HN Gopher Feed (2017-10-26) - page 1 of 10
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eBay launches visual search tools that let you shop using photos
93 points by dayve
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/ebay-launches-visual-search-to...
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searchers - 6 hours ago
As I understood, there are 2 different apps: "Find it" and "Image
search". If yes, .. why?
dboreham - 6 hours ago
My pet startup idea, going back I suppose 15+ years is a service
that does this:You have something. You like it. You want another
one. The service gets it for you. This doesn't have to work from a
picture -- it could use a UPC barcode or a text description.Idea
originally inspired by a school friends of mine who wore the exact
same type of boots for years and years. When the old pair wore out,
he'd buy another pair the exact same.Over the years I've noticed
many instances where I really want another one of something I have
but it turns out to be either painful or impossible to find. You
know however that somewhere someone has a warehouse full of the
things.Also like the electronics industry brokers who can track
down an old component for you to repair gear or re-start
manufacturing on some old product. Those have existed since at
least the 1970's.A few years ago I tested Amazon's visual product
search feature to see if it would do what I wanted. It didn't. I
showed an image of some brown boots I was wearing, and certainly
the suggested products were also brown boots, but not the same
kind.
whoisjuan - 5 hours ago
I would totally use this. 8 years ago I bought a pair of Nike
shoes in Paris. I loved those shoes. I tried millions of things
to buy a similar pair but I was unsuccessful at finding
them.Maybe the service should be like FlightFox, but for people
who are really good at finding stuff. You pay a commission to the
individual who helps you find the item.
thess24 - 2 hours ago
I've been building an automated service very similar to this
for womens fashion (mens fashion soon) in my free time over the
past 5 months using deep learning. The goal is to index
existing items, and then expand to items that are no longer
available. So you could take a picture of your
shoes/shirt/hat/etc and it would ideally find the same one. If
it doesn't find the same exact item, it would find similar
items at different price points that you could buy. Getting
similar items isn't that hard -- getting the exact item is much
trickier though. With the pace of improvement in these types
of models, there will probably be a lot of these types of apps
popping up over the next few years.
51Cards - 5 hours ago
I would use a service like this. I am similar to your friend...
When I find a product that I like I'm good with getting more of
the exact same in future vs. bouncing around through other
brands. I have another Bluetooth headset still in box for when
this one dies for example. Usually when this happens it's eBay I
turn to (or Google image search) and so I am hopeful for this new
system.
jasonkostempski - 6 hours ago
Someone's been watching Big Bang Theory reruns.
blntechie - 6 hours ago
Just adding - AliExpress has had similar feature for more than a
year when I started using it. It doesn?t work really well though.
tegansnyder - 6 hours ago
Can anyone recommend a good tutorial or reading on how to setup
content-based (visual) image searching using a CNN to process
images. I'm looking to build a POC of a reverse image search
trained with in-house product data. In the past I've used the
imgSeek but it is dated and not using neural nets.
dahernan - 4 hours ago
For a POC you could use Tagbox, just a REST API packed as a
Docker container from https://machinebox.io, here the blog post
https://blog.machinebox.io/visual-search-by-machine-box-
eb30...Disclaimer: I did both of them so, I'm a little bias :)
482794793792894 - 4 hours ago
Last weekend, my dad needed new printer cartridges and so we went
sifting through the internet for different offerings. By chance, we
got onto a page on the manufacturer's website, which had images of
all their cartridge packs. Among those, we also found an XL version
of what we initially thought to buy.So, there we were, needing
exactly this feature. If I didn't know that it's impossible for
them to have developed this in such a short time, I'd be a little
freaked.Thankfully, though, TinEye served the exact same purpose...
dessant - 5 hours ago
I have made a browser extension[1][2] for those looking to perform
reverse image searches with multiple engines at once. It's more
reliable than Chrome's built-in image search, which appears in the
context menu only for![]()
elements, while this extension parses
the clicked area to extract images. Support for shopping sites may
come in the future.[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail
/search-by-image/cn...[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/search_by_ima...
addictedcs - 6 hours ago
Interesting how we built a raw prototype about eight months ago
(https://imgur.com/OIaQu7x), but it never took off (at least for
the customer whom we've pitched). To add to other's comments, the
visual search can be quite useful comparing to terms search
specifically for non-native speakers and people who are not skilled
in fashion terms (i.e., the name of the material, pattern). As for
how accurate it is, this is indeed an existing problem. If you
product set is significant (>10k products), then the visual search
results can be entirely off the target, not surprised Ebay is
dealing with the same problem.
zepolen - 6 hours ago
I didn't find that surprising since your blue bag results in the
demo returned a bunch of bags that didn't look at all like the
original.
addictedcs - 6 hours ago
The fuzziness was added on purpose in a way to recommend you
products you may be interested in (not necessarily the exact
match).
martinshen - 5 hours ago
Can someone explain to me why eBay is trading only at 5.5x P/E? I
fully understand that it isn't growing tremendously but with all
its classified assets, I can't help but feel that it should be
trading at a much higher market cap.
quizme2000 - 5 hours ago
Funny I noticed this also on yesterday's the Show HN stock
viewer. Seems like ebay is ready to be bought or acquired with a
stock transfer and cash deal. I would think Walmart would be in
a damn good position to pull this off even though I'm no fan of
walmart in general.
jk2323 - 1 hours ago
Interesting point. But p/e so long, and they are never paying
dividends, what is happening with that money?I don't think of
ebay highly, desides what they did to Craigslist.They had Skype.
They could have been Facebook, but no. They had Paypal. With
Skype and paypal they could have easily made micropayments on
cell phones, but no. I hardly ever see a company with so many
wasted chances. They are in a "winner takes it all" niche but
sooner or later someone (Open Bazaar?) will challenge them and I
don't see any innovation from this company.
dsfyu404ed - 6 hours ago
Seems like a great way for eBay to undercut brick and mortar stores
(and for consumers to save money) on cheap junk from China that
people would rather pay $0.99 and wait 3wk for than pay $4.99 and
have right now.
icebraining - 2 hours ago
Also dropshippers who resell such Chinese products under
different names for a margin.
conceptoriented - 5 hours ago
To test a machine learning algorithm, one can use "Fashion-MNIST":
https://github.com/zalandoresearch/fashion-mnist"Fashion-MNIST is a
dataset of Zalando's article images?consisting of a training set of
60,000 examples and a test set of 10,000 examples. Each example is
a 28x28 grayscale image, associated with a label from 10 classes.
We intend Fashion-MNIST to serve as a direct drop-in replacement
for the original MNIST dataset for benchmarking machine learning
algorithms. It shares the same image size and structure of training
and testing splits."
