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Worth the read: "Is eBay a dying marketplace?"
Stumbled upon this quick article, and found it to be an interesting point of view worth the read.
79 comments
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Discussion interactions are currently paused.
Stumbled upon this quick article, and found it to be an interesting point of view worth the read.
kh-stanley1
·11 months agoHi everyone,
This thread has been closed due to the failure of some posters to stay on topic (and perhaps getting personal?)
Thank you for understanding.
sreu3058
·11 months agoI think the end of the De Minimis rule for non US stores could be a game changer for small US online sellers such as ourselves.
Ending my comments on a positive note-
paxilill
·11 months agoIt's not worth the read.
psfhobbies
·11 months agoI don't think its dying but definitely thinning out. My sales are hit and miss day to day when in past 2021 and before I could count on the day to day sales being consistent like clockwork, Now days of 12 bucks then up to hundreds back down to nothing and so on..
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
·11 months agoThe AI gods have spoken:
johnrj1226
·11 months agoHere is another 1K pic
kh_nipun
·11 months agoHi everyone,
This discussion has gotten a bit off topic. Please bring the discussion back to subject established in the original post.
Thank you.
sreu3058
·11 months agoQuote:
‘They should also get props for not coming on here and offering unprofessional medical advice to the choir.’
I’ve never seen medical advice on EBay. I thought that was Amazon’s new deal- find a Doctor online, or possibly Etsy’s- get a psychic reading.
Sorry, I did not read the article, just here for the laughs, I am depressed enough without reminders my $5. an hour job will soon be firing me, HA.
wri-8727
·11 months agoThat's high cotton sreu3058;) I lived on $60 a week for ten years and still had money to spare for neighbors needing cigarettes.
ETA: and a ever present pot of bean and ham-hock soup for whoever was hungry (or lonely)
gurlcat
·11 months agoWhich decade in the early 20th century was that?
wri-8727
·11 months ago2005. I lucked out on the beans though. Helped re-roof a house and was paid in Y2K beans, (more then several buckets:)
gurlcat
·11 months agoYou paid for mortgage/rent, utilities, transportation, whatever other bills, food, cigarettes, for $60 a week in 2005? Yeah right. 🤣
wri-8727
·11 months agoSome of the best years of my life
PS I found a quarter yesterday picking up apples and mentioned it to Herself that that was the most money I've had in months.
ETA I checked to see if it was an error coin. Nope.
gurlcat
·11 months agoSo is Herself the one paying for the internet or cell service you're using right now?
johnrj1226
·11 months agoHang around the shopping basket corral at Aldi and you can rake in quarters all day long. When I get a free quarter there give it to my grandson 6 y.o. to put in his pig bank after he has helped me pick up limbs in our yard. When the Pig gets full & fat we go to the bank put 1/2 in his guardian savings account, the other 1/2 buy what he wants as long as it is legal.
chapeau-noir
·11 months agoThis poor little blog article lol.... The bar to "publishing" a blog is about as high as for making a video on YouTube...i.e., almost non-existent. I'm not sure many of them are even read. This person also has reviews, etc., their 'about' page is busted. They get props for putting in the effort and not coming on here and preaching to the choir.
hartungcards
·11 months agoThey should also get props for not coming on here and offering unprofessional medical advice to the choir.
gurlcat
·11 months agoBut the OP and others saying he made good points, no props!! Or soup.
annadryl
·11 months agoEverything in that ad has been discussed here and elsewhere ad nauseam, and better. That could have been written the exact same several years ago. Oh yeah, ebay was dying then too.
Whoever wrote that is probably having a hard time offloading those cell phone cases or whatever they bought for resale so they're feeling like being gloomy about it in public. I see that stuff here every time I log in.
If it's dying, why still be here?
tobaccocardyahoo
·11 months agonecrophilia
wri-8727
·11 months agoBad publicity is better then no publicity yet what the Brits don't get is it's not eBay fading away but postwar nostalgia; the foundation that this pop stand was built on.
gloryglorygifts
·11 months agoIt's basically saying the same exact things that we say here often in the community. Someone just posted yesterday or the day prior about the Amazon dropshippers.
Thanks for sharing it though.
tobaccocardyahoo
·11 months agoMany of the business models used by some Ebay sellers died with the advent of Covid. Others died due to trust and safety issues.
Many of those dead models continue to litter the Ebay battlefield and the smell of their death lingers and to the likes of the author of this blog are being mistaken for a serious problem.
