eBay

gwzcomps · ‎09-29-2021

Nothing like waking up and seeing an abnormal number of sales and getting worried. This used to be a good thing. Now with how dead eBay has been it is somehow the opposite. It is amazing how sellers have gone from easily seeing a 30-40% sell though rate on a small amount of inventory to barely being able to move 3% of $250k worth of inventory.

I feel things would be moving better if eBay wasn't trying to sabotage sellers with their malicious search manipulation and eBay's pay to win strategies. It doesn't help that Amazon and now Facebook Marketplace are whittling away from the little market share eBay has left. I'm starting to wonder if eBay leadership have lost interest in the site, and are just going through the motions. Seems odd my local and Facebook sales easily outpace eBay with minimal effort.

At what point does eBay wake up and focus on what makes them unique rather than trying to cut into established markets?

dbfolks166mt · ‎09-29-2021

I too have notice the slow down while many of my other venues are doing just fine if not improving, early Christmas shoppers I believe. The other things I believe that have impacted eBay, as well as other ecommerce sites, is the level of competition that has sprung up, the new sales tax laws, increased shipping costs and the opening back up of the B&M environment with the lifting of some of the COVID constraints. There were several Wall Street articles that have mentioned things like this and the challenge ecommerce companies would face in the post COVID environment. Some of those are starting to manifest themselves.

iart · ‎09-29-2021

We realized early on that if we wanted to do well in here, we couldn't sell the same stuff as everyone else. We had to be different.

eBay was different by design. Unique. And they seem to be tossing it all aside.

gwzcomps · ‎09-29-2021

The funny thing is my sales are down compared to pre-covid sales numbers. To find personal comparable sales numbers to this year I have to look over 5 years back. I can see how shipping rates would hurt the light weight stuff. I haven't seen too big of a change in ground rates, but I am using eBay for my labels. I couldn't speak for sales tax stuff since I would guess at least half of my buyers don't pay sales tax. I would agree it has had some impact on selling though.

flyingmvp · ‎09-29-2021

@gwzcomps wrote:
I'm starting to wonder if eBay leadership have lost interest in the site, and are just going through the motions. Seems odd my local and Facebook sales easily outpace eBay with minimal effort.

At what point does eBay wake up and focus on what makes them unique rather than trying to cut into established markets?

No need to wonder, Ebay leadership has no interest with your sales, most of them are passing time waiting for a better lucrative position in next the corporation to come up, in the meantime, as long as they keep the shareholders happy all is good.

Ebay pushed out the unique a long time ago with trying to copy Amazon and became sub-Alibaba, they lost their edge and losing buyers as well, all their attention is focused on milking more out of the sellers.

They just got a gift from USPS in the shape of Holiday fee increase, they will make more out of the 10% FVF they charge for shipping, just like that, greater passive income, without moving a finger.