CamelCaseName - 7 hours ago
I have been trying to use Amazon's visual search for the past week
or two and out of many trials, it has only worked once.I wonder
whether eBay will beat Amazon in this category as the types of
photos they have access to (amateur/home vs. professional/stock)
are very different. Either way, I am not confident that taking a
picture is a better solution than just typing in the name for the
vast majority of items.
thess24 - 2 hours ago
Yes, the types of photos will have a huge impact. eBay most
definitely has an advantage in that regard.
dsfyu404ed - 6 hours ago
>Either way, I am not confident that taking a picture is a better
solution than just typing in the name for the vast majority of
items.It's a great solution for "I want another one like this one
but searching for it returns 10000 different items"
CamelCaseName - 5 hours ago
That seems like a rare case to me. Typically there's a company
name or model number somewhere on the item, and often that
identifier returns a very specific item.Looking around my
house, I only see a few items that don't have unique
identifiers like furniture or plates/utensils. However, I
suspect the majority of things sold through Amazon/eBay are
more likely to be video games, books, toys, etc. with very
visible and highly unique names.
tom_pinckney - 5 hours ago
Consider fashion or home goods. Frequently you see something
you like based on pattern, texture etc that cannot be easily
described in words. Image search is the perfect fit for these
kinds of purchases.
gdulli - 2 hours ago
> I am not confident that taking a picture is a better solution
than just typing in the name for the vast majority of itemsI call
this the Minority Report effect. When an idea seems cool but in
practice is much less usable and practical. And tries to solve a
problem that never existed. Do I want to wave my hands in the air
to control an interface or rest them on a table? Obviously the
latter. It's worked very well for decades.
introvert - 5 hours ago
Surprisingly, it works well. I tried searching for few items and it
showed similar items on ebay..
ecommerceguy - 39 minutes ago
I wonder if I snap a fake rolex it will find an actual fake rolex.
lolsal - 7 hours ago
It seems like ebay would have a ton of user-provided photos which
would be a possibly huge corpus for machine learning to help
identify objects like this. It will be interesting to see how well
this works!
bflesch - 6 hours ago
The yellow sofa example in the article looked very convincing.
syntaxing - 5 hours ago
I know a bunch of sites has this feature already but I'm pretty
excited to try it out since eBay is probably the website with the
best dataset. I do not think any other site has as many home taken
pictures as eBay. This would definitely make the image recognition
much more robust. I'm guessing the problem with Amazon or TaoBao is
that most of the pictures are studio pictures and does not scale
well when a person takes a picture in a random environment.That
being said though, the eBay buying and selling experience is a hit
or miss. It sucks how there is group of people preying on the site
to rip people off. I had an selling experience so bad that I
vouched never to sell anything via eBay anymore. Craiglist tends to
be a much better transaction.
pkamb - 3 hours ago
I thought the title said "let you STOP using photos (when
selling)", which is what has basically already happened due to the
prevalence of stock images and CGI items on a white background.I'm
still looking for the browser extension that lets you filter out
any listing with a pure white or gradient background from your
eBay, etsy, pinterest, etc. searches.Would be a HUGE indicator of
an actual real used item sold by a human, vs. a new dropshipped
item from China. You know, what I want to use eBay to buy.
incan1275 - 3 hours ago
Happen to know that is the work of the eBay team in New York.
Really great engineers in that lab.
eurticket - 3 hours ago
Pintrest should've hit this first.
thess24 - 2 hours ago
Pinterest does have something similar and has a few blog posts
about how they did it
ll931110 - 6 hours ago
Shameless plug for my friend's startup, which has prototyped the
concept and got a few customers for the last
year.https://www.mirrorthatlook.com/
contingencies - 6 hours ago
I'm pretty sure Taobao in China has had this for ages. Search
suggests[0] since as early as 2011. To test it, go to Taobao[1] and
click the photo icon at the right of the search box (previously
only available in some countries and product categories, now
apparently global). If this was the other way around it would be
"OMG China is copying the west!" No such discussion the other way
around. Just sayin'...[0] https://www.chinainternetwatch.com/1189
/taobao-imagine-an-im...[1] http://www.taobao.com/
leggomylibro - 6 hours ago
Sort of; they also have links to visually-similar items if you
hover over a listing, if there are the 'right' amount of matching
products.I mean, how many relevant listings are you going to find
for a stock photo of a 7x7mm QFP32 chip? Still, that's a risky
thing to buy on taobao anyways, and it is useful for things like
specifically-shaped buttons, connectors, etc.
[deleted]
cisanti - 4 hours ago
Also aliexpress, but it is possible that taobao was first.
averageweather - 6 hours ago
Some brilliant mind who lurks on HN should create a competitor to
eBay. Not some online yard sale where you have to meet people in
person for the exchange, but a nice online marketplace for people
to sell their stuff.If this already exists, do tell.In my opinion,
eBay for sellers (outside of maybe the power sellers. I've sold
<100 items) is a nightmare.I sold a Tiffany necklace a few months
back. The buyer reported to eBay it was fake and I was ordered to
refund the seller and they could keep the fake item. Long story
short, over a span of a few weeks, I was lucky enough to get an
original receipt from Tiffany and supply it as evidence, which
almost still did not work.More recently, I listed an old iPhone
with a "buy it now". Sold in like 30 minutes to someone with an
"@god[dot].com" email requesting I send the phone first and then he
will pay me. It took a week or longer for me to challenge this. I
even have settings to disallow certain types of eBay users based on
ratings etc. eBay still charged me a listing fee.I had success
doing a non buy it now sale after that. Maybe that is my only
option now.I don't even feel like getting into how slow their
seller admin tools are ...
nwatson - 6 hours ago
Google did a similar acquisition in 2010, "like.com".
https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/20/its-official-google-acquir... .
homero - 5 hours ago
Might be related to Google goggles app which died
[deleted]
gnopgnip - 4 hours ago
Ebay doesn't charge a listing fee for the first 50 items per
month. If the buyer never pays you should open an unpaid item
claim after three days, then call ebay after four days and have
the claim closed in your favor. If more sellers did this the
buyers would get filtered out of ebay. In the future you can use
buy it now and require immediate payment to prevent this
entirely. Verifying the authenticity of commonly faked items does
not have an easy solution and I would not buy or sell anything
like that on Ebay. Any place that allows the sale of items like
this will have tradeoffs.Some alternatives to Ebay are Ebid,
Etsy, Rakuten/buy.com, Amazon, Bonanza(allows cross listing with
Ebay), Swappa for phones, uBid, Jet.
djaychela - 5 hours ago
"In my opinion, eBay for sellers (outside of maybe the power
sellers. I've sold <100 items) is a nightmare."I wouldn't argue
too strongly with you there. I've sold loads of stuff on eBay
(about ?50k worth over the years, apparently!), and there are
problems too often. People try it on, so I have to send
-everything- via recorded mail, which is expensive, so then
people complain about the postage cost, even though I always put
them up front.I've had quite a few completely fatuous claims made
against me when selling, one of which said there were parts
missing, when I'd actually said those parts were missing in the
listing. eBay refunded him and let him keep the item.Whenever I
have an issue now, I just say 'send it back, I'll refund it' as
this is invariably the path of lowest friction. Dealing with
muppets is a cost of selling on eBay that has to be factored into
the equation, alas, and it's worse than it ever has been; here in
the UK around 2000 it was pretty 'niche' and only serious people
seemed to be on there. But after a few years (and a few
newspaper articles along the lines of 'quit your job and make a
living on eBay') it started getting like it is now.Non paying
bidders are a pain to sellers, but it means nothing to eBay so
they don't do anything about it.The upside, at least, is that
when you buy on there, you're well covered. Had a dodgy
'reconditioned' cylinder head turn up a few weeks ago. Returned
it without even having to pay postage, which was a relief - in
the past that would have been ?400 I'd never have seen again.
notyourwork - 3 hours ago
Years ago I sold an ipod on ebay after Christmas. My parents
bought me one and a family relative also bought me one.My account
was suspended for fraud even though I provided proof of purchase
for the item. I left ebay/paypal and stopped using it when I
realized that they could arbitrarily hold my money for 6 months
even though I provided legit proof they were wrong.
