@tunicaslotwrote:
Totally agree with all that - but are we changing anything continually complaining about it everyday? I spent the day thrifting and listing for the most part - I'm here to make money - not to complain about things I can't change.
I get people are upset and frustrated - but we have no say in the matter - nor do they care - so use the site to the best of your ability with how it exists at the present. Make plans for the future - no sense so many letting this consume them like it does.
After finding out that the results were back and the tumor I had removed was benign - these problems with Ebay mean so little to me.
The topic is "where did all the customers go- and why? These "complaints" are the "why".
I'm a very long time eBay power buyer- not only for myself personally, but for my three businesses as well. All the changes and constant fiddling eBay has done over the last ten years, plus all the "buyer protection" stuff that eBay seems to suddenly be loath to enforce with sellers who know how to game the system and be uncooperative have caused me to try elsewhere... because simply from a productivity point of view with my businesses eBay seems bound and determined to cost me more productivity with every change.
When I'm sourcing parts for customers I don't have TIME to spend hours wading through the non relevant junk full of Chinese duplicate listings. The end result is that I now come to eBay dead last, and only if I can't find what I need in other bookmarked places. Ten years ago, it was only eBay, and I seldom- if ever- came up short on a search.
When you've got a guy like me who has made eBay purchases for well over 20 years on this and a previous ID, and is very familiar with all the little tricks to ferret out merchandise throwing up his hands and going elsewhere... how does that bode for occasional users, newbies, milennials, and Gen Xers?
I also have many years experience in retail... hard and soft lines... and had a 7 year stint as a district guy answering to the regional office and national HQ for a once very mighty discount retail company. I've seen the folly of mindless panic over a perceived competitor, combined with the senseless panic mode of forgetting about your customers and who they are in pursuit of what you think the other guy has or is doing, rather than concentrating on making what you are already established and known for better.
I've seen it go nutty enough that my firm even tried to emulate the other guys by laying stores out uniformly the same like the other guy's, forgetting that we were in leased older buildings and the new guy was building stores to suit.
Even though any ear to the ground would tell anyone who would listen that our customers tried the other guy and most were dissatisfied because they preferred our way of doing things, you couldn't get anyone on the executive board to listen.
My company was bought out by another big retailer and both are nearly gone now. The other guy? Doing great.
forgetting about your customers and who they are
That's a line I wrote earlier in this post, and trust me... this is any retailer's or etailer's Waterloo, right here. The minute you abandon your customers to chase somebody else's you're doomed, no matter what all the projections and analytics tell you. It's ballgame. You're trying to get customers who already belong to and are loyal to the other guy... and they know your attempt to be the other guy is just that. The customers who have been loyal to you for years are abandoned by you. they'll shrug and say "If my guy wants to be the other guy, maybe the other guy is OK after all. Why buy from a wannabe?"
We can talk about how an up and coming generation is the buyer of the future, sure, but that doesn't mean you turn your back on the buyer waving a fistful of dollars under your nose right now. Can anyone tell me if I have two dollars in my pocket- one came from an old guy with one foot in his casket, and another came from a kid in high school- which dollar is worth more on deposit?
Chaos is NOT an "industry standard".
