Active Buyers down, Active Sellers Dow, eBay is dying-what is management doing about it?
I've been on eBay for 24 years. I have gone from selling items out of my living room for pizza money to owning and running a business with 13 employees that grossed over $7 million last year. Over $4 million of that was eBay sales, and eBay has always been a core part of my business strategy.
But while sales on my other channels rose over 40% last year, my eBay sales rose a tepid 7%, which I consider basically flat. Now I've seen news that active sellers are way down, active buyers are way down, and my eBay 2022 first quarter to date is down 24% year over year.
What, if anything is management planning to do to address this? From my vantage point, they are content to collect their salaries and let the business run itself into the ground. The look and feel of the website hasn't changed in literally 20 years, and it seems that nearly every seller update that are charging us higher and higher fees and giving us nothing but fewer buyers.
Talk to me eBay. What, if anything is being done to address this death spiral? How about some advertising? Or here's a novel idea-why don't you cut fees to attract more sellers back, which will in turn attract more buyers?
eBay is rapidly losing its relevance to my business model, and from someone who started his business because of eBay, this pains me deeply. Please, for the love of Meg Whitman, do something.
cardxcraft
·3 years agoI'm not a doom and gloomer. I'm gracious for what Ebay and other sellers have provided...Ebay has been a great thing. Without the many individual sellers and millions of buyers, we wouldn't even be here discussing, or having this great forum to learn from.
I truly hope Ebay continues for decades:
cardxcraft
·3 years agoRead for the broader points. My favorite, Barbarians at the Moat.
https://www.marketbeat.com/pages/search.aspx?query=
inhawaii
·3 years agoPeople have been predicting the downfall of ebay for the last 20 years.
cardxcraft
·3 years agoIt's not a prediction...unless a substantial change occurs, it will happen...it's a mathematical certainty. The prediction you speak of is in regards to when.
You see the graphs below? The are from 2019 and the 2022. Extrapolate, LOL.
  
cardxcraft
·3 years agoThe honest truth: Ebay is looking for ways to scrape off remaining monies you may be profiting. Please do not look to Ebay for help.
When Sears was suffocating and suffering under blue bloods, workers believed they were busy looking into new, innovative ways to stave off insolvency...instead, these immoral sharks were busy figuring out how to pilfer any remaining money.
It's up to us as an individual to assess and navigate our next course of action, based upon the current road we now face.
laststopgeneralstore
·3 years agoeBay isn't going anywhere and comparing your sales to site that specifically and only sells what you are selling to eBay is not an equal comparison. If your sales increased then I don't understand why you are complaining? I wouldn't and am not concerned about eBay going anywhere as long as their is eCommerce.
chapeau-noir
·3 years agoJust a note, but "more competition" to me means more competition across the etailing space rather than directly on eBay. A lot of sellers come and go, but the consistent sellers are going somewhere if they are no longer here.
zamo-zuan
·3 years agoI agree, there's different types of competition. In my reply, I'm mostly thinking of the "there's too many sellers" narrative that is often spread on here.
But in both areas, eBay is facing issues.
What I mentioned in the last post describes the problems on eBay itself, as there's a lack of actual competing when they're removing the things you could do to earn ranking and making organic ranking less and less effective.
But outside of eBay, they're falling behind as well. This year not only fee increases, but continuing to make ads more integral, which is an inadvertent fee increase. This makes eBay less competitive against all the other competitors and sellers who have left eBay.
On both fronts, inside and outside of eBay, the current path isn't sustainable. I can only hope they realize this sooner than later and make changes. Otherwise the bubble will burst eventually and they'll be forced to change, but that'd leave all of us in a much worse situation.
ed8108
·3 years agoThe ebay experience
We have Growth
Followed by a Peak
Now in a state Decline
zamo-zuan
·3 years agoeBay management is increasing fees and highlighting promotions even more, of course! You hadn't heard about their expansions of PLA all over the sellers pages this week!?
Sounds like an amazing plan, right? Increase seller and ad fees to bring up their own revenue despite less active sellers, which in turn brings up eBay's sales prices to be higher than the competition, and leads to even less active buyers!
Isn't it refreshing to see that they've pointed eBay in such an unsustainable direction?
anjofak
·4 years agoI wonder how many sellers rushed in with all those rare Beanie Babies, that I have a refrigerator box full after 3 years of storage waring..
apkeng26
·4 years agoI am new here. I want to start selling on eBay. Can you please share the details on how can I start selling on eBay.
anjofak
·3 years agoWatch, learn and gain some foresight on the whatever you plan to sell..
mr_lincoln
·4 years ago@themightyquinnbrassandwinds I haven't experienced that ... to me the biggest set back was Covid which made getting inventor in my categories ... it is more competitive now then it was at the end of 2019 so instead of easily doubling money the margins are lower.
zamo-zuan
·3 years agoThis is actually a theory spread mostly on here by a certain group of people (that there's "more competition now"). Active seller numbers were MUCH higher in the past:
The difference is that search ranking used to be organic, meaning being a GOOD SELLER, doing a GOOD JOB, and TAKING CARE OF CUSTOMERS used to be what earn sales and "made you more competitive".
Now it's just promotions which will make you more competitive, and since there's a ceiling on how much you could promote efficiently, it's that combination of bringing up sales prices, lowering margins, and having no way to truly stand out among competition.
It's not competition that's the problem, there's actually LESS competition (we're at the lowest numbers of competitors since like pre-2013). Things are designed in a way that there's no way to actually compete. They're even removing the tools that allowed you to compete, leaving you with nothing but more promos.
valueaddedresource
·3 years ago@zamo-zuan I've seen that site and not sure where they get their data, but if you go by eBay's actual quarterly SEC filings, it's actually even worse than that!
For many years eBay did not include Active Sellers in quarterly reports, then started to do so fairly consistently throughout 2021 (presumably because it had increased due to the pandemic) but stopped again after it started going down and Wall Street reacted negatively to that news.
Active Sellers reported for 2021 were:
Q1: 20M
Q 2: 19M
Q 3: 19M
Q4: 17M
And that 17M in Q4 2021 is the last time eBay officially reported active seller stats publicly anywhere, that I'm aware of.
I think we can all agree if that number had gone back up in the last year, eBay would have been very vocal about it. Since they aren't, I can only assume it's likely the current figure is somewhere "less than" 17M.
mrdutch1001
·4 years agowe all love these doom n gloom threads>>>>eBay has been dying for 15 years now...and yet still here, still going...
ibmquality
·4 years agoHi, If your selling on eBay is part-time and does not involve any kind of organization to support your business then eBay works, on the other hand, you are constantly being charged more fees with fewer potential customers then this is a problem. If the post office increases do not affect you because you don't ship often If your item is returned you lose all your shipping, handling, etc.. even if the item was perfect and the reason is they changed their minds. selling on eBay after 20 years should be very refined and easy to list, sell and do trade. Unfortunately, it is not and for good reason when people don't know how it works they make mistakes that cost them not eBay. eBay is lazy, profit-driven at sellers' expense, and is not innovative which is a technical world is normally the doom scenario
ibmquality
·3 years agoUnfortunately, eBay does not allow for Buyers' defects when they don't read adds, or order the wrong item; any return is at the seller's expense, the buyer is protected, and the seller is punished in service metrics ebays way of increasing their fees. Pretty sad when the seller is always wrong and punished by the Gods at Ebay!