downwithebay

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!




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We Can't Afford a Search Monopoly, Even If It Kills Yahoo

I sure like to see yahoo bring back their auction site. With all the craziness going on over at ebay with many 1000s of good sellers leaving the site...this would be an ideal situation for yahoo and/or google to establish online auction venue again.

So many of us long time ebay sellers have large customer bases which could substantially increase traffic on yahoos website and search engine.