On April 5th, 2010, just 6 days after eBay implemented another round of changes -- click here to see the official announcement -- eBay seller zenartinc posted the following topic in eBay's Seller Central Discussion Forum: "5 DAYS STRAIGHT, NOT 1 SALES. SELLING FOR 10 YRS.WHAT THE IS GOING ON HERE!". It has now been over 3 months and it is by far still the hottest topic on the forum.
As of today, there are over 5,600 replies in response to to the original post (click here to read entire thread), the majority of which are complaints from sellers about the lack of sales on eBay. To be fair, the replies are not from 5600 unique sellers, but there is something to be said for any forum topic that stays in the forefront for that amount of time.
Apparently, eBay sellers who have posted in the thread have a laundry list of complaints:
- Lack of visibility. Sellers' two biggest complaints are that their listings are either buried by listings from eBay China (whose sellers pay no fees and consequently flood the site with unlimited listings of the same items), or what sellers suspect are "rolling blackouts" on eBay's servers.
- No clear definition of how the "Best Match" algorithm works. "Best Match" doesn't seem to work for either sellers or buyers. Buyers often get a hodge-podge of listings when searching -- try searching for "iPod 30gb". Everything from an iPod to iPod parts shows up on the first page. Sellers have no idea what is necessary to achieve high placement in best match.
- Heavy-handed buyer favoritism which has allowed buyer scams to dramatically increase. I won't elaborate on some of the scams sellers have complained about since I don't want to inadvertently provide tips and tricks.
- Seriously flawed feedback system. While other sites have one-sided feedback systems, this is something that does not work for eBay. Sites such as Amazon are true "store" sites: you place your item in a shopping cart and you pay. Until you pay for that item, it remains available in the sellers store. Simple. eBay allows buyers to "Buy It Now" without requiring immediate payment (unless the seller actively selects that option when listing the product). Using "Buy It Now" effectively ends the listing, but until the buyer actually pays for it, the product is in limbo: the seller can't re-list it and sell it to another buyer until the first buyer either pays up, or the seller files and successfully closes and UID (Unpaid Item Dispute -- a process that takes a minimum of 8 days to complete). Without the dual-sided feedback system, sellers have no way to warn other sellers of "deadbeats". To add insult to injury, once a buyer has "bought" an item, they are free to leave feedback whether or not they have paid for the product. Granted, eBay allows you to have negative feedback removed if it is determined that the buyer never actually paid for the item, but it is not automatic (as it should be) and you will have to get customer service on the phone to get it done. You'll recoup your final values on the sale, but guess what? You'll have to pay to list it again.
- Other complaints: Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs) (anonymity doesn't help identify problems, causing difficulty in taking corrective measures), disproportionately preferential treatment for high-volume sellers, canned responses from customer service, and inability to request check, wire transfer or money order payments except in select categories (eBay lists PayPal as the "preferred" method of payment, not surprising since they own PayPal).
Whatever is going on, someone in management forgot that most of eBay's small-medium sellers are also buyers: alienate one and you have alienated the other, which explains the continued growth of Amazon and the rapid growth of eBay-alternative sites such as eCrater, Etsy, and Bonanzle.
Back in 2007, eBay CEO John Donohoe said: "We had to create a vision of the future so people could let go of a very successful past."* If the current customer dissatisfaction is any indication, management has performed admirably.
* Quoted taken from www.leggmason.com, full speech is available here.
Comments
What a great article! Its refreshing to see the truth published instead of the kool-aid drinking investment analysts. Its clear that John Donahoe has destroyed what was once a great and novel business model. In effect, he's killed the golden goose while all it needed was some dressing up! I guess when greed and visions of the success of other sites (Amazon) gets in the way...this could well be the outcome. Ebay is now desperate. Their second quarter has closed and in spite of free listing days last month and two full weeks of free listing days this month they are still clearly in decline. Sellers are so buried in the listings and so many buyers have left that now instead of 100 views on an item per week its more usual to see only 3 or 4 views! Who is going to continue to pay for that kind of service! Ebay's board best wake up and soon now...its almost too late for a real turnaround...back to common sense and good business practices!
Sellers have been reporting slow, low, or non existent sales since the last round of changes.
Some point to the slow down as being economy related. If you want to believe that nonsense, go right ahead and believe.
Fact is eBay's slow sales are not economy related. If the economy was the problem, eBay would not be the only website with the problem.
