No Christmas for eBay Sellers 41 comments
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October usually marks the time of year when eBay (EBAY) sellers gear up and prepare for a busy holiday season. New inventory is almost always purchased, shipping supplies are procured, and new listings are prepared so that sellers can list items at a moment’s notice during the busy holiday season.
But not this year.
Christmas has apparently been canceled. Sellers are leaving at a frantic pace to set up sites elsewhere because they no longer trust eBay to have a functional site. eBay’s search engine (Best Match) has crashed twice this month alone and there seems to be no resolution in sight.
dfromnm writes:
My search button doesn’t work half the time...HELP!
serverfactory writes:
Yes, I think it [sales] may worse than 50% for me. It has something to do with the "best match" which is really screwing things up! I can’t make any sense of it.
Donahoe recently blamed eBay’s poor 3rd quarter performance on the economy (see conference call transcript), but this simply isn’t true. eBay’s performance is directly tied to Donahoe’s disruptive innovations because they don’t make sense and never work.
For example, ladyjane writes:
What balls eBay has to tell you to end your auction and relist because they can't get their act together (free shipping icon appearing). They told me the same thing yesterday when the search wasn't working. I guess that's the new canned response, what a way to run a business.
The stock closed Friday at 15.35, which is less than half its value year to date and it looks like a toboggan run because buyers, sellers, and shareholders have lost confidence in what was once the world’s biggest, most user friendly auction site.
Perhaps Santa will swing by San Jose and leave eBay a new CEO for Christmas - one who understands that eBay’s success or failure lies in its small sellers of hard to find, wacky wonderful items eBay is famous for, like a special spoon to complete grandma’s set.
I hope Santa will also leave sellers a special Christmas gift, including keyword searches, the old SYI form that worked, and a functional shipping calculator so sellers can get back to the business of selling on eBay.
But it is doubtful that sellers ever will return because it’s all about trust. Sellers simply don’t trust Donahoe, especially after he lowered listing fees, more than doubled final value fees, and added a ton of advertising to complete with sellers.
Disclosure: Author is a long time eBay seller
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This article has 41 comments:
Good morning! I sure hope Santa leaves small sellers that Xmas gift because if he doesn't there probably won't be an eBay left.
Have a great weekend!
They had it all! They drove all the small shops out of business, and it resulted in even large antique malls being closed all over the country. We could have continued selling there for a long time, but no.....they had to change it again with new ideas and inovations. You used to be able to drive across the country and find small shops all over to stop and shop. That is no longer the case, and eBay is largely the reason.
I would have stayed to sell, if they had just left it alone and stopped 'fixing problems' that didn't need to be fixed, but why pay someone to list your stuff, if the search tools don't allow buyers to find it?
I've found an antique mall, and am going to try that again. At least customers can see your stuff, and find it if they are looking for it.
All I want for Christmas, is a new eBay CEO!
After 5+ years of operating a successful ebay business, we recently opted to close our ebay store and now focus all our attention and advertising dollars on our newly established website and other storefronts that we have on some of the lesser known sales venues. My fiancee recently closed here ebay store as well. I was a bronze power seller wth a 99.8 feedback rating, roughly 8,000 sales and my DSRs/buyer satisfaction ratings were 4.9,4,9,4.9 and 4.8. My fiancee was a silver power, had roughly 13,000 sales and here 12 month DSRs are the same as mine. I'd also like to note that many of our customers were steady repeat customers that are now regularly shopping at our other online stores.
Niether myself or my fiancees were big mega sellers, but we did typically generate 300-500 sales each month, and were both forking out anywhere from $1000-$2000 per month in ebay fees and commssions, plus another $1000-$2000 in paypal fees...and that seems to be a problem for Donahoe...If you arent a gold/platinum/diamond seller doing a large volume of monthly business on ebay, Donahoe places little value on your business.
Every change Donahoe has rolled out resulted in both our companies getting less and less site listing exposure, our listings rarely appeared in best match, our sales and sell thru rates plummeted and we actually sufered a loss selling ebay the last 2 months we did busines there after being quite profitable for 5 years straight.
