1) First impressions of any business is paramount. Fix the search engine, it's a royal mess and is getting worse. A new buyer coming onto eBay is not going to have a good experience trying to navigate the maze of promoted listings, bad SE returns, China goods that do not belong in the search, etc., You have 8 seconds to make a good impression, eBay can't do it right now.
2) Regulate the Chinese vendors better so they are not creeping into every single category, especially collectibles and antiques where they are flooding categories with knock offs. NO buyer wants to have to keep tweaking their search criteria to get past eBay's terrible artificial intelligence monster they call a search engine. It's truly dreadful.
I actually have buyers ask me all the time now if my items are 'real' or from China. This is very telling, it means they have already been burned here once or more.
3) ADVERTISE!! We are going into the BEST selling season and Amazon, Mercari and Poshmark are killing it with advertisements on television. Prime television. I see Mercari on Live PD every episode, and their ads are GREAT! Where is eBay? And why are their ads embarrassing and aimed at drunk 20 year olds? I'm serious on this one, the last handful of eBay ads I did catch (Everyone wants a new thing, new thing with the nasally twangy voiced girl whining) and the actually misleading leather sofa ad laughing at brick and mortar stores are not good ads. Get professional eBay and make eBay look GOOD.
4) Clean up the site, the massive amount of duplicate ads from Chinese vendors with dozens of accounts, stop the bait and switch multiple ads from same that advertise something for .99c, only to find that is a safety pin and the item the buyer actually wants is $20. I'm assuming here, but these listings are deceptive and drive buyers away who feel they are being tricked. Lose buyer confidence and their money dries right up.
5) Give a new buyer incentive like a coupon or something they can use to make their first purchase here. Mercari does it, other sites do it, get these new possible buyers here to close the deal with an incentive. Let them get a taste of eBay and maybe they will come back. IF the search is fixed and if the site is cleaned up of the little mini con games like I mention above (mostly China, but since China is eBay's 'Baby', they need to discipline their bad babies if they play dirty and they do.) Same with their big sellers here, no scrubbed bad feedback, etc., that is NOT a good buying experience for a buyer, altered FB and not in a good way for the buyer. The only ones a cleaned up FB helps is the seller and eBay. Where is the buyers EXPERIENCE in this move? Cheating the buyer out of reading the truth?
6) Bring in some real retail experts who can do a "Shark Tank" revision on this place. It appears the bulk of eBay's focus is on their stock holders and that is never good for buyers and sellers. When the push is to please the investors all the time, the site will suffer and it is.
7) Just stop with all the new gimmicks and ideas. It is not only confusing to your buyers, it is confusing to your sellers. As a buyer, I want basically the same or a better experience the next time I return to a site I visited. When the site keeps changing, I don't like it and most people don't like it. Humans do not, for the most part, like change. We are a habitual species, change causes stress. So many of the changes look like desperate moves to sell things, buyers feel it, and they wonder why are they trying so hard to sell me something. Is their stuff no good? Should I wonder about this or just go somewhere else.
😎 ADVERTISE!!! You competitors are, and new buyers are coming to those other sites that I see on TV EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. Where is eBay?
By the way, a mention again of that brick and mortar stores TV advertisement. I was talking to a neighbor 2 days ago and they said, "Do you still sell on eBay?" I said yes. They said, "That sofa ad made me angry, it was tacky and mean, I don't buy on eBay anymore." (Or something close to that).
That's one voice from America who no longer shops here. Tacky and mean. About sums that commercial up too.
