User 217221

New Selling Form Sinks eBay Sellers

Looks like I messed up the URL's for the three sites I recommended. Sorry about that. Guess it's the "newbie" syndrome at work.

New Selling Form Sinks eBay Sellers

"Similarly, unless all sellers worldwide unite and say NO to the new selling form, then the morning after it goes into effect sellers will wake up and discover they're working for Donahoe."

Hello Dinah.

I submit that all sellers have been working for eBay since eBay first changed their position from "just a venue" some years ago.

I agree that sellers bemoaning their fate and wishing for the "good old days" is counterproductive and that eBay today is an extremely hostile and labor-intensive environment for sellers, particularly small sellers.

What I'm a bit concerned about is the unqualified "leave now" exhortations I see on this board.

While that is a wise alternative to challenging eBay's decisions, each seller has to consider their own unique situation and the fact that it takes time to establish themselves on a new venue.

So, in the spirit of helping sellers that may feel overwhelmed instead of criticizing them, here are my recommendations based on my move to new venues I started over 18 months ago:

1. By all means start to move now, but be cautious about the financial impact of your decision to move particularly if your livelihood depends on your sales.

While time is clearly not on your side, the handwriting on the eBay wall clearly says it is going to get much worse before it gets better and cost significantly more to sell there.

2. Be cautious about the cost, knowledge and effort required to build your own web site particularly when there are venues that will provide that ability for nothing or a small annual fee.

3. In your search for a venue, carefully consider how what you sell is represented on their site. All products do not sell well on all sites.

A good place to start is their category structure. For example, my category is included in "Everything Else" on Amazon, hardly conducive to effective marketing.

4. If you can sell on Amazon, do it. They are clearly the major viable competitor to eBay, the one eBay is trying to emulate, and, as posted earlier, they are completely up front regarding their terms and policies.

5. I consider <A HREF="www.ioffer.com/">iOffer</A>... <A HREF="www.ecrater.com/">eCrater</A>... and <A HREF="us.ebid.net/">eBid</A> as venues that have the potential to also effectively compete with eBay.

Although their combined 6.8 million listings are now about 47% of eBay's 14.5 million, they are growing rapidly and they appear to be the choice of many sellers on forums like this one. If sellers who leave eBay all go to any one of these three venues and bring their customers with them, it will soon bring the 800 pound gorilla to it's knees.

6. Don't underestimate the learning curve for things like how to set up your store, use their selling form and listing/payment/shippi... policies. Above all, don't expect instant results. It took almost 6 months for my sites to begin generating a reasonable volume of sales.

7. Once you have a new site, consider selling selected items on eBay as a way of promoting your new site. Include marketing literature in your shipping package that tells them how to find you. It can be very effective in bringing your customers with you, even if you only break-even on your eBay sales.

So, for those who decide to move, do it deliberately based on a solid understanding of what you are doing and best wishes for success in your efforts.

New Selling Form Sinks eBay Sellers

Watching the Wheels:

We are definitely on the same wave length when it comes to the underhanded way that eBay is managing change. The problem with many folks who still sell there is that eBay stands head and shoulders in generating the traffic it takes for a small seller to survive.

I don't think the small sellers like being shafted, but for many, like me, the alternative is to quit selling. If requested, I'll be glad to share the results of my 18 months experimentation with selling elsewhere.

As far as trust goes, I worked as a systems consultant for over 30 years implementing the "strategic concepts" proposed by consultants like Donahoe.

One observation I can make without qualification is that to get to the top in companies like Bain consultants have to have an enormous ego and an unwillingness to accept responsibility when something goes wrong.

I was all too often on the receiving end of "Your team screwed it up" when their basic concept was seriously flawed and they ignored the advice from implementation experts on my team for making the concept viable.

One thing many were vehemently opposed to was informing the workers and customers about the true impact of the changes they proposed. Many were also arrogant enough to say that they couldn't understand and all that would result was "noise". Sound familiar?

I firmly believe that eBay's direction is "too little too late" regarding their ability to compete with the likes of Amazon and their implementation is seriously hampered by marketplace distrust, faulty design, bug-laden software and sellers, large and small, who have grown weary with the constant chaos.

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A few thoughts about "radical change":

In my schooling as a Systems Analyst, I took a course called "General Systems Theory".

The basic principles are simple:
1. A system will always tend to stabilize itself.
2. If changed, a system will always attempt to adjust.
3. If changed too often and/or too drastically, a system will thrash trying to adjust.
4. The more complex the system, the more severe the thrashing.
5. If the system cannot stabilize it will thrash until it destroys itself.

Summation:
Radical change of complex systems is likely to cause severe enough thrashing for the system to self-destruct.

eBay is certainly a complex system and I believe they are on a path to self-destruction.

New Selling Form Sinks eBay Sellers

"The breadth of this plan could not have been thought up and strategized overnight"

And it wasn't. Donahoe was hired long before he became CEO, he comes from a strategic consulting environment that supports "radical change" as a key to business success, and I'm sure his "vision" was an integral part of the hiring process.

If there is one way you can describe what's happening on eBay since he arrived, it is "radical change".

I am convinced he has been working his plan and implementing it piecemeal long before he became CEO since many of the changes since 2006 dovetail nicely into his grand plan to make eBay another Amazon.

New Selling Form Sinks eBay Sellers

My listings on ebay always have at least three photographs, the free gallery image and two others I host on my own domain.

According to what I read, the new seller form will prohibit most off-site links but will still allow links to off-site photographs as long as those links don't promote another site.

A question that still remains unanswered from my communications with eBay is whether I will violate that caveat because my domain name where I store my photos is also the primary link to my off-site store.

The minute that eBay makes me pay for the photos I need to sell my goods, I'm history along with my 4.9 DSR's and 100% feedback.