eBay's negative sentiment continues

Your blog is partially responsible for the downward pressure on eBay stock. You have always written negative about the company.

ebay can rot in H_ll, they have destroyed thousands of sellers who did this full time. Its not just the fees, but manipulating the search engines to favor auctions over store which ebay promoted. In 9 years they got $40,000. from me and rather than building relationships, we got knifed in the back! My feedback is 13,300 I have already pulled 600 items from my store, I have auctions and accounts now active on Amazon, Online Auction & Waggle Pop. In our case we purchased an 8300 Sq Ft building with 14 commercial business suites, then advertised in magazines for people to open up online ebay stores. Escrow closed on June 12th and on July 19th the Cobb letter arrived.

Now I monitor ebay for illegal merchandise and am in touch with law enforcement to remedy ebays one way street approach to profits and greed vs the community it once was. Now in my case, I do press releases per the polygamy in America issue in the news and I think investing in ebay is risky with sellers who feel as I do and YES we are communicating outside of ebay!

Jay Beswick

eBay has put so many people out of business its not even funny. I sat in amazement last week as I sat and read the letter that there was going to be yet another fee hike. Hello the economy sucks. People are only buying what they need. There is not a whole lot of room for extras for the average joe. Its all you can do to put gas in the car and food on the table.

I am a work at home mom. I have my degree in Graphic Design. I also have 4 children that need to be mothered. I am average part of the "working poor" We used to rely on the money I earned from eBay. But over the last 5 years it has gone completely down hill.

I have been accused of stealing my own work. Even though I registered it with eBay's Vero. I have sat and watched other people steal my work only to have eBay pull my listings and claim that they did not belong to me.

I have had listings pulled for no good reason and my buyers pretty much told I was a fraud. I have written countless emails to them Only to get no responce, I have called on the phone to get told to email. And NOW MORE FEES??

I will tell you this much. I am done. They want too much money. The store was nice to have even though they upped the fee last year. (which I felt was wrong as well) But the fact of the matter is. There are other ways to sell products. There are other ways to make money online. There are google ads there is google's froogle there is yahoo shopping, shop.com and I can sell what I want for the price I want. At all these differant places. I am not going to get stuck in the middle of a "I am gonna sell mine for a penny war" I am not going to be mis treated stepped on and then on top of it ROBBED BLIND.

I recently found out that according to eBay Policy I can't be on their anyway because I have my own merchant account. WHY? I use a repuatable company that has been in business for over 30 years BEFORE ONLINE existed. SO WHY can't I use them. Well wait I know because eBay doe'snt own them.

You know there's not much in this world that we can do anything about. You can't control how much gas is. Or the price of goods because of the gas prices. Hell we can't even control anything I swear if there was a way for someone to figure out to charge for air they would.

One thing I can control is where I sell. And I choose not to sell on ebay WHY??? BECAUSE ITS NOT WORTH IT. You make 40cents on the dollar and thats if you didn't buy it to sell it. ITs dumb the fee's are too high.

Ol Meg can take her "POWER OF EBAY" and "POWER OF PAYPAL" and she can go sit with the great and "POWERFUL WIZARD OF OZ" Because as long as those fee's are high. I am done with eBay. I spent over $9.000 in fee's last year. Between ebay and paypal. YOu know how much I made? 15,000 You tell me is it worth it?

I am taking my business back and I know alot of others will too. eBay has gone too far. ANd they can give what ever they want away for half price. I am not buying into it.

I will tell you. That night I got the letter. I went straight to my ebay account and closed the store and ended my listings. You know what IT FELT GOOD!!!!!

Ebay has inspired a hatred among its users. And it's time for a revolution.


Anna Malik

Meg & Bill have been very well aware of the problem with link between natural search & driving traffic to the stores & that idiot Chris Tsakalakis who has been on vacation the entire time is at the dead center of this fiasco.

