How can eBay regain seller confidence?

[b86fiero]

With the recent change in eBay leadership, nervous sellers off loading product to other sites and buyer disinterest, it is paramount that eBay deliver an outstanding 4th quarter sales improvement.

What will it take to generate buyer excitement and bring them back to the site?

Forget seller issues like MP, GTC, etc for this thread please.

I'd like to hear thoughts on buyer enticements, loyalty programs, advertising and marketplace presentation.   

[b86fiero]

Marketplaces that deliver buyers and generate sales create seller confidence by putting dollars in those sellers wallets.  The more income generated from a site, it seem to reason, that sellers will invest more in that site through increased inventory.

How many abandoned malls and department stores have you seen?  Why did they fail?  Lack of business maybe?  Why did shoppers abandon them?   Obsolete goods?

[b86fiero]

I'm off to ship packages and will check back later.  

Thanks to all who reply and offer ideas and opinions.

[greg5000]

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@pburn wrote:

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@b86fiero wrote:

What will it take to generate buyer excitement and bring them back to the site?

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Speaking strictly for myself, the addition of sales tax and the increase in postal rates (neither of which are eBay's doing) have come pretty close to pricing me out of the eBay market.

On top of that, some of the items I look for are offered at laughable prices: certain discontinued items listed at $50--used--that I can get on Amazon for under $20 brand new, for example. Lately, I've checked for specific books, DVDs, jigsaw puzzles, and a small kitchen appliance at least, and all were priced way above Amazon. That's not encouraging for a buyer.

As a final straw, probably eight of my last ten transactions have been disappointing in one aspect or another--with the seller misrepresenting an item or packaging it poorly or whatever. Problems with my last two sellers pretty turned me off eBay. I know eBay is made up of good sellers, too, but I've had a pretty bad run of luck lately, even after doing all the appropriate "due diligence." A buyer can only give eBay sellers so many chances before deciding to go elsewhere.

So, as a buyer, I'm not sure what would rekindle my interest in eBay. An 80% "disappointment" rate is just too high for me to continue to buy here consistently. I might check it now and then for some obscure item, but I won't be checking it routinely anymore. The %-off discount offers used to spark my interest, but they've stopped doing those. The other ideas you mentioned are great, but, for me, they're not enough to put up with mediocre purchases or transactions.

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I had to look twice to see that this was you.  I always thought you liked eBay? 

[ed8108]

EBay needs to view each seller & each individual buyer as being either an asset or a liability, & then act appropriately by thining the herd of problem ebay users.

[myjunqueyourtreasure]

I'm with you on the "disappointing" buyer experiences.

As a seller I'm tired of busting my hump after working an 8 hour shift to get orders out the door as fast as possible only to then turn around as a buyer here and see sellers print a label then wait up to 5 days to get around to mailing it.

[southern*sweet*tea]

As a seller, if Ebay really wanted to gain my confidence, they'd get rid of the legions of abysmal sellers we have here, along with the multiple account holding, mega duplicate listing overseas sellers that clog the site with their 99 cent junk.  This is why we have so many bad buyers. Bad buyers don't care about a "good experience" - they're going to rob you no matter what. Good buyers just leave when they have enough bad experiences.

Get rid of the bad sellers, support your good ones, and the bad buyers will leave. Will the good ones come back? Probably not, I think it's too late for that. But at least some of the bad ones would give up and move on elsewhere and we could retain the good buyers we do have.

[albany_sellers]

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@b86fiero wrote:

With the recent change in eBay leadership, nervous sellers off loading product to other sites and buyer disinterest, it is paramount that eBay deliver an outstanding 4th quarter sales improvement.

What will it take to generate buyer excitement and bring them back to the site?

Forget seller issues like MP, GTC, etc for this thread please.

I'd like to hear thoughts on buyer enticements, loyalty programs, advertising and marketplace presentation.   

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eBay could back off on this quest to nickle and dime us to death while doing virtually nothing to prevent scammers from running wild. If they would hold buyers accountable then sellers would not be so weary about shipping to new users, sellers wouldn't feel the need to block buyers for simply asking a few questions and I'd bet that canceled orders would decline if the sellers knew that eBay would protect them if things went sideways.

By eBay sticking it to us and not protecting us, many of us feel like we have to do all we can to protect ourselves, and in doing so it ends up driving buyers away who wanted to buy something but got their orders canceled or got treated with suspicion.  Sellers who are confident cause buyers to be happy.

