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EBay's Bid To Go Beyond Auctions Disappoints
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "eBay is having trouble attracting online shoppers with its new fixed-price sales site, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'Jonathan Garriss, executive director of the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance, an independent group of eBay sellers, estimates eBay Express accounts for less than 1% of sales for the group's more than 1,000 members, who together sell more than $1 billion a year in merchandise. And while eBay's main auction site attracted more consumer visits than any other online retailer in November, eBay Express was at No. 87 on the list of top shopping and classified sites, according to research firm Hitwise Pty. Ltd.'"
I never did get why eBay express was instituted.
If you want to sell an item at a specific cost, just put in a buy it now option. I admit, I don't use eBay, but couldn't you just place the buy it now and reserve at the same point?
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Ever think it may be because of advertising? This is the first time I'm hearing of eBay Express.
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...attracting scammers, cheats, and frauds. My wife has had so many problems with eBay, and I'm so unimpressed with them anymore, that I wouldn't bother with their Express site. I can certainly get stuff cheap enough off of Amazon.
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Overpriced goods & lousy service! Bad communication! Do not buy from these sellers! F-
However, eBay Express doesn't support transactions outside of the USA, so I visited the site once and never went back.
Ebay will be fine. They'll just raise the fees for sellers again. And the sellers will pay it. Because for all their whining, it seems pretty clear they'll put up with anything ebay does to them just to get access to that critical mass of buyers. There's definately a lot of people fed up with ebay, buyers and sellers...but ebay has such a wide reach, its a household word with people that barely use a computer, that sellers just don't want to give up that customer base. And potential competitors see to much of a burden to entry. And the buyers? Well...I really don't know what their problem is, ebay prices are usually like %15 higher then retail these days. They must just like clicking on things.
Only a powerhouse like google, maybe microsoft (yahoo?) could make inroads, and I think they'd have to throw a lot of advertising money at the problem.
This comes as no surprise. After all, it's far more difficult for criminals and scam artists to rip people off when the price is fixed.
eBay owes its existence to (a) collectors of various obscure items and (b) the criminal element.
eBay works because people are always looking for fantastic deals, and the auction format provides a sense of urgency. eBay express is really only a buy-it-now subsection of eBay, except the products don't have an expiration date, and aren't displayed prominently in searches.
... it's seems more like an afterthought.
Search seems like the express product's major downfall. Most eBay users don't want to shop by store, they want to shop by product (and typically via a search). eBay express only comes up at the very bottom of main eBay searches, or if nothing was found during the search. Sometimes eBay express items also come up as "related items" when clicking on an auction item. But this really isn't going to drive significant traffic
Also, for some reason the express site seems SLOOOOWWW. It took about 1 minute for the main page to come up just now (from 2 different locations on 2 different networks), ugh.
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... there's a Professional eBay Sellers Alliance?
what the hell is that?!
Given that so, so many auctions already have minimum bids and buy-it-now prices set within one dollar of each other and close to retail prices, what's the use of this express? I've been looking for games for my Nintendo DS and Gamecube (to play on my Wii) games. If they aren't at retail prices, they want higher than retail prices when you add in the $15-25 "shipping and handling" fees.
The problem with eBay (and it being a public company) is that it is under constant pressure to drive more and more revenue its way. eBay was successful at ONE thing: online auctions. Now that shareholders demand more, it has to keep looking for more and more businesses. PayPal was a great buy. But the rest? Eh. If they had done all this 8 years ago, that would have made sense. But eBay is synonymous with auctions and nothing else. Same reason why Amazon isn't associated with auctions. The brand has been defined in stone.
They've also done a piss poor job of keeping their sellers happy. They raise fees twice a year, regardless of what people say and always say it's being done for the "health of the marketplace." Their spokesman Hani Durzy says the same shit over and over. yet, eBay is FLOODED with goods and sellers The marketplace is so diluted on eBay now that it's very difficult for sellers to make money anymore.
I don't know what the solution is, but eBay certainly doesn't have it. eBay Express is a dog. They threw in the towel in China (which was a HUGE initiative for them the past two years that has failed miserably), their stock is flatlined and every initiative outside of auctions has essentially failed.