Bill lied to us in 2-2005 and that RATE INCREASE where they gave us a nickle back when people were already being encouraged by ebay to shove listings in the stores. Ebay needs to make up their mind on what they want us to use & then move their butts out of our way so we can grow our business.

Meg lied to us in June at ebay live, saying she wanted to help grow our business how we see fit! WTF, why would I want her to help me grow my business when she can't even get the natural search optimized the way it used to be

They lied to the analyst because the analyst wanted to hear it. Theres no way sellers would of rolled over on this one. They knew the stock would tumble just like it did last year.

And their contrite discount specials are making me sick, tossing us a few quarters so we go list for them so they dont' have to show their bosses just how bad they messed it up.

Go to the stores board forums, go to ebays blogs. See for yourselves investors. We want Pierre back, get Meg & Bill & Chris T out of here so this business can skyrocket

Ebay is the Enron of the internet.

and another thing that message that was sent up, those numbers are wrong. You have to click the link to see what the true amounts are and once you get your calculator out & compare the 2 you'll see, thats a huge difference and not anywhere near 6%

They must have a finance guy with brain damage because the current fees, that's not even what we pay right now. What a stupid mistake of numbers and people have already bailed from ebay because of it.

and how can anyone read that and understand what their fees per item will be? Oh trust ebay to calculate right? Nooo way, they messed up my billing for 2 months in a row

All of the retail merchants SHOULD BE AWARE EBay IS AN AUCTION COMPANY first, store format is a SECOND choice for the BUYERS. Fees are up on INVENTORY formatted stores, so good luck to their new venture on other RETAIL SITES and see how your PROFIT MARGIN will BE.

All this negative talk about eBay is insane. Lots of people will buy their Christmas gifts on eBay this year because of the price of gas. They will avoid Christmas traffic like crazy. The price of gas has slowed everything down, people are not buying as much, they can't afford to buy. The store price increase was warranted in my opinion. Sellers took advantage of eBay by placing thousands of items in their store for 2 cents each for 30 days. Then they would place a measly 50 or 100 auction items for sale hoping to drive traffic to their store to sell the remaining 900 items. EBay should have set a limit on how many items can be placed for 2 cents for 30 days. Three cents more per item is not going to put a successful business out of business. Infact If I were eBay I would put a limit on how many items can be parked in a store for 5 cents.

Look, we have posted our feelings on the eBay "Stores" discussion board about all the fee hikes and if you think negativity is rampant, you might want to check out what the "core customers" are saying. You cannot find a positive post on the board. Sellers are more than angry with greedbay. http://forums.ebay.com/db2/forum.jspa?forumID=21

Greedbay's unquenchable thirst for money is so much that they will not even let their customers get in the way. Charge more, take more, give less - way less!

Customer service? nahh let them email us and we will send a canned response. After a few times they will give up and we can still collect their money. Oh, they want a telephone #? Well let's just give them one and hide it and if they find it, we will direct them to that email form again so that we can send a canned message out mmmuuuuuuaaaahhhahahhaah

Search feature for stores? Ahh let's hide the store listings after we pitched the H@ll out of stores at eBay live and launched eBay Express which is a FIXED PRICE platform. We will pitch the H@LL out of fixed pricing, stores and express and after everyone is on the wagon let's switch gears and do away with ALL of that. Let's now pitch "the magic" of eBay and offer discounts on "auction style listings!" The other stuff we spent millions on, let's just bag it hehehe.

These sellers are such idiots, we can pitch whatever we want and switch our directions within weeks or days! We are the kings!

Look, there are alternatives out there and with the help of places like http://www.auctionbytes.com and http://www.ebayauctionmasters.com we can all list somewhere else!

