Regards,
@tobaccocardyahoo wrote:Ebay is not an innovator any more.
The threads on this forum are often dealing with issues months after they arise on other marketplaces.
Ebay has issues to deal with which are more extreme than other marketplaces.
They are 100% dependent on 3P sellers unlike the big marketplaces for their revenue - Amazon and Walmart.
They are the first choice for money hungry offshore dwellers. Particularly those who need profit margin so they cannot play at Temu.
They have a longtime image as a place to sell the stuff in Grandma's attic, so they are not considered as a place to buy many classes of new product.
Sponsored ads came later to Ebay than other marketplaces and many sellers are wasting their money on promotion, because they have no clue whether it will help them or not. Those sellers bid up the cost of promotion so that many who could benefit are on the edge of failure when they are promoting.
I have no clue what % of Ebay sellers have no retail experience, but it is probably higher than Amazon or Walmart because of other obstacles to selling there.
Some other markets have different concerns. Walmart makes it easy for buyers to never see any 3P seller results in their search, and I and many other buyers there use that ability.
The FTC lawsuit against Amazon is targeting Amazon's past requirement that Amazon sellers offer their best price online on Amazon, and Amazon's suppression of its Buy Box from uncompetitively priced offers.
You can't be found on Ebay because Ebay is organized wider than Amazon, while Amazon is organized to be deeper.
Ebay experimented with a catalog system with all offers under a single entry, and the weaker sellers complained profusely.
Ebay is structured as the sellers preferred, and the sellers are paying the price.
Ebay listens to its sellers far more frequently than other marketplaces, and the sellers are usually wrong in what they ask for.
When a seller starts their post with how long they have been selling here, and with their feedback percentage, we know they have been smacked in the head by the reality of being of being a retailer in the 21st century. Their longevity and feedback are largely irrelevant.
Amazon is a mass market site, Walmart is a mass market site. Success is selling 100s of thousands of item per year, and many Amazon sellers do. They buy products with their own brands on the product or buy national brands at prices which are comparable to volume retailers. They use Amazon to fulfill their orders because it is cheaper than packing and shipping for them self. They make decisions which make sense in the volumes they sell. Amazon screws the little guy as often or more often than Ebay.
And many sellers fail there, but they are more likely to recognize their failure sooner. When sellers face long time storage fees coming, the have their merchandise discarded or sent to liquidation. And much of that product is bought for liquidation by Ebayers. And much of that merchandise has already proved to be unmarketable, and not necessarily just because of price. I have the opportunity to review liquidation product, and much of it brings to mind "what were they thinking"
@tobaccocardyahoo I was reading through the post and was curious about the two highlighted statements. Would there be any specific examples for those two statements? My sales have been steadily declining since the beginning of 2022 when eBay made two major changes, neither of which I had any say in nor would have encouraged the implementation of ... that would be the full roll out of PLA and the new Views counting.
