pwrsellr

eBay: Bottom Is a Few Months Away

123: You want quantify. I'll make it simple.

1) Ebay used to have a 1% discount on ALL FEES not just Final Value Fees if you had their monthly fees taken directly from your bank account. I had the 1% for 7 years. 6 months ago they announced that within 24 hours the fees would be gone. My costs then went up $100 a year
2) Within the last 18 months, the Post Office has raised IT'S costs to sellers...an average of 20%. My postage costs went up $2400 a year. Ebay has just instituted maximum fixed costs on my category, If I left my starting price where it was I would lost $7000 a year based on their maximum costs I would be allowed to charge. Instead I have to raise by start prices which cost me an additional $3000 a year in initial listing fees.
3) I have been selling on Ebay 7 years. For the first 5.5 years, I could count on like clockwork, my sell thru percentage. I did my research, had my starting prices competitive with other sellers and along with what the item had been selling for on Ebay. I COULD COUNT ON SELLING 33% OF THE NUMBER OF ITEMS LISTED. My wife and I would marvel on how that would happen EVERY TIME even though the titles changed. Now, through "Best Match" and DSR's my sell-thru at best is 17% and averages about 12%. Example...I used to list 500 items for a week. I would sell 170. List 100? I would sell 35. Now I list 200 and sell 25. All because of "Best Match" and DSR's and Corporate Customers being placed first. And that's when I had LEGITIMATE S/H charges in the listings and 100% feedback!
4) When there was two way feedback, I would have 2 non-paying bidders maybe a month...and I could block bidders who obviously were troublemakers as seen in feedback they received from others. Now I have 5-10 a month and they threaten me with bad DSR's unless I allow them to pay on THEIR TERMS. It's not so much the money lost [$50-$150 more a month lost] but the TIME it takes to chase these poeple, communicate and file reports with Ebay. So I am getting MORE NPB's on LESS LISTINGS.
5) I have projected that my TOTAL FEE COSTS as a procentage of sales and including listing costs for items that don't sell will rise 20% this year. And that is totally due to Ebay fee changes, S/H caps and sell-thru deterioration based mainly on BEST MATCH search engine. And my customer service is impeccable...but my DSR's and therefore Powerseller discounts don't reflect that.

I could go on and on. But I've spent enough time. Ebay wants the big corporate sellers. Donohoe does NOT want a "flea market" platform that had been the success of Ebay over the years. He wants what Amazon has. When a marketplace leader starts emulating the competition instead of staying ahead of it like they had in the past, they are doomed to failure. When they don't LISTEN to their customers [the sellers] they are doomed to failure.

The buyers are leaving [as Donohoe naively or egotistically states] not because of the potential of retaliatory negative feedback by sellers but because the small sellers with the unique items are being forced out. So Donohoe's tact is to lambast the sellers and make them impotent with higher costs to make the platform more "buyer-friendly". Except who knows that? Are they advertising that? The angle is all wrong. You attract more buyers by having more sellers selling items buyers want. With more sellers prices stay more competitive. Ebay should spend their resources creating a Customer Service department that GETS RID OF the scam sellers AS WELL AS the scam buyers.
I am not saying by any means that all buyers are bad. Quite the contrary. But neither are all sellers bad.

Ebay was once unique and at the top of their game. No longer. Pretty soon they will have just a bunch of selling conglomerates selling same-o items that can be found anywhere.

They are on a downward spiral and I am saying that without emotion.