eBay’s “level playing field” is now officially dead. Big retailers, sellers with a £1m turnover and those who form part of the “few top sellers” who deliver 38% of eBay sales are now priority, according to eBay executives.
Many eBay sellers will say that this is hardly news. And they’d be right. But finally, in the past few days, interviews and press releases from eBay have clearly confirmed a strategic focus on the very biggest of eBay sellers.
Clare Gilmartin, the Vice President of eBay Marketplaces is reported as saying: “Figures show that 38 per cent of sales come via a few top sellers. We work closely with these firms to ensure they have the support they need, for example, dedicated account managers and other help.”
For the vast majority of serious eBay sellers, even those who sell several hundreds, or even thousands, of pounds worth of goods every week, this committment may be surprising. No Gold and Silver Powersellers have account managers at eBay. And of those we’ve spoken to lately, few Platinum Powersellers even enjoy the rather meagre privilege of access to a dedicated, knowledgeable, named eBay account manager either.
I have personally spoken to eBay sellers in recent months who spend thousands of pounds in fees every year but don’t have access to a dedicated account manager at eBay who is willing to speak to them and help them solve a problem.
Any business turning over a few hundred quid’s worth of trade on eBay should be not ignored. But all the anecdotal evidence I see shows that such businesspeople, the lifeblood of eBay, receive (at best) cursory care from the the very people who take their fees.
Further proof of the focus on uber-business sellers was clear last week when eBay executives celebrated the 159 eBay sellers with a turnover of one million pounds annually. eBay director Angus McCarey provides glad words in his interview, but anyone with experience as an eBay seller of late, especially below that now all important £1m level, will certainly wish to beg to differ with him.
The tragedy of eBay’s love affair with the biggest sellers (and often the worst), is so ironic, as to be comedic. Amazon do it better. There should be room for everyone in the world’s biggest marketplace but to worship big retailers is to forget what smaller retailers deliver better than a faceless giant.
What price personal service, great prices and sheer swiftness? These are all things that Britain’s small businesses all provide on eBay. And which many buyers, such as myself, are now finding more easily on Amazon and direct from sellers’ own ecommerce sites.
eBay will die if it ignores the small sellers that built it. And one question is still begging: “who are the ‘38%’ sellers?” We should be told who eBay favours the most.
Update: 31/08/2001, 11:00am eBay have asked us to point out that the original quotation from Clare Gilmartin regarding eBay has been changed on the FMWF. It now reads: “Figures show that 38 per cent of sales come via our Top Rated Sellers. This is an eBay term which is given to those sellers, whether tiny or larger, which have achieved the gold standard for customer service.”
36 Responses
Ebay really are incredibly stupid.
38 % of sales comes from a few top sellers = 62% of sales comes from the rest of us and we are getting well and truly cheesed off.
38% will almost certainly increase as the rest of us look at other market places
Those of us that form the 62% have made ebay the success it is. If we start leaving I’m sure that buyers will follow.
By way of example when I started trading I sold approx 90% on ebay and 10% on Amazon. That ration is now closer to 70 / 30 and I’m trending more and more to Amazon.
It has been apparent for several years that eBay are no longer interested in the small or medium entrepreneurs (SME’s) Even prior to the departure of Meg Whitman the move was away from those that helped build eBay to the large national and International company it has become.
Even in the early days of eBay.co uk the company never placed any significance on its customer service. It was quite happy to send out press releases publicising small one man or woman eBay success stories but did little else to help them.
There was a time when you could not go into any post office without finding yourself behind an eBayer with parcels galore to dispatch. Now it is a rare site. I personally doubt if it is possible today for anyone to start a small home based business just selling on eBay and succeed.
Further to Dan’s comments I would question how long eBay will retain the auction format as an option. I can see the day when it will be all Buy it Now. If this does happen I suspect eBay will be played off the park by Amazon
I have an account manager who..
never answers the phone
responds to emails as she is leaving the office so conversations are never fluid
deliberately side steps the actual question if it’s in anyway anti-eBay
all in all, for those that don’t have one I wouldn’t waste much sleep worrying about it.
