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eBay Watch: Alibaba Stake, U.S. Store Promotion, e-Commerce and GMVs

Wow, someone's been drinking the koolaid today!

More eBay PR waffle as usual.

What on earth has GMV growth to do with the ill perceived success of eBay?, yes more value MAY have been sold, but that is not eBay inventory, in reality all they sell (and they do that VERY poorly) is bandwidth and a search engine which belongs in the 20th century, now weighted so much towards worst match that buyers won't even get as far as a "buying experience' because the widget they are looking for is hidden among a gazillion cheap cellphone accessories etc.

The buyers (who are the seller's buyers, not eBay's) will just click the back button when they don't immediately find their widget on a search and go search at other online stores via the base.google.com framework. So assuming the GMV figures are correct, well done to those sellers.

What SHOULD have happened to give a positive outlook is that Y/Y growth increased rather than taking an almost linear % decrease. Someone want to tell me how a non existing inventory value increase is more important to a (non)service company than actual market penetration growth?

EBay needs to accept the fact that their ONLY customers are sellers (buyers don't add a dime to eBay coffers as a stand alone group), and we all know about the sad relationship that eBay is now perfecting with it's sellers. Perhaps, if eBay was to concentrate on a "good seller experience", they would see real Y/Y growth and not this huge exodus to alternate sites of the long term sellers, surely they realize that you can't replace the ones who are leaving with a bunch of new, inexperienced sellers and expect EITHER GMV or Y/Y growth to increase.