TBS

#6 Obviously not one with a ebay store. ebay encouraged the mass listings in emails when we set up the stores. It was to be for those mass inventories that did not sell well on auction. Then we were told to drive traffic to our own stores. Most of us paid seperately to have our stores linked to search engines. Shortly after ebay tried to redirect inquiries to our store pages, forwarded to other ebay sellers with similiar items. ebay benefitted from traffic driven to their site via our stores that we paid other outside firms to promote. I have my store address in magazines, on business cards etc.

In a real world, this is called UNJUST ENRICHMENT, FRAUD, BREACH OF CONTRACT, PRICE FIXING, MONOPLY, ANTI-TRUST VIOLATIONS, INTERFERING WITH INTERSTATE COMMERCE, IF STOCKS WERE DEVALUATED FOR A 2 BILLION DOLLAR APPROVED BUYBACK, THEN MANIPULATING STOCK & INSIDE TRADING. If this isn't enough the phising, identity theft, stolen property rings and other illegal sales, are issues just now begining to mature.

I am a consultant to Law Enforcement and while making part of my living here, I turned a blind eye or gave up trying to police ebay. 6 Years ago one of our non profit members wrote ebay to clean up its act regarding the sale of vandal materials, San Jose being in Santa Clara County, our member was the Santa Clara County District Attorney. ebay blew the DA off, reserving ebays right to circumvent California law. We let ebay slide....

This go around I have 100 cities Identifying product and I am buying objects and devices. Because ebay hurt sellers with no regard for their survival, its time to merely force ebay to play by state law. Its not revenge, more its no longer turning a blind eye to existing violations of law.

You want to invest with a sleezy corporation, go to it, but its one that will remain in the news for quite some time. Added to this is the foreign news of the developements in India and China, which serve to further out source business outside the USA. The news article state that its China's seller market at stake. They knock off copyright infringement product, I know because we in LE have documented such. They have a labor that will work for $6.00 per day and much of what is resold on ebay was already an import. The Foreign markets will eventually replace the US market, just like real world TEXTILES and greed little stockholders will cheer short term profits, hand China and India the keys to the former USA economy! Why settle for USA middlemen, if the products China produces are sold direct and again by those willing to make $6.00 a day.

Some day the job you lose will be your own. Right now the jobs we save are ours. So with luck, ebay will slide further.

A little secret is the % of units sold verses items listed. The auction represents a 7 to 1 average. Or 1 in 7 items sale. This means that one item has to pay the upfront losses of the 6 that did not sell. The reason sellers don't want to return to the auction, all 541,000 of them, if you follow ebays figures. The 70% of listed items sold, is old and was tricky, the ,99 cent and penny auctions dominated the sale successes. Many .99 cent sales, were packed and padded on the shipping and handling in to make a profit and off set the .99 selling total. If it was a good deal sellers would go willingly!

I have sold 40,000 items in 9 years, paid ebay over $40,000. and have a feedback rating over 13,000 and yet stockholders with no clue think they know more than experienced sellers. You guys must be those with government jobs and no clue to the true reality of ebay.

THE PARTY IS OVER and if you get stuck with worthless stock, then you got what you deserved!

I've been on eBay since 1997. The success of the auction format is dwindling, so sellers moved their items to the stores, where there were sales. But eBay has been having numerous tech problems which they fail to address: repeated "page not responding" errors, the horrid bug-ridden new selling form that increased my listing time from 1 minute to 15 minutes per item, "errors" in billing (always in their own favor), and most critical, search not working.

I sold 8 items via auction to one buyer on the same day. When you search on items purchased by him, only ONE of my items shows up! I couldn't get them to appear when the auctions were live when searching with keywords, which is how buyers find things. My buyer only found them because I emailed the auction numbers to him when he stated interest in similar items. Stores are not included in the main search at all, and recently reports of random "optimization" (aka manipulation) or rolling blackouts of certain stores in search have surfaced. I can take these as more than paranoid theory because the traffic reports provided to my via eBay show that I went from hundreds of hits in June to ZERO to ONE hit daily in July. I seriously doubt there was a mass exodus from the internet at that time since my own website (with the same items) did not show a similar decrease.