Jemmeh - 3 hours ago
I have the same problem with Amazon. Both of them favor the buyer
because customers trusting their platform is a huge selling point
for them. As a seller most people are honest, but enough of them
are not for it to be extremely annoying.Problem is you have
plenty of scammer sellers too.
overcast - 1 hours ago
Amazon is the worst for a seller, much worse than eBay. It's
completely in favor of the buyer over there, and can easily be
gamed. Saying something is damaged, waiting to the absolute
last second of a 30 day "trial" to return it. It's horrible. I
will never sell anything on there again.
callmeed - 3 hours ago
Seems like Facebook would be best positioned to do this. They
already more transparency than Ebay/Amazon with regards to who
you're dealing with. They also have regional buy/sell groups
already. Integrate with some shipping platforms and they'd be on
their way.That being said, its not really in their lane.
cr0sh - 3 hours ago
The thing I miss most about ebay are the independent sellers of
"crap" - not sure how else to put it, but basically the random
people who dig out stuff from the their "attic" and put it up for
people to bid over.You know - what Ebay was originally set up
for.I mean - one time I found a bucket of bolts for auction; just
a bunch of random rusty bolts someone had in the back of their
shed, they decided to auction off. And wouldn't you know it, a
bidding war happened. That bucket of bolts went for close to a
$100.00 by the time it was all over.Those are the kind of stuff I
like to see, and the kind of stuff I like to bid on and/or buy.
Not the mass-produced junk from China - if I want that, I'll get
it from Amazon or Ali Express (and I do).You can still find this
on Ebay, but it isn't as ubiquitous like it was in the beginning.
I personally think their decision to compete with Amazon instead
of sticking to their core users really changed perceptions and
user base. Maybe it's better for them, but for users who like
auctions, finding something similar that is trusted as much
hasn't been easy (there are a few).
beambot - 5 hours ago
Lollipuff (YC W'13: https://www.lollipuff.com/) does exactly this
for higher-end women's fashion -- to directly address the issues
you had with your Tiffany necklace (though I don't think they
support Tiffany today). All the items get authenticated before
listing by professional authenticators, without needing to take
items in hand. This provides more-than-ample evidence in the
event of a dispute (the authenticators are well known in the
field!). Then Lollipuff walks buyers & sellers through the
process to ensure a safe transaction -- including instructions on
shipping, which can also be a frequent gotcha for high-end items.
ssharp - 5 hours ago
I wonder how much eBay has been impacted by this type of
"wedging". I would use eBay primarily to buy/sell musical
instruments but Reverb took a pretty big chunk of that market
and provides a better and more trustworthy experience than
eBay, at least in my experiences there.I know there are a few
fashion-related sites like this out there and I'd guess there
are other "Reverb for X" sites as well.I'm sure there is still
a fortune in the long-tail but specialty sites seem to be more
of a concern than a direct competitor.
nik736 - 6 hours ago
I agree completely, also their platform is just so slow and full
of bugs. It simply looks like they havn't changed anything in the
past 10 years.Edit: Forgot to mention that their search is so
bad, they mix search results with search phrases previously so
it's impossible to find things I am looking for.
Xeoncross - 6 hours ago
This is a real hard problem. Bad people make everything bad for
everyone else. The problem is more about the US market laws and
scalability I think.Large companies like eBay have to take fraud
and customer support costs and weight it against their company vs
you as a seller. It would take a company that cared more about
sellers than their own bottom line.The customer is always right.
Middle men like eBay have two customers though: the buyer and the
seller. They support the one that helps them the most and let the
other get burned occasionally.Note: I mostly buy "buy-it-now"
items on ebay
idibidiart - 6 hours ago
The only purchase I ever done on eBay was in 2002 for a PocketPC.
It never came. I reported the seller. They said 22 others were
scammed and PayPal, their partner in crime, said that they
couldn't reveal the seller's personal detail unless by court
order. That was the only UX data point I needed. Never used eBay
again.
jws - 6 hours ago
What were you planning to do with the seller's personal
information outside of the legal system?
idibidiart - 1 hours ago
Naively, alert his bank that he was stealing money from
everyone and share the PayPal email with them. I wasn't aware
at the time that I could take the matter to small claims
court. PayPal offered no assistance as far as laying out what
my options were. They were fine with it, it seemed. Zero on
actual customer "care."
gdulli - 2 hours ago
It's just as bad selling on Amazon. They both disproportionately
and intentionally side with buyers because the buyers are where
the money comes from.
chis - 2 hours ago
I just sell things on reddit. Something about having access to
the other?s post history keeps things honest.
fny - 2 hours ago
There are a bajillion eBay alternatives in the wild. Here are a
few... /smercari.com, swappa.com, letgo.com, offerup.com,
snapsale.com, wish.com local, varagesale.com, listia.com,
carousell.com, shpock.com, 5miles.comBelieve it or not, eBay has
even made their own local selling app close5.com
user5994461 - 5 hours ago
Ebay is great.There isn't any marketplace without fraud on iPhone
and jewelry.
searchers - 6 hours ago
I think blockchain will help us with this.
SamPatt - 5 hours ago
For the payments layer, yes, but not for storing the actual
marketplace data. Blockchains aren't great for storing data
apart from maintaining a transaction ledger.When we started
building OpenBazaar we specifically avoided using a blockchain
apart from Bitcoin for payments. It was the right call I think.
There are plenty of other decentralization tools to use apart
from blockchains, like IPFS, which OpenBazaar 2.0 is built on
top of.
untog - 6 hours ago
It would be interesting to create an HN bot that replies
exactly this to every top submission, then track the
up/downvotes
[deleted]
SamPatt - 6 hours ago
>If this already exists, do tell.Yes, it does exist, and it's
completely open source. It's called OpenBazaar, and it's a fully
decentralized marketplace. There's no middlemen at
all.https://www.openbazaar.org/It's backed by the OB1 company,
which has raised $4.25 million from a16z, USV, and BlueYard.It
uses IPFS so that stores don't go offline, and all payments are
settled in Bitcoin.We love code reviews and pull requests. The
back end is done in Go:https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-
goThe front end is an Electron app:https://github.com/OpenBazaar
/openbazaar-desktop
njarboe - 5 hours ago
OpenBazaar looks like a great project, but with $4.25 million
in backing from VCs, it does not look like a charity project.
