Picture me standing there in eBay's doorway with my arms folded across my chest.


No one is leaving until I'm done with them.


We've got some scores to settle.


Now here's how it's gonna be...


Film at 11:00

Ebay has desperately tried to push skype on buyers and sellers but it has been a failure because as the sellers have stated they do not want buyers calling them and they much prefer email because they can answer emails at anytime. They also realize they would be barraged with stupid questions and calls from the lonely or crazy people. Can anyone blame the sellers for rejecting skype? Ebay obviously doesnt think things through and they are blinded by thier rose colored glasses.

I hope when analysts get ebays core figures next time, they ask ebay how many of these listings were submitted for free or with a listing special. That after all could really skew the figures.

EBay has been a leader in changing the way consumers buy and sell products. EBay's founding mission to create efficient markets places has been achieved within the consumer sector.

Meg and company have created a successful business model and brand identity that will continue into the future.

The question that needs to be answered is what new markets can EBay set out to make efficient? And does their current model and processes meet these needs?

If EBay can not effectively move into other markets and impact the efficiency, they will mature and/or make head scratching acquisitions.

There are many markets in need of efficiency and EBay needs leadership that can leverage its brand strength to capture them.

When that happens you will see a turnaround in their stock.

I am an online merchant and use ebay among other venues. I HATE buyers calling me for the exact reasons crystal ball stated in post #2. What the hell would I want to use Skype for?
Ebay is arrogant and blind to what people really want and what would improve their site. They lost over $2,000 monthly revenue from me alone when raising their store fees in August. Now how smart is THAT Meg Whitman?
There is only one reason why ebay is still successful. NO COMPETITION and no alternatives for the fed up sellers.
I sell mostly books and less than 1% are sold on ebay. When I had my store there maybe 10% were ebay. Ebay never understood bookselling online - thus they own less than 5% of the used and rare book market (my personal estimate). Even their crappy half.com booksite is deader than ever.
If someone will come around and really challenge them, they are going to be in deep trouble.
I do not think they can be challenged as a whole at this time unless Bill gates or another super ri8ch fart decides to throw 5 billion or so into the battle. But on segments (like books) they are extremely vulnerable, if someone with the proper knowledge of the market goes up against them!
JMHO
Martin

To My Fellow Long Value Investors: (from a friend responding to negative whining bashing attacks on ebay)

Remember that spaghetti sauce commercial from the 1970s – I think it was for prego sauce where the mother keeps asking –do they have garlic and the answer was “its in here”….what about onions..? ”Its in there” Well “its in there” is the answer to every point you have brought up all year. In other words its all factored in the stock price and then some.


Let me explain to you why I'm looking forward to ebays next two or three earning reports. Ebays is set to show 30% growth in revenue this year. Todays stock price is assuming that ebay can grow at 30% for ONE YEAR more and then 4% only FOREVER.

Now, 4% forever for ebay is the equivalent of NO GROWTH for most companies because ebay has enough pricing power in both its monopolistic auction business and paypal to raise prices this much per year easily. So the market is saying after this year – no more growth. Think about this.

Well it will be very interesting to see ebay put up 30% growth numbers for another quarter or two or three – eventually the revenue and cash flow numbers are going to be so high in a few more quarters that the market is going to go nuts – there is no way it will be able to hold the stock price down to this level much longer if those kind of growth numbers are met in the next two quarters (and they are easily going to hit those numbers this quarter)

So when you talk about the negatives, they are meaningless without reflecting that against the stock price which I have not seen you do.

Yes, ebays growth is slowing in the US – but the stock price is more than reflecting this. What many growth lovers never comprehend is that this slowing growth is actually a VERY POSITIVE thing when the stock price has fallen to a level that reflects low growth. The reason why is that once ebay saturates its market it can declare itself KING. In a saturated market its going to be very hard for another company to take any share from ebay. An expanding high growth market is nice- but it allows competitors to move in more easily and capture parts of the growing market – (see ebays experience in Korea as an example of this) So to a value investor, seeing that the markets are getting saturated makes you more sure that the revenues from the source are secure. You adjust down the growth numbers in your models but the model is more likely to be precise for the reasons explained and as long as the stock price is low enough, then these can be very lucrative situations for investing.

What is also often forgotten with all the focus on core listings is that paypal is a large part of this company. I suspect paypal will eventually be larger that the auction business – but because the company name is ebay, everyone is focused on the auctions – make sure you consider all revenue sourse both present and future when valuing the company.

Now please make a point that won't elicit the answer “its in there”

Need I say more?

Let's talk about Skype shall we? First alot of people poo pooed on PayPal. Again Patience. Skype was purchased for 2.4 billion dollars (if targets met then 4.4 billion). Do the math and compare it to vonage. That's $20 (2.4 billion/120 million) per suscriber in terms of acquisiton cost. That is freakin cheap compared to Vonage at $400/user and burning money like no tomorrow on marketing! It takes time to monetize this business as things are rapidly changing. They are on track to hit $200 million end of 2006. Think about it they are the largest telecom company in the world with low infrastcture cost. YOu have to be a fool to dismiss the potential of this company. EBAY, PayPal and Skype have a large MOAT=Network Effect=Barrier to Entry.