Some Ebay sellers have not learned that they cannot do business like they used to and keep trying to.
heckofagame
·11 months agoIf the ship is going down, that makes me one of the rats. ðŸ€
gurlcat
·11 months agoOr the captain. How would we know??
chapeau-noir
·11 months agoI'm one of the deck chairs. Why do people keep moving me around?
mam98031
·11 months agoThere have been those sellers for decades that have believed Ebay is dying. Ebay is now 30 years old and is still a company that is making a profit. Not all sellers on the site can say the same thing, but then they have never been able to do that. We each run our little businesses in various different ways. There are all kinds of reasons that can cause any given seller not making a profit, not always a fault of Ebay.
simba6
·11 months agoIt's only an issue for buyers that don't check prices before buying. I used to buy from a seller that did drop ship from the river. The strange thing is their eBay prices were lower. Also all that only applies to current production items. There are many items you can only find here.
tobaccocardyahoo
·11 months agoAmazon does not view Ebay as a competitor. They set their strategy to compete with bigger ecommerce sites than Ebay.
For most of the brand new, in production products with brands people know, buyers know to get a better deal on Amazon, Walmart or even Target.
Ebay has reported their drop in sales of such products.
The EBay dropshipping problem is significant because it has brought the price difference with Amazon and Walmart to the attention of the lousy shoppers on Ebay, and to the buyer who thought they could avoid the hated Amazon without any cost to them. Eventually, most of these shoppers were likely to catch on, even those with a room temperature IQ.
Amazon has in its policies, ceded most collectibles sales, used clothing sales, and liquidation product sales to Ebay.
Ebay.com is the best site to buy low end and middle grade collectibles and antiques on the Internet.
Ebay.UK clearly has problems beyond those in other countries, hence the initiatives that were taken to seek more amateur sellers. Even the UK sellers I encounter listings on Ebay.com from show signs of taking lower prices than are normal from US sellers, no doubt because of slow delivery.
Before Temu, I bought all of my cheap Chinese electronics on Ebay. They undercut Amazon. Now Temu gets that business from me, and Temu is a much more painless site to return defective product to.
Is Ebay perfect? - hardly. Are all EBay sellers responsible? Hardly. But the Ebay MBG works other than false tracking scams and credit card chargebacks work.
mommaknows
·11 months agoI sure hope not. I've only just begun.
chapeau-noir
·11 months agoThis is a blog post. AN OPINION PIECE written for the general public, not for us. It's a perfectly good summary of overall perception, and this:
"The truth is, the website is stagnating and plateauing"
Is correct, as it appears that there is an increasingly desperate drive to keep giving back to shareholders (increased ad attribution).
It's not badly written (it's a blog post), but evidently it has made some people uncomfortable. That's what opinion pieces do, spark conversation.
hartungcards
·11 months ago"It's not badly written (it's a blog post), but evidently it has made some people uncomfortable."
I wasn't uncomfortable with this piece until I read the warning that this was not professional medical advice.
jonathanbrightlight
·11 months agoWhere does the idea that a blog post can’t be badly written come from? I don’t expect college research paper citations, but it can still be poorly written, and that one is. It’s also just regurgitating things we’ve seen often on these boards, mostly ones arising from sellers completely failing to understand eBay policies and procedures and then complaining when things work the way they are expected to work.
â€Uncomfortableâ€? No, I just rolled my eyes.
chapeau-noir
·11 months agoIt's a blog post. It is not written for the exclusive eBay seller board readership, it's just a general opinion piece, we are not the target audience. The writer is not a professional writer and I doubt they're even one on TV.
sakic92710
·11 months agoFrom my aspect & only my aspect, eBay died 4 years ago. Right now, I do not even have any listings. Either I try a new strategy, or I just give up entirely. I do MUCH BETTER on Marketplace. I just finished a 6-day selling streak on there. I have difficulty getting 6 days of sales within a month on eBay. 6 days without any sales per month was the common cycle for me. Once it dropped, the dismal amount of incoming cash never recovered. The potential for buyers is much greater than Facebook, so why can I sell 25x more on Marketplace? I sold over 80 patches this week. How long would it take me to sell that many on eBay. 27 months? lol Much success to all who do well on eBay. I'm not one of them & I accept it.
hartungcards
·11 months ago"From my aspect & only my aspect, eBay died 4 years ago."
Isn't that when you ran out of Lions Club banners to list?
powell-collectibles
·11 months agoAlways a classic.
luckythewinner
·11 months agoThe conclusions the article draws are generally correct, but IMHO most people who were paying attention recognized that eBay plateaued about three years ago.
ed8108
·11 months agoLet's now move into & address the question ,
Is eBay in decline, or are eBay:s best days still shead & why ?
my_boston_baked_beans
OP11 months agoExactly.. always remember we (sellers) are ebay's income.
Despite, your sales ebay always has the upper hand, and we pay regardless of our lack of income using this venue.
I used this article to point another opinion of the overall possible lack of sales ..nothing else! How you translate this is up to the individual.