Reality is that Amazon, Bonanzle and a host of other sites are seeing double digit increases in sales in the same economy in which eBay operates and the economy is not a valid excuse for eBay.
The biggest change in the last round was elimination of store inventory listings and rolling those listings into core where sellers were promised better visibility. How sellers listings were going to get better visibility when millions of store inventory listings were being combined into core was never defined, and turned out to be another false claim made by eBay executives.
Core has become such an overloaded mess that many buyers si
Core has become such an overloaded mess that many buyers simply find it easier to X out of eBay and search other less jumbled websites which offer better and more accurate search results than eBay provides.
The truth is that eBay sales have been slowly declining for years. Profits were no longer driven by the low fee / high volume model that had performed so well in the past. eBay wanted to please Wall Street so they proceeded down a slippery slope whereby they started raising fees to offset the lost volume.
As sales continued to slow - not grow, eBay still needed to improve it's bottom line revenue. The next target became those inexpensive store inventory listings.
Management decided that those store listings had to be monetized to Bay's financial advantage. The result was the elimination of store inventory listings, and another round of fee increases.
eBay did not care that hundreds of thousands of hard to find items were going to disappear from the market place, an
Nice article but you left out a lot of other stuff that is wrong with Ebay. Customer service is a major problem because there is hardly any. In a world where customer service is everything, Ebay will eventually lose out.
John Donothole bites the big one.
I enjoy buying on etsy. I just recently added a seller account so I could use my business name. I just listed some items on bonanzle and it was the easiest way to list. No listing fees for bonanzle either! Or expiration date on listing! Only a fee when items sell. I look forward to spending more time on these alternate venues. I see lots of sales on etsy too. Bad economy or not.
No one had asked for Free Listing Days. A Seller pays for their so called (Free) at the end on commission fees etc. - since prices that now have sky rocketed anyone out there knows by now -eBay has nothing to offer for free.
All we wanted was fair treatment - same as any Buyers get.
Like Equal Feedback Options etc. - I have joined Bonanzle after neing with the now called "Greed Brothers for 9 years.
Commission Fees on Bonanzle where $5.30 -where as on Fee_Bay same would have cost me $28+ for same total on sales.
Who would be in their right mind not to go and join another site like Bonanzle.Also no lising fees there and Item srays listed till it sells for free. A low commission fees only when Item sells - not like eBay where one pays .55c on every listing every 7 days of auction.
Anyway`s get smart and join the newest fastest Auction Site (www.bonanzle.com) . (J.Donahoe) will gone soon ! Guaranteed. Since it is all about Ruling the World with eBay !
I was ripped off by sellers on several occasions when there was dual feedback and Ebay's/Paypal's guarantee is a joke. Why don't you look into this? How about seller admits by email he misrepresented item. He tells me tough. I have to wait to file claim to allow time for buyer/seller resolution (bear in mind seller said tough). I file claim and have to wait weeks for investigation (they have copy of seller's email saying tough). Ebay/Paypal notifies me by email they will refund if I send back misrepresented item. Exactly one business day later Ebay/Paypal notifies me by email since I didn't return item and provide them proof of same they were closing file and marking RESOLVED. No appeal possible.
I quit selling on ebay about 2 1/2 years ago, when the dsr stars came out and the 4* out of 5 * rating wasn't good enough, not to mention the one way FB BS.
I only use internet for more rare things I cant find locally for hobby/collecting. Ebay is a ghost town for my favorite things nowdays. It also strains my (new) computer, but I've still tried to look sometimes.
Now Bonanzle... big whoop. There was something I wanted to buy there for a couple hundred $ or so. But then I noticed the 'owners' picture, looked like some kindly old shop keeper guy from the midwest, was a stock avatar, which strikes me as a big fat scam. A fake picture to create a false impression of trustworthiness. So Bonanzle gets an F, and the same bad word of mouth as ebay.
You people still trying to sell on ebay, good luck but I don't feel sorry for any of you. Whining on that ebay forum is not going to change a thing. No one cares. It's up to you individually to move on or accept being abused.
E Bay has ceased to be. Most of what they do is immoral and dishonest, some of what they do is illegal. Look into their open encouragement of shill bidding by hiding bidding ID's to prevent detection/reporting or their special treatment of Chinese corporations clogging the site up with counterfeit items by the thousands.
It would appear that the eBay whale has now well and truly beached itself, has died, and is now stinking. Unless you are somewhat mentally disturbed, you can only stand and watch and smell the horrible aftermath of this sad, self-inflicted event for so long.
