To celebrate their 21st Birthday, eBay have just gone live with their UK Retail Report – a snapshot of the way Brits bid, bought and sold in 2015/16.
It’s an interactive website where eBay share their data, telling the story of the biggest trends of the past 12 months on eBay UK and how cultural events shaped shopping behaviour.
It’s also a look at the future trends eBay see as a marketplace and exclusive insight into the way they interpret shopping – for example cutting eBay’s own numbers with Land Registry data to understand how people buy and sell when they move home.
According to the report, TV is changing how we shop and inspires us to shop on the sofa – Smartphones touch 57% of eBay purchases and many customers mobile-shop when inspired. eBay reveal the most influential programmes – Game of Thrones’ Emmy success mirrors its enormous buying power on eBay and Peaky Blinders joined The Great British Bake Off as some of the UK’s most influential shows. There were over 1.2million searches for ‘Thrones alone this year, extending into categories like clothing, showing the power of cult TV.
Brits love to have the latest tech. Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in 2007 and it remains one of the most wanted pieces of tech on eBay. And today, Brits are also fond of selling their old device to keep up with the latest device release. When the iPhone 7 launched this month, Brits used eBay to search the sale price they’d get for their old model as they wait to trade up. Today, eBay has more than 410,000 listings available for ‘smartphone’ onsite.
However we’re not always stuck inside on our phones. April 2016 saw an unusual sunny spell and Brits headed outside, with searches for BBQs up to over 200,000 during this time. eBay’s Retail Report data shows that the Easter bank holiday is always the watershed moment for Brits buying outdoor goods – and having BBQs – no matter what the weather is like.
Murray Lambell, Director of UK Trading at eBay, was on BBC this morning, here’s what he had to say about the UK Retail Report:
20 Responses
Read a report that with a new Iphone 7 release the listings for selling older models has increased. Amazed to know that more than 410,000 listings are available for ‘smartphone’ onsite. Buyers may get at older models at great deals 🙂
Happy Birthday! Let’s celebrate with Paypal being down today (see Down Detector). I managed to buy an item via Paypal outside of eBay but it took an age to go through.
Phone sales on ebay are probably the number one item that has caused so much mis-trust for both buyers and sellers on eBay and a reason why many people don’t use the site any more. Think about all the phone related problems we have all heard about on ebay (probably mostly concerning second hand or spairs and repair phones) over the past few years and it’s easy to see why phone related searches might no be something to be optimistic about with regards eBay.
Slightly off topic again but I wanted to ask if other sellers find their sales generally drop off a cliff every time ebay has one of it’s 50,000 free listings weeks which they are currently doing at the moment (invite only but I’m guessing most sellers here are included). Every month without fail my sales dry up the Monday to Wednesday of any 50,000 listing week. Things are generally fine otherwise during the week but weekends can be a ghost town week in week out these days. I really don’t know if these free listings of 50,000 benefit anyone. My hunch is that eBay hope most people will put up listings on good til’ cancelled rather than 30 days and then forget to end them before they renew with fees attached (assuming the seller has used up their monthly free listing limit of course). If someone really spams the 50,000 listing deal with every possible variation of a custom”Keep Calm” quote mug for example then ebay are quids in if the seller fails to end the listings.
They’re not interested in reporting on when Ebay or Paypal go down. It happens too often to be newsworthy any more.
Ebay experiences significant problems on roughly half the days in an average month.
Check downdetector (the UK site, not dot com) and see for yourself.
Also compare this performance to Ebay’s role model, Amazon.
Almost no days of problems.
Throw in the occasional paypal payment problems and it’s easy to see how sales can fall off a cliff.
Why SHOULD buyers have to put up with a malfunctioning site and checkout.
Why SHOULD buyers have to put up with search and payments problems on Ebay?
They get away with it because it just isn’t newsworthy any more.
The occasional day when Ebay literally falls on its ar*e for 24 hrs or more still makes ripples.
But not otherwise.
The b*stards have won.
its all down to ebay throttling
downdetecter reports