Are We Seeing The Downfall of eBay?
November 24, 2008 by Pablo Palatnik
As the holidays near, eBay will make its big marketing push to attract buyers to the site using all types of media. As an eBay account holder with an eBay store for one of our businesses, I recieved a call from eBay telling me how to “optimize” my business on eBay with email marketing which is a free tool in the ebay store.
With a weak economy, eBay is hurting and now needs the help from its sellers to push their products as much as possible to buyers. For the past two years now, eBay has been enforcing rules that does not entice sellers to sell on the website. Rising listing fee’s, feedback issues against sellers, and more. This has pushed eBays view to sellers in a very negative way, I think most would agree on that.
Nielsen Online shows a dramatic drop of 30% in October 2008 in pageviews. Amazon is gaining ground in traffic and seller interest.
Donahoe, the CEO of eBay, is one of the more critized CEO. Rightly so, eBay is one of the largest online companies in the world which has an incredible system that WORKED. Both sellers and buyers were very happy thoughtout the 90’s and early 00’s. Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay was doing things right I think until the end where the stock holders became more important than the eBay community itself which is very active and lets you know how they feel.
eBay needs to look at what worked and go back to the basics and fundamentals that made their company what it was and the monster it build today. As it stands today, the company is not in its best of times and the forecast isnt looking any better unless some serious changes come about and eBay starts listening to its community.
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Comments (2)
From my experience, eBay is dropping due to more so to their changing policies & how eBay is no longer friendly to the small-time seller. Talk about viral marketing when so many joe the plumbers can have a buy-in to your business model and promote it to everyone they know. Those were the good days, and eBay might have messed it up.
My mother sells used books & other unique 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 as 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.
Wow, I just have to say, great link you posted in the comment and I’ll be sure to promote website. What is the plan once 2k is reached?