This comes from the very top.
It will not change unless the leadership changes.
And what percentage of ebays earnings are generated by the 38%?
Under 20% maybe?
Surely its about earnings not turnover or am I missing something?
ebay surely earn more from the 62% but appear to reward them with little by way of service in return.
The time will come when a site is set up to compete with ebay. When this happens, the value of ebay will tumble around their ears.Once the value of their shares start to fall, investors leave and they wonder what have we done wrong.To late the small mans long gone else where.
What I find interesting is that eBay have been traditionally secretive about how many PowerSellers there are at each level.
Sellers with a turnover of £1m annually or more roughly equates to the Titanium PowerSeller level of £95k sales per month.
We now know that there are roughly around 159 Titanium PowerSellers in the UK based on sales value. (There are probably more based on the relatively newer criteria of 5000 items/month)
To me a customer is a customer, no matter how much they spend. If you treat them right they will come back, as its easier to bring back a returning customer than it is to find them in the first place.
I’ve noticed that eBay think very differently. Last Christmas I was supprised to see that eBay sellers who have had the same listings live for months or even years get more feedback than me. So going by the feedback score they would have had more overall sales.
As I was relisting every 30 days I was very disappointed, but what I’m trying to say is going by my point above, eBay seem to fix everything anyway and are a con. I sell on eBay so I can promote by website my adding a flyer in every delivery. To me eBay are a good way to source customers and promote my website.
Do I care if eBay survive, what do you think?
It is an undeniable Law. Todays biggest Sellers were themselves once small sellers. The biggest Oak Tree started life as an Acorn. Several of the UKs biggest retailers started life as a Market Stall. So while it may look attractive to the current ebay Management to give the biggest, over £1 million per annum, Sellers All and the rest nothing it might not be sensible in the long term.
There is another point The biggest sellers do not themselves stay at the top for ever. On just about every High Street there is a hole that was once occupied by Woolworths. They went bust. In the long term there is no guarantee that todays biggest sellers may not follow them at some time in the future.
What ebay should be doing is to give every seller a fair crack of the whip. Obviously the largest sellers generate the greatest income for ebay. But as has been pointed out they generate 38% which leaves 62% from the rest. It should be possible for ebay to arrange itself that it gives a reasonable service to all the sellers and not just the selected few.
According to my Omniture traffic data many of my customers purchase a different product to the one they first looked at when entering my shop. The data also suggests that many customers spend 5 or more minutes viewing my products before making any purchase and return regularly.
The point I make is that many potential buyers like to browse before making any purchase. Now it may well be that one of my potential customer’s looks at one of my products but buys from one of my competitors and vice versa.
By following this chain of logic it is highly probably that potential buyers enter eBay looking at the products of a SME but buy from one of eBay’s chosen 38%
Now if eBay fails to support the SME’s and they take their business elsewhere it’s highly probable that potential buyers will also take the browsing and purchasing habits elsewhere.
Ebay as a whole needs to appeal to all. Focusing on the 38% and their fast sell products will reduce the appeal to many buyers who like to browse the site and purchase on impulse.
Ebay needs SME’s and their long tail products to retain interest in the site.
Ebay has kicked me in the teeth for the last time!!Yes I am Joe Small the guy who built Ebay !! In this time of economic disaster Ebay should be helping the world instead of tearing it down!! President Obama should rink Ebay and Paypals neck!Stop spending your hard earned $$$$ at Ebay NOW !!!!!
Great news for niche marketplaces then?