How do you plan on monetizing your work? It was not clear to me
from the OpenBazaar or OB1 websites. I only ask because many
great products work well when VC money is supporting it, but
then are seriously degraded when the company needs to start
showing revenue and then a profit.
usrusr - 49 minutes ago
In an ideal world, maybe from selling consulting to
commercial sellers? In reality, I see absolutely no overlap
between the kind of business who would ever consider paying
for FOSS consulting and the kind of business who would trade
on a more chaotic version of eBay.But could an IPFS
distributed system provide reasonable search, e.g. competing
with eBay's new search-by-image?An open, distributed market
can be worked by closed, centralized search engines. If they
design the market they are a prime candidate for becoming the
dominant search engine layered on top.
SamPatt - 4 hours ago
I responded to this
elsewhere:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15561370
Sir_Cmpwn - 5 hours ago
Being a desktop application is a pretty serious barrier to
usability for the average person. So is using Bitcoin, to be
honest.
SamPatt - 4 hours ago
You're right. We're about to launch a mobile app and working
on getting it working on browser as well.Bitcoin is a barrier
but our goal is to eventually be currency agnostic. It does
enable us to do escrow properly though with 2-of-3 multisig,
and it also ensures that people control their own money.
mustacheemperor - 1 hours ago
Bitcoin is an accessibility barrier, but OpenBazaar is also
an example of the kind of models bitcoin reduces the hurdles
for.
themihai - 6 hours ago
How do they manage listing flooding or fraud?
SamPatt - 6 hours ago
Buyers can place orders one of two ways:1. A direct order.
The Bitcoin goes directly from buyer to vendor. There are no
protections. This method is only used for small value
transactions or transactions where the buyer trusts the
vendor.2. A moderated order. The Bitcoin goes into an escrow
account (a 2-of-3 Bitcoin multisig address) and there is a
third party moderator who will resolve a dispute if one of
the parties feels wronged.Note that if there is no dispute
opened in a moderated order, the buyer and the seller can
release the funds without the moderator even knowing they
were chosen for an order.There's nothing to prevent listing
flooding, but the rest of the network will just ignore nodes
that are abusive. There are also third party search engines
that crawl the network, and they'll block spam themselves for
their users. Rawflood is an example:https://rawflood.com
teddyh - 4 hours ago
How do you select and assign moderators?
SamPatt - 3 hours ago
Currently the vendor selects a list of moderators they
are comfortable working with, and then at the time of a
sale the buyer selects the one they prefer. If a dispute
is opened the moderator the buyer picked from the
vendor's list will resolve the dispute.
teddyh - 3 hours ago
That does not sound safe for the buyer at all; they?re
forced to choose a moderator from a list completely
decided by the vendor?
SamPatt - 3 hours ago
In practice most vendors choose from the top moderators
on the platform who all have good reputations, so it's
not as dangerous as it sounds.If a vendor only offers
unknown moderators a buyer just won't buy from them, or
will ask them to add a moderator they trust.
smogcutter - 46 minutes ago
What's in it for the moderator? I assume they get a cut
of the escrow?How is the moderator's reputation visible
to a buyer? If there's some kind of rating system, why
would the reviews be useful at all? After all, any
situation where the moderator has to act will leave one
party pissed off.This seems like a lot of complication
just to buy something on the internet... unless what
you're buying is heroin. In which case the whole 100% p2p
thing starts making more sense.
sharemywin - 5 hours ago
I never understood how this works. How does a16z, USV, and
BlueYard make their money back? That's why I've been hesitant
to deal with this stuff because I don't understand the business
model.
SamPatt - 5 hours ago
They didn't invest in OpenBazaar, they invested in OB1, the
company who is leading development on OpenBazaar. I'm a co-
founder of OB1 and we monetize by offering services to users
on the platform, not by monetizing the platform directly (no
fees).
sharemywin - 4 hours ago
If you don't mind me asking:How do things like privacy
policies, terms of service, contracts between parties work?
SamPatt - 3 hours ago
The contracts between users are all cryptographically
signed in a system called Ricardian Contracts. At any
point each party has a digitally signed copy of all the
information they need to proceed with the trade.Because
this is a protocol for decentralized trade, and a network
to engage in trade, there's really no terms of service or
privacy policies that can be enforced between users. They
connect to each other completely P2P, the devs or anyone
else can't enforce anything between them (and don't even
know a transaction is happening).
majormajor - 49 minutes ago
Is this a sorta "we had no idea so much of our revenue
was derived from pirated content" play sorta like
Youtube, then, but for an active marketplace that's
actually maybe just filled with fraud?No awareness by the
company and no easy ability to enforce terms before users
make me wonder why the heck I'd ever want to try to sell
or buy something on that platform. Seems like craigslist
but with too high a bar of entry for the good-intentioned
non-fraudster non-tech-savvy users.
zokier - 4 hours ago
OP has relatively specific bad experiences with ebay. How does
OB exactly prevent similar cases? Being decentralized and based
on bitcoin does not help against fraudulent buyers or buyers
wasting time by attempting to negotiate unreasonable terms.
tomaskafka - 4 hours ago
So you can sell your goods to all three people on Earth
interested in both ipfs and btc?
SamPatt - 4 hours ago
They are built on top of those technologies, but the user
isn't exposed to any of the technical complexities.
Seriously, go to openbazaar.org and download it, see for
yourself.
jes5199 - 5 hours ago
None of the problems with Ebay are the software.
schnevets - 4 hours ago
I had a summer of eBay nightmares in college. I was supposed to
help a relative sell an attic full of old clothes and knick
knacks. Nothing was buying because I was a new seller, so I put
some old video games on to bolster my score with quick sales.
Everything went well until one person reported me for not
including the box & manual (which was never mentioned in the
listing) while another claimed the disc was counterfeit. After
these two headaches, my relative complained about having to give
some costume jewelry up for $7. At that point I decided it wasn't
worth the trouble. Final profit was $97There are definitely ways
to improve the process. Maybe a "middleman" has to provide an
appraisal or validation for the jewelry/electronic before making
the listing. The true obstacle with any new competitor is network
effect. When normal people want to sell local, they use
Craigslist, when they want to sell nationally, they use eBay. Any
chaff has already been taken by the big guys, and what is left
isn't worth the fight.
kermittd - 3 hours ago
I've actually thought about that idea and even did some initial
prototyping for a mobile app. But the idea I had was a more
usable/less scammy version of craigslist specifically for local
commerce. Initially, I was thinking of limiting the goods to
electronics and then expanding slowly to other items.
zokier - 4 hours ago
It would be interesting if they'd use this tech to deduplicate the
gazillion listings for many cheap (chinese) goods which seem to use
common set of images with maybe varying watermarks etc.
adityapatadia - 2 hours ago
We provide similar technology as a service if anyone is interested
to hire us. Check our demo at:
https://app.turingiq.com/demo/image/client
Kiro - 6 hours ago
How can I use this from desktop?
