downwithebay

eBay: Growth at the Right Bid

Chuck,
I encourage you to checkout Quantcast.com before putting much faith in Donahoe's thesis of projected earnings. Simply enter the name of any/all of Ebay own companies into quantcast's traffic search and you'll see for yourself just how dismall things have become for Ebay since Donahoe took over the helm as President and now CEO of Ebay. The numbers look pretty scary.

According to Quantcast,
Ebay.com site traffics has fallen from 95.5 million unique monthly visits in 03/07 down to 62.1 in Oct 09, and YoY traffic for Q3/09 is down slightly from Q3/08.

Shopping.com traffic has steadily fallen from 25 million monthly inn 04/07 down to 3.3 million in 09/09, and Q3/09 traffic stats are down from Q3/08.

Donahoe claims PayPal has been experiencing tremendous growth over past 12 months, yet traffic numbers for all 3 quarters have actually been down slightly compared to first 3 quarters of 08.

Half.com monthly traffic has plummeted from 220k unique visits in 04/07 down to 18k for each quarter in 09.

Q3/09 ProStore traffic is down roughly 20 percent compared to Q3/08

Rent.com monthly traffic has steadily declined from Q3/08 and YoY

Kijiji monthly traffic is down roughly 30% compared to Q3/08.

Stubhub monthly traffic is down measurably compared to Q3/08

Other facts:
Ebay loses $64mil in LVMH lawsuit in Q3/09 and opened the doors for many other trademark owners that feel Ebay is an active participant in the sale of counterfeit good.
Ebay currently dealing with 2 additional significant lawsuits (craigslist and Skype) that could prove to be quite costly depending on outcome.
As of 10/1/09, there were 36% less veteran sellers actively selling than there was in 02/08 many of whom no longer seller or BUY on ebay now.

Until fall 08, Ebay stores, ebay affiliates and ebay paid advertisements completely dominated top placement in google searches for pretty much every conceivable keyword search. For nearly 8 months now, ebay stores and other related traffic drivers have been completely non existent in google search resulting in a massive loss of traffic for most ebay stores.

Ebay and Channel Adviser tout how there has been sales growth on Ebay in recent months, but aside from a very narrow group of larger ebay businesses that is getting the bulk of traffic funneled directly to them, almost all other sellers appear to be experiencing 30-70% less sales compared to Q3/08.

Three Value Stocks That Appear Ridiculously Cheap

Here's an interesting find. 8 SHORT days ago a bunch of the suits at Feebay were awarded a TON of stock for their performance in 2007-2008. ALL the big numbers below are the number of shares each putz received. Pretty stinking sad when shares of Feebay stock have plummeted roughly 60 percent in one year, The company has never paid a dividend, YET Feebay suits get rewarded with MANY 1000s of shares in bonus stock. Absolutely B.S.!

02/27/09 NORRINGTON LORRIE M Exercise 58,334 NA NA
02/27/09 SWAN ROBERT HOLMES Exercise 66,667 NA NA
02/27/09 THOMPSON SCOTT Exercise 8,334 NA NA
02/27/09 AXELROD ELIZABETH LYNN Exercise 46,667 NA NA
02/27/09 DONAHOE JOHN JOSEPH Exercise 127,196 NA NA
02/27/09 JACOBSON MICHAEL RICHARD Exercise 41,667 NA NA

eBay to Hold Analyst/Investor Day: Ten Questions to Ask Them

Here's an interesting find. 8 SHORT days ago a bunch of the suits at Feebay were awarded a TON of stock for their performance in 2007-2008. ALL the big numbers below are the number of shares each putz received. Pretty stinking sad when shares of Feebay stock have plummeted roughly 60 percent in one year, YET Feebay suits get rewarded with MANY 1000s of shares in bonus stock. Absolutely B.S.!

02/27/09 NORRINGTON LORRIE M Exercise 58,334 NA NA
02/27/09 SWAN ROBERT HOLMES Exercise 66,667 NA NA
02/27/09 THOMPSON SCOTT Exercise 8,334 NA NA
02/27/09 AXELROD ELIZABETH LYNN Exercise 46,667 NA NA
02/27/09 DONAHOE JOHN JOSEPH Exercise 127,196 NA NA
02/27/09 JACOBSON MICHAEL RICHARD Exercise 41,667 NA NA

Suggestions for eBay 2.0

Scot,
Your entire series was awesome! Great analysis and vision! 5 STARS!!!!!!!!!!


