I spend no time on Etsy's boards. I find them impossible to navigate and have never seen a thread with more than 5 posts in it and I have looked. So I don't know how they think there.
I think that a lot of sellers want everything easy and convenient, but are also into new and change - just as ebay is addicted to change. And most times they will not give anything enough time to work. There have been posters here that have talked about how they tried Etsy or Bonanza and within a few months they have to come back to ebay because that is where the sales are. It took me a couple of years to understand the buyers on Etsy and to build up a customer base that comes back to my stuff and passes along my name outside of selling sites.
But i never treat a selling site as the only one to have my eggs in. When I had my B&M store I started doing ebay, when I closed the store, I started looking around at other sites and live shows. And I am always doing minor experimenting with something different and new to see how it will work out - if it works, I do more, if it doesn't I'm not out much. So many think that internet selling is black and white, this site or that one not a potential to be worked. Right now I am thinking of ebay as my third job because next weekend i am going to do a live show where I will make more there in 3 days than I will on ebay in a month.
My theories about why sales are dropping are fluid and change with season or happenings. For example, back when the tsunami hit Japan, my sales tanked because Japan's economy went from looking a certain way to rebuilding the country and helping their people. I used to ship at least 3 times a week before, now maybe once a month. If you look, you can have a basic understanding of how circumstance is effecting sales.
Right now, Americans are either scared silly or angry or basking in glory, the problem is that the baskers who got our new president elected and angry people don't spend a lot of money on frivilous stuff, and the scared are hoarding their cash in preperation for the disaster they feel is coming. So sales are going to drop along with tax day just passing. But I sell Internationally and I'm getting an uptic in those so that is making up for any losses from US fear.
But I think that the reason why there are more new sellers on ebay is the same reason sales are down, money is tight. But because there are more sellers there are fewer dollars for everyone else. There is a fact that when someone cuts a major artery and they start to bleed to death, the body tells the heart to pump faster to make up for lack of blood getting to effected areas so the death comes even faster. That is what is happening on ebay. More sellers are shrinking the amount of money available to sellers and then there are the Chinese that do not put the money they make back into ebay.
I think that ebay was smart when they started out but developed mindsets that hindered them from holding their market share. One of those mindsets is their secretive attitude toward their users, another is cultivating the buyer verses seller attitude. Another is their obsession with change when it is obvious that they don't understand that change does not mean retooling something on the site so that their casual users have to relearn something every other time they log in.
I had a discussion recently with an upper echelon ebay CS here in the US and he started talking about how internet sales are all about change, and that things have to constantly chage to keep up. I commented that Etsy has changed very little in the basic site and it's use since I started there in 07, a couple of things that are improvements, but nothing major like having to relearn how to refine search, or how the listing pages are presented and nothing that forces the seller to redo something to every listing to keep them listed on the site. That cut the conversation short.
For ebay, I think that they are in a downward spiral that I am not sure they can recover from. If they want to, they will have to make radical changes and fast, not in retooling the site, but in making it the shopping site that everyone will want to come to. And that does not mean creating a new 'intuitive' search that gives buyers everything except what they are searching for, or claiming to be faster, stronger, better.
The reason people came to ebay was because they could find what they are looking for. The people in chare of ebay weren't around when that was happening and they obviously don't use ebay so they can not understand just how important that fact really is.
Today I made a search for a hard to find item and ebay said there were none on the site - so i changed to search for the show it comes from. There was one, that wasn't shown in the first results but should have because all the keyerds were in the title, but at the bottom of that listing there were 4 more of exactly what I was looking for, all on ebay and should have appeared in the first search results. I knew how to refine my search and knew that I had to because the real search results of what you want are not on the search results page but on any listing you opened up and are considering buying. But what about the buyers who don't know? Who just sees that there are none on ebay and go to Amazon. So the next time they look for something, they will remember that they couldn't find it on ebay and just go straight to Amazon.
I fear what will happen that Etsy will follow in ebay's path because the college educated CEOs all think the same way and place importance on the wrong things and then act on that. Where traffic comes from means nothing if you don't advertise poorly there or anywhere else buyers could come from. Such as, I have seen ebay Fashion ads, with a little tweaking, they could be awesome ads. But what makes ebay think that they (ebay Fashion ads) are going to do any good placed on ESPN??? Like that is going to get a pile of baseball fans coming to ebay to buy a pair of pumps.
(*Bleep*)