___________________________________________________________________
eBay launches visual search tools that let you shop using photos
93 points by dayve
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/ebay-launches-visual-search-to...
___________________________________________________________________
searchers - 6 hours ago
As I understood, there are 2 different apps: "Find it" and "Image
search". If yes, .. why?
dboreham - 6 hours ago
My pet startup idea, going back I suppose 15+ years is a service
that does this:You have something. You like it. You want another
one. The service gets it for you. This doesn't have to work from a
picture -- it could use a UPC barcode or a text description.Idea
originally inspired by a school friends of mine who wore the exact
same type of boots for years and years. When the old pair wore out,
he'd buy another pair the exact same.Over the years I've noticed
many instances where I really want another one of something I have
but it turns out to be either painful or impossible to find. You
know however that somewhere someone has a warehouse full of the
things.Also like the electronics industry brokers who can track
down an old component for you to repair gear or re-start
manufacturing on some old product. Those have existed since at
least the 1970's.A few years ago I tested Amazon's visual product
search feature to see if it would do what I wanted. It didn't. I
showed an image of some brown boots I was wearing, and certainly
the suggested products were also brown boots, but not the same
kind.
whoisjuan - 5 hours ago
I would totally use this. 8 years ago I bought a pair of Nike
shoes in Paris. I loved those shoes. I tried millions of things
to buy a similar pair but I was unsuccessful at finding
them.Maybe the service should be like FlightFox, but for people
who are really good at finding stuff. You pay a commission to the
individual who helps you find the item.
thess24 - 2 hours ago
I've been building an automated service very similar to this
for womens fashion (mens fashion soon) in my free time over the
past 5 months using deep learning. The goal is to index
existing items, and then expand to items that are no longer
available. So you could take a picture of your
shoes/shirt/hat/etc and it would ideally find the same one. If
it doesn't find the same exact item, it would find similar
items at different price points that you could buy. Getting
similar items isn't that hard -- getting the exact item is much
trickier though. With the pace of improvement in these types
of models, there will probably be a lot of these types of apps
popping up over the next few years.
51Cards - 5 hours ago
I would use a service like this. I am similar to your friend...
When I find a product that I like I'm good with getting more of
the exact same in future vs. bouncing around through other
brands. I have another Bluetooth headset still in box for when
this one dies for example. Usually when this happens it's eBay I
turn to (or Google image search) and so I am hopeful for this new
system.
jasonkostempski - 6 hours ago
Someone's been watching Big Bang Theory reruns.
blntechie - 6 hours ago
Just adding - AliExpress has had similar feature for more than a
year when I started using it. It doesn?t work really well though.
tegansnyder - 6 hours ago
Can anyone recommend a good tutorial or reading on how to setup
content-based (visual) image searching using a CNN to process
images. I'm looking to build a POC of a reverse image search
trained with in-house product data. In the past I've used the
imgSeek but it is dated and not using neural nets.
dahernan - 4 hours ago
For a POC you could use Tagbox, just a REST API packed as a
Docker container from https://machinebox.io, here the blog post
https://blog.machinebox.io/visual-search-by-machine-box-
eb30...Disclaimer: I did both of them so, I'm a little bias :)
482794793792894 - 4 hours ago
Last weekend, my dad needed new printer cartridges and so we went
sifting through the internet for different offerings. By chance, we
got onto a page on the manufacturer's website, which had images of
all their cartridge packs. Among those, we also found an XL version
of what we initially thought to buy.So, there we were, needing
exactly this feature. If I didn't know that it's impossible for
them to have developed this in such a short time, I'd be a little
freaked.Thankfully, though, TinEye served the exact same purpose...
dessant - 5 hours ago
I have made a browser extension[1][2] for those looking to perform
reverse image searches with multiple engines at once. It's more
reliable than Chrome's built-in image search, which appears in the
context menu only for
the clicked area to extract images. Support for shopping sites may
come in the future.[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail
/search-by-image/cn...[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/search_by_ima...
addictedcs - 6 hours ago
Interesting how we built a raw prototype about eight months ago
(https://imgur.com/OIaQu7x), but it never took off (at least for
the customer whom we've pitched). To add to other's comments, the
visual search can be quite useful comparing to terms search
specifically for non-native speakers and people who are not skilled
in fashion terms (i.e., the name of the material, pattern). As for
how accurate it is, this is indeed an existing problem. If you
product set is significant (>10k products), then the visual search
results can be entirely off the target, not surprised Ebay is
dealing with the same problem.
zepolen - 6 hours ago
I didn't find that surprising since your blue bag results in the
demo returned a bunch of bags that didn't look at all like the
original.
addictedcs - 6 hours ago
The fuzziness was added on purpose in a way to recommend you
products you may be interested in (not necessarily the exact
match).
martinshen - 5 hours ago
Can someone explain to me why eBay is trading only at 5.5x P/E? I
fully understand that it isn't growing tremendously but with all
its classified assets, I can't help but feel that it should be
trading at a much higher market cap.
quizme2000 - 5 hours ago
Funny I noticed this also on yesterday's the Show HN stock
viewer. Seems like ebay is ready to be bought or acquired with a
stock transfer and cash deal. I would think Walmart would be in
a damn good position to pull this off even though I'm no fan of
walmart in general.
jk2323 - 1 hours ago
Interesting point. But p/e so long, and they are never paying
dividends, what is happening with that money?I don't think of
ebay highly, desides what they did to Craigslist.They had Skype.
They could have been Facebook, but no. They had Paypal. With
Skype and paypal they could have easily made micropayments on
cell phones, but no. I hardly ever see a company with so many
wasted chances. They are in a "winner takes it all" niche but
sooner or later someone (Open Bazaar?) will challenge them and I
don't see any innovation from this company.
dsfyu404ed - 6 hours ago
Seems like a great way for eBay to undercut brick and mortar stores
(and for consumers to save money) on cheap junk from China that
people would rather pay $0.99 and wait 3wk for than pay $4.99 and
have right now.
icebraining - 2 hours ago
Also dropshippers who resell such Chinese products under
different names for a margin.
conceptoriented - 5 hours ago
To test a machine learning algorithm, one can use "Fashion-MNIST":
https://github.com/zalandoresearch/fashion-mnist"Fashion-MNIST is a
dataset of Zalando's article images?consisting of a training set of
60,000 examples and a test set of 10,000 examples. Each example is
a 28x28 grayscale image, associated with a label from 10 classes.
We intend Fashion-MNIST to serve as a direct drop-in replacement
for the original MNIST dataset for benchmarking machine learning
algorithms. It shares the same image size and structure of training
and testing splits."