Things have just gotten absurd, and the problems are endless for businesses of all sizes...BUT all these changes have made it virtually impossible for small businesses, casual sellers, auction style sellers to conduct business on ebay both SAFELY and PROFITABLY especially if you dont offer FREE shipping. Ebay hides the vast majority of seller's listing in non default searches and almost exclusively exposes the larger volume businesses that ebay wants to remain on the site. Ironically, many of the big businesses ebay courts and favors in search have much lower buyer satisfaction ratings than most of the small volume sellers being totally isolated from their listings appear in ebay's new default search engine. Donahoe doesnt care about the "buyer Experience", he just used the TRANSPARENT DSR system as a tool to exclude all small volume sellers from best match while continuing to take their hard earned money.
Ebay appears to be purposely trying to drive off small businesses and casual sellers that dont do a large volume of business. Consequently, virtually all the unique, one of a king, eclectic and rare items items you once found on ebay are disappearing as more and more loyal part time sellers and small businesses leave the site. The thing I find most ironic about that is this:
The vast majority of "Big Box" large scale businesses ebay wants on their site ALL have their own websites and merchant accounts for credit card checkout. Much of ebay's buyer traffic is and has been being eroded by the very same big companies ebay wants to court. I've made many many purchases over the years, and without fail, any time I purchased something on ebay from a large volume vendor, that vendor followed up with an email encouraging me to check out their website and typically offered a discount coupon to entice me to make future purchases from their website rather than their ebay store. Commissions on ebay sales run anywhere from 12-15% per sale....for any seller that has a website to market their website to their ebay customers to avoid these feels plus have much more control over your business.
Donahoe wants large online retailers, manufacturers, wholesalers, and other large volume type sellers. Ironically these companies DO have websites and have been using ebay's seller platform for years to drive ebay shoppers to their websites. That's the REAL reason site traffic has been steadily deteriorating, and now that ebay is favoring large volume sellers in Best match searches, I forsee a drastic decline in ebay buyer traffic as these big online companies collective erode more and more of ebay's site traffic promoting their websites immediately after the intial ebay sale.
Donahoe called sellers who complained about all his radical "disruptive innovation" policies as NOISE. hmmmm....
Since Doahoe took charge of Ebay monthly site traffic has fallen approximately 10 million since Q1 (from 73 million down to 62.6 million). Yet amazon's monthly traffic has remained fairly stable.
Since Q1 site traffic has increase at Craigslist by 1.7 million, monthly traffic at Ioffer is up 500k, traffic at ecrater is up 130k, etsy is up 80k and ebid is up 60k to name a just a few other lesser known sites that are experiencing growth. As more and more ex ebay sellers continue to contact their ebay customers and notify them of their new store locations....a significant percentage of the new growth these sites are experiencing is ebay buyers shopping with their favorite ex ebay sellers. Keep up the NOISE sellers!
If Donahoe truly believes that site traffic, GMV and revenues at ebay marketplace is because of the weakened economy...the man is truly cluless. Sales have been steadily picking up for many sellers at these lesser known sites, and at seller's webites....and the bulk of the buyers I've had are actually registered ebay users.
Fortunately for both of us, our sales have been steadily picking up at other sales venues, and now that we have our websites fully functional, we are enthusiastic we'll experience solid growth in website traffic and sales once we begin marketing our websites using the $1000s we are saving in ebay fees each month.
We truly loved ebay and the whole unique experience ebay once offered. After 21K sales and well over 500 purchases on ebay, it was hard to let go and move on...abut we are thankful we did! Our enthusiasm for ebay and the trust we once had for that company has been completed destroyed.
Yes Donahoe has down everything in his power to destroy any seller who doesn't sell mass produced widgets made in China that anyone can purchase cheaper in a Dollar Store, Walmart, or Kmart.
When Paypal becomes mandatory, which I think is tomorrow, there will be a mass exodus of sellers because no seller wants to be subjected to Paypal's built in FALSE POSITIVES which allows Paypal to hold sellers' funds while they earn money on the float.
But I suspect that the NOISE will have the last laugh because one half of all Paypal revenue comes from eBay and when there's no sellers left Paypal won't have much income to report.
Have a great weekend!
