 2.41 2.81 X 235.67 188.67 X X X X
James Shields 2.82 3.52 X X 249.33 227.67 X X
CC Sabathia 3.00 3.38 X 237.33 200.00 X X X
Jose Valverde 2.24 3.78 X X X 72.33 69.00 X
C.J. Wilson 2.94 3.83 X X 223.33 202.33 X X
Dan Haren 3.17 4.33 X X X 238.33 176.67 X X X X
Mariano Rivera 1.91 2.16 X 61.33 8.33 X X X X
Josh Beckett 2.89 4.65 X X X 193.00 170.33 X X
Ricky Romero 2.92 5.77 X X X X 225.00 181.00 X X X
David Robertson 1.08 2.67 X X X 66.67 60.67 X
Clayton Kershaw 2.28 2.53 X 233.33 227.67 X
Roy Halladay 2.35 4.49 X X X X 233.67 156.33 X X X X
Cliff Lee 2.40 3.16 X X 232.67 211.00 X X
Ian Kennedy 2.88 4.02 X X X 222.00 208.33 X
Cole Hamels 2.79 3.05 X 216.00 215.33 X
Tim Lincecum 2.74 5.18 X X X X 217.00 186.00 X X X
Yovani Gallardo 3.52 3.66 X 207.33 204.00 X
Matt Cain 2.88 2.79 221.67 219.33 X
John Axford 1.95 4.67 X X X X 73.67 69.33 X
Craig Kimbrel 2.10 1.01 77.00 62.67 X
Madison Bumgarner 3.21 3.37 X 204.67 208.33
Ryan Vogelsong 2.71 3.37 X X 179.67 189.67

Ouch. Of the 23 players on the list, 19 of them had a higher ERA and pitched fewer innings in 2012, including every AL pitcher. Only Matt Cain and Craig Kimbrel reduced their ERA and only Madison Bumgarner and Ryan Vogelsong pitched more innings. Increase the thresholds to an ERA increase of 1 point or more or a workload decrease of 30 innings or more and you’re still left with 12 players. That’s more than half of the players on the list with significantly worse performances in the season after they received Cy Young votes. I think we’re on to something. So how are last year’s Cy Young vote recipients doing? We’re only a week into the season, but there are some interesting small sample size results:

Name ERA
David Price 8.18
Justin Verlander 2.19
Jered Weaver 1.50
Felix Hernandez 2.57
Fernando Rodney 16.20
Chris Sale 1.84
Jim Johnson 0.00
Matt Harrison 8.44
Yu Darvish 0.00
R.A. Dickey 8.44
Clayton Kershaw 0.00
Gio Gonzalez 0.00
Johnny Cueto 2.77
Craig Kimbrel 0.00
Matt Cain 8.38
Kyle Lohse 1.50
Aroldis Chapman 0.00
Cole Hamels 10.97

Out of the 18 vote recipients, 6 have started out with an ERA of more than 8, including both Cy Young winners.  Success!  Update: shortly after this was posted, Jered Weaver was injured and will now miss a few weeks.  They’re dropping like flies.

For those of you still reading this, yes, this is a joke. Pitchers get injured. Players regress. There’s no magic formula to predicting who is due for trouble, mainly because this sort of thing is so common. Older players are at risk. Younger players are at risk. Good players are at risk. Mediocre players are at risk. Healthy players are at risk. Injury-prone players are at risk. All we really know for certain is that the repeated throwing of a ball at high speed isn’t exactly a recipe for an injury-free life. But if you want a shortlist of pitchers due for some trouble, you could do worse than the GPE.

My Take on the 2013 Mets

Posted by on 10 March 2013 Comments Off on My Take on the 2013 Mets

Wait, someone wants to know what I think?

One of the perks of having a baseball blog is getting bloggers from other teams asking for your thoughts on your team.  Trust me, it’s a lot more exciting than it sounds.  While this blog isn’t getting much of any attention, I (along with probably every Mets blogger out there) did get a request from Daniel Shoptaw at C70 At The Bat for some thoughts on the Mets going into the 2013 season.  I am in no way qualified to provide expert analysis on the subject, but I have never let that stop me before, so why start now?

You can read the answers from six other Mets bloggers at Playing Pepper 2013: New York Mets.

1. How would you grade the offseason?

Based on expectations and the meager offerings on the market, a B- sounds fair, if a bit on the high side.  It’s tempting to grade them lower for not making any flashy moves, but it’s not like the flashy moves they’ve made in the past have worked out all that well.  They kept Wright, grabbed one of the top catching prospects in baseball, and picked up plenty of cheap options for the outfield and the bullpen.  Losing R.A. Dickey is tough, but the package the Blue Jays were offering was too good to pass up.  Not only did the Mets hang on to all of their hot young pitchers, but they picked up another one to add to the crowded single A ranks.  Most importantly, they didn’t throw big contracts at bit parts, going with plenty of non-roster invites (NRIs) over multi-year deals.  It’s not ideal, but it leaves the team in a good position to add pieces when better options become available.  It’s worth noting that this is the first offseason in which Sandy Alderson has not signed a reliever to a multi-year deal.  This is a huge improvement considering that the last two were D.J. Carrasco and Frank Francisco.  Travis d’Arnaud looks to be the catcher of the future while John Buck provides a legitimate veteran presence behind the plate.  The outfield still looks terrible, but did you see the amount of money that was getting thrown around for even moderately decent outfielders?  Now is not the time to be signing the next Jason Bay, the last one is still on the books.

