From a closed Community Chat thread --
@ekmadonna
"Buyers do expect to be able to return items when they shop online. When they aren't able to return items they often shop elsewhere." [italics mine]
They're already shopping elsewhere... and have been for awhile.
We're rummaging and slashing about trying to figure out what the problem is. Before recently, I spent perhaps a half-hour on these boards *total* over many years. I was busy with my little business, now reduced to a nothing-burger. These days I lurk and commiserate vicariously about these boards for insight into this radical and sudden dropoff in sales and traffic... certainly sudden for me, but I've been luckier than most. These days, I've got little else happening on eBay.
I say "radical and sudden" because that's my perception. I've been fortunate to have been able to persist impervious to the effects of eBay decline a little longer than most. I'm lucky like that. My product and approach are unconventional. But I'm starting to get a little angry now.
Whatever has changed -- we can speculate all day, but it's probably a combination of things -- eBay is a frail shadow of its former self, a "financial asset" to be gamed and dressed out toward some profit objective having little to do with the viability of the mechanism itself. eBay, once a bright and representative outlet of that quintessential Mom and Pop Spirit of enterprise that so endeared itself to America -- indeed to the world -- is now dulled, eschewed by hipsters and the Apple Pie crowd alike. What was once organically all things to all people is now the rodent-infested back alley of online retail.
I am deeply saddened, long reluctant to accept this appraisal, longing to be proven wrong -- again and again failing to unsee it.
When eBay assesses culpability upon the earnest and true, and kowtows to the bad -- believing (so it seems) that such homogenization represents the best of both worlds, it deteriorates like any pride-abandoned neighborhood. The classiest residents are either already gone or looking at the door.