I'm one of those small ebay sellers who is winding down my listings on Ebay and will list there no more. I've had my standing in the listings lowered from "raised" to "standard" and now can't get views or bids. I'm a 10 year seller who has never had a negative in over 3,000 feedbacks and my DSR's are 5.0 across the board...so much for being a good seller! Ebay's explanation is that I didn't have enough feedbacks in the last 30 days so my standing was lowered! We were told in January that this new "system" would rid the site of bad sellers - that they would eventually fall in the listings until they were gone and good sellers would rise to the top. Well, that's not exactly the truth - its another John Donahoe blatant lie! The truth is that big box sellers and large powersellers will rise to the top and the rest of us - no matter what our reputation - will be smothered. We are only allowed to PAY THE SAME FEES! This is the major reason why small sellers are leaving.
One other cold hard fact is that I can sell so little on Ebay now that it is actually profitable for me to list on several small sites that offer free listings and between those and my own website I'm doing pretty well. Now, my main marketing is in getting ALL my old customers to buy from me on my own website. This is something I suggest every small seller do - reach out to your customers, tell them where you'll be - offer them discounts and free shipping (you can if you aren't paying Ebay's fees)! Its slow going but its coming along and I expect to have a decent holiday season....no thanks to John Donahoe! Don't buy on Ebay until Donahoe is gone and the ship has turned around and is back on course!
My Ebay business has been growing steadily over the last years to the point where I became a gold powerseller at the begin of this year. Everything worked perfectly for me until all these new changes came into play. 2 months ago I closed my store which I had for almost 5 years. My listings are greatly reduced now and my main focus is no longer directed at Ebay, but my own web store and some other for me profitable selling venues.
Too bad, a once very profitable selling platform for the average guy went down the toilet and is no longer in everyone's mouth. Many of my buyers have already left and hundreds follow each day, as they don't want to keep up with all the changes that don't work in their favor (best match, soon to be Paypal only) just to name a few.
I can't blame them, I am a buyer too and am totally frustrated with the irrelevant listings that best match shows me most of the time, if the search works at all. Like many other sellers I received a 10% off coupon a couple of days ago and don't even intend using it. Why should I bother and waste my time finding stuff that I want, when I can have everything in a heartbeat(click) in Google search from private online stores, mostly even cheaper than at Ebay?
A new SEO, who actually understands Ebay from every point of view, speak also as a seller and buyer, is more in demand than ever before.
Wake up eBay. My website sales are growing every single day, yes, on a $15 a day advertising budget. If I sell 3 items on ebay, my FVFs are already $15+.
If it is the economy, wouldn't my website be suffering as well?
I am closing ebay sales completely on December 29, 2008. Starting the year 2009 FRESH from the stress of ebay and their constant changes, empty promises and complete lack of support for sellers. Did I mention the blatant LIES?
The economy is merely a convenient excuse for ebay and nothing more. They think they can ride the rest of 2008 on that excuse but what will the excuse be in Q1 2009 when sellers continue fleeing the site? Donohoe will reduce us to "chronic complainers, whiners and bad business people" as always.
The fact is, the world is opening an eye (or should I say closing an eye) to ebay.
Ya just can't fool all the people all the time eBay.
Wake up.
It's 7:30 am, eastern standard time, and I just discovered that listings for EVENT TICKETS are not showing up in eBay's "new & improved" best match search engine.
I started my search on eBay's home page. Typed in EVENT TICKETS and was taken to a page with only 63 search results - most of which were not tickets.
Prominently posted above the search results was a link to STUBHUB. Then I noticed an OPT OUT link on the far right, clicked on it, and was immediately transported to eBay's home page where I did my search again & got the same pitiful results.
What an insult to small sellers of event tickets!
You can bet that sellers are going to have a great christmas this year! Consumers will flock to the internet like never before! Both my website and my amazon items are going thru the roof! In all likely hood I'll abandon ebay altogether sometime in 2009... or should I say, Ebay will abandon me because this shell of a dysfuctional site is not our fathers ebay.
THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I HAVE SEEN THE REAL THING RE: EBAY.
STOCKHOLDERS TAKE NOTE!
Non-paying bidders are at an all-time high since Ebay has the new policy disallowing sellers to leave negative feedback !! Only the bidders are permitted to leave negative feedback now. Many sellers are now afraid to file an 'Unpaid Item Dispute' against a non-paying bidder... as they are subjecting themselves to a negative feedback!! Think Ebay didn't think about that?? Fewer FVFs for Ebay to refund ! If a non-paying bidder (I REFUSE to call someone who doesn't pay- a 'BUYER' ) responds to the dispute in any form... could be "I changed my mind" or "I will send payment" (ANYTHING- just so it's a RESPONSE) then the seller is NOT refunded the FVF, and the buyer is entitled to leave a negative feedback for the seller. WHAT a SYSTEM !
