@my-cottage-books-and-antiques wrote:
@retro_entertainment_collectibles You say (and I'm only quoting part of it): " Perhaps eBay would be open to concepts of closer partnerships with vendors, a collective. Concepts such as focal sales days and dates whereby members of said collective (best vendors) have site wide or categorical sales that eBay could promote and orient on site. "
I've been suggesting similar things for years. ebay talks a lot about how valuable we sellers are, and ebay does work directly with a limited number of sellers for things like Daily Deals, Livestreams, and even to get certain merchandise onto the site. But ebay has never really leveraged its seller base as an asset. ebay has been doing a good job of "milking" the base.....fee increases, Promoted Listings etc...but has never figured out how to really work with sellers.
Your suggestion is a good one. And I've repeatedly asked ebay to at the very least give us advance notice if they are going to be running a specific marketing or ad campaign so that we can try to benefit from it. But getting ebay to actually work with the seller base is an uphill battle.
I'd love to hear some of your other suggestions....
Greetings,
I've put forth some concepts such as a refined statistical system towards seller and consumer confidence and safety I assume you have saw. I've put forth concept of localized online malls which I also assume you may have read of.
There are vendors here at eBay that directly in their listings promote off site trading and purchasing inventories from consumers whereby eBay completely misses out on a single red cent. Sure they are not supposed to do that but they do and its not as if they link their websites, nope, all it takes is a google search and there ya are. eBay should have a mechanism by which consumers can offer up things directly to a vendor if they so choose, simply a private listing targeted at a given vendor whereby the "trade or sale" is literally "Held by the hand" via automation, a step by step process easy peasy.
eBay stores should be much more robust in features like any decent webstore application. They should allow for subdomain, "Cottagebooksandantiques.ebay.com" and the application afford proper indexing just as common eStore software does. So, you could submit to Bing, Google, other search engines. Many commerce apps allow for aggregate partners whereby say you find a collectibles forum and they agree to affiliate link products for a commission. We don't even have upsell ability in the storefronts, they are very basic which I find very surprising. IMHO should be capability of unique domain essentially meaning you're robust featured eBay store is quite transparently its own entity other than "Powered by eBay" on it. These can also be grouped into localized online malls whereby eBay also sell ad space, attract localized businesses and can be done many a way. Californiamall.eBay.com, SanAntoniomall.ebay.com, YorkshireMall.eBay.uk etc.
Taken another direction can do Petmall.eBay.com, CustomAuto.eBay.com and in order for sellers to be included in said malls (which can indeed have all sorts of scheduled promotions!) performance matters.
You can see levels of commonality that I am speaking of in not only refining eBay as a whole but extending it atop those refinements. Being a software (toot toot!) engineer w/ marketing the commonality towards changes and scaling remains logical and thus there are not buckets of fringe program code laying around that in time become spaghetti.
Ask yourself how many small and moderate sized businesses have tried operate their own online storefronts? Most of them fail miserably as key components towards knowledge and effort are not there. I can have the most lovely storefront on the net but if nobodys coming its moot. Online malls failed because just TOO MUCH, they sat in a globalized scope much like eBay itself. Just too much to reasonably view. Not a ONE OF THEM ever moved towards refinement into localized/regional commerce.
Nobody cares believe me but my ex is one of the key entities that resulted in Amazon's marketplace. They had auctions and zShops which were failing miserably. It was my ex being a political/marketing beastie who called Amazon, worked through the phone channels ending up talking to a Mr. Tsuzak (spelling aside). He was the CMO of Amazon and they'd talked and talked and talked time and again for hours about commerce, politics and this and that. Yeah, in 15+ years with her I learned a few things LOL. They implemented the marketplace did away with the existing venues and it exploded just as she predicted it would. Me well, I coded up a reprice engine that when submitted to Amazon for review they were blown away by but the repricer was so very aggressive in capability they "kindly" told me "uh no" as it in the hands of thousands of sellers it could devalue their entire marketplace in huge fashion as well as scant time. True... Dummy me never thought of that.
eBay is also missing out in huge fashion on the capability of mobile technology. There's lots of collectors of items out there including consumers and dealers not to mention other consumables. Show me a site whereby I can submit what I am seeking and notifies me when a seller has it up for sale. This is where detailed information in a database counts, UPC/EAN etc codes. Want sellers build that database sorta requires they've reason to and "because google wants it" doesn't exactly equate to sellers going, "Oh, does that put soup in my dish? I dont see it?"
I can go on...
