dlweld

What Can eBay Do to Close Its Amazon Gap?

LOL re the code words that bloggers use on eBay's forums to escape eBay's thought police - "the river", "the ranch" - what is Ebay's code? "The dump?"

I used to sell a lot on EBAY and made good money, but I no longer regard it as a viable venue. It's simply no longer a practical place for small sellers, sure, some deals work OK, but you just need one bad buyer to give a strong negative and your business is wrecked and you feel terrible - the selling experience is generally very bad at EBAY. If you're a "liquidation world" with special deals with ebay itself then it seems to work, but not for the great majority of sellers of interesting items - of course, flip side, not much of interest to buy there anymore either.

Suggestions for eBay 2.0

Great analysis! I'd suggest presenting the whole package to the guys at GOOGLE - they're a crew that could pull it off. When I think of the huge auction market world wide - Christies, Sotheby's, Bonham's, Waddington's, Barons, all the local auctions, farm auctions - it's a massive and lucrative industry - EBAY had the chance to take it all over - worldwide - they were getting there. But I guess the young MBA's just didn't have much realization about where the real money is, and little experience of the world - anything not new from China is a "flea market" item - gad!

Amazon vs. eBay: Follow Up Q&A

Very puzzling, EBAY seems to be working all-out to drive "eyeballs" away from their site! Certainly if the new chat rooms initiative is taken at face value - the new boards are clunky and difficult to scan, the icons for new topic, watched topics, are now harder to locate, avatars make the pages slower to load, all combined with a frustrating and cumbersome layout to discourage people from participating, plus, soon only ebay related threads will be allowed. Why, EBAY, do you want to discourage folks at your site - advertising dollars are tied to page views and site visits - what are you thinking? Do you hate your customers so much?

On the Heels of eBay's Slide, What News Will Amazon's Earnings Bring?

Seems to me that EBAy has given away the one thing that made their site a magnet - the cool and bizarre things that turn up for sale. That's what made EBAY unique and successful. My usual search used to turn up dozens of items of interest to me - almost nothing now, so little point visiting the site. So, having driven away the small sellers and thus given away their unique advantage over other e-commerce sites - given away the one thing that got the "eyeballs" - they're now trying to compete with all the established thin-margin e-commerce sites - good moves!

On the Heels of eBay's Slide, What News Will Amazon's Earnings Bring?

Seems to me that EBAy has given away the one thing that made their site a magnet - the cool and bizarre things that turned up for sale. That's what made EBAY unique and successful. My usual search used to turn up dozens of items of interest to me - almost nothing now, so little point visiting the site. So, having driven away the small sellers and thus given away their unique advantage over other e-commerce sites - given away the one thing that got the "eyeballs" - they're now trying to compete with all the established thin-margin e-commerce sites - good moves!

eCommerce Stock Pair Trade: Amazon vs. eBay

I see from comments below (and my own experience) that the end result of the new feedback system is that any buyer can easily wreck a seller's business - buy a few items, give negative feedbacks - these can't be fixed, ebay reprimands the seller, and zaps the seller's ranking in subsequent search results, business drops, things get worse - so every transaction is a "risk the business" one. Nice work ebay - BTW if a buyer is also a seller and leaves you a negative - I'd suggest buying a few items from him/her and leaving some gratuitious negatives - ebay will take care of the rest for you :+)