for years I controlled the amount of sales we had to one degree or another. Obviously the nay-sayers dont understand that when youre good at your business, you dont just sell stuff and its not just some luck of the draw.
Its just 2 of us doing over 400k a year so we would raise prices frequently and we relist 80+% of our store. There have always been economic issues, holidays and this or that. I started this business during the 2008 housing crisi when spending got tight for many but, becasue many of our items go to well healed people, we grew leaps and bounds as fast as we wanted, in a way. After 10 years, we dont want to do more than 20 packages a day and we got rid of our store location so we dont want to hire and fire people. We just decided to keep it a size where we can take care of it and 3 million dollars, 25k sales, 1500 a day, over 10k per week, we grew month after month with some obvious weird spots but, never in 10 years were we blacked our 12-18 hours, then rapid fire sales for a few hours, repeat multiple days in a row. We sold at one point 40% international, many overnight sales. Naysayers say people are sleeping. Well, not everyone.
I think weve heard enough rumors of server downsizing (which is insane), we know for sure there were many layoffs, and if you read comments from those "laid off", some of what they say must be true. Lots of outsourcing and dumping of talent for the cheaper labor. We know all of the glitches and issues we have almost constantly. We know of all of the policies ebay put in place to make selling easier and how that worked out. We know that many of us followed ebays lead in item specifics, free shipping, free returns, one day handling, and all the hops that buyers want. We know ebay was not showing all shipping options we specified becasue buyers were writing us for the options that werent shown to them.
We know that returns have multiplied and a behavior that is more amazonesque of asking no questions becasue there is no skin in the game and you can just file false return. We know what customer service tells us occasionally when we get a human who sounds like theyre frustrated.
We know ebay execs always act excited at all the great things that theyve done for us to make us more conversions and velocity and how well that worked out.
So sure business has ups and downs, economies, and seasons but this monster has every facet plus a system that says, not you us, loses pics for 100's of listings that took forever to take and longer to even find which ones. (I still find one occasionally when a customer asks for more photos and there should be almost a dozen but, there is one)
We know that everyone telling us, its just normal sales may sell 2 things a day and not run as a real business, thats fine and everyone is different. We also know that a few accounts here seem to have inside info, are contrarian to almost all complaints yet do not identify themselves as employees of anyone who would be paying them to be here on these forums.
We know Wall Street is pressuring a second splitting up of the company. I used to never have time to write on this forum, nor much time for anything but taking a zillion pictures, upgrading our system, editing on vacations, and then we couldnt charge a restock even though were a different kind of business with rare things and an asp of $120+. Which of course was only there to have people actually have to read what they were buying and perhaps ask a question.
I field more issues with buyer shave zero idea how to do a return or much of anything for that matter as ebay doesnt encourage anyone to know how to use the site, including us who live here who cant keep up with changes to the site, cant find things that used to be there and see cotradictory info.
Do I expect ebay to be perfect? Of course not. Do I expect the $300 month to include a working platform? Yes of course. Its always been kinda bad and behind but was functional. Theyve spent all of their time chasing other businesses vs. fixing things like ebay mobile, combined shipping in their cart, the horrible defect system that most tell us they cant remove even though it seems our sales drop off when we get an unwarranted defect that some other CS agent removes because its obvious.
I'm terrified of managed payments due to ebays track record and obvious money grabs aimed at their faithful sellers but, now in the 2 days since paypal started stealing the 3% from sales we dont get to keep due in no part to us (even though some on here think 20+ years precedent and billions in profits, its still ok to start hitting us with fees for stuff we didnt sell, of course including shipping), Weve had 3 cancellations for absolutely silly reasons having nothing to do with us having bad listings or photographs. Weve done under 3000 wk. at one point (which is 25% of avg for years) recently and then get a $400 return because ebays system shows only some items "for a better buyer experience" and the buyer finds it cheaper after buying yours due to be advertised later.
These are supposed to be the best and brightest, CEO's and executives and software engineers competing with google and walmart but, somehow the system is broken and I dont thhink its an accident. Of course I could be wrong, it could be all the wrong people for the job.
Why am I picking on ebay says some of the cheerleaders. Well because Im seeing one company chop up visibility for whatever reason (Im sure some profit motive or just trying to keep a broken job) leading to economic insecurity for people with families. Should ebay care about these people? Yeah, a little. Enough to know which niche sellers bring value to ebay and which are selling the same shirt as 500 others and every other marketplace. Is it ebays responsibility to make us money? No, of course not but we pay them a good bit, so delivering a working product only brings about long term gains which noone clearly is doing. This seems very orchestrated, whether to get us all into the managed payments cash cow, the web interpret, or pay twice as much with promos for the few things we can now sell, even though it seems to knock all of our former big sellers off the front page.
Some of us are also seeing someone selling the same item for more money, similar location, worse feedback and standing while ours sits with 100% feedback, glowing feedback about the waro speed at which they received their amazingly accurate product, that was better than described.
Many have done experiments to see if we can see all of our listings on other accounts and even different I addresses with negative results.
Dont forget how many execs left ebay this year including the CEO and were at the beginning of October. I never thought that I would say this but, I miss Donahoe.
Some say we can just kick dirt and go elsewhere if we dont like the rules that changed os much after we dumped so much time and energy into this platform and created a loyal base that has shopped with us for a decade and maybe we helped foster that ebay was a great place due to our great transactions. Many people are planning on leaving but, things come up that take peoples money that was saved, injuries and medical or family matters make so many cant spend any time rebuilding their business. IM only talking about some human decency of letting peole know if the server space is limited for a billion listings and more being aggressively solicited.
I dont recall one promise of upgrading the site or making it better for us that has worked for us. Im sure there are a couple but, off the top fo my head, its certainly not the search algorithm. Thats gotten absolutely terrible. Remmeber when were told best practices and they made sense and maybe even worked some?
There is something happening that will probably not be a surprise. I'm tired after dumping thousands of hours into ebay to build the biggest store of its kind encompassing more than 35% of the entire niche category. I'm tired of hearing its some thing im not doing right or to have people tell me that they need to see my listings even though it would be a safe bet that they werent selling 3 million bucks here or 55k a month. I make mistakes, lots of them but, this isnt my mistake and the parts I dont do perfect would not knock 75% of my sales off which is revenue for ebay and having 35% of a niche category means many of those sales are not fulfilled by someone else.
I'm tired.
Regards,