🙂
A quick ‘strawpoll’ here, says that many people deliberately buy from SMEs and actively search out the ‘little guy’
I would think this is a growing trend as, counter-intuitively, alongside lower disposable incomes, exists a thoughtful consumer for whom price is not the be all and end all. This is particularly obvious in the burgeoning craft sector and I could also cite fresh produce as another example where quality & provenance is more important than saving 5p (to some consumers)
I know this sounds strange at first thinking – we have less money than ever, but we are deliberately choosing a supplier that seems more ‘valid’ and more expensive? Perhaps it is to do with control: ‘We can still choose where to spend it’
I can’t validate these observations, beyond a very small sample, but I do feel this is the way the wind is blowing 🙂
eBay, with all their amazing trend forecasting, evidently know better!
Georgie
Trouble with “big” sellers is it’s all so much “more of the same”. They basically sell the same tat that you can buy on the High Street. That 62% is where the “variety”, the “different” and the more “obscure” is. Trouble with mainstream is you have to compete with some very very big boys, and we all know what that leads to: price wars. Good for consumers maybe, but not good economically and in the long term for all concerned.
In some ways I blame the likes of myself (in part) who was one of the people who brought a mass market “new” product to eBay, the High Street (and other online venues) noticed it happening and thought “we should maybe have some of that”. Took a long time to get to where it is now but that’s another story.
When I was a kid I used to love to poking in the secondhand shops of Brighton, you could take in a load of books, get credit against them, buy another load of books …. There were unusual record shops, junk shops, market stalls …. A large part of the experience was the “looking”, you always ended up buying something, but it’s all gone now, it’s replaced by sterile looking chain stores all selling the same old “tat”, and of course that’s what happening to eBay. eBay is a place to find something different, but it’s going the same way as those shops I mentioned in Brighton ….
eBay have and always will do what they believe is best for eBay and it’s shareholders. There is no emotion, no community, they don’t care about individual sellers, and quite frankly anyone who thinks they do must be living on another planet.
Tbe good old days of eBay aren’t coming back anytime soon, get use to it. eBay has for the last few years gradually turned into little more than another shopping portal for big players, and it’s going to get worse. The introduction of the Catalogue system will be the final straw that breaks the vast majority of it’s smaller sellers. If you’re not the cheapest offering the best service you’ll die on eBay within the next few years. You can’t fight it so don’t even try.
If eBay is your main venue start looking elsewhere NOW! before it’s too late. The most obvious move is having your own site, blog, mailing list, facebook, etc.
Don’t believe me. Take a real step back and look at how eBay is doing things now compared to just a year or two ago and you’ll hopefully see eBay for what it has evolved into and the way it’s going, open your eyes a bit. Start working for yourself again rather than being dangled like a puppet dancing to eBay’s tune.
I am only a private seller on ebay now – I closed my shop and business account on eBay in 2009 and moved to Amazon and my own website. There are some problems with selling on Amazon, but on the whole they are much easier to deal with and I get far better sales.
However when I stopped selling on eBay I also for the main part stopped buying too. Now I only go on eBay if I can’t find it on Amazon! Usually for products that have been discontinued, but smaller sellers still have in stock, so I snap up all I can find. This wasn’t a concious choice but I got fed up with trawling through pages of “BIN new” items, which are basically the tat the chains couldn’t shift on the high street.
It was on the wall when they tried to bring in ebay express and when this failed they thought they could bring it in through the back door.
And that is what they are doing in my opinion slowly but surely
fees, my ebay changes and now the motors category is getting it and all the smaller sellers are up in arms.
All this catalogue stuff is either to do with Google placement or geared towards the biggest sellers and my bet is its the second one.
Thr clip from the BBC is worth a watch; It would be interesting to see a “where are the now” feature on all the rising eBay supperstars from the last 15 years. I wonder how many companies have been doing million pound eBay turnover for more than five years?
Thanks for the vote of confidence!
i just cannot wait untill this basket of eggs fall.
Am I alone in thinking that eBay has had its time and is now on the decline?
I have been a seller on ebay for 5 years plus ..I have 1000 auctions a week and and my sell through has gone from 20% to under 10% in the last 18 month ..my items are increasing and I am offering free shipping and selling at the same price as last year ..still no sales …why ???????