What really matters though is how these guys look in cards.  Shaun Marcum has some nice Brewers jersey swatches, John Buck is a big win in terms of game-used memorabilia with pieces of jerseys from the Royals, the Astros, the 2002 Futures Game, and the 2010 All-Star Game on top of bat, glove, chest protector, and shin guard swatches, and d’Arnaud is a bit disappointing with only some red jersey swatches so far, but most of the NRIs aren’t any better.

The exception is Marlon Byrd, who has an astounding amount of game-used memorabilia to his name from his time with the Cubs and the Phillies.  I really hope he makes the team just so I justify having what I’ve already bought on speculation.

2. Will Johan Santana be back to his old form this season?

It doesn’t really matter.  The Mets aren’t expected to contend this year and this is the last year of his contract, plus he already gave us a no-hitter last year.  It’s been a good but not great run from Santana thus far, so it would be nice to see him finish strong.  Best case scenario, he comes back in top form and gets dealt in July for an outfield prospect, with the Mets eating most of his remaining salary and Zack Wheeler taking his spot in the rotation.  Worst case scenario, he has a setback early in the season and Jenrry Mejia/Collin McHugh/Jeremy Hefner fills in for him until Wheeler is ready.  Most likely, he’ll be good for 100 or so innings as long as he stays away from Reed Johnson.

3. What did it mean to you that the team signed David Wright to an extension?

More than it should.  This team has a terrible history when it comes to keeping star talent.  Even the Astros have had decent luck holding on to their stars for the duration.  You have to remember that the Mets lost The Franchise not once but twice and just last year let Jose Reyes (briefly) go to the Marlins without so much as making him an offer.  The only Mets star to spend an entire career with the team is Ed Kranepool; Wright is second on the list by games played, with current Mets Daniel Murphy and Ike Davis also in the top ten.  I love Kranepool, but that is just sad.  With almost no payroll committed past this season, there was simply no excuse for not locking Wright up for the rest of his quality years.

4. What rookie will make the biggest impact in 2013?

There are really only two options here, Zack Wheeler and Travis d’Arnaud.  d’Arnaud has the potential to be a star at a position that has been a problem area for the Mets since Mike Piazza’s departure, while Wheeler has the potential to be the ace in a rotation with some very underrated young pitchers.  The need is greater for d’Arnaud, but I see Wheeler having more impact on a team that is likely to be in pretty bad shape late in the season.

5. What will be the final record of the team and where will they finish in the division?

76-86, 4th in the NL East ahead of the Marlins.  3rd would be nice, but the Phillies don’t have enough experience with late-season collapses to out-collapse the Mets.  Last year they got it completely backwards, almost finishing with a winning record.  They’ve made some great moves this offseason to improve their ability to disappoint, but they’re still at least two or three years away from contending for last place.

Seriously though, the real test for this team isn’t going to be about their record or where they place in the division, it will be whether they can keep from dropping off like a rock after the All-Star game.  They were still in contention last year at the break, then they forgot how to win games and were a lost cause by the trade deadline.  This has been the trend for several years now and needs to stop before the Mets can ever be considered a contender, regardless of how many Wild Card teams are added.

6. What one thing from your team are you most looking forward to watching?

In abstract terms, the unexpected.  Last season brought us a no-hitter from Johan Santana and a 20-win season and Cy Young award from R.A. Dickey, not to mention the debut of Matt Harvey and David Wright getting back to being David Wright.  Even with so much going wrong, there were plenty of bright spots.  If you were at Citi Field for the final home game of the season when R.A. Dickey struck out 13 on the way to his 20th win, you wouldn’t have thought that this was a team wrapping up another lost season.

In more specific terms, I’m really looking forward to seeing a (hopefully) full healthy season from Ike Davis.  Looking at his final line from last year (.227/.308/.462, 32 HR), you don’t get a full appreciation for just how terrible he was from the start of the season until I posted this in June (.167/.248/.285, 5 HR in 206 PA).  His performance from that point on (.261/.341/.562, 27 HR in 378 PA) was enough to bring him up to mediocre on the year, but a full season at that level would be a real treat.  A hot start to the 2013 season could give David Wright some company at the All-Star Game at Citi Field this year.

And then there are the unanswered questions.  Can Jordany Valdespin make it as a big leaguer?  Is there a position for Wilmer Flores?  Will Jeurys Familia live up to his high expectations?  And will we ever settle on a pronunciation of “Jeurys?”  Who will settle into the closer role?  How quickly will the hot arms at single A make it up through the system?  Will playing in Las Vegas (AAA) cause any problems?  Will a major league outfield appear in Citi Field by the end of the season?  There’s a lot to look forward to, even if this season turns out like the last few.  It’s baseball, isn’t that enough?