Thank you
hartungcards
·11 months ago"Despite, your sales ebay always has the upper hand..."
Of course they do. Whenever the inmates try to run the asylum, it turns out poorly.
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
·11 months ago@ed8108 When the present CEO took over he declared (not a direct quote, but the gist of it) : We don't compete with Amazon. We tried, and Amazon won.
ebay has become, or is becoming, depending on how you look at it, much more of a niche site (despite its huge and varied selection). It's current tagline is something like "ebay: reinventing the future of ecommerce for the enthusiast buyer" (my emphasis)
That is really quite a different thing from being an Amazon or a WalMart. For those who (mistakenly) continue to view ebay as an Amazon competitor, well, I think it's easy to see ebay as a site in decline. But if you look at ebay as ebay itself does, as a site much more focused on a particular slice of the much broader ecommerce market, then I'd say ebay continues to have the potential to grow within that space.
Growth certainly isn't inevitable, but it's not impossible either. I think even within its niche, ebay has lost a good bit of ground to other sites. Some of them, such as social media sites, aren't even strictly speaking ecommerce sites. Only time will tell whether ebay can really grow in this space.
But as a reseller, I figure there are quite a lot of options, so, even if ebay closes down tomorrow, reselling itself will continue. So the question for me isn't so much about whether ebay's best days are ahead or not, it is: does ebay still make sense for me as a reseller? My answer is: For me, yes, it continues to be worth it. And yes, I can think of things I really wish they would do. But my job is to work within the ebay that exists, not the one I wish existed. And so, for now, I just plod along.
estate_echoes
·11 months agoI feel like eBay was a niche market... and they burned that chasing Amazon. The resell aspect got buried with Chinese junk. I still see more going on geared at emulating Amazon and very little geared at a niche market. (maybe other than advertising)
Ads all over listings, making it hard to find listing details
Auctions seem to be rendered pretty much useless with promotions
Still pushing free returns, ridiculously so like with P&A
Automation of everything,
Lack of customer service,
Centralized control
Garbaged search engine
cheech2021
·11 months agoI love buying and selling on Ebay. You can write and read anything you want in life, but what does your experience tell you. I bought ABC cards for my new grand daughter for $5 bucks, the other day and they came the next day from Amazon delivery. I knew what happen, and I laugh and said wow I checked all my prices on Ebay even got a "deal offer", and I made sure they were coming from the USA, but for $5 bucks don't have the energy to check Amazon nor did I thing I had to. I WAS HAPPY WITH THE OUT COME.
I need 2 cycle oil and I check Ebay got my best price, very best price, but I just check Amazon and they won, I will order from them. I WAS HAPPY WITH THE OUT COME.
No one can compete with EBAY. Now if your selling a cool piece I have or 2oz of Motor Oil, the motor oil guy my lose to others but my cool piece wins.
What are you selling to complain about.........again I love Ebay, no oil here.
powell-collectibles
·11 months agoNot much to disagree with, large because there’s so little meat there. Sure, I think we can all understand how Amazon drop shippers are hurting eBay.
jonathanbrightlight
·11 months agoI’ve seen claims that eBay was dying for *checks date* about 30 years, give or take. I don’t take any of them seriously.
my_boston_baked_beans
OP11 months agoI found some of the problems mentioned that eBay obviously has interesting.
I am looking behind the scene. Ebay has had a long run been here for 25 years myself. Whether it finally goes under at some point so be it.
jonathanbrightlight
·11 months agoI opened the article and tried to read it, and regretted it pretty quickly. It’s very unprofessionally written, and feels like a low quality forum post but in a way that it can’t really be responded to, likely because anyone who read that and was able to respond would rip it apart quickly.
my_boston_baked_beans
OP11 months agoSo disregard it and move on. I was not asking for a critque rather just looking at the ideas presented.
Sorry it did not meet your scholarly requirements
hartungcards
·11 months agoSee, that's the thing about internet blogs. They don't have any "scholarly requirements." All you need is a keyboard and internet access.
Just read the Disclaimer at the top of the article: "The content on this website is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before making health-related decisions."
jonathanbrightlight
·11 months agoYou posted it publicly. I responded publicly. I felt my opinion was worth taking a few moments to share. I don’t have to have your approval to share my opinion.
itsjustasprain
·11 months agoI think I recognize that author as someone who posts here occasionally. The article uses a distinctive child-like word that he apparently invented and is quite proud of (you will know it when you see it) and which has appeared here a few times (where I think it may have used some spaced-out punctuation in order to avoid the filters here).
