The International Site Visibility Listing Upgrade?

Here is an eBay announcement about international site visibility listing upgrade. There is a discussion thread on seller central about this new “upgrade”. There seems to be something very funky going on here. The seller central thread had a message from pink about how eBay isn’t charging any money for what was once free. Then immediately afterwards there were some messages directly contradicting the claim of pink. What’s going on here? Is eBay adding a feature and once again charging fees for it or did they suddenly decided to charge fee for something that was once free? If you know the answer to this question please feel free to comment.

UPDATE (8:13am) : There is a new thread discussing this announcement and it seems like sellers aren’t liking it.

UPDATE (4/2 8:11am):  I found this Power Sellers United thread discussing the international site visibility upgrade.

USA TODAY article on eBay

I found a rather dull USA TODAY article on John Donahoe and eBay’s past and future business. The article reads like a press release written by an eBay PR rep but disguised as a meaningful content written by a journalist. Despite this lackluster article there is one short paragraph that jumps out. “Donahoe has vowed to put greater emphasis on fixed-priced listings — items sold through its eBay’s Buy It Now service — a seismic shift for eBay buyers that would approximate their experience on Amazon and elsewhere.” Donahoe believes that eBay has to become an Amazon clone but I just don’t see how this is possible. The buying experience with eBay is completely different than Amazon in terms of the type of goods available, the process of the purchase and the expectations that goes with the purchase. eBay already has a marketplace that works somewhat like Amazon and that’s half.com. Ironically Amazon has made parts of it’s store to be more like half.com while eBay wants to abandon it’s core business even though they already have half.com.

Here is my take on current status of eBay. It’s obvious eBay’s core business has basically flattened out. The big question is why? I think when all is said and done the main reason for this stagnation is result of ever increasing fees. Years ago when fees were much lower, sellers were able to offer items at a non-significantly lower price than your brick and mortar stores or Amazon. Over the years the fees have gone up significantly and sellers had to incrementally raise prices to make up for the increase in fees. Of course that makes the seller’s items less competitive against conventional online retailers which in turn means less sales. Less sales by sellers ultimately results in flat stock price but I’m getting ahead of myself. On a side note, the increase in fees also created the problem of inflated shipping prices. Since the final value fees don’t get calculated from the shipping charge it’s only natural to bump up the shipping charge to minimize final value fees as much as possible. eBay has basically caused this problem and ignored it for so long that it became a common and to some degree accepted practice. Getting back into the stagnation issue, the increase in fees resulted in elimination of any price advantage of items sold on eBay verses the conventional online retailers. Everyone knows that buying from an unknown seller on eBay does have more risk associated with it than buying it from a local brick and mortar store but the reason why people take that risk is because of the money you may be saving from the purchase. The cost associated with the risk has to be outweighed the money savings for buyers by some margin or else buyers will go elsewhere. eBay’s increase in fees have eaten up all the price point advantage that eBay sellers used to have. When the price difference no longer exists only thing remains is risk and that’s when buyers decide it’s just not worth it to make the purchase from eBay. To me it’s not a big mystery why eBay’s business has flattened out. Raising fees even higher in attempt to to bump up the revenue for eBay only makes the matter worse for both eBay and sellers.

First Post

Yes. This is it. This is the first post of Boycott eBay blog. Just to warn you I can’t write to save my life. It means if you’re looking for grammatically correct well punctuated writings you should look elsewhere.

I do like the fact that this blog has been started on April 1st. It means if this blog fails to inform, enlighten or even perhaps amuse you, I can retroactively declare that this whole blog was a big April Fools joke and deny any responsibility for it.