Red Ink Diary

This post was written on the eBay community boards three years ago by an eBay loyalist. As you read it you will feel the pain bleeding through the words.

At that time I had begun learning how to build my own website. I removed over 1500 listings (about 70% multiple item inventory) from my eBay store and planned to remove another 500 immediately after Christmas. It was obvious that my eBay store was not going to return to its former profitability in the forseeable future.

Any bolding is mine.

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EXTREMELY concerned about the future of eBay - written Oct 7, 2006 5:45 PM

It seems like I have been wanting to write this post for a few weeks now. I figured I would give it some time to see if anything led me to believe what I was seeing was temporary. I also gave some thought to whether to post or not because any posts that are negative often influence others,so I had the idea it was probably better to share the information with someone at eBay just to “let it all out on someone” that could listen and perhaps at least see things from the ground level here.

I realize some of you dislike my long posts, forgive me on this one! LOL I will also be brutally honest and straightforward in hopes this might spark some discussion and notice to help things that may or may not be going wrong. Most of you know I am a usually positive person and will only come out and be critical in hopes of effecting positive change.

I have no clue what has happened but I believe eBay as we know it is self destructing. I know this sounds like a ridiculous statement and I do not want to argue about any particular move , change or fee hike as there are numerous changes and or things happening. I just have to say I believe eBayers , even the best and most dedicated are leaving the site, or otherwise unhappy and cutting back operations to an extent I have not seen since selling here. I also believe buyers are leaving and finding the site overly complicated, confusing, wondering what eBay Express was, someone was telling me they were going to “send a package by eBay Express” LOL (no lie!)

Sales have come to a grinding halt for many store sellers and even the most positive of people I speak with have serious concerns. Things seem to be snowballing to the extent where traffic in some cases to listings is running down 80% from last year and 40% from a month ago.

Sometimes when we feel something is amiss its a temporary situation that corrects itself perhaps or maybe a slow period etc. As you know , I am in a seller group where pretty much everyone was there to grow sales and chose to be in the group because it was more positive than other boards or groups. I decided to take a pulse on the group the results can be seen below.

Question:

With all the changes, but the excitement of the holidays coming up, how do you feel about eBay? Are you up? down? middle of the road? disgusted? Elated? Confused?

Results (106 Votes counted so far):

Totally Elated-Its been Great 1/0%

Doing Well 20/18%

So-so Not so excited about it lately 28/26%

Feeling a little bummed 22/20%

Pretty much disgusted 35/33%
This poll expired 10/03/2006 05:57:25

This is by far the most negative our group has ever been. Not to be deterred I spoke with the other three moderators who had seen the same results with their sales. One who had sold 5-6k a month last year had 300 in sales. Another who once listed 1000 items had about 120 items and a former friend/buyer emailing me asking me where all the items they use to list went since they buy for their husband for Xmas from him.

Endless sellers feel the same way. Its obvious from the board, the petitions, the outside eBay contacts I have and even from some of the most positive people that insisted I mention them here…

Here is one comment that caught my eye…

“Lets see. At one point..for about 10 years, until a few short months ago, I was eBay devoted, and a total eBay cheerleader. My eBay business was growing, and I was so looking forward to a FANTASTIC Christmas selling season on eBay.

Today?

• eBay Stores Fee Hike
• For the Fee Hike, they give us NOTHING, and say SIS is never coming back.
• My eBay invoice is now SHOCKINGLY large right now.
• eBay KILLS the eBay Keywords Program (which I heavily rely on for Christmas traffic for several of my products)
• they PLASTER Monster.com and similar non-eBay related ads in banners on search pages where eBay Sellers keywords ads, for our customers, used to be
• they add a very poorly thought-out item specifics to my category right in time for the holiday selling season which is making me jump through time-consuming hoops AND which may discourage sales
• they put their time and effort in the hard to launch off the ground eBay Express instead of into the already here eBay Stores.

There’s more. I’m just so disgusted right now.”

I felt it was pretty much on the mark. I emailed this person and received the OK to post here. Even though they insisted on being mentioned by name I will delete some info..

