@blurryrobot wrote:
What boggles my mind is that this stuff impacts their bottom line as well, since they have no other source of revenue but our sales.
What boggles my mind even more is that they could fix this all by one weird trick: Do nothing. Literally, do nothing. Don't make improvements. Don't make code changes. Just do nothing. Coast. Chillax. Kick back on a beach and sip mai tais. How many different ways can I say this.
Cancel 75% of the meetings, do maintenance instead of these big stupid changes, and just let it run. When everything you do breaks something, doing nothing is the most basic improvement possible.
Alas, that same situation existed when I was in engineering. Process works without a flaw for 60 years? You can run it with the lights out? One time you forgot to stop the process during a planned shutdown and when you came back, everything was fine except that you had surplus inventory now?
Well that's perfect situation for an ego driven boss to start meddling, and the result is usually a process that works almost as well as the old one, at the cost of constant tweaking and repairs...
That, friend, is what we have going on here. I don't even have to attend a single meeting to recognize the signs of it...
Signs of basic maintenance deficiency are everywhere too. Every few days I definitely run into a spate of server problems, "no healthy upstream", "session not found". And probably not coincidentally, those days seem to coincide with sluggish sales. This is the sort of thing they should be fixing, not implementing more needless and self destructive category changes (next round 9/20, oh joooooy).
What do they think they're going to accomplish after all these category changes are done, if they're ever done, in what, five or ten years? Oh great, now you're up to "industry standard" but it's the industry standard of 10 years ago, oof. They think this kind of thing will end up with them being #1 in 2035? Delusionalllll.
There's a bit of a misconception about their bugs, particularly the search ones.
While they are often bad for the majority, search will always have weight of *something*. In the recent issues, we saw a lot of mid-range sellers suddenly on top of search, while all the top sellers in the category, the ones with highest PL investment, etc were pushed down to the bottom.
EBay was still getting sales. It's that their search system wasn't working properly when showing up in search based on rankings. The TRS who put in effort for strong metrics, the ones who are investing the most in PL, the ones who fought to get the highest organic rankings? They were NOT the ones properly being given traffic. Instead it was being given to *other* sellers.
Basically, it seemed as the ones who take eBay seriously and rely on it for income were the ones suffering most.
EBay does have issues with technology, though. They need to take a good 6 months on just FIXING issues without adding or changing anything significant. So many features are broken, so many bugs reported and never fixed. There's no way they will be an industry standard when they're never working as intended.
That said, eBay's numbers ARE down a pretty significant amount - just not nearly the amount people were seeing in these drops. ~20% rather than > 50%.
And the issue eBay has is stepping on their own feet in terms of promotions. Sure, they get a higher % of the FVF's. But the eBay prices are higher than the competition. Meaning LESS people have a reason to shop on eBay at all. Inevitably, that will lose buyers in order to get short term gains.
EBay learned their lesson about this in ~2019. But new management, means new people making the same mistakes...