On Feb 23 05:57 PM Patricia013 wrote:
>
> One thing I would like to see. I'm sick and tired of 12 month powersellers
> being "trustworthy" while my 10 year spotless record takes a back
> seat. I would like to be able to pay Ebay for intense verification
> of credit rating for sellers. I'll match my 800+ fico score with
> the best of them! Then the CREAM of that crop can be considered
> trustworthy...perhaps have a small verified logo attached to their
> ID...nothing fancy but something that tells the buyer that THIS is
> a proven trustworthy seller. Overstock uses something similar.<br/>
>

I will agree with you that being a power seller certainly doesnt constitute a sellers overall trustworthiness.....bu... by the same token, just because someone has a high fico score doesnt necessarily merit labelling the person a trustworthy seller either. Heck, Ebay Corp. has awesome fico ratings, but you and I both no Ebay is not the most trustworthy company, nor is everyone with high fico scores trustworthy business people either.

Although I was never a big time seller, I generated over 7000 sales (5500 feedbacks over the years, lifetime feedback rating of 99.9 with 5.0 and 4.9 DSRs.
BUT my fico score royally sucks because of loss of job, stock market losses and health problems of a family member that exhausted all of my resources in a very short time. Having a less than desirable fico score in this crazy economy with so many folks losing their jobs cerrtainly does not mean that a person is not a trustworthy online seller. I beg to differ with you on that point.

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.

Some Positives, But Problems Persist at eBay

While ebay management and the typically analyst dont view loss of sellers leaving ebay as a major variable to ebay steady declines....I beg to differ with you. Like many ebay sellers, buyers are leaving ebay too. Below is some data that came out today of just one lesser known buy/sell platform where ebay shoppers and sellers are moving to in large numbers.

Etsy released December 2008 sales numbers that show just how much traction the online marketplace for homemade and vintage goods has gained in the past year. The value of goods sold on the site was $12.9 million - a 20 percent increase over the previous month, and a 153 percent increase from December 2007. Etsy merchants sold 815,327 items in December 2008, a 13.4 percent increase from November and a 140 percent increase year over year.

Additional statistics for December 2008 include: 1,098,644 new items were listed (down from 1,143,942 items in November); 164,789 new members joined the Etsy community, including 19,481 new sellers; and 410,365,372 page views were recorded on the site, essentially the same number as November.

Ioffer.com's sales and growth stats are just as impressive, and many other smaller sites like bonanzle, ecrater, atomicmall and ebids are experiencing massive growth registering as many as a 1000s new sellers daily many of who are attracting many of their ebay customers to follow.

It amazes me that Analyst devote so much time crunching numbers, yet spend so little time LISTENING to Ebay's ONCE most loyal customer as to the REAL reasons for many of Ebay's shortcomings like GMV, user stats etc....

In Ebay's quest to concentrate solely on catering to a very small percentage of it's userbase while completely screwing over the masses....The sellers Donahoe refers to as "NOISE" are not only taking their business elsewhere, but taking their customers with them to.

Now that the holidays are over....investors can expect another large exodus of ebay sellers of all businesses sizes establishing storefronts on the net and conacting their entire ebay customer base about their new online storefront location.

Ebay's greed and lack of respect for it most avid/loyal user base with be the downfall of Ebay marketplace in 2009.

What Will Become of eBay?

It's so ironic the media accepts what Donahoe says about auctions dying as a significant drop in ebay traffic.

Donahoe is the one that doesnt like auctions not the average ebay user!

Prior to Donahoe taking over the reins at ebay, our company had awesome sell thru rates on most anything we listed auction format. As soon as ebay implemented best match and heavily favored fixed price listings in their default search engine, our sales plummeted so draastically we were forced to close our two ebay stores after having been successful power sellers for nearly 6 years on both store accounts.

