Ebay down spirral is mostly of its own making, driving sellers out of its marketplace
Tough times for the San Jose, Calif., e-commerce site.
As Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget reports, eBay’s core business is falling apart with its number of unique visitors declining more than 13%, over a year ago.
“And eBay’s efforts to turn around this business do not appear to be working,” writes Blodget.
However, most of the bad news is due to eBay’s own making like forcing Paypal on sellers, eliminating feedback that sellers can give buyers, higher fee structures, dubious listings/buyers/sellers, failed “best match” search engine… which are making harder for sellers to do business on eBay and eventually driving them out of what has now become an online flea market.
And with less sellers, eBay is less atractive to potential buyers.
A vicious circle that is taking eBay down with it. The former Internet powerhouse share price hit a five-year low last Friday and is now valued at about $16.7 billion, almost a third of its value from early this year. And as a former disgruntled eBay buyer puts it, “they’re outsmarting their way out of business.”
You hit so many things on the head. And my mother would love it.
My mother sells used library books & other garage sale finds on eBay. It’s a full-time job for her, but she describes herself somehow as semi-retired. I think it’s the work from home aspect & it allows her the flexibility to volunteer on-call with a hospice agency. Typically she’s selling unique items & books at $1 auctions & crossing her fingers that they go up from there. She’s been filling my ear with her frustrations with eBay as they favor the small time seller less & less these days. It seems the policy changes favor the Dell computers, other refurbished re-sellers, & large volume sellers rather than the person at home on a desktop.
She’s been thinking about switching to another site but wonders if she can take the challenge of re-launching her sales to something new & wonders if she can even sell with something with less traffic volume as so many of her titles are so random and unique. Wanting to help, I signed up to a website organizing folks to pressure & boycott eBay’s changes in small-time seller policies at http://www.thepoint.com/campaigns/boycott-ebay-for-fair-seller-policies if you’d be interested in joining too.
Thanks.
An ebay seller attempted to defraud me. I gave the seller negative feedback, so the dishonest seller retaliated by libeling me with negative feedback.
Ebay refused to take down the libelous statements. They said that they “investigated” the seller, but the seller was running the same scam after the “investigation.”
I had to try seven or eight times before ebay would cancel my account. Dishonest sellers and ebay’s inaction are the main reasons why most buyers have left ebay.
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