Isn't this why eBay bought out half.com? I remember before eBay got their grubby mits on half, they actually enforced that something sell of 50% of its sale value. Sure the site didn't have as many items but just about everything on there was a deal. Back to the point, why have an eBay Express at all? They already have a fixed prices sales site.
I heard about it a while ago. I buy tons of ps2 games off ebay, so I get bombarded with their ads every other time I log in. Frankly, I was just confused. It just seemed to needlessly duplicate the Buy-it-Now feature and/or reserve. Near as I can tell, it was purely a marketing thing, meant to position ebay to compete with Amazon and what not.
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EBay actually had the highest bid to go beyond auctions, but just seconds before the closing, someone came in with a higher bid and cherry picked it away from EBay.
Me too never heard of it, and I don't think I will act on this info. Those pesky Buy-now items are bad as it is now, but I'd really like them to be siphoned off to where I won't see them.
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Even with fixed price auctions on normal E-Bay, the seller has the option of offering a 'best offer' feature so you can try and wangle the price down. It looks like even that feature's been omitted from this site - so why the hell not buy using froogle.com which actively lets you search for best prices? This is just a stupid idea.
The reason why ebay express was created was that ebay faced a very distinct possibility that they were going to lose the buy it now feature from their auction site, as the company that won the patent infringement lawsuit sought not only damages, but a permanent injunction against ebay. So ebay was trying to steer the "buy it now" portion to ebay express AND attempt to legitimize the tainted image of high profile "buy it now" auctions. Fortunately for ebay, the Supreme court ruled in favor of ebay, and it happened to be a landmark blow to "patent trolls" everywhere.
I am curious though, how long ebay can continue to raise it's fees and continue to offer LESS features and service and still maintain it's business model. Personally, I think the worst thing ebay ever did was to go public. It never needed to go public, it was a cash cow and was one of the few initial Internet businesses that actually made a LOT of money by doing essentially nothing, but hosting servers. Now ebay's future is dictated by the stockholders.
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Is that sometimes you can get things for a good deal (even after shipping) and sometimes you can get something for a reasonable price when you can't find it anywhere else.
This service offers nothing that you can't get anywhere else, and usually at higher prices.
Seems like a no brainer why this is failing, (plus the buy it now option fills this niche somewhat).
Ebay's glory days are long since passed. There came a point where they went from being the cool little niche pseudo-yardsale, to being some clearing house for every piece of crap some wholesaler from hong kong can get a hold of.
They do everything they can to screw the buyer, and are surprised when a new initiative fails? Issues I've spotted, reported and gotten bullshit form letters in response to:
1)Sellers charging too much for shipping - They give an example of someone charging $20 to ship a DVD as bad. I found someone charging $60 to ship a USB Thumb drive via the slowest cheapest USPS method possible.
2)Sellers setting their "handling" fee as a percentage of final sale - I found a fellow who'd listed all his auctions stating that the handling fee was 4% of the final sale price or something of that nature.
3)Keyword spamming - How many times have you seen an item listed as: DLink NOT Linksys
4)Misrepresenting items - A linksys befsr41 is not a modem. Funny how that descriptor appeared only in the title and nowhere in the description.
5)Listed multiple entries for the same item - I once came across a seller who had about 30 of the identical item, carbon copy listings, all listed at once all ending at the same time. Their ToS either limits to 5 or 10.
These are just some of the things that I've seen in violation of the ToS, but all from "powersellers". Each time I get a bullshit form letter about how they trust their sellers to do the right thing.
I've also seen numerous examples of abuse of the feedback system. "Powersellers" hold it hostage until you leave yours to ensure they can retaliate if they mess up. I've seen constant entries like this:
Buyer leaves: "Item took 3 months to be delivered from 1 state over. Item was broken, not even the the right item and I think the seller urinated on it before sending it. Seller doesn't respond to e-mails."
Seller leaves in response: "Bad ebayer stay away!!!!!!!11!!!omg."
Ebay was supposed to be a buyers market, but its turned into a wholesalers market where they rule the roost. More and more people are realizing that and when a solid replacement comes along I think you'll see it pick up quite a bit. Hopefully it won't fall prey to the same issues Ebay did.
It's interesting to watch eBay slowly die.
