What would happen....

[Anonymous]

     .....if say, most or close to all sellers on this platform on a certain day and forward stopped promoting their listings ? Simply refused to use promotions......would views come to a halt ? Would the site be severely impacted ? Would the programming that controls the views and promotions greed game burst into flames ?

     Would it get eBay's attention ? It certainly wouldn't be punishable......we as a majority just decided not to play the game anymore, right ? After all, it is still a voluntary choice to promote, could they handle it if we all happened to make a different choice at the same time ?

     I guess it would be like a mutiny, with eBay walking the plank.......would they just walk off, or would they realize their greed and stop charging us for views ? The whole concept of paying for views (therefore a chance to sell) is utterly ridiculous.....views should flow freely and just be how the system works, like on every other platform.

     Many sellers have come into this forum and stated that they are on other platforms now, or have shifted the majority of their business to other platforms because of this nonsense. I myself am killing it on Whatnot these days, doing live stream auctions and selling my wares for their worth in 30 second intervals like my own QVC.....and it's FUN. Remember when eBay was fun, and not a drag to TRY to sell something on ?!

     That being said, those of us selling elsewhere because of this carp could certainly afford to make a stand against it and see what happens. It's probably thousands of sellers at this point that are selling on other platforms too.

     Food for thought ? Wanna make national, if not global news ?!

[nocoolnamejane]

Sellers tried to go on strike years ago… when PayPal was made mandatory? When eBay started charging fees on shipping? When eBay called the community members “noise”? I don’t remember because it was over 10 years ago and was a major fail. 

Sellers on here are a tiny sliver of all active sellers, and most active sellers go on their daily business without a care for these concerns. Either the platform works for them, or it has pitfalls but they accept them because the benefits outweigh them.

[Anonymous]

Yes, amazingly enough, most sellers on this platform aren't even aware that there is a forum.

The list of benefits to selling here is getting very short, the one about all the exposure and world-wide audience dropped off the list when PL started. It was taken from most of us.

[inhawaii]

It's kinda like trying to organizing a "sick out" at work or what we used to call the "blue flu" in the police department. 

There will always be a people who will not participate.

[patmos-8]

What would happen if the earth started spinning in reverse?  Speculating on hypotheticals that have a 0% chance of happening is fruitless.  Every business has overhead.  The percentage eBay charges you is orders of magnitude lower than it would cost you to bring the same traffic to your own website.  And to build and maintain that website.  And the SEO team you'd need to hire on an ongoing basis.  And the bandwidth.  And the payment processing.  And the amount of time you'd have to invest.  Oh, and good luck negotiating a postage discount with USPS anywhere near what eBay has.  eBay fees are a bargain.  Anyone that thinks otherwise is either uninformed or malignantly entitled.

[Anonymous]

Well Duh, if the world started spinning backwards there would be no tomorrow, only yesterdays.

Did I win ?

Of course running your own site would be expensive as all get out.......but the simple solution to an expensive platform that's difficult to sell on is to go to an easier, less expensive platform.

I've been live stream auctioning items on Whatnot for 11% and 90% of the items you put up sell and sell immediately. Not in weeks or months. Bidders know they are paying a set shipping price as well as what they bid. Whatnot gives the same bidder steeply discounted shipping on their 2nd item on, essentially auto combining shipping for that bidder. After the stream, Whatnot has labels ready to print for all of the buyer's purchases, including combined shipping for those that bought more than 1 item. Print out the labels, slap 'em on their packages, and done. Whatnot uses Shippo for labels. They only do First Class for packages up to a pound, Priority for packages over a pound. Automatically chooses which by total weight of bidder's items. Of course, this means only sm-med sized shippable items, but if that's what you sell it's perfect. It's very fast, efficient, and fun......remember fun in selling ? I know it's been a while here.

eBay could be that efficient and fun, but they've chosen to brainwash millions of members to pay them more for the chance of selling something and think of it as normal. 

Try to defend THAT......

[rosachs]

You'd have more success herding cats.

It's been tried and it's never worked.  There are too many sellers with too wide-ranging different opinions to get a majority, to say nothing of 'close to all' sellers to agree on anything.

This was a big thing at eBay Live 2005 (San Jose) -- big push to 'unionize' sellers so that they could demand changes.  Never came to fruition, not in any truly effective way.  Made for a lot of interesting press for a short time, but even that too faded away.

Herding cats - think about it.  It's a hilarious visualization.  🙂

-Bob.

[rosachs]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Right, the point is that our items are what is sold on eBay......if nothing is seen, nothing is sold, there is nothing on eBay to sell. It would be their own greed game haunting them. 

Want to make it seem to us like we have a choice to promote or not ? Thanks for that, we choose to not promote, therefore nothing for sale on eBay. Now what ?!

IT WOULD BE EPIC !!!

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It would be unnoticed.  If you pull all the PL listings out of Search, you still have all the organic results to display.  Buyer's wouldn't notice, nor would they care.  If they are even aware of PL, they likely look at it simply as paid advertising.  FVF is what you pay to have your business, PL is the advertising you do to try and generate better sales.

At least is only pay-per-sale and not pay-per-view or pay-per-impression (appearance in Search).

-Bob.

[Anonymous]

Yeah, those are probably coming in the next update......just before Christmas to make things a jumbled, confusing mess.