CamelCaseName - 7 hours ago
I have been trying to use Amazon's visual search for the past week
or two and out of many trials, it has only worked once.I wonder
whether eBay will beat Amazon in this category as the types of
photos they have access to (amateur/home vs. professional/stock)
are very different. Either way, I am not confident that taking a
picture is a better solution than just typing in the name for the
vast majority of items.
thess24 - 2 hours ago
Yes, the types of photos will have a huge impact. eBay most
definitely has an advantage in that regard.
dsfyu404ed - 6 hours ago
>Either way, I am not confident that taking a picture is a better
solution than just typing in the name for the vast majority of
items.It's a great solution for "I want another one like this one
but searching for it returns 10000 different items"
CamelCaseName - 5 hours ago
That seems like a rare case to me. Typically there's a company
name or model number somewhere on the item, and often that
identifier returns a very specific item.Looking around my
house, I only see a few items that don't have unique
identifiers like furniture or plates/utensils. However, I
suspect the majority of things sold through Amazon/eBay are
more likely to be video games, books, toys, etc. with very
visible and highly unique names.
tom_pinckney - 5 hours ago
Consider fashion or home goods. Frequently you see something
you like based on pattern, texture etc that cannot be easily
described in words. Image search is the perfect fit for these
kinds of purchases.
gdulli - 2 hours ago
> I am not confident that taking a picture is a better solution
than just typing in the name for the vast majority of itemsI call
this the Minority Report effect. When an idea seems cool but in
practice is much less usable and practical. And tries to solve a
problem that never existed. Do I want to wave my hands in the air
to control an interface or rest them on a table? Obviously the
latter. It's worked very well for decades.
introvert - 5 hours ago
Surprisingly, it works well. I tried searching for few items and it
showed similar items on ebay..
ecommerceguy - 39 minutes ago
I wonder if I snap a fake rolex it will find an actual fake rolex.
lolsal - 7 hours ago
It seems like ebay would have a ton of user-provided photos which
would be a possibly huge corpus for machine learning to help
identify objects like this. It will be interesting to see how well
this works!
bflesch - 6 hours ago
The yellow sofa example in the article looked very convincing.
syntaxing - 5 hours ago
I know a bunch of sites has this feature already but I'm pretty
excited to try it out since eBay is probably the website with the
best dataset. I do not think any other site has as many home taken
pictures as eBay. This would definitely make the image recognition
much more robust. I'm guessing the problem with Amazon or TaoBao is
that most of the pictures are studio pictures and does not scale
well when a person takes a picture in a random environment.That
being said though, the eBay buying and selling experience is a hit
or miss. It sucks how there is group of people preying on the site
to rip people off. I had an selling experience so bad that I
vouched never to sell anything via eBay anymore. Craiglist tends to
be a much better transaction.
pkamb - 3 hours ago
I thought the title said "let you STOP using photos (when
selling)", which is what has basically already happened due to the
prevalence of stock images and CGI items on a white background.I'm
still looking for the browser extension that lets you filter out
any listing with a pure white or gradient background from your
eBay, etsy, pinterest, etc. searches.Would be a HUGE indicator of
an actual real used item sold by a human, vs. a new dropshipped
item from China. You know, what I want to use eBay to buy.
incan1275 - 3 hours ago
Happen to know that is the work of the eBay team in New York.
Really great engineers in that lab.
eurticket - 3 hours ago
Pintrest should've hit this first.
thess24 - 2 hours ago
Pinterest does have something similar and has a few blog posts
about how they did it
ll931110 - 6 hours ago
Shameless plug for my friend's startup, which has prototyped the
concept and got a few customers for the last
year.https://www.mirrorthatlook.com/
contingencies - 6 hours ago
I'm pretty sure Taobao in China has had this for ages. Search
suggests[0] since as early as 2011. To test it, go to Taobao[1] and
click the photo icon at the right of the search box (previously
only available in some countries and product categories, now
apparently global). If this was the other way around it would be
"OMG China is copying the west!" No such discussion the other way
around. Just sayin'...[0] https://www.chinainternetwatch.com/1189
/taobao-imagine-an-im...[1] http://www.taobao.com/
leggomylibro - 6 hours ago
Sort of; they also have links to visually-similar items if you
hover over a listing, if there are the 'right' amount of matching
products.I mean, how many relevant listings are you going to find
for a stock photo of a 7x7mm QFP32 chip? Still, that's a risky
thing to buy on taobao anyways, and it is useful for things like
specifically-shaped buttons, connectors, etc.
[deleted]
cisanti - 4 hours ago
Also aliexpress, but it is possible that taobao was first.
averageweather - 6 hours ago
Some brilliant mind who lurks on HN should create a competitor to
eBay. Not some online yard sale where you have to meet people in
person for the exchange, but a nice online marketplace for people
to sell their stuff.If this already exists, do tell.In my opinion,
eBay for sellers (outside of maybe the power sellers. I've sold
<100 items) is a nightmare.I sold a Tiffany necklace a few months
back. The buyer reported to eBay it was fake and I was ordered to
refund the seller and they could keep the fake item. Long story
short, over a span of a few weeks, I was lucky enough to get an
original receipt from Tiffany and supply it as evidence, which
almost still did not work.More recently, I listed an old iPhone
with a "buy it now". Sold in like 30 minutes to someone with an
"@god[dot].com" email requesting I send the phone first and then he
will pay me. It took a week or longer for me to challenge this. I
even have settings to disallow certain types of eBay users based on
ratings etc. eBay still charged me a listing fee.I had success
doing a non buy it now sale after that. Maybe that is my only
option now.I don't even feel like getting into how slow their
seller admin tools are ...
nwatson - 6 hours ago
Google did a similar acquisition in 2010, "like.com".
https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/20/its-official-google-acquir... .
homero - 5 hours ago
Might be related to Google goggles app which died
[deleted]
gnopgnip - 4 hours ago
Ebay doesn't charge a listing fee for the first 50 items per
month. If the buyer never pays you should open an unpaid item
claim after three days, then call ebay after four days and have
the claim closed in your favor. If more sellers did this the
buyers would get filtered out of ebay. In the future you can use
buy it now and require immediate payment to prevent this
entirely. Verifying the authenticity of commonly faked items does
not have an easy solution and I would not buy or sell anything
like that on Ebay. Any place that allows the sale of items like
this will have tradeoffs.Some alternatives to Ebay are Ebid,
Etsy, Rakuten/buy.com, Amazon, Bonanza(allows cross listing with
Ebay), Swappa for phones, uBid, Jet.
djaychela - 5 hours ago
"In my opinion, eBay for sellers (outside of maybe the power
sellers. I've sold <100 items) is a nightmare."I wouldn't argue
too strongly with you there. I've sold loads of stuff on eBay
(about ?50k worth over the years, apparently!), and there are
problems too often. People try it on, so I have to send
-everything- via recorded mail, which is expensive, so then
people complain about the postage cost, even though I always put
them up front.I've had quite a few completely fatuous claims made
against me when selling, one of which said there were parts
missing, when I'd actually said those parts were missing in the
listing. eBay refunded him and let him keep the item.Whenever I
have an issue now, I just say 'send it back, I'll refund it' as
this is invariably the path of lowest friction. Dealing with
muppets is a cost of selling on eBay that has to be factored into
the equation, alas, and it's worse than it ever has been; here in
the UK around 2000 it was pretty 'niche' and only serious people
seemed to be on there. But after a few years (and a few
newspaper articles along the lines of 'quit your job and make a
living on eBay') it started getting like it is now.Non paying
bidders are a pain to sellers, but it means nothing to eBay so
they don't do anything about it.The upside, at least, is that
when you buy on there, you're well covered. Had a dodgy
'reconditioned' cylinder head turn up a few weeks ago. Returned
it without even having to pay postage, which was a relief - in
the past that would have been ?400 I'd never have seen again.
notyourwork - 3 hours ago
Years ago I sold an ipod on ebay after Christmas. My parents
bought me one and a family relative also bought me one.My account
was suspended for fraud even though I provided proof of purchase
for the item. I left ebay/paypal and stopped using it when I
realized that they could arbitrarily hold my money for 6 months
even though I provided legit proof they were wrong.