They announced a few days ago that they were going to relaunch their China operation, due to the fact that this market has failed for them. Desperate measures. It's taking a little longer than Japan, but surely dying nonetheless. Pretty much every day since their Eachnet purchase they've been bleeding customers.
Their stock price is less today than it was the same time last year, which is less again than the same time the previous year. It is slowly and surely sliding downwards.
The talented Jeff Jordan is gone, Meg Whitman has seemingly been conspicuous by her absence from the media spotlight all year, and externally seems to have done very little to change the companies' fortunes. Growth overall is stagnant or negative, and this Express site is obviously just one more failure.
I think the fundamental issue is one of completely failing to either listen to, or even make a token attempt to understand the needs of customers. They've completely failed to address a number of fraudulent behaviors - especially of Power Sellers - in the name of profit. They're like the anti-Google. 1...2...3... let's do eVil!
Buying on eBay is relatively easy to accomplish technically. Of course, you have to hope and pray you've not sent money to a fraudster, and you are most likely going to be paying through the nose for shipping. But technically it's not too time consuming.
Selling, however... is by no means easy. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to sell one item. It can take an hour or two list something, and once you do, you will be paying eBay and Paypal a significant percentage for your hassle, so you'd either better be very dedicated, have no wholesale costs, or as forementioned, scam the buyer with extra shipping charges to cover the eBay fees. When something goes wrong, you are on your own.
Economies of scale and listing tools may help pro sellers, but are way too much hassle for someone that just wants to sell some old piece of crap they found in their garage. Selling on Amazon is considerably easier. Selling on Craigslist is easier. Selling is easier pretty much anywhere else.
Up until 2003 every Christmas period was one of fantastic growth and revenue for eBay. Their stock price shot up every quarter. Since there is still demand for Internet traded goods, the only explanation for their current predicament that any reasonable person can conclude is "Management Failure".
What happened to Google's Base thing? I've heard nothing about it for months. My feeling is that the only reason eBay (and actually Amazon and a few others) are still around is because: 1. we still have no good Internet Micropayments system, and 2. Search engine technology still has much room for improvement.
If I were an executive at Walmart, or Microsoft, or Google or one of the many other 452 Fortune 500 companies more successful than eBay, I'd be watching them closely. I'd expect these executives to be circling like sharks or vultures. eBay looks as though it is in trouble for sure, maybe not bottomed out yet, but thoroughly on their way down.
"Buy it Then"...
We do about half of our sales through eBay, and we've been there since close to the beginning (1997). This isn't necessarily because we want to do business through them, it's just easier to find buyers through them than through our normal websites. eBay is very good at getting our items pushed to the top of search engines.
For a while, we were the largest eBay Store in our category, with about 12,000 items. We also ran about 1,000 auctions every week, mostly to drive people from the auctions to our store items (if a potential buyer was interested in one kind of product, our auction listing would give them an option to click on related items in our store). A few months ago, in an effort to drive business toward eBay Express, eBay dramatically increased the rates for eBay Store listings (from between 150% and 400%, depending on the cost of the item). This price increase had two results. First, many of our competitors opted to leave eBay completely, preferring to try their luck with other venues. Second, our profit margin on eBay dropped significantly.
We haven't seen any significant sales through eBay Express, and we don't expect that to change. I'd guess that eBay has probably lost a significant amount from this experiment, because their attempt to push people toward an undesirable venue has caused them to lose a large number of high-volume sellers.
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Buying online is all about trust, and eBay doesn't have mine either. The eBay feedback system is so broken. When the system for ensuring trust is not trustworthly - you know there is a problem.
Very few people leave negaitive feedback. And not without great fear of retaliatory feedback. A lot of people don't leave feedback at all anymore.
I know that the feedback system has to balance the buyer and the seller. Right now it's tilted far to the side of the seller. And that has helped to drive the increasing number of scammer and frauds selling on eBay.
Good luck to eBay - getting back trust once it's been broken is not easy.
I browsed eBay Express over the past month or so, and I was not impressed. It seemed I was seeing the same sellers over and over again in specific categories, and the prices were not great. I wanted to browse for some fishing gear, and my search returned pages and pages of rod building parts, but very little of what I wanted. The Buy It Now feature works for auctions because it assumes someone is already out there looking for a specific product. When it comes to browsing for merchandise, most online stores fall flat. That's one of the shortcomings I see with eBay Express. I stil have much better luck browsing for (non-big-ticket) items in a brick-and-mortar establishment, but if I'm looking for specific items, I usually will start online.