Another thing eBay could do is stop interfering so much and then playing the uninterested bystander when their policies and their meddling cause us issues with our buyers. Stop trying to sneak things into our listings to "help" us, stop telling us how long to list our items, stop causing buyers to want to cancel by showing them cheaper listings as soon as they pay for our listings, stop pushing returns as soon as someone buys by showing them the return buttons as soon as an order is paid for, and stop trying to micro manage us and punishing us by pushing out listings down for not taking part in "optional" things like promoted listings or free returns.

Speaking of "helping us",  auto turning on best offers is such a dumb move by eBay. How do you imagine the buyer feels when they send what would be a reasonable offer to a seller who has best offers on, yet it's instantly denied no matter what because that seller did not want to take offers but was forced into having the option activated? You get a seller who is turned off from buying on eBay because they don't know that the seller has been forced into that, they just think the seller is a jerk or unreasonable.

If eBay wanted to create a better environment, they could, but history has show me that they don't care much about that and only care about how many fees they can extract. Everything else is an afterthought.

[josepmcelro_3]

Concentrate on current technical issues remember it's not you it's us. Stop the catalog it's horrible. Search is a waste of time. I can't tell you how many times I stopped looking for something and went somewhere else and 4 clicks it was purchased and paid for. I am a seller but also a buyer. 

Answer seller questions about managed payments. 

[albany_sellers]

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@greg5000 wrote:

This is coming from a very frequent Buyer from 2010 until 2019 (when eBay imploded).

Although there were some issues over the years, it wasn't until 2019 when I chose to stop buying here. 

The reasons were:

• A very bad buying experience that wasn't handled properly.
• eBay allowing bad high volume sellers to remain on the site.
• Improper Feedback Removal, and eBay not following their own policies.
• Unacceptable and Frequent Technical Issues and Glitches.
• Poor Customer Service to address my concerns (and I'm a Concierge Member).

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100% agree with the bad high volume sellers part. That is why I refuse to buy almost anything on eBay now and use Amazon instead. My last straw was buying bubble wrap from a big seller who we all know as the one who sends only half the order and then lies to eBay about you only sending half back when you return it, the same seller who has almost every negative feedback scrubbed from their account.

That one transaction pretty much hit all the bullet points. They removed my perfectly legal negative feedback from that seller's feedback, and then when I called to find out why they would do that, I was told how it was "within policy" and because this large volume seller suffered a "Natural calamity" that made them send me only half my order, ignore me, sent an insufficient return label, ignore me AND eBay some more, and then lie. This same seller who every single day seems to suffer natural calamities that requires the daily negatives they get to be removed.

After that fiasco, I was done. I lost trust in the feedback scores that were being manipulated to sucker people into buying from sellers they would have avoided like cancer had they been able to see the real picture.

[oldwestgold]

I would simply like to answer your subject question.  "That horse left the barn a few years ago and will never return. RIP."

[oldwestgold]

DITTO

[oldwestgold]

One item would be for eBay to stop with all of the pop-up ads for sellers on our listings or whatever you call them. I see websites outside of eBay for my competitors just because that have the cash to advertise here. eBay restricts sellers from including this information yet allows others that don't even sell here to advertise on my listing pages.  How much sense does that make? Why today I even noticed an ad on my listing page for Shopify to create your own eCommerce website to sell your goods off eBay. WHAT?!?

[coolections]

Actually no matter who is in charge it is buyer confidence that makes $$. I doubt Ebay cares a whole lot about seller confidence. Sellers are a dime a dozen so unless thousands leave and no new ones come not much will change. 

[b86fiero]

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@coolections wrote:

Actually no matter who is in charge it is buyer confidence that makes $$. I doubt Ebay cares a whole lot about seller confidence. Sellers are a dime a dozen so unless thousands leave and no new ones come not much will change. 

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Agree that buyer confidence makes the money for sellers.  

Is seller confidence in a site's ability to deliver buyers not directly related to buyer confidence in the sellers on that site?  

[albany_sellers]

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@coolections wrote:

Actually no matter who is in charge it is buyer confidence that makes $$. I doubt Ebay cares a whole lot about seller confidence. Sellers are a dime a dozen so unless thousands leave and no new ones come not much will change. 

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I'd like to see the buyer's confidence when all of the good sellers are ran off by bad policy and only the reject sellers that nobody else will allow on their platform remain. eBay should be bending over backwards to keep sellers who buyers actually want to buy from.