nadine

eBay Offers Something Amazon Cannot

To the author: Check the revenue and earnings trends for eBay. The trend is not your friend.

Donahoe squandered much of eBay's good will and market share on an ill-conceived campaign to compete with Amazon. Even the analysts on Wall St can see that this effort has failed. Donahoe is now trying to backpedal into something that will work for eBay and obfuscate their failure; that's what all the blather about "secondary market" is about. However, believing that auctions are obsolete (despite still providing half eBay's GMV), he has not yet attempted to support them, even though they remain at the core of eBay's Marketplace business. The Marketplace business will continue to flounder until he returns to supporting the eBay core brand. The most you can say about eBay's latest moves is that they have stopped actively running off sellers. Now Amazon just pulls them away with better service and results.

Suggestions for eBay 2.0

The need to address the issues that Scot discusses is becoming so acute that probably not even the current eBay management will be able to avoid it altogether. So I predict some plan rolled out with fanfare that amounts to about 5% of what Scot suggests. If you notice from previous changes, eBay is actually rather timid about changing the base structure of the site (why is there STILL no shopping cart?) so probably 'the plan' will just involve splitting auctions from fixed price with different default sorts. Griff is already making noises to this effect. But really dropping fees? (as opposed to raising them and calling it a decrease, as if we were all too stupid to run the numbers) or really understanding what selection means on the site, and how they have to address it? I wouldn't hold my breath.

User 363989, if the benchmark for Donahoe's removal really is $8 / share, we shouldn't have long to wait. Less than four dollars to go. I can only wish.

What Will Become of eBay?

If auctions were simply "losing favor" in the marketplace, then eBay could have worked years ago to accommodate the switchoever to fixed price. Sellers naturally want to go wherever the market is. Instead, they keep trying to manipulate the sellers into fixed price deals that offer high margins for ebay and no margins for sellers. Thus sellers of all sizes are diversifying to other channels. eBay is only cutting margins to do deals with big sellers like Buy.com, on whom it will come to rely more and more. Of course, eBay won't have the leverage with the big sellers it does with the small ones, so we can expect a margin squeeze.

Meanwhile, the auction business struggles on, on a degraded platform full of glitches with far too many changes, all of which are designed to help the fixed price business and not the auction business. eBay originally tried developing the fixed price business on a separate site, but it failed, so now they are jackhammering the original site.

Analysts: Stop watching the listing numbers. They are meaningless. eBay can manipulate them at will. Watch the traffic numbers and the margin numbers. They tell the true tale.

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

Larry, don't be fooled by ebay's usual bs. They have changed the fee structure so that different categories pay different back-end fees. For most categories, it is a BIG increase. The examples ebay quoted were from the few categories that did not see an increase. Go look at the schedule, otherwise you're just spreading misinformation.