@hioctane62 wrote:
Buyers and sellers both seem to be leaving eBay in the dust at an alarming rate, and eBay doesn't seem to care. They think they can just keep milking the remaining sellers (who are selling less and less with the traffic decline) to increase their profits. From all indications, and what they've stated publicly, their only business plan is to collect more fees from sellers. It just isn't sustainable to take more from those who have less.
Sadly, the real situation is the opposite of the direction eBay is going.
If eBay wants to grow, they need a strength above the competition, or something the others can't offer.
That strength used to be prices, eBay would have the cheapest prices as they had the lowest amounts of fees and costs.
But then eBay changed returns to have less protections, increasing costs, and encouraging many other policies that increase costs. Returns and shipping methods that all increase costs.
It seems they thought this would make the offerings more comparable to competitors such as Amazon, but even with Free Returns and Guaranteed Delivery, the offerings are still sub-par compared to Amazon, so it didn't really improve things.
What eBay really needs to increase their income is a stronger marketplace; more marketplace sales! For sellers to be able to do that, the first step is they need to be able to reduce their prices as much as possible. That way, eBay actually has a strength again; strong prices!
The next steps would be allowing sellers to actually select business models that fit them most. Nobody should feel as if they're "forced" to use things like Free Returns, Guaranteed Delivery, overpriced expedited shipping, or sponsored listings. But many categories of sellers do feel pressured to use these things as they will lose visibility or protections without it, and the loss of profit margin would be too much without them.
Of course, sellers would be offering faster shipping if they're able to, but not every product is one that could be shipped cheap. Some product lines require very expensive shipping, especially to expedite, so it's silly that they're pressured in to spending more on shipping and returns only to make sure they have appropriate protections and appear in search.
They would also offers buyers choice. They could take the cheaper item, or they could pay a little more for quicker shipping. Visibility shouldn't automatically be granted to the person with a smaller handling time, unless the person doing the search is specifically looking for a shorter delivery time.
It's just general eCommerce. EBay is very limiting right now, sellers can't come up with their own business models or marketing plans. They're being funneled in to the model that eBay decides on, and it simply doesn't work for everyone. It leads to unavoidable costs or penalties for certain categories, and definitely is not "fair" treatment.
If the market isn't treated fairly in those categories, of course eBay is going to have drops in those categories.
Likewise, if sellers are able to actually develop marketing plans that fit their product line, that will allow them to give better offerings to customers and increase eBay sales, and eBay's profits.
Serious sellers will be doing the best they can to bring themselves more sales. EBay's policies have become an obstacle in the way of sellers bringing in more sales for many categories.
They keep trying to blame everything else, but if you look at the graphs of when the decline on eBay started, it's plain to see Q1 2018 is where things all started to go wrong. And that's precisely when the change of direction to the current policies began.