“More than OK (deleted). Feel free to let them know who I am–in fact, you can have my full name, (deleted) eBay knows me very well–I do the (delete) collecting site at About.com (owned by the NY TImes Company), where I’ve covered eBay for years.. I was a huge, huge cheerleader for eBay. eBay, in fact, has paid my way prior to all this to attend their Collectible Summits. I have taught eBay courses to thousands of (deleted) collectors nationwide. I even did PR for THEM as a collector on eBay at the San Jose eBay Live!”

This is just one of many many such emails and conversations I have had with numerous people across all kinds of eBay businesses.

Store sellers have been hit with quite a wallop lately. Between stores in core, out of core, store fee increases, keyword program ending, and most of all (to me) being told the that somehow now after nothing but positive comments about store growth (even in eBay’s own transcripts from the prior quarter) they say the “magic of eBay has been diluted” by stores?.

I see an acceleration of even the best sellers leaving eBay and taking their buying with them. I know one seller who doesn’t post often to our group that was extremely successful, wonderfully brilliant woman who because of all that happened just started her own off eBay business and is getting more sales from there with the drop in traffic on eBay. I see selection dwindling to the point where people cannot find items on eBay anymore and go elsewhere. I see people reevaluating the whole concept of selling on eBay cost in time vs reward of little sales higher fees etc, and those people taking their buying with them. A lot of the craft/self made artist community has moved to one site, others to other sites. Even though perhaps small in terms of sales at first, its hurting the community and the availability of those special items people sought on eBay.

I see people disgusted as I read through thread after thread even here on the board about unresolved issues, advice never listened to, changes that are shaking the very fabric of the community that is coming out and warning about those changes (example anonymous bidding thread) and I see the departure of many key employees , especially those held by other eBay members as guardians of what it meant to be an eBay community and special people they looked up to.

In terms of other issues, the Skype integration has been painfully slow and allowed competition to seep into the market and grab away many advantages before it even got moving much (at least in my opinion) and I was a HUGE Skype fan.

I see the community sentiment starting to creep into the investment community with many analysts now starting to catch on to the various things they should be looking at in terms of registered users, store seller sentiment etc.

I have no clue where anyone can say that core auction growth is benefiting from millions of store items being lost. If anything, core has been hurt by the loss of store sellers, their buying and the positive word of mouth that came from those sellers. Auction listing counts have tracked lower all year pretty much as shown on the Medved statistical site.

Tons of statements make no sense if you want more core auctions increase effective ads. Sales will increase, sellers will add more product to correspond to higher sales and better pricing. Saying store items “sell slower and are of a lower quality” doesn’t make sense to people that saw them fly out the door when stores were found in core search.

It also seem the current ad campaigns have not been successful at all in bringing in new buyers and most current Express campaign seems to be turning people off or splitting the traffic to eBay.com and the (all important) core

To me, it seems like many things are in disarray and that there needs to be a concerted effort to turn this around before the churn gets any worse. I watched this happen at AOL and correctly surmised that situation before it happened and I see the same thing happening here.

I feel so torn because I see so much potential as you can tell from most of my posts here about things like local trading, Skype, PayPal mobile etc. In our group we actually give prizes to people for contests to inspire people to list more items or for other reasons related to growing their business.

I think there are a TON of things that can be done to turn this situation around. We had a whole thread 700 posts long on “How to fix eBay” with lots of good suggestions.

Making matters worse is the apparent disappearance of an eBay presence on many of the boards, announcements that make no logical sense and a whole new set of glitches.

If I had to take everything and boil it down to a few short lines I would have to say that it makes me sad to see hard working dedicated caring people who loved or still love eBay leaving the site in such numbers and others scared to speak up or stuck not knowing what to do.

There are many many other issues I can discuss but I do feel that what I am witnessing is more than a temporary blip on the radar screen.

Id like to be involved in the effort to turn this around if people really feel it needs to turned around and feel that action needs to be taken . Of course everyone could have a different opinion here but I really felt I wouldn’t be doing my job If I sat by and watched things deteriorate any further.

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Y’all come back!