A newcomer to Ebay- looking for items- will automatically be defaulted to the BEST MATCH search. Not knowing they can change this- they assume that they are really looking at the actual Best Matches for their item. Not so !! . Best Match is based on SO many stupid factors now, that the searcher will NOT see hundreds- or more- items that are listed.
Many times, I find my items that end in four hours, stuck on a page in the back- FAR below other items ending in 20 DAYS or more !! Ebay has made a GAME out of selling on Ebay.. and sellers are NOT getting what they pay for !
Ebay decides the SEARCH VISIBILITY criteria for our listings. Among this criteria is Feedback percentage- DSR scores - FREE shipping- FIXED PRICE listings- SEARCHER'S BUYING HISTORY- and who knows what else ? Ebay also throws in a LOT of off-site option LINKS for the Searchers- That takes them away from Ebay listings, and on to the Big Businesses to do their purchasing !! I'm sure that the revenue from these Big Businesses- for advertising their business links, generates a LOT more income for Ebay, than we small sellers do........
I also do NOT trust the DSR scoring system- which is scored entirely ANONYMOUSLY by our buyers. (Supposedly) The Power Seller will receive a discount- from 5% to 20%- on their Final Value Fees- based on these scores... Mine always seem to DROP right around invoice time- and then go back up ? We are scored on 1-Item as described, 2- Communication, 3- Shipping Time, and 4- Shipping and Handling Charges. Scores are from 1 to 5. ANYTHING below a 5 WILL hurt the seller- and Ebay tells the buyer that a score of 4 is good !! Soon now, any seller with a score lower than a 4.3 will NOT be allowed to SELL on Ebay !!
Normally- the LOWEST score a seller will receive, will be on Shipping and Handling charges. This is SO often misunderstood by the buyer- as they believe Ebay is asking them if they were happy with what they had to pay for shipping (and who is?) It's also a fact, that many sellers will get this category 'dinged' (low score) even when they offer FREE SHIPPING !! Why? Because the buyer is dinging anonymously, and because they CAN. Ebay is going DOWN the drain !!
Donahoe even said himself in a presentation that many would not understand why they had to apply "disruptive innovation" to a business model that is as SUCCESSFUL as ebat was. Maybe stockholders and media are starting to get it.
I paid ebay thosands of $ in fees as a buyer and a seller over the years. I had a perfect performance record on thousands of transactions. But I'm no longer good enough to be treated like the "BIG' sellers that ebay is courting. My items have been literally hidden and unseen by buyers and bidders - until I stopped selling (and buying) a few months ago. I have been treated like TRASH for the last few months as a seller. And most other ebay sellers (tens of thousands are now former ebay sellers) know exactly what I mean. For Donahoe and his (by many accounts) incompetent team to have destroyed ebay is outragious.
WHY HAVEN'T THE STOCKHOLDERS DONE SOMETHING ABOUT THIS? Surely they don't believe the tripe that comes out of ebay management. If anyone wants the real story they should go to the ebay message boards and read the LITERALLY TENS OF THOUSANDS OF COMPLAINTS and concerns of sellers and buyers. Very few of which are even acknowledged, let alone answered.
I guess the stockholders want to loose half their money while Donahoe continues to bury ebay. If they had read the ebay message boards and other things on the net, they may have noticed the predictions of ebayers that the ebay stock would fall this much and more. Those predictions were made months ago when "disruptive innovation" was rolled out and the death spiral started.
INVESTORS:
NO, IT'S NOT THE ECONOMY. IT'S EBAY!!!!!
What a shame. Ebay should be thriving right now with people looking for bargains at the holidays. It's now a horrible experience for buyers and sellers alike, not to mention a waste of time. And what a shame that 1600 ebay employees had to be laid off.
Respectfully, somebody needs to wake up to this disaster that used to be ebay, namely the stockholders and the media. I seem to remember that another company fooled around and collapsed while everyone looked the other way. That company was Enron.