Jemmeh - 3 hours ago
I have the same problem with Amazon. Both of them favor the buyer
because customers trusting their platform is a huge selling point
for them. As a seller most people are honest, but enough of them
are not for it to be extremely annoying.Problem is you have
plenty of scammer sellers too.
overcast - 1 hours ago
Amazon is the worst for a seller, much worse than eBay. It's
completely in favor of the buyer over there, and can easily be
gamed. Saying something is damaged, waiting to the absolute
last second of a 30 day "trial" to return it. It's horrible. I
will never sell anything on there again.
callmeed - 3 hours ago
Seems like Facebook would be best positioned to do this. They
already more transparency than Ebay/Amazon with regards to who
you're dealing with. They also have regional buy/sell groups
already. Integrate with some shipping platforms and they'd be on
their way.That being said, its not really in their lane.
cr0sh - 3 hours ago
The thing I miss most about ebay are the independent sellers of
"crap" - not sure how else to put it, but basically the random
people who dig out stuff from the their "attic" and put it up for
people to bid over.You know - what Ebay was originally set up
for.I mean - one time I found a bucket of bolts for auction; just
a bunch of random rusty bolts someone had in the back of their
shed, they decided to auction off. And wouldn't you know it, a
bidding war happened. That bucket of bolts went for close to a
$100.00 by the time it was all over.Those are the kind of stuff I
like to see, and the kind of stuff I like to bid on and/or buy.
Not the mass-produced junk from China - if I want that, I'll get
it from Amazon or Ali Express (and I do).You can still find this
on Ebay, but it isn't as ubiquitous like it was in the beginning.
I personally think their decision to compete with Amazon instead
of sticking to their core users really changed perceptions and
user base. Maybe it's better for them, but for users who like
auctions, finding something similar that is trusted as much
hasn't been easy (there are a few).
beambot - 5 hours ago
Lollipuff (YC W'13: https://www.lollipuff.com/) does exactly this
for higher-end women's fashion -- to directly address the issues
you had with your Tiffany necklace (though I don't think they
support Tiffany today). All the items get authenticated before
listing by professional authenticators, without needing to take
items in hand. This provides more-than-ample evidence in the
event of a dispute (the authenticators are well known in the
field!). Then Lollipuff walks buyers & sellers through the
process to ensure a safe transaction -- including instructions on
shipping, which can also be a frequent gotcha for high-end items.
ssharp - 5 hours ago
I wonder how much eBay has been impacted by this type of
"wedging". I would use eBay primarily to buy/sell musical
instruments but Reverb took a pretty big chunk of that market
and provides a better and more trustworthy experience than
eBay, at least in my experiences there.I know there are a few
fashion-related sites like this out there and I'd guess there
are other "Reverb for X" sites as well.I'm sure there is still
a fortune in the long-tail but specialty sites seem to be more
of a concern than a direct competitor.
nik736 - 6 hours ago
I agree completely, also their platform is just so slow and full
of bugs. It simply looks like they havn't changed anything in the
past 10 years.Edit: Forgot to mention that their search is so
bad, they mix search results with search phrases previously so
it's impossible to find things I am looking for.
Xeoncross - 6 hours ago
This is a real hard problem. Bad people make everything bad for
everyone else. The problem is more about the US market laws and
scalability I think.Large companies like eBay have to take fraud
and customer support costs and weight it against their company vs
you as a seller. It would take a company that cared more about
sellers than their own bottom line.The customer is always right.
Middle men like eBay have two customers though: the buyer and the
seller. They support the one that helps them the most and let the
other get burned occasionally.Note: I mostly buy "buy-it-now"
items on ebay
idibidiart - 6 hours ago
The only purchase I ever done on eBay was in 2002 for a PocketPC.
It never came. I reported the seller. They said 22 others were
scammed and PayPal, their partner in crime, said that they
couldn't reveal the seller's personal detail unless by court
order. That was the only UX data point I needed. Never used eBay
again.
jws - 6 hours ago
What were you planning to do with the seller's personal
information outside of the legal system?
idibidiart - 1 hours ago
Naively, alert his bank that he was stealing money from
everyone and share the PayPal email with them. I wasn't aware
at the time that I could take the matter to small claims
court. PayPal offered no assistance as far as laying out what
my options were. They were fine with it, it seemed. Zero on
actual customer "care."
gdulli - 2 hours ago
It's just as bad selling on Amazon. They both disproportionately
and intentionally side with buyers because the buyers are where
the money comes from.
chis - 2 hours ago
I just sell things on reddit. Something about having access to
the other?s post history keeps things honest.
fny - 2 hours ago
There are a bajillion eBay alternatives in the wild. Here are a
few... /smercari.com, swappa.com, letgo.com, offerup.com,
snapsale.com, wish.com local, varagesale.com, listia.com,
carousell.com, shpock.com, 5miles.comBelieve it or not, eBay has
even made their own local selling app close5.com
user5994461 - 5 hours ago
Ebay is great.There isn't any marketplace without fraud on iPhone
and jewelry.
searchers - 6 hours ago
I think blockchain will help us with this.
SamPatt - 5 hours ago
For the payments layer, yes, but not for storing the actual
marketplace data. Blockchains aren't great for storing data
apart from maintaining a transaction ledger.When we started
building OpenBazaar we specifically avoided using a blockchain
apart from Bitcoin for payments. It was the right call I think.
There are plenty of other decentralization tools to use apart
from blockchains, like IPFS, which OpenBazaar 2.0 is built on
top of.
untog - 6 hours ago
It would be interesting to create an HN bot that replies
exactly this to every top submission, then track the
up/downvotes
[deleted]
SamPatt - 6 hours ago
>If this already exists, do tell.Yes, it does exist, and it's
completely open source. It's called OpenBazaar, and it's a fully
decentralized marketplace. There's no middlemen at
all.https://www.openbazaar.org/It's backed by the OB1 company,
which has raised $4.25 million from a16z, USV, and BlueYard.It
uses IPFS so that stores don't go offline, and all payments are
settled in Bitcoin.We love code reviews and pull requests. The
back end is done in Go:https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-
goThe front end is an Electron app:https://github.com/OpenBazaar
/openbazaar-desktop
njarboe - 5 hours ago
OpenBazaar looks like a great project, but with $4.25 million
in backing from VCs, it does not look like a charity project.