As for the complaints posted I did not notice anything particularly new. The article is basically a summary of often-heard grievances and a wish that Ebay would Do Something About It.
gurlcat
·11 months agoAre you talking about 'en****ification'? -If so, I don't know who made it up, but it's a term used worldwide. In fact it was 2024's 'Word Of The Year.'
valueaddedresource
·11 months ago@gurlcat that distinction belongs to Cory Doctorow. 😂
reallynicestamps
·11 months agoPretty good chance it was Terry Pratchett who also referred to his early onset dementia as The Embuggerance.
Something that may not have been noticed by US based sellers is that the Trump Tariff (federal sales tax) is going to kick in heavily on small imports on August 31.
Canada Post has already decided that it is not the job of other nations to collect US taxes, and one result is that eBay will not be offering Canada Post shipping labels any more.
I expect a lot of orders from my Canadian discount postage buyers.
gurlcat
·11 months agoI just saw a headline (somewhere) saying Canada just announced they are backing off their retaliatory tariffs. -Couldn't tell you anything more than that, but maybe worth a search.
cl-235403
·11 months agoif you are researching this topic, be sure to also take a look at their latest earnings report from end of july. doesn't seem like a dying marketplace/sinking ship unless i'm missing something.
grand-and-glorious-purpose
·11 months agoYou have watched as ebay has steadily made itself more and more hostile to sellers, given less, charged more and pinned growth on garbage like Promoted Listings.
Multiple startups have sliced off chunks of ebays market share and they have done nothing to get it back but protect people who sell Rolex and designer purses.
You are witnessing ebay slowly die from lack of service and lack of innovation.
I have not seen an ebay update that has addressed anything important.
Have you seen ebay bother to tackle tracking scams?
How about being able to buy multiple labels...simple stuff that should have been taken care of 2 decades ago yet we get 500 characters for feedback as innovation.
People saying ebay isn't dying aren't paying attention.
It is slow for sure but it absolutely is happening.
gurlcat
·11 months agojonathanbrightlight
·11 months agoI disagree that I have witnessed any such thing.
I have witnessed eBay go from an absolute wild west with no protection for buyers or sellers to one that buyers are comfortable using.
I have witnessed many changes, not all of which I agreed with, but none of which are detrimental to the long term success of eBay.
I have seen tons of people claim eBay was dying but none be able to actually give a truthful reason why, because the fact is eBay is doing quite fine.
There have always been scams. There are fewer now. It's not perfect, but it's been going in the right direction overall, not the wrong direction. Specific ones like fake tracking or empty box returns need to be addressed, but I'm not confident they can be addressed by eBay as long as consumer protection laws remain the way they are.
gurlcat
·11 months agoClearly some people don't know the difference between "dying" and "sucking" (for them).
I would say Walmart sucks big time compared to how it was in 2000 or whatever. -Used to have employees manning every department to help, plenty of cashiers, even baggers. Now not only are employees virtually nowhere to be found but lots of merchandise is locked in cabinets that would require an employee to open, and you have to either check yourself out or wait in a long line for the single human-manned checkout aisle (that exists only because of how easily cigarettes could be shoplifted).
But imagine someone saying "Walmart is dying." 🤣
jonathanbrightlight
·11 months agoYep.
Some people have a bad time on eBay. It's not always entirely self-inflicted (though I do see a lot of that).
But eBay is not dying, or even getting worse.
hartungcards
·11 months ago"People saying ebay isn't dying aren't paying attention. It is slow for sure but it absolutely is happening."
If you're paying attention, everyone is slowly dying.
stainlessenginecovers
·11 months agoEven though that article is from the UK, which may be skewed from the typical USA point of view,
in my case:
70% of sales come from Ebay
30% of sales come from Amazon
Overall 2025 up 12%.
I believe since Covid, 'listing' and 'online selling' has doubled (the amount of sellers)
Look at the number of listings for just these 2 categories.
With these below numbers I don't believe Ebay is going anywhere in our lifetime.
bonanza125
·11 months agoEbay isn't dying. Customers spending habits are changing yes but there would be good months/years and bad months/years. It's all part of the business.
hartungcards
·11 months agoThe reports of eBay's death are greatly exaggerated.
my_boston_baked_beans
OP11 months agoThe article does not address the "death" per say, but rather why sales are slowing, buyers disgruntled, and eBay doing nothing regarding dropship and other obvious problems as the article reveals...
hartungcards
·11 months ago"The article does not address the "death" per say,.."
Oh ok, so the "Why eBay Feels Like a Dying Marketplace" title was just clickbait?
my_boston_baked_beans
OP11 months agoIf that reflects your opinion ride on. I have my own opinion certainly not what you imply..
hartungcards
·11 months ago"I have my own opinion certainly not what you imply.."
Cool, I wouldn't want to "imply" anything, let's hear your opinion.
estate_echoes
·11 months agoYou lost me at "death", as it clearly says "feels like a DYING marketplace".
Seems like an obvious diffence.