I suppose if one were Bill Gates they could have all the patience in the world but most investors are not Bill Gates. I do have some free advice for the ebay lurkers though. It seems a major problem is too many listings crowding each other from other countries that nobody bids on. Ebay should charge .10 extra if the seller wants thier listing to appear on another country's ebay. Buyers are having to weed through listings from other countries to find thier own countries listings. It becomes overwhelming to the buyer and they just leave the site. Most do not like the slow shipping and the trust factor comes into play when the listing is from another country. If ebay were to charge ten cents for each additional country a seller wanted thier listing to appear on, it would please buyers, sellers and investors.

Agreed but they are buying businesses with no moat like stubhub.

http://mrwavetheory.blogspot.com/2006/10/stubhub-on-block-ebay-buyer.html

EBay has been a leader in changing the way consumers buy and sell products. EBay's founding mission to create efficient markets places has been achieved within the consumer sector.

Meg and company have created a successful business model and brand identity that will continue into the future.

The question that needs to be answered is what new markets can EBay set out to make efficient? And does their current model and processes meet these needs?

If EBay can not effectively move into other markets and impact the efficiency, they will mature and/or make head scratching acquisitions.

There are many markets in need of efficiency and EBay needs leadership that can leverage its brand strength to capture them.

When that happens you will see a turnaround in their stock.

The top five auction sites under ebay have approx. 27% of the amount of listings that ebay currently contains. A few short months ago, that figure wasn't even 10%. And don't talk about Slow Moving or Badly Priced items; these items were LOST to ebay and they did generate revenue.

Before anyone else writes it, I'll write it...those sellers may find their items do not sell on those other sites and return to ebay. Return, when? Well, it won't be for a while. They are pizzed; some will never come back. Many discover that their web site does actually work. All on their own and NO constant barrage of fees.

What built ebay - The WWW - crosses that moat.

PayPal has come up against Googlepay. Googlepay has seen many hurdles and still has a far ways to go to appease their users. That's the key phrase, "appease their users", as in, Users that are with Google through the long-haul; not users that they will have to 're-claim'. Why are they sticking with Googlepay? Because they are also pizzed at ebay/paypal.

The torch-carrying Tiny Mob is across the moat from PapPal. When the Google-bridge comes crashing down, it will span the moat and possibly take out some castle wall as well.

Skype? What a joke. Where is that 120MM customer base figure coming from...ebay? Everyone here that wants Telemarketeers calling you at all hours, raise your hand. The same would apply to potential buyers, except their actual numbers would be multiplied. No thanks! No one is going to use it; at best, a few high dollar item sellers might. Once!

The Skype moat will be drained by lack of use. Also, the technology has been copied, stolen, whatever! It has been made redundant/obsolete. The bone-dry moat will be easy to walk across.

So yes, let's talk about Skype...

Why is virtually nobody is using it on eBay? Think about it.

Then we all got excited to be told about 'click to call'. Think about it. Who wants to employ people to speak rather than cheap machines to process? Oh, and if you want the latest news on the click to call deal between Skype and Google...

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20061007GoogleeBayHangUpClicktoCall.html

Seems somebody has thunk about it!

$2.4 Billion? I doubt eBay will have to pay much more than that and certainly not the $4+ Billion.

If a person could be livid in upset and laughing their guts out at the same time... that'd be me right now.

Please understand me here as I contradict myself. There's so much misunderstanding about what is happening at eBay.

I say:

eBay is great and wonderful, an unpolished gem in (a declining) position of dominance over it's field.

eBay's potential is LIMITLESS! There are no fences around it's program, though some must be erected for protection of the internet, for eBay users and for eBay and Paypal themselves.

eBay is a money making machine without parallel. It will grow itself, enrich it's investors and serve in high standard the buying and selling public at large.

Skype is the way of the future but it's being mishandled and damaged as you read this.



So why are we arguing? What's the issue here? Virtually everyone seems to have a valid opinion!


It's simple!!! It's screaming at you!!! WAKE UP!


eBay operations are in the hands of those who obviously have no concept of what eBay is, was or can be! eBay is in the hands of people with no ascertainable visionary skills and extremely questionable integrity.

DON'T YOU GET IT YET????

If you took eBay as it is right now at this very moment(1:25am Sunday Oct. 8 2006), and stripped the current administration all the way down to the level of department supervisor, and then reinstalled first year college level business and economics students with guidance from qualified and aggressive attorneys,


YOU COULDN'T HOLD THAT STOCK VALUE DOWN TO SAVE THE PLANET!!!.


As soon as eBay is unshackled from it's current inept administration and whatever their hidden agendas are (legal or otherwise), eBay will immediatly return to it's former march to the very pinacle of internet retail merchandising... and far beyond that in it's scope.


Until such time as eBay is liberated from it's current situation,
eBay shall continue to be picked apart and wither until it's near death condition shall finally end all our questioning.

It's that simple.

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Ebay is a great idea overall but horribly managed, I'm sure they're raking it in for their investors but for sellers it sucks which in turn makes it suck for buyers which leaves everyone but those cashing in their stocks disgusted with their performance. I like how they did with raising the fees on their stores.. the story basically was "Since we can't get enough traffic to your store items to help you sell the stuff and they stay listed forever, we're going to raise the fees." Now what kind of crazy crap is that? Personally I closed down my ebay store and set up on my own store on my own server using a store script called oscommerce which works well through paypal, and is FREE... My host set it up for free, and it took me about a day to customize it and list my items and no more ebay fees ever for my online store which I can now run however I see fit and don't have to follow all the various rules that ebay decides to make whenever they like and expects you to change 400 listings overnight, it must be nice to be god... As soon as I get an auction script set up on my store site I'll be done with them forever... Thanks for letting me air my opinon, Billdo