Thanks
But look at the positive side, by missing out on one Christmas we can guarantee a great Christmas for every year starting 2009
auctions8.com is a Community site where all the hardworking members make all the decisions.
The site belongs to the members and will never be sold off at any price.
In fact we are grateful to JD for making us realize what we can achieve together.
Thanks JD
And im not alone. Tons, tons tons of other small time ebayers are being shut down due to low dsrs in the 4.4 and 4.3 domain. Even with over 78 positives in 1 month and 0 negs they still say im a bad seller. Over 1000 items listed each month in my store and aprox 100 sales per month almost guaranteed and im a bad seller .
Smells like ebay wants to just get rid of the smalltime mom and pop shops which started the whole thing and only concentrate on the big corporate sellers.
Every empire eventually comes crumbling down.....happened to the romans of old, the spanish , the mongols, the chinese dynasties and now looks like ebay is on its way....shame though...it was fun while it lasted.
I just found a large media seller that has over 150,000 feedbacks, racking up tons of bad "buyer experiences" and has a 12 month DSRs og 4.6, 4.5, 4.2 and 4.0. Seller was stripped of power seller status BUT still gets high visibility in search.
I just found a Pesa memeber that has had a 4.2 DSR for shipping time for many months now, yet still gets high visibiloty on best match searches.
I find that many of the large vendors have far worse overalll buyer satisfaction ratings than majority of small businesses on ebay that NEVER seem to get CONSISTENT best match exposure yet more often than not are eligible for some type of power seller discount indicating their seller performance is more than acceptable.
In my opinion it should be ilegal what ebay has been doing manipullating searches giving large vendors the bulk of best match exposure while bronze power sellers, casual sellers, auction sellers and even silver power sellers are getting totall shafted getting very little default search engine exposure.
Although I decided to stop doing business on and with ebay after 5 years as a bronze power sellers with near perfect buyer satisfaction ratings, I monitor the categories I used to list in frequently. 99% of the search exposure is ONly being given to about one tenth of the sellers listing in that category (virtually all large sellers or sellers offering fixed prices with FREE shipping). Hardly any auctions ever show up in best match even though the same auctions typically had 100% sell thrus prior to these manipulative changes, and if the seller isnt offering free shipping or top 5-6 volume seller in the category...chance of getting listing visibility in best match search is nearly impossible regardless how good the sellers DSRs and previous sales were.
I think it is truly sicken how ebay suits an PR folks put such a BS spin on everything. They continue to tell the public some selllers just dont like change, when in reality most of us just want the services we PAID for which is listing visibilty on their site...not having our listings buried in nondefault ssearch engines that drastically reduces viewing traffic and sales and ultimately results in wasted advertising dollars.
I am so flippin glad I decided to stop ALL sales on ebay and focus on website sales. Ebay has turned into a team of ruthless, manipulative liars that simply can not be trusted what-so-ever. They have an agenda, and the agenda doesnt include small busineses and casual sellers yet they continue to hype up auctions and how they encourage casual sellers to sell on ebay...taking their hard earned money and giving nothing in return.
I want to thank everyone for taking the time to post your comments because small sellers (those who aren't diamond powersellers) are being systematically destroyed by Donahoe's disruptive innovations.
Last nite I noticed that if you put search terms in quotes best match automatically EXCLUDES some categories in search results. This is disturbing but not unexpected given Donahoe's track record.
Did Donahoe really think we wouldn't notice?
I dont think Doanhue cares whether sellers notic things like that or not, but in reality there are countless numbers of good, honest, reputable sellers on ebay scratching their heads trying to figure out why their sales are so bad, and still have no clue Donahue is manipulating their listings on search AND more than likely manipulating feedback to reduce PS discounts and justify why SO MANY sellers items never show up in best match.
As for myself, when I did get best match....ebay always seem to pick my worst sellers to expose in best match, and all my super high sell thru type items ended up in ending soonest merely because my prices were better than larger competitors ebay favors on search.
I've claims recent sales have alot to do with best match, but the more I study the categories I used to list in, many of the items have never been listed in core before SO how the heck could the seller established a history of sales. The whole system is corrupt since Donahue took over, and I feel aweful for all the naive folks that still have no clue just how badly Donahue is undermining the vast majority of sellers.
