@stoneledge wrote:
Setting aside all the emoting about this new feature, let's think about why they may be testing this out.
eBay owns a gigantic database of previous listings data. How many billions or trillions of listings? Hard to say.
If I'm a data analyst at eBay and I want to see how to stimulate growth in revenue, transactions, and positive outcomes where sellers sell things and buyers buy things, I would look at the billions and billions of listings that ended without a sale and start to ask questions.
One thing I'd probably find is that there are billions of listings that never sold and one reason for that might be that the price on the listing was statistically higher than the price on listings for similar (or the same) items. And I'd be dependent on big computers to try to figure out what items are similar or the same. And those computers aren't going to be able to do that perfectly every time, but a Barbie doll with a specific UPC in brand New condition is a fairly specific thing that has sold thousands of times on eBay and a computer can look at the distribution of prices and find that 90% of them fall within a certain range, taking into account other factors, etc. (Other items are far less easy to peg, and are much more subjectively priced, and there's going to be a much greater grey area on them. )
Another thing I'd find is that there are billions of those unsold listings that were Auctions, and the variable that most highly corellated with "did not get a bid" (so failed to sell. No fees. No happy buyers. No happy sellers. Some of whom eventually go away and buy or sell elsewhere... etc.) would likely be "Starting Price minus eBay Average Recent Sold Price for Same Item." And where there are a lot of "Same Items" out there, it would be a reasonable analysis to conduct.
Now, a lot of savvy experienced sellers may feel that they don't need this kind of push from eBay. We see emotions all over these boards on this and many other topics, but the guy who came up with this is a data analyst using big computers and some good reasoning.
CERTAINLY, eBay should have announced that this was coming to Sellers, Buyers, and eBay staff. eBay screwed that up. So what else is new?
I would propose that several things should have happened to make this work better (but maybe its just in a limited Beta test so they don't want to announce and have press coverage before the kinks are worked out. Perhaps, for example, eBay is testing presenting this to different Buyers with different wording to see what works better.)
- eBay should have announced this to Sellers and explained it.
- Sellers should have the freedom to opt out of it globally or for each listing individually.
- Sellers should have the power to set (or not set) $ limits to automatically accept or decline the "Make Offer/Best Offer" from a Buyer just like Sellers can on Fixed Price Best Offers. "Auto Accept all Best Offers of at least $10. Auto Decline all Best Offers below $10."
BUT the logic of this could make very good sense in trying to make more listings sell. Happy Sellers, Happy Buyers. eBay revenue. Return customers, etc.
And, no, it does not fit easily into many categories. We all already know that for lots of items, eBay is woefully bad at estimating the "right" price. (But if they are dead wrong 20% of the time out of a billion items listed, whatever the number is, it's a huge number of wrongs, but a hugerer number of fairly good guesses by eBay. And eBay has to go with the numbers.) But they should employ more nuanced human intelligence to determine where the computers aren't going to nail the pricing. They should automate feedback from Sellers on the "performance" pages of Seller Hub for example, where we could tell them "eBay suggested I sell this item for $5 with Free Shipping but here's why that's far too low."
So they botched it so far, but it could be a powerful idea.
It's a powerful idea, all right... in the same way rotting corpses on a 100 degree humid day are a powerful smell.
