Basic Supply and Demand | Selling

my-cottage-books-and-antiques · 2024-10-23T02:20:43.734000Z

I've noticed a couple of, let's just call them trends, on ecommerce sites. Now, I'm not an economist, but I've always understood the basic point of The Law of Supply and Demand. I would expect CEOs of ecommerce sites to understand this as well. So, the two trends: 1. Let's shift fees to buyers, and remove or reduce them for sellers. This will incentivize sellers to list more! Yay! Except, it might very well drive some buyers away. So, the goal seems to be: "We've increased supply and reduced demand. This will improve our business!" 2. And then there's this trend: "AI is pure magic! We can use it to speed up the listing process, so that our sellers can list more and more faster and faster. And this enormous selection will---maybe---bring us more buyers. Or not. Because we might be increasing the number of items by a factor of, say, 100x, but we might only increase the number of buyers by a much lower amount. So, "we've increased supply exponentially and maintained demand, or maybe sparked a tiny increase in demand. This will improve our business!" Anyone else think these strategies could maybe use a little review by the powers that be?

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