EBay Makes More Changes To Encourage Sales

Kicks off Feb 20

[engine]

Online auction leader eBay Inc on Tuesday introduced price changes and tighter sales standards in a bid to retain quality sellers, improve customer service and revive flagging growth.

In a speech to eBay's top store operators and market makers in Washington D.C., CEO-in-waiting John Donahoe will set out a plan to reward the company's best sellers with sales incentives and priority ranking in search results for auction items.

Key changes involve lowering fees for listing items within auctions or for independently operated stores run on eBay. It also involves raising some of the fees sellers pay once sales transactions are successfully completed. And eBay plans to raise minimum standards to discourage abusive sales practices.

EBay Makes More Changes To Encourage Sales [uk.reuters.com]

[rocknbil]

I received an email yesterday. This one has me wondering what the heck they are thinking.

Buyers will only be able to receive positive Feedback [pages.ebay.com]

So among the other negatives this leaves for sellers, you have no benchmark for people bidding on your items. Great.

"Buyers will be held more accountable when sellers report an unpaid item or commit other policy violations."

What, they'll send them more threatening emails to ignore? :-)

Haven't been on eBay for months, except when I'm feeling down and need a laugh ("Weird Stuff" always turns a smile.)

[dpd1]

Pretty much anything they do now is too little too late... As soon as they started getting away from the quality one-off auction item crowd and pandering to the $19.95 'buy it now' crowd, they were doomed. Quality buyers don't look at eBay anymore, because it's mostly a bunch of liquidation crap, or some other kind of infomercial type junk. No matter what you look for, you get pages of that. Who has the time to go through all that to find the good stuff? The quality buyers with real money to spend have moved on.

[ByronM]

The problem i have with eBay is the good customers left and the ones that remain are so immature and self centered that they feel sellers owe them the world.

For example i sold large tvs on there with free shipping. I got negative reviews becuase one dude said he had to go pickup the tv from the freight facility in his city when it was stated on the auction that if you live in a PO box, apartment or complex that freight companies would not have curbside service.

Another dude said "took to long".. sorry, you can't overnight 200lb items. It was in the description and shipping notes that freight was involved and its ground common carrier. The took to long one really stunk since i sent nightly ship reports and answered questions even on the holidays and the user said "didn't communicate".. yet i sent all the crap to ebay and all they said was "ask for a mutual withdrawl" and low and behold a mutual withdrawl is still a negative as far as the seller ratings go.

Just a lot of work involved for so little margin that ebay fosters powersellers that sell enough bulk crap they can make a decent living.

and WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY to much fraud.. i'd be interested in seeing how the seller protection works and honestly, why can't ebay force every user to be a verified address - the technology is there today that they can spend a few cents to protect the sellers. Seems to heavy handed to protect the buyers once again.

[dpd1]

Personally, I think you're much better off with your own site. As you say, who the heck wants to be "rated" in the first place. That may have been fine 10 years ago but things are different now... People are rude, impatient and unreasonable now. And frankly, some of them act outright insane. I tried selling new merchandise that I manufacture myself on eBay a few years back and received $1 bids for products that sell new for $100-200. Ridiculous. Then the couple times I did sell something (at a lower cost than on my site) the people always had some problem. One lady who was too stupid to get her email to work right never received any of my emails, then complained and gave me a negative. Another claimed the product never got there, but refused to even confirm his mailing address and wouldn't even give me a chance to send another... They sided with him because it went through the mail without evidence of being shipped. So as far as I can tell, you can basically just say you never got something, and they'll side with you. That was the last time I used eBay for sales. It may work for people selling $19.95 junk, but anybody with legitimate quality products should have their own site. You'll never get the respect you deserve with eBay. And as far as making a living from bulk sales... I'm not so sure about that. I would like to see the turnover rate for exactly how many people try going through all that, make very little money, then quit... There's a few guys on eBay selling the same kind of products I sell for a fraction of the price. Sure, they're making 5 times the sales I am due to that, but I know how much it costs them to make the stuff. In reality, they're making pennies in profit. I can make in one sale what it takes them 6 sales or more to make. So they have to work 6 times harder to make the same money. How long can even the slowest person do that before they realize it's a waste of time. I think a lot of these people just have very poor accounting abilities. But unfortunately, in the the meantime there's a large enough rotation of people coming and going to flood the market with cheap stuff and hurt the legitimate guys.

DD

[trinorthlighting]

It does not matter what ebay does, until they lower the 20% in listing fees, pay pal fees, etc... They will not attract new sellers.

[bwnbwn]

It looks like you won't be able to rate now anymore anyway so now wait it is really gonna get intresting.

At least you could see if the person ad been around a while through how many times he had been rated.

I see this leading to even higher fraud and bad sales. I guess it is buyer beware now on ebay....Quit shopping there pretty much myself now I know I most likely will be even more so now.

[Essex_boy]

This kind of says we know theres a problem but we dont know how to solve it, so lets tweak the system and see what happens.

Which is a big worry for shareholders.