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EBay Deal Irritates Individual Sellers
Dekortage writes "EBay's recent deal with Buy.com appears to be seriously irritating its veteran individual sellers. The deal allows Buy.com and other large fixed-price retailers to list millions of items on eBay without paying listing fees, and appears to be the direction that eBay will follow in the future. Understandably, individual sellers are outraged. 'I've paid eBay many hundreds of thousands in fees over the past several years and believed them when they talked about a level playing field. And they just plain and simple are going back on their word.' This comes after the dire prediction that eBay is losing its popularity."
With no real competition in the online auctions and micropayment system, I don't see things getting better. Craigslist auction anyone?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Their anti gun policy made me stop using ebay years ago....
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
You hear that kind of excuse a lot, just like when a politician does something particularly egregious (e.g. Obama's FISA vote) you hear people explaining, "Oh, that's just a compromise to get more votes. He can't do anything if he isn't elected."
The problem with the stock explanation is that it's very often just wrong. Ebay's current emphasis on big sellers at the expense of individuals is losing them money, just like Obama's FISA sellout is losing him votes. Piss off your core market to chase some other potential market, and odds are you won't do well with either. By all means, businesses should try to expand their customer base and politicians should try to appeal to more voters. But when you abandon the people who got you where you are in the first place, you're almost guaranteed to suffer overall.
Businesses that do well are those which build a steady, loyal customer base that keeps coming back for more. This is particularly true in the online world, where changing to a competitor is very, very easy; the few success stories to come out of the dot-com mania of a decade ago show how to do it right. Amazon, for all its evil, still does a damned good job of selling books. Google, no matter what else it does, remains far and away the best general-purpose search engine. Until a couple of years ago, I'd have counted Ebay among those success stories, but now it looks as though they were just as flaky as any HowFastCanWeBurnVentureCapital.com site; they just took longer to show it.
Suits and their sycophants love to talk tough about how they serve the bottom line ... but in the real world, the suits are wrong more often than not, and here's a sterling example.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
eBay's stake in Craigslist does not allow for any management input on eBay's part, and based on Craig's previous behavior I don't think he'd have any qualms about competing with them.
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Well, it is an auction, and a fixed time length.
One thing eBay should do to fix one of the major problems of their auctions is that every time a bid is entered, and there is less than 5 minutes left on the auction, the auction time should be extended to 5 minutes.
That way, there is none of this nonsense of waiting until 10 seconds before the end of the auction and then bidding furiously. If you knew that each time you bid you would extend it 5 minutes to give other's a chance, items would be selling for realistic values and not trumped up values in the last few seconds of an auction.
I know several people who used to do a lot of business on Ebay who are rapidly becoming disgusted with it because of its clear preference for giant sellers over individuals; I'm not at all surprised to hear that this is a general trend.
The only sellers that should be disgusted are ones with their head in the sand. EBay's costs mostly fixed so they grow through volume. You get volume through larger customers who can provide that volume. Economic inevitability.
EVERY non-regulated company I'm aware of besides eBay provides volume discounts in some fashion for larger customers. I was an individual seller as well as a high volume power seller. One of the (many) reasons I no longer sell through eBay is precisely BECAUSE they provided no incentive for me to bring additional business to them. They kept raising rates instead of providing incentives to bring additional volume. Basically they priced me (and lots of others) out of their marketplace. It was too expensive as an individual or a business to continue to sell on eBay.
but why are they abandoning the business that made them successful in the first place?
The short answer is that they decided a long time ago to become a publicly traded company and the growth demands of being public is the deal with the devil you make to get equity funding. That's why companies don't really want to go public unless the owners are either cashing out (private equity) or they have no other choice. Had eBay remained a privately held company they could have chosen to stay their present size.
Businesses out grow their original business model all the time. Some businesses simply do not scale beyond a certain point. Amazon started as an online bookseller that had no warehouses of their own. That only scaled to a point. IBM got out of the personal computer business not long ago. That particular niche of the industry just didn't hold enough growth/profit potential for them anymore and was more of a distraction than an asset. When you are a publicly traded company shareholders demand growth and eBay has hit a wall with being the world's premier online flea market.
Well the big difference is that eBay tries to act like wal-mart. Making everything fit their ideals, extra safe, family oriented and nicey nice ... as long as they can squeeze out the extra .01c per transaction.
Is it me or has the size of eBay become the other half of the downfall. I hate searching for something and finding a million junk auctions or ubsurd shipping (which ebay is mostly to blame for anyhow) on many others. People that list 1000's of items simultaneously all for 'buy it now' aren't auctioning anything - they below in a store. Perhaps part of a larger, searchable multi-store "online mall" but still.
Ebay is trying to move away from 'auction' and towards 'online store front'. Meh.
Give me a google auction site and maybe i'll start doing online auctions again. Or better, convince Visa, MC, AMEX, or anyone to offer a realistic e-payment system that supports micropayments and fees somewhere close to reality. Seriously.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.