Books Category Getting the Buy.com Squeeze

Anyone remember when eBay announced that they are partnering with Buy.com? Here is the blog entry announcing that partnership. Of course they make it sound so innocuous but after a month here is the result of that partnership.

Buy.com has an eBay account and currently listing about 517,000 items. Last week they had just over 500,000 items so they are in the process of increasing that number incrementally over the long term. Here is a shocker. Of the 517,000 items, 420,000 items are in just Books category. eBay currently has about 962,000 items listed in Books category as of this writing. That means Buy.com’s items account for 44% of the total eBay’s listings on Books category. On April 8th, which is only two months ago the Books category had 541,000 items. If you do the math the sharp rise in listings count of Books category is entirely due to Buy.com. On a side note, just about every category except the ones Buy.com is listings are down from the early April when I started tracking listing counts.

It’s clear Buy.com is currently flooding the Books category with their stuff right now. If you’re a book seller right now you’ll getting hit from the multiple sides at this point. Increase in final value fees, crazy Best Match search, newly instituted one sided feedback system, and now this.

You’ve probably heard sellers saying that eBay doesn’t want them anymore and they want to push them out. You could have thought that this was just an over exaggerated complaint coming from a bitter seller. It’s pretty clear now that this is in fact true. eBay is actively trying to push sellers out of certain segments of eBay. Any illusion that there is some level of fair playing field between sellers is no longer true at this point. eBay as we know it has been changed to the point where it’s no longer recognizable from the past.

Here is a message left on the aforementioned eBay’s announcement to Buy.com partnership.  I think this pretty much says it all.

Amber On 05.04.2008 at 9:03 pm Said:

Usher, thank you for popping in. I’d just like to say that after all of the changes my business has absorbed, this particular decision has tipped the scale.

I am going to close my ebay store.

I’m a media seller (I guess that should be “I used to be a media seller.”). I’ve operated a tiny, but reliable romance bookstore here for over 5 years. My repeat customers are 40-50% of my business every month. People who shop on ebay because they like buying from me. By turning the site over to the big retailers, you’ve undercut that person to person loyalty that created this site and that makes eBay unique.

I’m wiping the tears from my cheeks as I contemplate the end of my selling career here. I don’t understand the logic of destroying what is wonderful about this site in favor of a quick buck. People don’t buy here to have a retail experience. Most buy because there really is a person behind the computer screen, not some automated software.

It won’t make any difference to you or other eBay execs, but you’ve lost me and will gradually lose my customers as well. I won’t buy on the site and will move my inventory elsewhere. Clearly, I’m no longer needed or wanted here.

Which categories are next for Buy.com? From the looks of it Computers & Networking and DVDs & Movies are next. Buy.com currently has about 29,000 and 22,000 items in those categories respectively. The transformation has begun and we’ll see where this will lead to.