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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?
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
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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However, eBay Express doesn't support transactions outside of the USA, so I visited the site once and never went back.
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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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.
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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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.
They'll get my encryption algorithm when they pry it from my cold, dead hard drive.