Out Growing The Average Seller
Considering the recent eBay fee changes it seems that the small sellers are the last thing on eBay’s list of priorities. They will handing incentives and discounts to the highest volume sellers which is just one example of the new changes in action. The new changes that eBay has adopted is just one more step to the removal of the small time sellers just looking to make a bit of extra cash on the eBay marketplace.
John Donahoe, the successor of CEO Meg Whitman made the following statement about the eBay market place when commenting about the new changes:
John Donahoe:
“A year ago, we had 14 per cent of global e-commerce, we are the largest e-commerce provider, and our home page still looks like a flea market,” he says. “The world around us had changed. In particular our buyers’ experience hadn’t kept up.”
In fact eBay’s rise to power was fueled by the very fact that they could be compared greatly to a flea market style of buying and selling. In essence it was the greatest flea market in the world where you could find virtually anything you could imagine. This was the very essence that drove so many people to use eBay. It was a place where you could find the one item you needed to complete your collection or vintage t-shirt that you could never find in a department store. Likewise, you could sell that old collection of baseball cards or clean out your closet and make a few dollars while doing it. Those very factors made eBay the unique experience that it once was in the past.
I get the sense that the heads of eBay such as John Donahoe have a different view of how eBay should work which is greatly different to the seeds that eBay has grown from. It will be an eBay full of professional department store style vendors that are currently everywhere on the internet to begin with. Therefore eliminating the factor that made eBay an E-commerce giant to start with. Though they can’t just eliminate the smaller sellers directly through constant subtle changes they can slowly weed out those “inefficient” small time sellers in favor of larger professional retail vendors. Therefore just creating another generic online market place full of the same items that you can buy from any other store or website.
It is clear that the eBay market place is suffering considering that nearly 40 percent of auction style listings are not successful, meaning no bids on the items. In my auction experience as a seller I have noticed fewer items listed and fewer bids. Items that I could have started for one dollar now have to be started at their value due to the simple fact that there are just not as many people out there to bid, combined with higher listing fees it makes it a much more costly experience when attempting to sell an item. I believe this only discourages more sellers to just not list items purely because it becomes more of an expense than an income.
People are starting to investigate other options for selling their goods online such as Amazon which has just recently surpassed eBay in numbers of listings for the first time in the company’s history. There are many new auction sites springing up but it will take a well marketed site to take control of the bulk of the online auction business. I have a saying that goes as follows: “Not all of eBay buyers are sellers but all eBay sellers are buyers as well”. It is a simple thing that eBay needs to understand, with every seller that eBay looses they will also be loosing one buyer. I alone can not determine the fate of eBay but I can say that by changing the base idea that eBay was founded on they will lose what made them unique, the very factor that is essential to success on nearly any online business.