Virtually everone that uses ebay thoroughly hates the new search engine. Most auction listing get buried in nondefault searches than many ebay users dont ever even see. Between Ebay's new highly disputed DSR system, Forcing the issue of fixed prices and free shipping, new 21 day hold on paypal funds, non-existent customer support, and purposely trying to drive off all small businesses and casual sellers....Ebay has lost a substantial number of high quality sellers many of whom were some of the most avid shoppers in the site.


Most of the mega sellers ebay is heavily propmoting alll have their own website and meerely use ebay's seller platform to generate customers for their own website which has caused a deterioration of ebay buyer traffic.

Sellers of all sizes have reestablished themselves on either their own website or one of the many lesser known buy/sell platforms and enticed many of their previous ebay buyers to shop on these new sites.

Sites like ecrater, etsy, ioffer, onlineauctions, ebids, bonanzle, Amazon and at least 20 other buy/sell platforms have experienced tremendous user growth this year, and the vast majority of that growth has been EX ebay sellers and EX ebay buyers.


Another reason for ebay's steady declines on both user traffic and revenues this year has come at the hands of Donahoe taking proactive steps to forcing many sellers of counterfeit goods off the site. Due to stricter federal enforcement and trademark owner pressures on ebay in recent times, Ebay for the first time EVER has been taken steps to ban many sellers offering counterfeit goods.

For years Ebay closed their eyes to the trademark infringement problem and reaped billions of dollars in revenues from the sale of luxury counterfeits on their site relying heavily in their credo "we're just a venue", and never took policing their site seriously for online fraud. This new crack down Donahoe has started has dramatically impact ebay's bottomline revenues and site traffic while sites like Ioffer.com are now the prodominate online site where much of these counterfeit luxury goods are bought and sold. In my opinion that's the main reason Ioffer has experienced 168 percent growth this year

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)


In summary:

Ebay has forced a massive number of great, respectable small volume sellers off the site this year

Many of these small volume sellers Ebay has purposely forced off the site were not only sellers but regualr ebay shoppers.

Sellers of all business sizes have reestablished themselves on other buy/sell venues and taken some of their ebay buyers with them.

Ebay is heavily promoting "Big Box" sellers that all have websites and are quickly eroding ebay buyer traffic enticing buyer to shop their website when making future purchases.

Ebay has booted a large number of counterfeit luxury goods sellers that once generated huge revenues for ebay.

It's going to take one heck of alot of new "diamond sellers" and Ebay marketing to ever recover from the massive loss of users and revenues Ebay once counted on.

Ebay is going down the tube fast!




.

Facebook: Looking for a Classifieds Partner

How the heck is Kijiji that gets 82.4k monthly visits a BIG threat to facebook's classified that gets over 42 million unique monthly visitors on their site.

With the right partner, facebook can quickly make Donahoe and cronies regret ever getting into the online classified biz!

No Christmas for eBay Sellers

NEW YORK, Oct 22, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- The International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (IACC) announced today that it has filed an amicus ("friend of the court") brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in support of Tiffany's appeal in its lawsuit against eBay. The brief references eBay's persistent failure to meet its obligations to prevent illegal sales of counterfeit and infringing goods on its site and explains why the Court should hold eBay contributorily liable for its failure to do so.
The law is clear: if a marketplace operator either actually knows, or should have known about widespread counterfeiting, it is obligated to take action both to prevent that illegal conduct and to stop providing services to those engaged in the violation. Tiffany sent eBay 20,915 notices about the "deluge of counterfeit merchandise" in 2003; 45,242 in 2004; 59,012 in 2005; and 134,779 in 2006. Despite being aware of the continuing extraordinary ongoing volume of counterfeit Tiffany trade on its site, eBay continued to provide material assistance to direct infringers rather than implementing policies that could have reduced the volume of counterfeit items, the IACC brief says.

Robert Barchiesi, President of the IACC said, "Counterfeiting is a criminal activity carried out on global scale and, with eBay turning a blind eye, broadly on the Internet. In fact, eBay is estimated to provide the forum for 29 percent of the entire online counterfeit market, which has widespread public health and safety hazards, as well as causing substantial economic harm to legitimate business...

