eBay after the bell 8-10-06: Mutiny on the eBay

Instead of eBay, we sell our paintings on ArtByUs.com . They don't allow mass produced artworks on their site. Artists don't have to pay anything to list on the site and the owner understands art. While it takes time until more people know about them, we are willing to support ArtByUs.com .

They really just don't get it.

The store owners by and large have a vested long time interest in ebays success. They are the ones who buy google adwords, build websites to point traffic to ebaystores, optimize for SE placement, join link lists and webrings, run loss leader auctions to pull traffic, and a thousand other things to PROMOTE ebay. Auction sellers (not all, but most) have little incentive for promotion.

For many years and until just prior to ebays fee hike / bring back the magic announcement ebay has heavily promoted the stores concept as the future of ebay. Sellers were encouraged to open stores and stock as much as possible.

And now, with this new corporate strategy, those same sellers are basically being to told "we don't want you here anymore". Ebay has become shifting sand for many who have heavily invested in time and inventory and rely on internet commerce for their income.

This may well be the straw that breaks the camels back. A great many sellers have been forced by economic sanction alone to close shop. Many more will be going in the next month as increases take effect. Others are re-evaluating their ebay business and moving at least some inventory and business to competing sites.

As for this writer, well, I've already closed up and have been steadily moving inventory elsewhere. I deal mostly in vintage early 1900's postcards. I know my market well. Success requires a very high inventory and turnover is slow. Can't do that anymore on ebay unless I'm willing to price myself out of the market or give about 42% of every sale back to ebay.

The time is right for someone to step up to the plate and offer a viable ecomm solution. Google is the obvious first choice & I would certainly fully support any effort they made in that direction.

Lets get real with this people. Ebay have a few issues ? So many users slow down the computing power, its needs to be paid for. The shareholders need their dividends. Its getting competitive on cyberspace, Ebay need to charge more to stay ahead. If you cannot handle the extra charges, then change your business. Time dictates change, don`t be left behind, think about things a different way and profit will come big again.

I opened an Ebay store 8 months ago after being told by them it was a good way to list lower cost items, if $35 is lower cost. Having spent a lot of time promoting it eBay is now removing it from showing up in searches, except in very rare circumstances. So no one will see what I have for sale. And my listing fees will rise by 83% not 15%! That figure is the increase in eBays fees to me when I sell something. Not very likely now.

I shall be closing my store and using Ebid for both selling and buying in future. Ebay has lost both sides of my business, other sellers please note if you want my business don't list on eBay.

Another angry seller ( and buyer)

I reciently closed my store on eBay. I could no longer afford the listing fees that they are promising, and like any B&M store, expenses had to be considered and cut. I am one of the sellers that opened a store at Wagglepop - where there are NO listing fees, and lower FVF's. eBay is shooting itself in the foot, and if the bigger sellers think that they will benefit from us smaller sellers leaving, they are mistaken. Word is getting out, and even the buyers will participate in the exit.

I am a buyer, not a seller on Ebay.

If EBAY is screwing the sellers, and they move to Google or Schmoogle or DipsyDoodle, I will follow them. I am after the product, not the process.

eBay is the last bastion of the small merchant

says one of the posts above but I have to disagree. The products I have in my relatively new shop on ebid couldn't be sold on ebay at all. Quite apart from the ebay listing fees and the cost of having a shop on ebay (as stated above up to hundreds of GBP per month for a store which might show if there are few listings in that category) there is also the not so small matter of 20p (GBP) in the first 1.00 GBP taken by Paypal. All of which means that to sell the identical item on ebay I would have to price it at twice the rate that it is in my uk.ebid.net shop.
While I wouldn't mind getting twice the price if most of it was in my pocket, I don't see why my customers should have to subsidise ebay's lousy management decisions.
TBH I think Meg and Bill are busy banging the nails into ebay's coffin and it doesn't look like they will see sense.
You only have to read the business seller's forum to understand that they have it all wrong.
What IS putting buyers off - the thousands of scam listings and the constant rip-offs being reported. Many accounts are being hijacked and non-existant items being 'sold' purely to extract the money out of the pockets of people who don't recognise the scams and yet they are easy to spot.
So easy that in one category I guarantee that if you know what you're looking for you will find at least ten scams within less than five minutes ... try a search for plasma tvs on ebay uk ... resulting in dozens of people getting ripped off for hundreds of pounds each every day of the week.
On the business seller's board on ebay uk there has been a thread running for many months about this problem but ebay have failed to tackle the problem in any way shape or form. Individuals reporting the frauds and fakes are dismayed to find they are very often not removed from the auction site at all.
Ebay uk at least now has a bad name as a place where you will get ripped off and that's the reason why the buyers are not keen to go there. It has nothing to do with the shop inventory format listings which always showed up at the END of the normal auctions and did not confuse buyers in any way at all.
Indeed many buyers prefer to perhaps pay a little extra to 'buy it now' and receive their item within a couple of days instead of having to wait for an auction to finish and maybe losing out in the dying seconds.
Meg and Bill think they are solving a problem? Not unless they get rid of the scammers and slaughtering the shop owners will not do that.
Of course it is also possible that a company may self-harm if it wishes to indulge in a buy back of shares, after all, if the share price falls you can buy more of them back for the same money, can't you. Of course, I am not suggesting ebay have this as a plan, merely that it is a well-known business tactic.

