Posted on 01/24/2010 8:43:24 AM PST by khnyny
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- As one of his first moves upon becoming CEO, eBay chief John Donahoe unveiled a slew of changes to the online marketplace, kicking off an uproar among sellers and sparking boycotts. Two years later, eBay is finally starting to see signs of success on its turnaround plan.
The San Jose, Calif., e-commerce giant on Wednesday reported 2009 sales of $8.7 billion, up from $8.5 billion in 2008. That's a 14% increase from the $7.7 billion in revenue eBay had in 2007, the year before Donahoe's overhaul.
EBay's profits, though, haven't kept pace with its sales growth. Net income dropped 8% from last year, to $2 billion -- putting eBay's earnings below where they stood two years ago. Gross merchandise volume, a closely watched metric tracking the value of items sold on eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500), was essentially flat from last year and down slightly from 2007.
"These turnaround efforts are paying off," Donahoe said Wednesday on a conference call with analysts.
That's a sharp change from the tone he adopted last year, as the company struggled through its changes.
"This business has continued to fall short of our expectations and customers' expectations," Donahoe told analysts at a meeting in March. "That's not acceptable. EBay has a storied past. But it's a past that we held onto for too long."
The firestorm: In February 2008, then brand-new CEO Donahoe announced a major revamp of eBay's fee structure and feedback policy. The goal was to make the site more buyer-friendly.
The move inflamed eBay's core community of active sellers, which numbers in the millions. They raised virtual pitchforks and organized protests, including a week-long boycott. Amid a flurry of scathing blog posts and online messages, many jumped ship entirely and migrated their online storefront to other sites.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
They got this part right. Sellers have no moral right to hold buyers hostage to good feedback, a formerly common practice, now prohibited. The buyer's sole responsibility is to pay in a timely manner. Having accomplished that, the seller is morally obliged to immediately leave positive feedback, as the buyer owes him nothing more. But they wouldn't do it, and would say something like "Once you leave good seller feedback for me I'll leave good buyer feedback for you". That is extortion.
I'm not sure why I should get so exercised about, as I rarely use eBay, but I don't like scams or cheating or extortion.
One other thing: Those earnings numbers look pretty damned good, considering the economic environment. Mr. Wonderboy isn't doing such a bad job.
I have only bought, and I understand that there are negatives to both sides (that’s why I tend toward garage sales, which only have negatives for a limited time!). But scammers exist on both sides—my wife and I have found sellers bidding each other up with multiple handles. And of course getting what you pay for doesn’t happen all the time, either.
The solution, in my view, is for sellers to use the site for sale items and link where possible to descriptions on their own external sites. Push their own sites where possible. Sort of like a real estate ‘for sale by owner,’ using Ebay as your MLS.
That said, I loathed the prior feedback system. I gave sellers ‘neutral’ reviews simply because they had my money and wouldn’t give it back otherwise—and I was locked into that review. What if they hadn’t? I was shafted.
I still buy things on E-Bay, but I find myself checking it less and less often. Even on a fast Internet connection and fast computer, loading all that crap I'm not interested in just takes too much time. On the other hand, I probably check the categories I'm interested in on Craig's list five or six times a day.
Getting my business has a lot to do with Craig's list has totally ended my selling on E-Bay. I probably get less money, but the less headaches more than makes up for it. I realize that dealers must have the national exposure, but for a private seller like me that's only getting rid of things they don't use or want anymore, local is fine.
I still buy things on E-Bay, but I find myself checking it less and less often. Even on a fast Internet connection and fast computer, loading all that crap I'm not interested in just takes too much time. On the other hand, I probably check the categories I'm interested in on Craig's list five or six times a day.
Getting my business has a lot to do with convenience - and the “new” E-Bay isn't. - and the “new” E-Bay isn't.
Ebay made other changes to the feedback system and also changes in the way that members can communicate amongst themselves. Many of these changes actually reduced the ability of Ebay members to root out fraudulent practices.
For instance their have been numerous feedback exchange scams. Someone would auction hundreds of “recipes” or other information that would be emailed to the buyer for a penny or two. Then both the buyer and seller would leave positive feedback for each other. In this way people could generate large amounts of positive feedback in a very short time. Then they would begin selling expensive items such as cars or other high value items. An experienced Ebayer could look back through the feedback of the other party and see if their feedback was from real transactions or one of these scams. I learned about this one the hard way. Ebay now limits the amount of time that you can look back at what feedback was left for to a maximum of two months.
Ebay buyers and sellers used to be able to communicate during auctions so that if you spotted a fraudulent or inaccurate listing you could warn others if the seller refused to take action. This is gone now also. My wife and I collect military uniforms and memorabilia. Much of it is improperly described and it is maddening when you send a message to a seller that they have made a mistake and they take no action to correct the description. I have seen dozens of examples of scam artists selling nearly worthless items for hundreds of dollars by claiming the item was something valuable using false claims. The victim may not ever discover that he/she has been ripped off. I have made numerous complaints to Ebay but they generally take no action. This type of scam hurts both buyers and honest sellers.
