old eBay seller

eBay Manages Expectations - Perhaps Too Well

Scot,

If revenue goes up but profit goes down is, as anyone who has been in business knows, a very bad sign and it is telling every one to get out now.
They are wasting money and energy on the wrong things. Yes the revenue goes up because the listings have gone up and Skype and PayPal have gone up but they are not selling the same percentage of listings as before so the profit goes down. eBay is loosing their market share and they are wasting money and effort trying to get it back by going in the wrong direction.
It is a rusty old ship that keeps on springing leaks and how long are the pumps (investors on Wall Street) going to keep it afloat.
Many of the crew (workers and sellers) see it and they are jumping ship.
The Captain still goes on like nothing is wrong and the crew look at him like he is a complete idiot.
Our eBay sales are still down y/y but they are coming back.
Example of our sales:

Q1-09 was down 36.5% from Q1-08
Q2-09 was down 55.4% from Q2-08
Q3-09 was down 21.8% from Q3-08

Q3-09 was up 2.5% from Q1-09
Q3-09 was up 35.2% from Q2-09

We deal in Hobby items and not the run of the mill CD's, DVD's and Electronic items that you can find any where but that is what the Captain is pushing for eBay when it was originally built on collectible's and hobby related type things. People are not going to go to eBay to find the general run of the mill type items and they never will. They can find it all a lot easier and cheaper on Amazon.

Until the management at eBay realizes that they will still keep sailing a rusty old ship that will eventually sink or run aground.

Bill

eBay: Out with the New, In with the Old

What Past Tense says is true. The simple fact is this. The management has no clue at all as to what is going on. They will probably come out in another 6 months or so and put a new spin on it with a new idea. I am surprised that the board and the share holders will even put up with this BS. The only thing I can assume is that they have no clue either.
Is everyone just running around the barn yard like chickens with their heads cut off?

Bill

What Are Analysts Saying About eBay's Analyst Day?

Mr. Patel has always been correct on eBay and he sees what is going on. The fees are way to high to be able to work in this type of economy.

Being a 10 year member and a Power Seller for 5 on eBay we have a good track record. We had to cut our fees to 50% of what we normally paid eBay each month but so far our sales are down 60% so we are going to have to cut back even more. If the trend that we are seeing is reflected in other bigger sellers it is not looking good for eBay at all.

Sales in the other venues we use are only down 20% to 30% and we are focusing more of our energies towards those areas which also leaves us more profit. We have been using eBay only as a place to attract customers which we lead to our other places. I am sure that many of the others sellers on eBay are doing the same thing.

The original dynamics of eBay are long gone and it is a dying entity. The management knows this and that is why the big emphasis was on PayPal and even Skype. The sad thing is that they also were the ones that caused these dynamics to disappear.

It was a good run and a lot of fun but we should all start preparing our eulogies for this company unless something can be done to give rebirth to it.

Bill

eBay in the Basement - But Not for Long

Down with eBay, that is what we do and we are not even a big box outlet. eBay is a cheap way of doing PPC to get buyers email addresses and turn them into customers on our web site.

One big thing that happened yesterday the search was not working at all for over an hour and according to eBay policy any items that were affected by an outage for over an hour will get a refund. Well I guess they are going to have to give a refund for everything that is listed on eBay including the store listings since they are now listed in the BIN lisings. That is going to cost them a pretty penny and is going to really drag the earnings down for Q4. You can read all about it on the auction bytes site:

www.auctionbytes.com/c...

eBay is going down the tubes or as the old folks used to say: Going to hell in a hand basket.

Bill