eBay announced last week that it’s clamping down on pre-order sales on Playstations 3s and Nintendo Wii consoles. Last year, when the Xbox 360 came out, numerous eBay buyers were hurt when they tried to buy consoles through such auctions, only to suffer when sellers couldn’t deliver the product.
This is a responsible move on eBay’s part. No video game reseller can guarantee you a Wii or PS3 at this time. You can pre-order a console from a retailer, but because supply issues are never resolved at a console launch, the retailer can’t guarantee it will be allocated the number of pre-orders it took. And most of the pre-order sales on eBay are actually individuals who made a pre-order at a retailer anyway, so they can’t guarantee the sale. It’s too disruptive a business for eBay, and they outlaw such business with this policy.
"The seller must guarantee that the item will be available for shipping within 30 days from the date of purchase (i.e., the day the listing ends or the date the item is purchased from a store front listing)."
However, since this policy is uniform across the eBay site, I suspect a lot of comics retailers are about to run into trouble with this policy.
There are a number of listings each month on eBay for pre-sales of comics merchandise. Here’s one as an example. This is for Marve Masterworks Avengers volume 6. Marvel is listing the shipping date as December 13, 2006. The auction expires October 19, well before the 30 days that eBay mandates for such auctions. Technically, this auction is not in compliance with eBay’s policy on pre-sale transactions.
But there’s a big difference between this listing and a listing for a console that hasn’t shipped. The retailer is utilizing the Direct Market to secure the Avengers book. He’ll place an order, and Marvel will fulfill it through Diamond Distribution. In fact, Marvel will create as many books as needed to fulfill the needs of Diamond’s retailer customers. Unless the retailer makes an error with his Diamond order or Marvel unexpectedly allocates the Masterwork (and I don’t think they’ve ever allocated such an item), the retailer will easily fulfill this order when the book comes out. And this retailer has done this transaction many times in the past; he’s got a 99.0% positive feedback rating on nearly fourteen thousand transactions. (I’m not endorsing the retailer at all; I’m just rattling off his eBay numbers. I picked this transaction solely because it’s the first one I found.)
Clearly, this sort of transaction shouldn’t be treated in the same way a console pre-order is. But the polciy doesn’t distinguish between the two; it treats both the same, and I suspect at some point comics retailers are going to be punished for the sins of the video game industry.