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it would help if people knew what "eBay express" was...
I've never heard of it. no wonder.
I'd totaly shop there.
I HATE bidding....
Buy it now rules.
of course, maybe I hadn't heard of "express", since I've been simply using eBay and their Buy It Now buttons...
No reason for another site.
especially if you haven't heard of it!
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I've been buying and selling periodically on eBay since late 1998, and have been watching them almost since since the site began. My focus has been on computers and peripherals, so I can only speak clearly on that. What has been obvious since almost the very beginning is that for some reason, a lot of people at eBay will pay far too much for older EIDE hard drives and later-model used laptops, to the point that even looking at these auctions is a waste of time and energy. I've never quite understood it.
There are doubtless many other such pockets of bidding irrationality scattered throughout their categories, besides older EIDE hard drives, newer used laptops and game consoles.
PingSpike said: "A few years later, ebay had exploded. I stopped even looking on the website when I realized everything cost more then newegg and other retailers. I only pop in occasionally to see how much people are getting gouged on the latest consoles."
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Me either. I've been an eBay user for eight years and this is the first time I've heard they have a fixed-price site... seriously. Did they ever advertise it? If so, did they just say 'EBay Express' or give something that mentions 'a fixed price site'. And what's wrong with the workings of 'By It Now' anyway?
Flame me all you want. EBay sucks. There's rarely any $avings and too often you have a problem with getting ripped off or having some spastic asshole in your face.
I try really hard to avoid it. I'm at the point where I just throw it away than try to sell it. It's too much trouble dealing with the weirdos.
There's been some complaining here about eBay feedback ratings. What's good? eBay provides a "feedback score" and a "positive feedback percentage". How would one translate that into, say, "Good", "Medium", and "Bad"?
With Paypal you can pay for multiple winning items at once. I did it quite often the past few weeks. Bought about 12 things on eBay .. all Buy It Now. Didn't even bother with eBay Express.
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It's not as if this is the first time a successfully focused corporation tried to grow by expanding its brand into areas it doesn't specialise in and diluted its brand in the process. It's a text-book recipe for long-term mediocrity. Diet Coke, anybody?
RTFM; please, I beg you.
I have an account there since 1996 and thing are in some areas better than before, but in others, it is worse. Let me explain.
1. I'm in Canada. Too many listings are "Will ship to United States Only" there should be some incentive for sellers to sell to other countries. Ebay Canada is really bad, and the variety of items there is not up to par with the USA eBay.
Keep in mind that it used to be worse. We were a long time with no PayPal in Canada, and back then, many sellers refused Canadian Money Orders outright.
I often get what I want by asking the seller if he will accept to ship to Canada, but it really is an hindrance.
2. The Price Gouging(TM) It's obvious that some sellers are selling items with a ridiculous price and then charge a lot more than required for shipping. That practice is against eBay Rules, but I have yet to see anyone that was prosecuted.
3. eBay Store and reliability. I recently had a problem with one seller and I gave up. The seller's store advertised a phone number + email address for support, but I never received any answer for the seller. I had to send back the product to the seller (Cell Phone Battery) at m,y expenses. By the time the item was sent and my waiting time, all the eBay automated services refused to provide me with support for either a refund nor leave feedback to the seller. Reading the seller's feedback, I saw that many people had the same problems.
eBay to have a store front on eBay, tthey should check the customer satisfaction once in a while. A feedback rating below 99.9 % should automatically mean that the whole store front is frozen and seller should have some explanation to do with eBay themselves.
4. It's not really ebay's problem, but custom duty fees for individuals for Low Value Shipment should be no more than 5 bucks. It burns me to pay no less than 35 $ to UPS or FedEx everytime I buy something from the United States. eBay should have it's own brokerage service. That would boost international sales.
5. Brand new items are nice, I'm thinking here Cell Phones (Unlocked). They would be almost impossible to find here at a good price. But stores selling dollar store items online, I don't think so. Bulk posting of items should be limited and they should be marked as such so they don't clutter searches.
As a "backward" canadian, that's my opinion...
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