Most folks are still more troubled over not being able to give negative feedback to non paying bidders....In my opinion that should be the least of their worries at this point. I'm truly shocked to see so many small volume sellers still on ebay considering most of them are having such poor sell thru conversions so many of them are losing alot of money after factoring in listing fees on so many items that dont get views much less bids.
Unless they get the ebay/paypal monopoly OUT of my revenue stream so they no longer control MY money and can't hold it for 3 to 180 weeks at their discretion and THEY get interest on it the whole time and then maybe they give it to me or maybe they don't, maybe they give it to some criminal buyer who has been scamming half of ebay and they won't kick him/her off - I won't ever go back.
Plus, I want to be able to read and leave honest feedback for buyers so I can try to avoid the criminals out there. Now we are told they are perfect and there are fraudsters extorting feedback for money/items. We can't tell the honest buyers from the scammers.
Until there are real penalties for buying and not paying, why bother doing the work to list?
Google checkout is a safe online payment system with a by far better name amongst online buyers and sellers than the hated Ebay/Paypal Monopoly. Paypal only IS illegal but it will apparently take a class action lawsuit or the government stepping in to enforce Anti-Trust laws (as they did in Australia when they tried it there. The Australian government shot paypal only down as illegal monopolistic behavior)
I'm sitting on some of the best stuff I have ever had to offer, Rare pieces of vintage dinnerware by some of the best vintage designers (Zeisel, Schreckengost, Wright) and definately stuff people will want, but it isn't going on ebay. I'm not getting the traffic I need at Ioffer and I am still angry about it because I could use the money. I will go to Ola.com and also eCrater and hope the buyers will find it there since "IT" won't be on ebay anymore.
If you take into consideration that ebay stock used to sell at around $50 dollars a share and now it is $15, that is a blatant lie that the stock is up.
I don't know how old John D. can "grow paypal" as one of their goals for the year, when everybody HATES paypal now and are switching to Google checkout on all the fast growing competitor sites to sell on out there.
I highly suggest you dont pay for a lifetime memebrship at OLA until you've sold there for awhile. OLA has experience alot of seller growth this year, but Fain after nearly 11 years as site own has ever gotten the site and the sellers listings RSS google feed and exposure in search engines.
Total site traffic for OLA is only about 34K and aside from seller growth, there has not been any real traffic growth at OLA for 10 years now. Ecrater on the otherhand os a different store. Although ecrater is a new site, ecrater already gets nearly 800k unique visiters monthly which is almost as much site traffic as Ioffer gets in U.S. user traffic.
I'm impressed with ecrater's development team. Sellers listings are beginning to show up high in google searches and traffic is growing quickly.
I'd also like to mention a few other sites you might want to check out.....Rubylane and goantiques which cater to buyers and sellers of vintage things and antiques. Both sites get nearly 30 times more monthly traffic than OLA, and they are niche sites catering to buyers interested in vintage products.
I'd also suggest checking out bonanzle. It a very new site, but has already registered 5000 new sellers in just the past few months, and is a really cool site with enormous potential. Atomicmall is another site you may want to check out.
I'm not trying to discourage you from selling at OLA, but based on my own experience and the experience of alot of sellers I know that sell there....there are actually more sellers on OLA than there are buyers which doesnt work....and Fain just doesnt seem to be motivated to make the site search engine friendly.
It is hard to put into words how condescending and arrogant ebay has become. They have lacked any degree of customer for a long time and that was a given. But they were incompetent, not mean spirited and spiteful.
Lost me as a seller last year when they came out with the worthless listing program SYI3. They lost me as a buyer on 8/20 when they announced checks and money orders would be outlawed in the name of "safety". I heve been in business since 1984, I've done mail order, storefront, and ebay. I will not be told how to pay someone - I pay by check, always have, always will.
I must say that I don't miss buying and selling on ebay at all. I do miss the sense of community we once had.
Wow! I've been swamped working my sites. Very busy. Took a peek... can't resist!
And was struck by an enormous impression. With this new CEO, and his dogged determination to "change" the site to Amazon (and I won't bother to go THERE) the unbelievable harm he has managed to -- not dole out --- but sledgehammer -- to honost, hard working folks making a satisfying living, MANY and MOST of whom were the backbone of creating the behemoth success ebay has enjoyed.