How do you plan on monetizing your work? It was not clear to me
from the OpenBazaar or OB1 websites. I only ask because many
great products work well when VC money is supporting it, but
then are seriously degraded when the company needs to start
showing revenue and then a profit.
usrusr - 49 minutes ago
In an ideal world, maybe from selling consulting to
commercial sellers? In reality, I see absolutely no overlap
between the kind of business who would ever consider paying
for FOSS consulting and the kind of business who would trade
on a more chaotic version of eBay.But could an IPFS
distributed system provide reasonable search, e.g. competing
with eBay's new search-by-image?An open, distributed market
can be worked by closed, centralized search engines. If they
design the market they are a prime candidate for becoming the
dominant search engine layered on top.
SamPatt - 4 hours ago
I responded to this
elsewhere:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15561370
Sir_Cmpwn - 5 hours ago
Being a desktop application is a pretty serious barrier to
usability for the average person. So is using Bitcoin, to be
honest.
SamPatt - 4 hours ago
You're right. We're about to launch a mobile app and working
on getting it working on browser as well.Bitcoin is a barrier
but our goal is to eventually be currency agnostic. It does
enable us to do escrow properly though with 2-of-3 multisig,
and it also ensures that people control their own money.
mustacheemperor - 1 hours ago
Bitcoin is an accessibility barrier, but OpenBazaar is also
an example of the kind of models bitcoin reduces the hurdles
for.
themihai - 6 hours ago
How do they manage listing flooding or fraud?
SamPatt - 6 hours ago
Buyers can place orders one of two ways:1. A direct order.
The Bitcoin goes directly from buyer to vendor. There are no
protections. This method is only used for small value
transactions or transactions where the buyer trusts the
vendor.2. A moderated order. The Bitcoin goes into an escrow
account (a 2-of-3 Bitcoin multisig address) and there is a
third party moderator who will resolve a dispute if one of
the parties feels wronged.Note that if there is no dispute
opened in a moderated order, the buyer and the seller can
release the funds without the moderator even knowing they
were chosen for an order.There's nothing to prevent listing
flooding, but the rest of the network will just ignore nodes
that are abusive. There are also third party search engines
that crawl the network, and they'll block spam themselves for
their users. Rawflood is an example:https://rawflood.com
teddyh - 4 hours ago
How do you select and assign moderators?
SamPatt - 3 hours ago
Currently the vendor selects a list of moderators they
are comfortable working with, and then at the time of a
sale the buyer selects the one they prefer. If a dispute
is opened the moderator the buyer picked from the
vendor's list will resolve the dispute.
teddyh - 3 hours ago
That does not sound safe for the buyer at all; they?re
forced to choose a moderator from a list completely
decided by the vendor?
SamPatt - 3 hours ago
In practice most vendors choose from the top moderators
on the platform who all have good reputations, so it's
not as dangerous as it sounds.If a vendor only offers
unknown moderators a buyer just won't buy from them, or
will ask them to add a moderator they trust.
smogcutter - 46 minutes ago
What's in it for the moderator? I assume they get a cut
of the escrow?How is the moderator's reputation visible
to a buyer? If there's some kind of rating system, why
would the reviews be useful at all? After all, any
situation where the moderator has to act will leave one
party pissed off.This seems like a lot of complication
just to buy something on the internet... unless what
you're buying is heroin. In which case the whole 100% p2p
thing starts making more sense.
sharemywin - 5 hours ago
I never understood how this works. How does a16z, USV, and
BlueYard make their money back? That's why I've been hesitant
to deal with this stuff because I don't understand the business
model.
SamPatt - 5 hours ago
They didn't invest in OpenBazaar, they invested in OB1, the
company who is leading development on OpenBazaar. I'm a co-
founder of OB1 and we monetize by offering services to users
on the platform, not by monetizing the platform directly (no
fees).
sharemywin - 4 hours ago
If you don't mind me asking:How do things like privacy
policies, terms of service, contracts between parties work?
SamPatt - 3 hours ago
The contracts between users are all cryptographically
signed in a system called Ricardian Contracts. At any
point each party has a digitally signed copy of all the
information they need to proceed with the trade.Because
this is a protocol for decentralized trade, and a network
to engage in trade, there's really no terms of service or
privacy policies that can be enforced between users. They
connect to each other completely P2P, the devs or anyone
else can't enforce anything between them (and don't even
know a transaction is happening).
majormajor - 49 minutes ago
Is this a sorta "we had no idea so much of our revenue
was derived from pirated content" play sorta like
Youtube, then, but for an active marketplace that's
actually maybe just filled with fraud?No awareness by the
company and no easy ability to enforce terms before users
make me wonder why the heck I'd ever want to try to sell
or buy something on that platform. Seems like craigslist
but with too high a bar of entry for the good-intentioned
non-fraudster non-tech-savvy users.
zokier - 4 hours ago
OP has relatively specific bad experiences with ebay. How does
OB exactly prevent similar cases? Being decentralized and based
on bitcoin does not help against fraudulent buyers or buyers
wasting time by attempting to negotiate unreasonable terms.
tomaskafka - 4 hours ago
So you can sell your goods to all three people on Earth
interested in both ipfs and btc?
SamPatt - 4 hours ago
They are built on top of those technologies, but the user
isn't exposed to any of the technical complexities.
Seriously, go to openbazaar.org and download it, see for
yourself.
jes5199 - 5 hours ago
None of the problems with Ebay are the software.
schnevets - 4 hours ago
I had a summer of eBay nightmares in college. I was supposed to
help a relative sell an attic full of old clothes and knick
knacks. Nothing was buying because I was a new seller, so I put
some old video games on to bolster my score with quick sales.
Everything went well until one person reported me for not
including the box & manual (which was never mentioned in the
listing) while another claimed the disc was counterfeit. After
these two headaches, my relative complained about having to give
some costume jewelry up for $7. At that point I decided it wasn't
worth the trouble. Final profit was $97There are definitely ways
to improve the process. Maybe a "middleman" has to provide an
appraisal or validation for the jewelry/electronic before making
the listing. The true obstacle with any new competitor is network
effect. When normal people want to sell local, they use
Craigslist, when they want to sell nationally, they use eBay. Any
chaff has already been taken by the big guys, and what is left
isn't worth the fight.
kermittd - 3 hours ago
I've actually thought about that idea and even did some initial
prototyping for a mobile app. But the idea I had was a more
usable/less scammy version of craigslist specifically for local
commerce. Initially, I was thinking of limiting the goods to
electronics and then expanding slowly to other items.
zokier - 4 hours ago
It would be interesting if they'd use this tech to deduplicate the
gazillion listings for many cheap (chinese) goods which seem to use
common set of images with maybe varying watermarks etc.
adityapatadia - 2 hours ago
We provide similar technology as a service if anyone is interested
to hire us. Check our demo at:
https://app.turingiq.com/demo/image/client
Kiro - 6 hours ago
How can I use this from desktop?