ebaywonderland

eBay: The Next 4 Months

Yes, moving to mass merchandise, loss of what made ebay, well, ebay. Finding the unique and one of a kind item, antiques, collectibles, custom made or artisan crafted have no place on ebay now.

Huge back end fees with no customer service to support any of it. A tome of policy that is so convoluted and poorly written that most members can hardly decipher it let alone follow it in any good attempt at compliance.

Paypal is the cash cow, thus the forced paypal by the removal of payment options of money orders and personal checks. Paypal is the fraud ridden payment system, not money orders or personal checks. Paypal holds sellers money arbitrarily and makes money on the float leaving sellers to ship goods without truly having been paid, paypal possesses the money. Paypal finding in the buyers favor more and more even though they do no investigation as to claims of "Significantly Not as Described".

Ebay is just a transit vehicle for paypal.

You can't find a more miserable place to sell than ebay. While they may have traffic, it's not turning into sales revenue and will do even less in that regard when in a mere couple of weeks the site is flooded with fixed price mass produced goods that most people can get locally or elsewhere on the internet.

Instead of taking this mature company into a more refined and well run auction site, the powers that be have decided to become a wannabe Amazon. Amazon does it so much better and always will, they don't try to be something they have never been.

The only revitalization of ebay core is if they erase all the inane policies from the past 5 years and get back to the basics of what made ebay great in the first place.

That's not going to happen with this bunch of fools at the helm.

EBay's New Fixed-Price Move: Amazon Envy?

There is nothing good in the bulk of the policy changes since February of this year, this latest round is another set of bad policy. Forcing paypal be announcing policy that personal checks and money orders can no longer be forms of payments offered for goods come October gives ebay another way to ring up the cut they take from sellers.

In ten years on ebay I've never seen such insanity and rapid fire changes that are driving good sellers away and watching ebay ditch a once viable and leading venue.

They have thrown away the business model that brought them solid success and now are trying to be a wannabe Amazon.

What a huge waste.

eBay P/E Hits New Low

Fraud going down? Based on what rules? Buyers are not staying, in fact announced at Ebay Live in Chicago was "millions of coupons to our best buyers now and again prior to the holidays". The problem is that a lot of people getting the coupons make a purchase and get error codes with the coupons, cannot be used. It's hit and miss.

Look at the active user number slide in the last 9 quarters, buyers and sellers are not flocking to ebay. They lost buyers year over year due to fraud and the fraud still exists.

No policy changes to control fraud from either side of the transaction.

eBay's Best Bargain - Itself

Just incredible to read the pablum ebay has handed out. Nothing more than a disguised press release because the author didn't bother to fact check the real impact of the fraud and abuse on ebay now.

Ebay has never enforced it's own written policies to control fraud, both on the seller side or the buyer side of any transaction. They expect their community of members to report to them. Report a violation and you're lucky they bother to read the report at all, let alone act.

Ebay has done nothing about the underlying problems that have plagued the site for years. I think the fact that they are handing out millions of coupons to buyers should pretty much tell the analysts that they have to buy the buyers and even that will only be a flash in the pan.

Do your research, trust nothing ebay tells you.

Stifel Upgrades eBay to Buy

I find it amusing, in a perverse sort of way, to read any analysts comments about ebay having improved it's standing with Best Match as well as a better buyer and seller experience.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, could be further from the reality of what is now happening on ebay with the many changes they have implemented since late January of this year.

All it takes is reading the message boards with real member comments to see what an absolute fiasco it has become. Perhaps the analysts ought to talk to customers of ebay and paypal first, rather than take their lead from data that is obviously misleading, such as the listing counts.

The sell through rate is tanking faster than the Titanic went down, buyers are no longer able to search categories with ease due to the default setting of Best Match who's algorithim has yet to make a bit of sense to either seller or buyer.

The feedback changes are showing their true colors in how buyers are now taking advantage of holding all the cards in the deck and demanding partial refunds, free shipping, returns because they didn't read the description, giving sellers negatives and neutrals at will for the most minor and often untrue reasons. And ebay taking advantage of the buyer's ratings of sellers to diminish the seller's ability to be found at all in searches.

And who, praytell, considers a neutral rating the same as a negative? Ebay does, and the seller's rating drops the same with a neutral as a negative. Of course it's to ebay's advantage to do so because the more the seller sinks, the less ebay has to pay to the powersellers who have to meet the bar ebay sets to receive their carrot on a stick 5% or 15% discount over the prior 30 day rankings they receive from buyers.

And let's add to the mix of failures, the fact that if a seller falls into what ebay determines to be lower than acceptable buyer satisfaction ratings, they are forced into paypal acceptance and paypal holds on payments received for up to 21 days.

And this analyst believes ebay has improved and their stock will increase as a result?

Does this analyst get paid for these opinions? That's a waste of money.