We all know this. Most of us have been reading. And posting. But it continues. It just goes on and on. And on. Sellers falling daily by the roadside. This is really bad. I mean, it's really bad. The extermination of the standard seller is wrong. It is.
It is unconcionable. This leaves such a bad and bitter taste. There is not a SINGLE ebay regular user that I have talked to in the last few months that does business with ebay anymore. None. It's not the sellers. Has nothing to do with the sellers.
Ebay has become dispised. JD needs to go. It's true. But he has been ALLOWED to plunder and destroy. Why is that?
I for one have no trust in the ebay "venue". Obviously JD is only the tip of the iceburg. And it's what's below the surface that concerns me.
The ebay "venue" would have to work long and hard to win back my trust again. Earn my trust.
Earn it.
Joe and Jane Average don't get to have Golden Umbrellas to fall back on if they mess up. Pay someone millions of dollars to get rid of them. What is this world coming to? Thinking? Real life for us is different than those of CEO's and Members of the Board. In the long run, this mammoth screw-up will take some serious fixing. Serious. Check with Webster on the meaning of serious. Refresh you understanding of the meaning.
And trust...
Earned back.
Earned.
Yes, it's all about trust & most sellers don't trust Donahoe.
Every distruptive innovation he has rolled out seems to be designed to rid the site of it's most valuable asset - small sellers who sell items you can't find elsewhere.
Have a great evening!
The law is clear: if a marketplace operator either actually knows, or should have known about widespread counterfeiting, it is obligated to take action both to prevent that illegal conduct and to stop providing services to those engaged in the violation. Tiffany sent eBay 20,915 notices about the "deluge of counterfeit merchandise" in 2003; 45,242 in 2004; 59,012 in 2005; and 134,779 in 2006. Despite being aware of the continuing extraordinary ongoing volume of counterfeit Tiffany trade on its site, eBay continued to provide material assistance to direct infringers rather than implementing policies that could have reduced the volume of counterfeit items, the IACC brief says.
Robert Barchiesi, President of the IACC said, "Counterfeiting is a criminal activity carried out on global scale and, with eBay turning a blind eye, broadly on the Internet. In fact, eBay is estimated to provide the forum for 29 percent of the entire online counterfeit market, which has widespread public health and safety hazards, as well as causing substantial economic harm to legitimate business...
...until the U.S. judicial system takes appropriate action with respect to eBay in forcing it to more aggressively fight the proliferation of counterfeit sales through its site, the IACC warns consumers that they should not feel confident in the legitimacy of certain of the products they acquire on eBay.
SOURCE: The International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition
One can only wonder how much money eBay generated in listing fees, final value fees, and paypal fees (including money earned on the float) for all counterfeit items because after all that's what eBay does best - levy fees, lol.
Which begs the question "What was Donahoe thinking?" which he added diamond powersellers who get charged NOTHING for listing fees, use their own merchant accounts, and drive traffic AWAY from ebay.
Have a great evening!
Keep up the great work helping to spead the word about how low eBay has stooped, fallen, sunk, sank, sunken, etc.
Have you noticed that the 'eBay shares are a great buy' stock experts, blogging on Alpha, have been silent lately?
Yours truly, and many others, have been giving them the blues by spreading the word about JD and his asine policy changes.
I celebrated?? my 11th year as an eBayer this month. I haven't sold there for a few months, and don't plan to in the near future. My 1500+ all positives are too dear to me to risk in the current environment.
I've been checking out Bonanzle. I like what I see, but no auction format option. One can go to their site and click on search, without putting anything in the description box, and see the total number of items. It's grown from 160,000 a couple of weeks ago, to over 220,000. I'm sure former eBay sellers are stocking its booths.
Best regards,
Bob C
I suspect Bonanzle will ultimately replace eBay because 1) it's a clean site; 2) it's very user friendly; 3) it uses basic simple keyword searches; 4) listing is FREE; 5) FVF is inexpensive; 6) payment method is not dictated; 7) the user agreement is written in plain English; 8) etc. etc. etc.
Yes, I too noticed that the "experts" are conspiciously silent. I predict eBay stock will ultimately trade at less than $10 a share because even Wall Street (who's always the last to get IT) finally realizes that Donahoe's disruptive innovations are a complete failure.
Have a great weekend!