I closed my store because I'm not paying even more for a lack of service. Fee hikes I can adjust for, random whims of search "optimization" I cannot. I feel like I'm dealing with a casino rather than an online selling entity. I am also tired of footing the bill for the free listings the people in China and Singapore enjoy while eBay tries desperately to get their foot in the door there. Perhaps part of the "troubling" (Bill Cobb's insulting description) number of store listings is in part caused by eBay giving away their services overseas.

I will not be buying on eBay either. Sellers are going elsewhere, and I will continue to patronize my favorite ones, but NOT on eBay. They need the kick in the pants of some competition. Right now they get away with shoddy service because they think they can.

Maureen

Well said, can I use your posting or do you have reservations about who see's it?

Thanks/Jay Beswick

Hi Jay,

Thanks - and yes, you can use it. I've no problem with sharing my opinion about this mess. I've grumbled on the eBay boards and in my own blog. :-)

Ebay seems to hire incompetent representatives. My husband and I sell on Ebay to be able to support our child with cancer. ( I cannot work because caring for her is a full time job in and of itself). Our account has been suspended for having the words CD-R in several listings although the items were NOT CD-R's but were previously released only as CD-Rs. We are currently searching for a new auction site to use while with face the possibility of losing our home. Ebay needs to re-evaluate the way its policies are carried out. I agree with the policy, but think that the representatives should actually READ a listing instead of violating it based on a word contained in it. It shows ineptitude and laziness. who wants to be part of that?

Wagglepop is $10.00 a month for their store, its small but building quickly. They picked up 300 power sellers in the past 12 days.

Online Auction has 2.3 million auction listings nexts to wbay with its present 11.7 million listings so its the closest 2nd. Its Chris Fain's alternative, he out of Grants Pass Oregon. His is $8.00 a month and there is no FVF on the back end. Its got a ways to go to see ebays traffic, but not a bad site to be an early member of.

Then Amazon's Auctions have unlimited listings for $39.95 and their own credit card payment system. They get a % but with it replace the Pay Pal cost to the sellers.

I am on all 3, still on ebay, but taking down ebay items as I replace them, in these other 3 venues.

Good Luck Melissa, ebay once was a family of sellers and we hope to be again at a smaller more personable site.

Jay Beswick

Bravo,
Jay you are so quick to mentioned $40k in fees you paid on your listings OVER 9 YEARS @ EBay. I DID NOT hear you SAID you lost ANY MONEY in that duration.
So far you did well for SO LONG, over 9 years!! And you are complaining?
EBay is a big enterprise in this domain, there will be opposition as expected, but this company has a long track record of recovering to deliver results.
Wish you well.

overall poor STR, ours is about 20%. Poor on-site search configuration, Extremely Bad CS, Way too many rules most of which make no sense. Continual unwarranted suspensions of sellers and removal of listings over trivial so call eBay infractions. What worse, they shoot first and never answer a question or spin you in circles for hours if one does actually get a response. I have been waiting for 7 years in hopes they would GTST, I have finally realize this hope is like Peeing into the wind. I have a lot of specifics to offer to any stockholder that wishes to hear them. Listing them here would take the better part of a week and I don't have time to waste as I am too busy setting up shop elsewhere. If any stockholders want specifics please use the contact us button on the home page of our website.

www.powersellersunite.com is a great place to look for alternatives and more information also.

It was fair income when I lived in rural Utah, where locals only made $7.50 per hour. Then in 2001 after 911 it took a dive. It was $10.00 an hour type work, long hours made it pay, not so much per hour. ebay introduced the stores in 2001, I didn't understand the stores and resisted until December of 2004. In November of 2004 ebay fees exheeded my gross, it was a slow decline from 911 to Nov. 2004.

I was full time once, but drifted into other part time GIGS and we have 3 incomes supporting 1 house.