I was planning to try selling on EBAY for some time now, but not until I switch to ether CABLE or DSL, and away from AOL. AOL hangs up or just drops me to many time with dial-up. BUT - after reading all that is going on at EBAY I will re-think even starting with EBAY. I keep getting email all the time to be a EBAY seller. But now I don't know ??? !!!

CONFUSED

I buy and sell on ebay and have had to try to get them to resolve problems many times. It's very obvious to me that ebay doesn't care about their buyers or their sellers. All they care about is whether or not they get their money. The problem is that they know no matter how many people they anger there's always someone new to step in where the others left. Maybe some Good competition would be good for ebay. Hopefully it would improve both the buying and the selling aspects of it.

I have been using Ebay for both buying and selling since 1996.
When Ebay announced the fee increase, I was already paying them, on average, about 30% of my total sales, not including fees to their Paypal subsidiary. While increasing a listing cost from $.03 cents per item to $.06 or $.11 might not seem like much, it is two to nearly four times what I had been paying, and on a store with hundreds of items in it, was quite achunk of change.Final Value Fees (FVF) are going from 8 to 10% in my case, which is a 25% increase. Please don't think I'm a fool and can't do the math, folks. How dare Ebay insult my intelligence by trying to convince me it is only a 6% increase.
In addition to the fee increase, Ebay has constantly tinkered with their searches. I can easily tell when I'm on and when I'm off, because sales go up and down like a yo-yo. And last we'd heard, stores were pretty much off. We are being treated like stepchildren, even though we pay the "rent" for the space.
Further, Chinese sellers can use the site for free-there is NO expense to them. To whomever said that the Chinese listings were minimal, I don't know what Ebay YOU looked at. I've bought frequently from Chinese sellers, but, knowing this, will not do so in the future.
Ebay does not police the site. People with terrible feedback are permitted to remain, and buyers who are too unfamiliar with the system use them, get burned, and spread the word.
It is also my sincere belief that Ebay is punishing the board members who are vocal in their discontent by removing them from ALL searches.
Mega-sellers have hundreds of thousands of items listed at a penny with astronomic shipping fees, in order to evade the commission on the final sale. Many of these are also the sellers with the rank feedback, but instead of choosing to insist these sellers charge a fair listing price, Ebay instead chooses to penalize the small, honorable users.
Ebay does not deign to respond to the thousands of concerned posts on their Community>Discussion>Stores user boards, choosing instead to absolutely ignore us. Not ONE official response has been made on this board in weeks. Rumor and innuendo abound.
They do, however, remove unflattering posts with regularity, rather than taking the high road and responding to concerns.
I think this stings worse than anything, this absolute lack of concern for the people involved.
Many of us are responding by closing our much-loved stores.
I have many wonderful Ebay stories, friends met, etc etc, but my time has ended. After agonizing over it for a couple of weeks, I closed my Ebay store last week.
Three weeks ago, I was the most LOYAL Ebay member on the planet. It is amazing how three short weeks of ignoring and abusing your most loyal customer can eliminate a decade's worth of good will.

First, forget the PayPal aspect of the argument. Just because eBay owns PayPal does not entitle you to any special privilages. eBay does allow other checkouts and payment processors - however, they require a track record. Google has very little to show at this moment. It's a means of meeting the demands of buyers with the needs of sellers.

Now if you moved your payment processing to another provider, you still end up paying the nearly the same, if not more, fees to your new processor. And this would somehow be better? Large sellers moving volume already get discounted fees through PayPal. Tack on a debit card and run your shipping charges against the card at a 1% cash-back discount. This off-sets your PayPal fees even further. Regardless, the point of including PayPal is moot as this expense would be carried elsewhere.

Second, maybe eBay is guilty of poor marketing decisions. However, everyone completely misses the important reason for the fee increase for store items and removal from the main search listings: The overall turnover for merchants is much lower. Yes, this has an effect of eBay's bottom line, but it also has an effect on the merchant's bottom line as inventory turnover slows. The greater problem is that too many merchants have all but stopped listing regular auctions, the primary reason people come to shop at eBay!

And you honestly think Google can do better? Ironic that they already launched a feature that was set to compete in a similar space with eBay... google base? Oh, but you want auctions. Well, there's plenty of competitors there - Overstock, Amazon and a host of others.... but those aren't good enough? (rhetorical question, no need to answer)

Sure, eBay has it's disadvantages - namely wretched shipping prices (which is the fault of merchants gaming the system) they haven't really dealt with in the past, unbalanced auction/store listings, as well as there being a number of buying scammers out there (but where aren't they?). Instead of jumping at the throat of eBay, maybe it's time some people actually looked at some of the hard data they have such as inventory turnover strategies, store/auction ratios, fee reduction strategies (similar to tax strategies), and other areas that large businesses use to stay competitive. There are a wealth of tools and knowledge out there that I rarely see these angry powersellers using.

eBay makes it easy to be in the market - you just have to learn or have the knowledge to stay in the market.

Recommended reading:

Essentials of Corporate Finance - Ross, Westerfield Jordan (chapters on inventory turnover are very pertinent)

Game Theory at Work - James Miller

and nearly any intro to economics book that covers the basic tennants of supply, demand and pricing.

This isn't the first time that Ebay's actions had an impact on the sellers, nor is it the first time that sellers have cried "revolt". The bad news for sellers is that auctions will only survive if there is buyer-traffic...and NO news auction site, even Google will have the 'auction-branding' that Ebay has...and that is where buyers will continue to go for auctions. I am afraid that the store experiment has had its day, it is time to move on.

If the stock hits $25, I'm in! Ebay will rebound nicely (IMHO)