TameBay Morsels*: 05/03/09

11 Responses

1. Looking on Sellerdome top 100 eBay UK sellers it looks like 27 of the top 100 have stopped selling with no listings at all!!

   https://www.sellerdome.com/default.asp?th=rank&uid=

   I am personally down on ebay sales by 70%, but more concerning is the traffic to my listings which are down 85% on last year and that with all my DSRs in the green and having several featured listings. I have stopped auctions because I was not getting the number of bidders needed to make any money….. my ebay fees have not gone down anyway near 70%, selling fees have increased from 6.8% of sales in 2007 and are now (2009ytd) currently in line with Amazon at 15% there a story there I think!!

   Any one out there with a business model relying on eBay needs to look at alternatives and quickly………………

2. https://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/SMB-Partner/How-eBay-is-Alienating-Selling-Allies/

   Also makes fairly Spartan reading. The SellerDome stuff is trully surprising, it’s the middle-weight top ten thousand that’s seeing the big declines, not the bottom one hundred thousand. It’s become a matter of when, not if, the Titanic goes down.

   A real shame.

3. sellerdome means nowt,
   it is feedback based ,

   not profit based

4. #1 Do you not think that auctions are a good way of generating interest? Perhaps stopping them has added to the drop in visits. It’s a tough call to make and only you know your business, but I see auctions as away of generating traffic not cash.

5. I see buy it now ,fixed price, and the watch option ,as the real problem,
   and auctions as the solution

6. #3 It’s the decision of sellers to stop selling on Ebay that’s at issue, not the numbers of feedback.

7. #1 “Any one out there with a business model relying on eBay needs to look at alternatives and quickly………………”

   Multi channel selling should be everyones ultimate aim, if there in retail IMO. eBay, amazon, website, B&M shop if you have any of these you should have at least one other to pick up the slack when one is lean or if something major happens to your only source of income. eBay tripling listing fees or a bypass being built that takes away passing trade.

   “Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket” It’s an oldy but a goody

8. they may be still selling with another ID
   we have dropped out of the top 5000 with this ID,
   but are still selling hard on other ids

9. 1 “Any one out there with a business model relying on eBay needs to look at alternatives and quickly………………”

   easier said than done for many

   we dont rely on ebay .
   but business would be an awful lot harder ,and a lot less profitable without them

10. Some great comments thanks all, I do sell in Amazon and my Website and due to my IT guys can switch on any new portal that comes to market, it would be great if Play.com started selling home & Garden…

    last night due to comments posted I restarted the Auctions and will measure the traffic to my other listings, it should be interesting as I know when I stopped auctions and restarted them so should be able to see if there is any corresponding improvement. I am prepared to take a hit if it drives business to my Fixed Price listings.

    Is there any where that you can find the total number of clicks ebay are getting? It might be encouraging if I could see the total traffic is constant.

11. #10 If you’ve got an eBay shop then stats from Omniture are built in, but you have to switch them on. If you have a featured shop, you get much more useful info.