...until the U.S. judicial system takes appropriate action with respect to eBay in forcing it to more aggressively fight the proliferation of counterfeit sales through its site, the IACC warns consumers that they should not feel confident in the legitimacy of certain of the products they acquire on eBay.


SOURCE: The International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition

No Christmas for eBay Sellers

again...I a[ologive for typos....some of my keys on this old keyboard tend to stick, and I foolishly hit the publish button before prooofreading most of the time.

No Christmas for eBay Sellers

mel-ster,

I highly suggest you dont pay for a lifetime memebrship at OLA until you've sold there for awhile. OLA has experience alot of seller growth this year, but Fain after nearly 11 years as site own has ever gotten the site and the sellers listings RSS google feed and exposure in search engines.

Total site traffic for OLA is only about 34K and aside from seller growth, there has not been any real traffic growth at OLA for 10 years now. Ecrater on the otherhand os a different store. Although ecrater is a new site, ecrater already gets nearly 800k unique visiters monthly which is almost as much site traffic as Ioffer gets in U.S. user traffic.

I'm impressed with ecrater's development team. Sellers listings are beginning to show up high in google searches and traffic is growing quickly.

I'd also like to mention a few other sites you might want to check out.....Rubylane and goantiques which cater to buyers and sellers of vintage things and antiques. Both sites get nearly 30 times more monthly traffic than OLA, and they are niche sites catering to buyers interested in vintage products.

I'd also suggest checking out bonanzle. It a very new site, but has already registered 5000 new sellers in just the past few months, and is a really cool site with enormous potential. Atomicmall is another site you may want to check out.

I'm not trying to discourage you from selling at OLA, but based on my own experience and the experience of alot of sellers I know that sell there....there are actually more sellers on OLA than there are buyers which doesnt work....and Fain just doesnt seem to be motivated to make the site search engine friendly.

eBay in the Basement - But Not for Long

BTW investor, according to quantcast user traffic at paypal hase been declining since Q2 with 700k less users in the month of Sept. than in last month of Q2. Since ebay doesnt use GAAP aucting, I serious doubt paypal's growth numbers are very accurate knowing user traffic is steadily declining.

As far as skype is concerned, ebay is still vigorously looking for a buyer for skype, so no matter how much they hype up skype, ebay themselves appparently dont see a promising future for skype.

Now, they've just borrowed a billion bucks to finance Bill Me Later and the ad sites they just purchased.

Ebay stock may still be a good value at these prices, but with the economy the way it is coupled with Donahues radical approach in investments, I forsee little up movement on this stock for quite some time, and I certainly dont see getting something for nothing since that something is currently ruining both Doanhoe's and Ebay's image.

No Christmas for eBay Sellers

oops...sorry for the typos...my brain tends to work faster than my fingertips when typing

No Christmas for eBay Sellers

Hi Dinah,
I dont think Doanhue cares whether sellers notic things like that or not, but in reality there are countless numbers of good, honest, reputable sellers on ebay scratching their heads trying to figure out why their sales are so bad, and still have no clue Donahue is manipulating their listings on search AND more than likely manipulating feedback to reduce PS discounts and justify why SO MANY sellers items never show up in best match.

As for myself, when I did get best match....ebay always seem to pick my worst sellers to expose in best match, and all my super high sell thru type items ended up in ending soonest merely because my prices were better than larger competitors ebay favors on search.

I've claims recent sales have alot to do with best match, but the more I study the categories I used to list in, many of the items have never been listed in core before SO how the heck could the seller established a history of sales. The whole system is corrupt since Donahue took over, and I feel aweful for all the naive folks that still have no clue just how badly Donahue is undermining the vast majority of sellers.

Most folks are still more troubled over not being able to give negative feedback to non paying bidders....In my opinion that should be the least of their worries at this point. I'm truly shocked to see so many small volume sellers still on ebay considering most of them are having such poor sell thru conversions so many of them are losing alot of money after factoring in listing fees on so many items that dont get views much less bids.

eBay Q3: What it Means for Sellers

to me the saddest part is that ebay claims that "buyer satisfaction" is their ultimate goal, and they are taking steps to suspend "bad sellers" with less than desirable DSR ratings....yet I have come accrossed quite a few large ebay vendors that have DSR as low as 4.0, and ebay takes no action against these sellers and still gives them high exposure in search.

