Not even Amazon does that! One can only hope it was an error: some careless coder who didn't correlate the user's browsed items with purchased items, or someone up the chain who didn't realize that he had to tell the coders to do that. (Because no one in management actually sells stuff themselves.)
And no, there's no end to the madness. It's almost like they're encouraging buyer returns instead of trying to reduce them like any sensible retailer would do.
Ever since eBay went public, it's been one bad call after another. Treat AVC like a poor stepchild (because even the few people in management who understood retail only understood new-SKU). Openly favor buyers over sellers. Strip sellers of their ability to protect themselves from bad buyers. Strip sellers of their ability to set their own policies. Institute one-size-fits-all requirements for turnaround time and tracking (drove out the sellers of custom-made goods and small ephemera). Confusingly elevate its own brand above the brands of individual sellers, so that buyers get the false impression that they're buying from eBay instead of from an individual. (In all fairness, most if not all marketplaces do this -- I still think it's deception.) Do nothing to address the problem of "renters" and bogus returns.
And the stock keeps dropping and the quarterly earnings inch ever downward...
I read that earlier and just shook my head. There just are no words.
I used to expect -- almost daily -- to hear that Alibaba was buying out eBay (and suspected that had been management's intention for years, going back to the notorious "No Touchy Jack Ma" signs we kept hearing about on some of the old boards). But no longer -- I don't think even Alibaba wants eBay any more. The only people interested in buying eBay at this point would be the kind of investors who strip out the more profitable sections of a business and liquidate the rest. I read some months ago that some of the big investment advisors no longer recommend buying eBay stock. EBay is too old-hat to be "cool" to millenials, too big to be nimble, too wedded to its walled-garden model and its outmoded fee structure, and has alienated too many of its actual customers -- the sellers, not the buyers. It will probably survive (just as Yahoo and MySpace have survived), but will never again be the game-changing powerhouse that it was back in the day. There are just too many alternatives.
I can't say this enough: even if you stay on eBay, get your head out of the walled garden. Don't limit yourself to eBay search when researching or pricing -- look at the wider market. And take responsibility for your own marketing, so you don't only depend on eBay's wonky search for eyes on your items. Even if you can't connect your eBay store to Facebook, you can get a business page and post your items to it individually, then join a bunch of groups and share to them. That'll give you targeted reach. Do the same for Pinterest. Post on Instagram. There's even a tiny group of vinties on Tumblr. Tweet. I know a lot of you already do that stuff (waves -- y'all know who you are).
The biggest benefit to "going social," though, is being part of a wider community that's largely independent of platform... but still come together to promote each other and the idea of wearing and collecting vintage.
Probably the best thing I've ever done business-wise was back when I had my shop on the Lane -- not because it was such a howling success (it wasn't), but because through that I started connecting on social media with other
