Open letter to eBay management.

[muanesy1]

To eBay management,

I've been an active eBay (Australia) buyer/seller on/off since it's early beginnings. unfortunately, recently I can see a clear steep decline in the quality of service on ebay.com.au. When trying to buy something I always come across a few very irritating issues with the buyer interface that causes confusion and frustration with the way this site is designed. This caused me in the last few months, after most of my visits, to close ebay.com.au and source what I needed from other suppliers. I know that eBay's loss from few hundred dollars missed sales is not much, but I don't think that I am the only one, I believe, just like me, many have started to leave eBay to be the "last option" when shopping online after many years of being the first.  Here are some clear points to clarify the negative experience at ebay.com.au:

1. Advertisements interwind in the item description: I was and still perplexed by the decision to overwhelm a shopper with distracting ads and other options just when they are about to buy! Imagine this scenario: You spend your time and do your research and pick a car you want to buy, then you go to a car showroom and tell the salesman exactly which car you want, but before you finish talking, the salesman interrupts you and offers to show you other cars. You tell him that you know what you want and that you don't want to waste time to see other choices at that point, but he insists to waste your time and confuse you because that is his showroom management sales policy. How do you rate that showroom/eBay.com.au? I personally walked away numerous times from eBay -not showrooms- because no car salesman would do that!
 

2. Allowing sellers to post ads with different items at different prices in one ad: common sense dictates that every ad should have one price, the options can be there to select variations like colour, otherwise this is just designed to confuse people, ruin the reliability of the search engine and open the gates for all sorts of tricks and abuse by sellers! and this is what is happening now all over eBay; For example, just before I came to write this letter, I walked away from ebay.com.au because after I "decided to buy" a traveller power plug from eBay, I picked one to buy but came across this ad with similar features but a discounted price. You will see the trick the seller used here, they put the price of extra few days of warranty as to be the price of the item. I immediately closed eBay and googled "St**** eBay management" to vent my frustration at the way the site is managed and allowed to be manipulated and of course, once again I will buy what I wanted from somewhere else.
 

3. The simple and advanced search on eBay are being manipulated to result in fake results: example: Try search for "2tb external hard drive", the "2tb" is the industry standard to specify the capacity of the drive, sort the results by price and you will get a long list of "empty" hard drive cases that had no drive, and therefore no capacity; cases are just enclosure and connector, the hard drive capacity is absolutely irrelevant. Even if you refine the search on the left and select "Storage capacity - 2tb", you still get overwhelmed with the empty cases. this is clear manipulation of the search. I understood that eBay might not be aware of such hole in their search engine, so I tried very hard to find a way to report that, but after a long time of searching, I found that there is no way to report an issue except through an item I bought earlier, I gave the details in a chat session, I was told that this will be directed to someone, now, more than a month later it is still the same. Of course, at that time I didn't bother and went and bought the 2tb hard disks from a local retailer, and soon after that, I bought 3 SSD drives without even considering eBay just to avoid wasting my time on sorting true from false.

Finally, I kindly suggest that you introduce a rating system for listings, they don't need all to be addressed, but when negative "dislikes" for a certain item reach a certain threshold, someone can look and see what the issue is. this might help keep you aware of the customers' experience, which appears to be ignored when making crucial point-of-sale decisions.

So, bye-bye eBay for now, and I hope this to be read by a concerned manager because I hope that eBay might come back to its glory. unless eBay's main source of income became through ads not sales, then please ignore my letter.

[gracieallen01]

Respectfully speaking, ebay, according to 1Q and 2Q messages to shareholders and 'the street', indicated that ebay revenue was up, while sales were down.  Therefore, one might surmise that the source of that revenue came from activities other than sales.  It isn't terribly surprising, as ebay is looking out for itself and it's well-being, therefore, sellers must adapt, just as buyers will have to.  Unfortunately, many sellers, and buyers, are set in their ways and ebay may or may not make it until enough new generation sellers, and buyers, are educated in the continual changes. 

Time will tell.

[cashvaluerecovery2011]

It is what it is. Ebay has chosen to bilk sellers for more per transaction than figure out how to get more transaction. They sell ad space on your listing while charging you for your listing. Its lack of imagination and shows zero experience in to how to grow business and then revenue. They have chosen the double edged sword approach of grow revenue at all costs and suffer an eventual death by 1000 cuts.

To replace lost revenue from sellers who leave ebay has chosen to just raise selling costs on the sellers remaining. Excaserbating the problem. That is what fake seller metrics are for. Promoted listings. Managed payments. All things devised to harm sellers pockets to ebays benefit.

[fashunu4eeuh]

That wall of text is a bit hard to read, but i did.

You make some good points regarding things that negatively effect the user experience on eBay. Your trials on the Australian site mirror mine on the USA site.

I can’t help but wonder if part of the problem is that eBay considers itself a tech company first and foremost. I just don’t hear them defining the business as a sales platform. I watched Devin Wenig’s presentation at the eBay convention. While it was impressive, and there’s no doubt that eBay is founded on some pretty amazing technology, he didn’t talk like a retailer or a sales facilitator for an ecommerce venue. I don’t know. I’m thinking their vision for the company doesn’t match up with its users’ expectations.

[greg5000]

Due to concerns with eBay in 2019 I also had to say bye-bye for now ...

Hoping for changes in Management, Customer Support, Platform, and Processes, that will make eBay a place we want to buy & sell on again.

[vintagecraze50]

The advertising budget was cut during those quarters are well so that possibly explains the lower sales amount. They did increase revenue from sales quite well several years ago when they had that massive advertising campaign. I am sure that cost millions. 

[hioctane62]

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@gracieallen01 wrote:

Respectfully speaking, ebay, according to 1Q and 2Q messages to shareholders and 'the street', indicated that ebay revenue was up, while sales were down.  Therefore, one might surmise that the source of that revenue came from activities other than sales.  It isn't terribly surprising, as ebay is looking out for itself and it's well-being, therefore, sellers must adapt, just as buyers will have to.  Unfortunately, many sellers, and buyers, are set in their ways and ebay may or may not make it until enough new generation sellers, and buyers, are educated in the continual changes. 

Time will tell.

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Unfortunately for all involved, sellers and buyers are learning that to "adapt", they need to move to other platforms. eBay has made it very difficult to do any kind of business here as a seller or buyer. 

[abfabvintage]

@vintagecraze50 

Hi, vintagecraze. And now that I have seen about 6 iterations of the "new" ebay advertise on TV? They must have paid about 5.00 to get that one published. THE most awful advertisement I have seen yet. Of course, doesn't help that before and after the eBay laughing hyenas Ad, we have Posh and Mercari which hit it out of the ballpark. Actually made me want to sell there...Rant over.  

[muanesy1]

This sounds like "Enron style" of reporting.