The stores kept us, many of us sellers from going under in 2005, but we are talking $50. to $80. per day. It ceased to be what it was, but many of us have huge inventories an that takes time to liquidate. The reality which few sellers study, is the real profits you declare on your taxes and yes I did it legal reporting the income.

I sell low ticket items of $3.99 Assuming a 25% inventory cost which goes up and down, on auction I had to add .35 cents for my minimum without the gallery option. Once sold ebay got another .24 cents in FVF. Since Pay Pal was owned by ebay, another .44 cents went to Pay Pal. On face value this is $2.07 Sounds like a deal except on auction, the ratio of items listed, to items sold, bottomed out at 15-20%. If only 1 in 5 items listed actually sold, then there was another $1.40 in fees of the 4 unsold items, that had to be factored in. Now $2.07 becomes $3.47 out of $3.99

Now I use to get $1.00 S & H and I increased that to $1.50 Stamps, tape, envelopes, blister pack, labels, rubberstamps, the labor to package and more were squeezed into that S & H fee.

Where it got tricky was for years ebay was claiming a 70% volume of sales from items listed. When sales were down, they encouraged us to list more items, it must be something we were doing wrong! More recently I have seen the stats on Penny auctions or .99 cent listings and these largely qualified the stats ebay was using. Such sellers either electronically deliver their items or pad the shipping and handling fees in order to make a profit. Padded is shipping, ebay does not get the same fees as those still operating in good faith.

There was also a time when ebay encouraged and promoted the .99 listings, a guarantee of going backwards if items sold at the minimum.

NO its been a slow death and only small profits to be able to stay and work out of ones home.

I of course use GOOGLE to pick up every story across the wires that mention ebay and truly its motivated by greed and a bottom line and managed to build using tactics that did not fully explain the true sales volumes. We took dozens of emails proding us forward to list, to reduce starting bids and yes to even chose a ebay store to push out inventories that were not auction friendly. Its all a part of ebay promotions and last week promoting stores was still up, they had not pulled the old advertising.

What has pissed off sellers the most is not the fees, but manipulation of the search engines and formats. We were led here, we paid for assumed visibilty and now ebay has changed the rules, including restricting traffic to our sites. I type with one finger staring at the key board, explains the typo's, but how many thousands of hours did it take me to sell 40,000 items or have 2,000 items in my store?

Even if ebay goes back to pre 7-19-06, sellers hate ebay and have dozen of emails that explain why. We were here for traffic, but this time, ebay shot themselves in the foot and most of us would just like to see the monster bleed to death. More smaller and kinder auctions would replace the giant and to most of that would be good.

ebay still has the corporate BIG BOXES, larger stores and salesw operations, but those who search out the rare and unusual would rather do it elsewhere, some place where they feel secure. Even if ebay retreated, in time they would do it all again and again.

good run down on the sites..... I am going with Go Daddy, Online Auction (if you go here, use code 1109 for up to $200.00 in listing credit), Bidville & eBay is last! Wagglepop is the biggest joke of the century - go ahead and google the site.

I think it’s worth looking past Meg Whitman’s poor stewardship of Ebay’s shareholder assets for a moment and understand why Ebay sellers are being alienated and why so many large sellers are failing . It’s important to fully understand that virtually all of Ebay’s revenue comes from these sellers. As a seller, you need to have stable, reliable selling platform to help mitigate at least some of the world market chaos that the internet has become. Ebay is has become a very volatile platform to operate from. When your selling platform is as chaotic as the market itself, your odds of success are unnecessarily diminished. If you are completely reliant on this marketplace as are many of the largest Ebay sellers, the risk of your failure increases exponentially. Ebay’s current management team does not understand this. With increasing frequency Ebay is forcing change in their seller’s business models. If the seller cannot adapt the volatility of Ebay’s platform, the result is failure of the business and loss of revenue to Ebay’s owners.

