We reported a most interesting story last week on Tamebay about how eBay has accused Amazon of using My Messages to recruit new merchants to sell there. Whilst it didn’t seem unlikely, the methods did seem primitive. After all, merchant details are displayed on every view item page and that can easily form the base of a prospects list. But contacting merchants via eBay’s own internal messaging system sounds really slipshod.
You can read that story in full here. But here are what some of reader wrote and their comments are illuminating and are worth sharing.
5-6 years ago, I was email contacted by an Amazon rep. “We want your products over at Amazon” and was offered 1 months free subscription to get me started. I was only selling on eBay at that time.
– Al
Happened on an account I worked on about 5-6 years ago. Amazon called and offered the Red Carpet Scheme to put all of the eBay products on Amazon at once, only condition was they wanted at least 400 products. Gave us an account manager and also guided us through the initial upload of products. Company weren’t selling online on any other platform at the time. It does happen.
– DBL
I had Amazon contact me several times offering the red carpet treatment to switch over my eBay listings to Amazon, I declined several times and then they offered the service where someone in India did all of the work transferring the listings and an account manager etc so eventually I went for it.
– John
Obviously, the quotes above represent only a few of the comments that Tamebay readers left regarding the story. And it seems certain that others will have perspectives that they haven’t reported. It is perhaps striking that the poaching, if our comments are accurate, has been going for such a long time. But that is certainly not surprising: should eBay indulge in seller recruitment, it would be obvious for them to begin with Amazon and other marketplaces.
4 Responses
I had Play contact me via Amazon a few years ago. All went swimmingly for a year before Play went t*ts up!
Was the contact initiated by Amazon via eBay Messages, which was the original complaint of eBay?
Of the three instances reported above, the first was “email contacted”, the second “Amazon called” and the third is not specific about the nature of the contact.
It is also not clear how Amazon sourced the lead. I am sure an organisation the size and nature of Amazon would trawl the usual places first (LinkedIN, networking events, company websites/Google etc), and could of course contact using the contact details at the bottom of each listing rather than using eBay messaging.
I am sure if something further comes of this then we will hear of it from eBay and Amazon, but it would surprise me if there was any truth to the allegations.
This is nothing new.
Lots of marketplaces do this, there is more to the world than eBay and Amazon. The last 2 markets we had a shot at both came to us direct, one of them kinda fell on it;s backside the other generates more in a year than ebay now….
To answer the question YES ebay should be doing this.
eBay already have too many sellers and not enough buyers, if anything they should be working out a way of recruiting new buyers or tempting back old buyers who no longer visit the site.