Dinah Balk

What Will Become of eBay?

Good morning everyone!

I gave Donahoe an F on his first year end report card as CEO in the last article I wrote. I must have got it right too because eBay DELETED nearly every post that made reference to the article.

What these analysts fail to realize is that eBay is about small sellers. They made eBay and now they're are taking it away - piece by piece in the media, in the courtroom, and by word of mouth because Donahoe destroyed the one thing that made eBay work - trust.

Happy Holidays!

Amazon vs. EBay: Looking Beyond E-Commerce

Great article Trader Mark!

I suspect if the shareholders don't get off their complacent behinds & pull the plug on Donahoe and his entourage of mba's by the end of the year there won't be an eBay left to save.

Dinah

eBay Sellers Must Learn the Art of 'Hacking' BestMatch

pssssst scot - sellers knew about this long before you posted it.

BUT now this handy little tool has gone pooooooof thanks to the article you posted. Did you really think eBay wouldn't notice, lol.

Piper: eBay Beginning to Turn Corner

Didn't anyone tell the analysts that the only reason listings were up is because eBay keeps having listing sales every few weeks? Let's not forget the phony shopping.com listings either, lol.

eBay Watch: Fixed-Price Traffic Boost, New Widgets, PayPal Forges Ahead

. . . . This is obviously great for buyers who can go on the site, find what they want, and complete a transaction immediately.

Finding IT is like finding a needle in a haystack due to Donahoe's (ebay marketing director) new buyer experience experiment dubbed Best Match. IF a buyer is willing to DRILL DOWN search results & repeat the same search over & over for each individual category he/she may eventually find IT but only after hours of frustration.

If a buyer is particularly brave, he/she has the opting of visiting Playground to find IT but runs the risk of being opted into guinea pig tests from which there is no escape as opt out links are either buried, don't work, or nonexistant.

Buyers won't find IT in ebay to go either because it doesn't make any sense for a seller to incorporate EBAY TO GO into their e-commerce site because Ebay actively promotes sending buyers ELSEWHERE thru onsite advertising in direct competition with their sellers.

So if buyers don't find IT soon and buy IT immediately there may be nothing left to find as many sellers are leaving for Amazon due to BEST MATCH & the continuous dumping of bad code into the site that renders ebay useless.

eBay Watch: Poor 2008 Start for Internet Stocks, Overstock's Good Points

Why did this occur? In a word Donahoe, ebay Marketing Director.

Buyers - Did he really think millions of buyers wouldn't notice the bad cookies he downloaded into their computers that opted them into his insane guinea pig tests? Most had no idea why their searches wouldn't work until they discovered an obscure opt out link at bottom of a page, if there was one there at all.

Sellers - Donahoe has devasted sellers with many innovations that are part of his mission to improve "buyer experience" but none work. The sell your item form (syi) has ceased to function despite 3-4 renditions in the last year, markdown manager still doesn't work, shipping calculator can't work due to a design flaw, predetermined item specifics don't make sense, and i could go on and on.

Conversion rates - When this seller asked the pink, Marniesue (ebay moderator of the Finding 2.0 thread on the Search Discussion Board) specifics about how conversation rates were calculated she was suddenly "called away" from the board.

Newbies - New members to ebay aka newbies are dupped into adding features to listings that don't make sense such as shipping overseas which is cost prohibitive to buyers or adding other features to make their listing standout.

Best Match - Buyers used to be able to find IT within a few minutes but that was before Donahoe replaced KEYWORD SEARCHES with best match. Now buyers are expected to DRILL DOWN and go through multiple levels to find IT & when they can't they are forced to start their search over & over again.

While Meg is out trolliping around the country with Mitt, ebay is slowly dying due to Donahoe. He is aware of all the issues above as evidenced by millions of complaints by both buyers & sellers and yet he continues his plan of destruction. I strongly urge all buyers & sellers to either buy 1 share of voting stock & vote both of the above out or seek another venue.

Amazon will welcome you with open arms.