We still use Ebay all of the time, but I do think some of the changes made things worse.
I used to spend a lot of money on E-bay but haven’t as much since they stopped selling guns parts. Too bad, there were some great deals to be had that I can’t seem to find anywhere else. Fortunately for E-bay my wife has stepped up and started buying clothes on E-bay.
I have had a few minor successes on selling Craigslist and troll it fairly regularly, mostly the jobs and gigs section. Ebay as for me buying anything is when I have to look for some hard to find AMC & Willys parts that someone is turning loose.
99% of my Craigslist ventures have been OK to very pleasant. I can’t complain there.
I don’t know if it’s been corrected, but as recently as 2006, PayPal could be “reverse engineered” to “ping” a checking account with a very small draft, verify funds and then wipe it out. Happened to a business partner of mine to the tune of $10k.
Our sister-in-law used to sell all sorts of trinkets on Ebay; she finally had to give it up because it was far too much trouble and frustration. She went from making just a little to making almost nothing in no time after the changes.
Craigslist is frustrating to me. Listings appear random and run on forever, extremely time consuming to find anything of interest. What am I missing? Needs a search and refine function badly, imho.
You can say that again. You can’t even use ebay these days without paypal. I despise PayPal and their fees and their rules and regulations...they are worse than the worst bank you could do business with.
The other thing that I’ve noticed is that I tend to be buying and selling bigger things, and E-Bay doesn’t work very well for that. I recently upgraded by treadmill and sold the old one on Craig’s list. It was a good model (Landice) that might have brought a couple of hundred more on E-Bay. But the thing weighed about 200 pounds. Who’s going to build a crate to put it in and get it to ashipping company etc, etc.
In the end it just seem simpler - take a couple of hundred less and have the guy come look at it, pay for it, and then haul it away.
Craigslist has also been a learning experience and has taken a while to get the hang of. I am sometimes slow myself to kill an ad when something has sold. As for me, I tend to search cities in SC and the NC/GA border for the most part which is an acceptable driving distance to me. There is room for a better search though, I can’t argue there.
There’s another site where you can sell and buy that Glenn Beck advertises - does anyone know the name of it?
Unfortunately, there are those confused individuals that completely mis-categorize the things they list.
I have bought and sold gun parts and reloading supplies on Ebay. It is still allowed in most cases. The restrictions are difficult to understand and maddening in some cases. For instance you can buy or sell all your reloading dies, presses and tools, but you can't buy empty brass. You can buy lead and bullet molds but you can't buy powder. I will say however that when I sold some excess reloading tools last year... they sold for more than I paid for them even with the excessive fees.
That really ticked me off when the leftists at EBay stopped allowing sales of brass, bullets, and magazines.
I had a seller who sold bulk quantities of once fired 45 ACP brass in single manufacturer lots and she supposedly went to Auction Arms, but I have yet to find her there.
Bullets are the same way.
I have greatly scaled back my EBay shopping and do a lot of buying off of Amazon and Craigslist now. I have started buying weapons related stuff off of Auction Arms but some of the deals are not as great as they used to be on EBay.
Selling stuff on Craigslist saved my butt last year. The added bonus is that they are sinking liberal newspapers all over the country.
The idea that E-Bay is tough on sellers in relation to buyers is beyond laughable.
E-Bays real name should be SPAM-Bay
From the stand point of a buyer. In the categories I am interested in 95% of the listings are spam. The sellers have some bot that posts the listings, they list dozens of identical items everyday, items with inflated prices or junk or both. In 95-99% of the cases the buy it now price with shipping is higher than regular online merchants for the identical item.
My initial search for an item might turn up typically 5000 hits, if I filter out ‘buy it now’ that number will drop to 400 or 500; if I filter again for items that have received at least one bid that number will fall under 100 often.
In other words of the listings in my category less than 5% are actually real auction, the rest is spam. By real auction meaning the seller has an item in their possession that they offer it for sale to the highest bidder.
I know there are exceptions to this and in certain categories the E-bay market seams to work well.
Here’s a list of auction sites and an interesting blog with comments ..
http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl
There are a lot of stupid people out there. I try to be as accurate as possible in description. Things like “Look” and “Best” in the description field totally turn me away. The amount of horrible photos (even snapshots) I see on Ebay amazes me. The typical idiot pocket camera can do a lot as far a web image goes but the cameras can’t do the thinking.
I will montage a few images into one master image to upload to Ebay to get around paying for multiple images. Over the years I have gotten very good at it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.