@silverado-800-925 wrote:
This message is for EVERYONE to read, buyers, sellers, and eBay people. Before we get into the chaos of the present 6/19/19 eBay, let's just review the 4 levels of the "pyramid" eBay is founded on. The Base of eBay (the MOST important part) is "stuff for sale" this brings in "usual" income, which is 10% of the sale for eBay. The next (most important in eBay working pyramid) is the Sellers, or the origins of the items up for sale. This can typically bring in extra income for eBay if the Seller has a store and pays fees or sponsors items (get to that in a second). Next important is the Buyer, who makes the sale happen, giving eBay 10% from the seller on their sold item. Then at the top of the pyramid is eBay, who digitally houses, services data, protects and insures items for buyers and sellers.
Clearly sometime over the past 7 months or so some serious changes occurred in HOW eBay functions from the perspective of the Buyer. Yes, Sellers it changed quite a bit for you as well. Rapidly many long term mega sellers started noticing huge drops in their sales. Small sellers with less than 50 items started noticing huge drops in sales. This caused much of the eBay community to panic, and start "sponsoring" their items up for sale giving eBay a larger cut. This did lead to eBay having a great first quarter but it was at the expense of the "middle of the pyramid". It was not higher sales generating cash, it was desperate sellers, the origins of the BASE of eBay's business pyramid. This boost in capital will be short lived, simply because it erodes the very BASE the company is founded on. Back to the Buyers, the main generators of the capital for eBay.
The buying "experience" has been GREATLY altered by these changes made upon the desperate sellers. Simply put "SPONSORED" items are nothing more than items constantly REPEATED in the thread of the category of items you are looking at. For most buyers, the first time they scroll past an item, aka "turn the item down" it really means they do not want that item. Constantly making it come up over and over does not necessarily make it sell, or sell faster. However, constantly making the same item come up as a buyer scrolls through the item feed makes fatigue happen. So if there "were" 500 items in the "buyers" search, in the old eBay maybe a few would repeat. Now, new eBay that same search with 500 individual items has a search scroll with 1,000 - 2,500 items, clearly with a ton of item repetition or "sponsored" items. The Buyer ends up having repetition fatigue, and does not complete looking through all of the 500 "individual" items in the search. This is WHY sales have decreased.
With decreased sales comes less MOTIVATION for Sellers to list items up for sale on eBay. The items for sale are the Base of eBay as a company. Sellers are getting hit with hurdles and increased payments to sell their items. These actions are unfortunately ERODING the Base of eBay as a functioning company. It is also leading to an increase in the size and amount of items for sale on other sites like Poshmark and a bunch more.
Personally, I USED to sell about $1,000-$2,000 per month on eBay. Before the changes. I would then spend ALL of it BUYING stuff ON eBay. So eBay "used" to get $100-$200 a month from my sales. Then eBay would get another $100-$200 a month from the sellers of the items I bought with my eBay sales money. So, that "used" to be $200-$400 a MONTH in cash sent to eBay. NOW in the chaos of eBay 6/19/19 I'm selling about $250 a month. This brings eBay's income from me down from up to $400 per month, to a measly $50 per month. So, in 2019 the new changes to eBay have cost eBay's cash flow from me to DECREASE up to 87.5% EVERY month compared to "before the change".
Great post. This pretty much sums up what's going on with many of us here. I had no idea that this was going on that long. For you eBay cheerleaders who need proof and facts, all of us have our personal experiences that are all verifiable.
Fact: I recently started selling again in September and used the 50 free listings and sold 41 items (excluding one unpaid item). I foolishly believed opening a store would help me sell more items, but since I did, I've sold only one item even with three times as many listings. My experience is not unique, as all of the eBayers I'm following selling 500+ items, none of them Chinese sellers, are experiencing the same or worse.
