downwithebay

Some Positives, But Problems Persist at eBay

Here's some growth stats for Ioffer.com....Another site ebay buyers and sellers are migrating to.

iOffer.com reported record dollar sales, units sold, new items listed, and new memberships over the past six weeks from November 1, 2008 to December 15, 2008. The "trading community" marketplace encourages negotiation between buyers and sellers and reported key metrics for the holiday shopping season (November 1 to December 15). Data from 2007 is listed first, followed by the same period in 2008.

Dollar Sales: $5.5 million vs. $15.1 million (175% growth)
Unit Sales: 121,323 vs. 275,813 (127% growth)
New Item Listings: 470,846 vs. 1,213,476 (158% growth)
Traffic: 3 million visits vs. 9 million visits (198% growth)
Page Views: 31 million vs. 80 million (158% growth)
New Member Registration: 44,192 vs. 126,175 (186% growth)

That's a whole lot of product that once used to be listed on ebay, that ebay made money on regardless of whether it sold or not. The colmination of ebay user traffic continuing to migrate to other sales venues obviously is impacting ebay's bottom line more than there care to admit. I'd venture to say at least 700,000 sellers have either stopped selling and BUYING on ebay this year, or greatly reduced both. Not only has ebay lost all the revenues from sellers fees from all these sellers, but MANY of the sellers that left Ebay this year pissed off were some of the most frequent shoppers on ebay so Ebay lost the collective buying power of a massive number of once frequent ebay shoppers.

The 800 LB gorilla is now the 700 LB gorilla and shedding weight quickly.