Even I have gotten tired of watching this idiot Donahoe as he has most stupidly, cruelly and inhumanely, slowly slaughtered this, probably the most successful commercial golden-egg laying goose of modern times.
Apparently, headless turkeys harbor great resentment towards such gifted geese …
Whatever is the grand plan that this fool Donahoe has for eBay, clearly there is no place in it for all those “small” sellers who made eBay the success that it used to be, nor for the buyers who wanted to buy what those sellers had to offer. Does not sound like a sensible strategy for “turning a business around”—unless it’s about going around in circles.
Still, it will be interesting to hear how the Chief Headless Turkey spins the ongoing disastrous consequences of the April Fools Day IT Massacre, when he presents what will undoubtedly be another creative reporting on the 21st next.
In the meantime, for anyone seriously interested in the utter incompetence and deviousness of eBay’s executive management generally, and in particular eBay’s deliberate and demonstrable criminal facilitation of the rampant shill bidding fraud being perpetrated on unsuspecting buyers, via nominal-start auctions, by a great many unscrupulous professional sellers, an introduction thereto (along with some PayPal horror stories thrown in for good measure) can be found at
www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=6502877
As a seller for 15 years, after the April change, my sales just about disappeared. I am paying more fees than getting sales and am considering closing shop completely as ebay is doing nothing about the problem.
I tried to shop for something the other day and the listings are so polluted with the same cheap items being listed thousands of times that I gave up and made my $300 dollar purchase at Amazon.
ebay is gone. We need to start supporting eCrater, Etsy, Bonanzle, and Amazon. I have already moved stuff to ecrater and bonanzle.
As a result of reading this post and Antique Trader Blog post on this subject, then visiting the discussion forum myself, I decided to create my own blog post on this subject. I would appreciate it, if anyone wants to take a look at my thoughts on the subject on my blog, French at hArt: www.frenchathart.blogspot.com
If Donahore gets hit by an 18 wheeler, I’ll celebrate. As for Ebay, Ebay is Dead. REST IN PIECE EBAY...
Unfortunately, it would appear that eBay's Board has as much understanding of what eBay is (or was) as has the Chief Headless Turkey, Donahoe.
I am officially on my way out the ebay door. Called Ebay about a feedback issue and after voicing my less than friendly opinions of what ebay is doing to sellers....I was told "then maybe Ebay is no longer for you" Seriously?? Well, then stupid me...all the money I pay them and told I should leave. Don't have to tell me twice. My sales have dropped tremendously in the last two weeks. Why bother, can't even keep up with the fess.
I am officially on my way out the ebay door. Called Ebay about a feedback issue and after voicing my less than friendly opinions of what ebay is doing to sellers....I was told "then maybe Ebay is no longer for you" Seriously?? Well, then stupid me...all the money I pay them and told I should leave. Don't have to tell me twice. My sales have dropped tremendously in the last two weeks. Why bother, can't even keep up with the fess.
I am officially on my way out the ebay door. Called Ebay about a feedback issue and after voicing my less than friendly opinions of what ebay is doing to sellers....I was told "then maybe Ebay is no longer for you" Seriously?? Well, then stupid me...all the money I pay them and told I should leave. Don't have to tell me twice. My sales have dropped tremendously in the last two weeks. Why bother, can't even keep up with the fess.
Sorry folks, I am not reposting that over and over. Every time I have refreshed the page a new post appears. I will just go now lol
To all you Americans over the other side of the pond, take it from me. You WILL get rid of John Donahoe eventually, trust me on this. The question is will you remove him BEFORE or AFTER he destroys Ebay. We had a similar situation here in UK with our Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his hopeless gang of Labour spendthrifts. If we hadn't have removed them from office on May 6th, and given them another 5 years, Britain would have been well and truly finished.
The same is true of Ebay. You must get rid of John Donahoe. He is not cut out for the job. He should be a football coach or something. Under him Ebay will fizzle out. Get him out before its too late.
And as for all that cr*p about Paypal taking over the world. Hahaha. Talk about a pipedream. Paypal is so easily replicated, and in the era of the internet, critical mass is no security.
If i had stacks of money, i'd short Ebay big time now.
Bye from England, your former colonialists.
Who knows, maybe with Ebid? English and better.
Just posted my last auctions on ebay.
Ebay abuses it's sellers and is now dying on it's feet.
Will never buy anything through ebay again, and will be doing all my selling on Bonanzle.
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