I just found a large media seller that has over 150,000 feedbacks, racking up tons of bad "buyer experiences" and has a 12 month DSRs og 4.6, 4.5, 4.2 and 4.0. Seller was stripped of power seller status BUT still gets high visibility in search and has never been restricted or suspended..yet many small businesses are suspended with far better buyer satisfaction ratings.

I've been monitoring a large ebay vendor that is a Pesa member that has had a 4.2 DSR for shipping time for many months now, yet their merchdise still gets high visibilily in best match searches, and never been subjected to the harrassment ebay gives smaller companies with better buyer approval ratings.

I find that many of the large vendors have far worse overall buyer satisfaction ratings than majority of small businesses on ebay that NEVER seem to get CONSISTENT best match exposure yet more often than not are eligible for some type of power seller discount indicating their seller performance is more than acceptable.

In my opinion it should be ilegal what ebay has been doing manipullating searches giving large vendors the bulk of best match exposure while bronze power sellers, casual sellers, auction sellers and even silver power sellers are getting totall shafted getting very little default search engine exposure and literally throwing advertising money down the drain getting no listing exposure on ebay now.

Although I decided to stop doing business on and with ebay after 5 years as a bronze power seller with near perfect buyer satisfaction ratings, I monitor the categories I used to list in frequently. Over 90% of the search exposure is ONly being given to about one tenth of the sellers listing in that category which are are either large online retailers, manufacturers, wholesalers OR sellers offering fixed prices with FREE shipping). Hardly any auctions ever show up in best match even though the same auctions typically had 100% sell thrus prior to these manipulative changes, and if the seller isnt offering free shipping or top volume seller in the category...chance of getting listing visibility in best match search is nearly impossible regardless how good the sellers DSRs and previous sales were.

I think it is truly sicken how ebay suits an Ebay PR folks put such a BS spin on everything. They continue to tell the public some selllers just dont like change, when in reality most of us just want the services we PAID for which is listing visibilty on their site...NOT having our listings buried in nondefault ssearch engines that drastically reduces viewing traffic and sales and ultimately results in wasted advertising dollars and financial losses.

I am so flippin glad my fiancee and I decided to close our two ebay stores and discontinue doing business on and with ebay. After over 21k sales in past 5 years between our two stores coupled with 99.8 feedback ratings and DSR scores of 4.8s and 4.9 only to be continually told we some how need to improve performance to get best match exposure is utterly ludacris. Ebay has turned into a team of ruthless, manipulative liars that simply can not be trusted what-so-ever. They have an agenda, and the agenda that obviously doesnt include small busineses and casual sellers yet they continue to hype up auctions and how they encourage casual sellers to sell on ebay...taking their hard earned money and giving nothing in return.


It interesting that ebay doesnt seem to realize that these same large companies Ebay heavily favor in best match searches typically have their own website with shopping cart, and the vast majority of these big vendors immediately begin promoting their websites to their ebay customers immediately after the initial ebay transaction. Is Donahue so fullish he cant see that while the large vendors may be generating more revenue for ebay in the short term, that these same online merchants, manufacturers, whoelsalers and completely eroding mainstream buyer traffic on ebay as more and more buyers are now going directly to these large vendors websites when making future purchases? Ebay and most analyst believe Amazon is biggest competitor when on reality ebay's biggest competitor for ebay shoppers are the same big businesses ebay heavily favors ion their site. Just since Q1 when Donahue took over as CEO and began heavily favoring large vendors in Best match searches, monthly site traffic has declined by roughly 10 million visits. How can so many people not make the connection that big companies that sell on ebay are lirterlally eroding all the buyers.


Donahoes disruptive innovations suck and in both the short term and the long term will be bad for investors as traffic and revenues for marketplace and paypal steadily decline.

Investors better hope and pray stubhub, shopping.com, skype and ebay's new ad businesses grow because marketplace is dying fast, and ultimately will hurt their cash cow paypal businesses. Interesting how googles merchant services are still experience modest growth while paypal monthly traffic has decllined 700k monthly visits since Q1.