As an investor, imagine that NYSE’s or NASD’s trading platform and fees being changed in a wildly unpredictable manner. Imagine you are constantly forced to devote so much time to adapting to the trading platform changes that your ability to do research and trades are severely impaired. Imagine that your only recourse is to move your business off of NYSE or NASD and to trading on a small backwater exchange ………………… welcome to selling on Ebay.

Online Auction had 55,000 items listed in January, yesterday they were at 2.3 million, IN 7 MONTHS????

A GROUP OF LETS SAY SEVERAL DOZEN POWER SELLERS CONTINUE TO COMMUNICATE OUTSIDE OF EBAY. Each with their own network of friends and sellers, are trying to jump and land some where safe! For whatever reason the core like Wagglepop, where I counted only about 17,000 items 2 days ago. 300 ebay store jumped there since July 19th hoping for a miracle.

Yesterday I saw 2,000 + items belisted as they use sequenctial numbering as ebay once did. The rate between listings is at present faster than ebay 1998. I remember when ebay sequenctial assigned numbers were less than 5 million and items added are out pacing that time period. The exodus is the make or break of these small auction and the media stories are driving traffic in 100 directions.

This time I went to Amazon first, as it is my 3rd try with a Commercial Merchant account at $39.95 per month for unlimited listings. Amazon is predictable and a market I have used before. Online Auction has its numbers listed on the Power Sellers Unite web page which updates volumes hourly. It is the runner up to ebay and in a week I saw ebay fall from 17 million plus items to less than 12 million yesterday, auction items only we are speaking. Online while is a sudden growth cycle appears the favored dark horse these days. The Grants Pass firm has some inovative thinking and was my second venue for $8.00 a month.

WAggle is about a core of ebay sellers bent on going there, so I have a store there at $9.95 per month. Several hundred sellers sticking together, if properly networking could build almost any site they join if working together in orchestration.

ebay, well I had 2040 items in my store, 7,000 items total for those where I had several listed. I down sized to 1380 and am not ready to further trim, until my other 3 sites are of more listings. I have added nothing to auction or store since 7-19, so missing one day for BLACK MONDAY, wouldn't be difficult. I have however purchased items advertised for graffiti & vandalism. MEAN STREAK Graffiti Markers, Refillable INK for Special extra wide tip MARKERS & Montana Spray Paint Advertised as the best Graffiti Paint on the market. Because the spray paint industry replaced CFC propellants, the replacement was propane as a compressed gas and as such it is a federal offense to air ship this, with added penalties after 911. On the ebay Soap Box forum I posted this in detail for ebay in front of many witnesses, having several friend download the PDF files should ebay later sweep or clean the content of the forums. ebay was told of products before I bid on them. when I paid by pay pal and when they arrived. As Deputy Director to nograf at www.nograffiti.com warning of California access laws being violated were stated as official complaints. The Santa Clara County DA use to be a member when he held that counties position. Given the protect auctions that ebay pulled, they could as easily pulled those items identified and did when I first ID a few, prior to realizing I had a list in the hundreds. When they pullled the first, they knew I was right about California law. WILL KAOS FOLLOW, I HOPE SO! ebay is not motivated by doing the right thing, only by GREED and that BOTTOM LINE. I have 100 US Cities pulling for me to take ebay down over years of access for vandals, including the sale of acid creams that destroy merchants glass storefronts. My issue alone could keep ebays name in the press. The yearly cost of vandalism to remove or replace is 15 Billion dollars, taxpayers don't like it, because government spends that majority. It was a simple task for ebay to pull 200 items begining with bait of a few, but they faltered when they realized it was a few hundred. In mid stream they allowed me to tell them what I was doing and did not stop the later sales. Our non profit is 70% Law Enforcement members so we kind of know the laws state to state and we have members in 21 countries, so we have reach outside the U.S. ALL EBAY HAD TO DO, WAS DO THE RIGHT THING! THEY ARE STUCK!