What’s wrong with eBay today?

No primary category set

There was an article in this weeks’ Sunday Times about eBay which makes for somewhat depressing reading. Titled “eBay: online marketplace for sale, one careless owner”, it’s a hatchet job about all that’s wrong with eBay today but as always there are some truths in there and the truth often hurts.

Cutting through the rhetoric, there are three complaints about what’s wrong with eBay that do have some merit – fees, relevance and financial performance, which can largely be summed up as seller grievances, buyers not being engaged and investor unrest.

eBay seller grievances

Fees are ever growing on eBay and today they are higher than ever, which coupled with eBay’s stated desire to widen their margins means sellers are getting a raw deal.

Let’s put this into some perspective. I remember a time on eBay when you could list SIF (Shop Inventory Format, defunct for over a decade) for 3p insertion fee and final value fees were 5.25% of the first £29.99, 3.25% for the portion of the sale between £30 and £599.99 and just 1.75% for anything over £600.

At eBay Universities I remember happily telling people I ran my entire eBay business for around 6% to 8% total fees (including shop subscription etc) plus PayPal fees. Today you’re looking at double or triple that, even with free insertion fees, depending on category by the time you factor in 10% or 12% final value fees and voluntarily donate a couple more percent to eBay’s coffers through eBay Promoted Listings.

With fees that high, the only thing that can justify them is massive sales and yet eBay’s growth has stalled or worse is contracting. eBay worldwide are getting fewer sales for sellers than a year ago but asking for ever higher fees. I’ve never yet seen a seller complain too much about fees when their eBay sales are sky rocketing, but boy do they complain when sales shrink and they’re not making an income.

Buyer Engagement

I went with a friend this weekend to pick up a second hand dishwasher she just purchased. Bought it on Facebook. My neighbour just sold a caravan. Sold it on Facebook. Want something tomorrow? Buy it on Amazon. Increasingly eBay are missing out on consumer to consumer sales and at the same time also missing out when a buyer wants speed and convenience.

You may well say that 2nd hand dishwashers, caravans, and some batteries delivered tomorrow aren’t eBay’s core strengths but equally all the time consumers are shopping elsewhere they’re not considering eBay for other purchases. It’s been known for decades that a consumer that occasionally sells on eBay is a much more loyal buyer but eBay are letting these customers slip away.

For eBay to be relevant it has to once again become the default place for buyers to start their search for pretty much anything. The Times describes Facebook and Amazon as “Both experiences are vastly different from eBay’s clunky bidding system and the faffing around with shipping. In an era when convenience is paramount, eBay is, well, inconvenient”.

Investor unrest

Giving money back to shareholders, as eBay has recently started doing with a dividend, is says The Times “an admission of defeat – a sign that you’ve run out of ideas”. With the sale of StubHub likely to complete and Investors pushing for a speedy sale of eBay Classifieds they say it will free eBay up to get back to it’s rooks as the destination for self-expressionists and treasure hunters.

The problem with this is that eBay need to have some fresh ideas. Sell offs make it more bite sized for acquisition but eBay’s strength should be returning to be the marketplace where you can buy and sell (almost) anything. Caravans used to be one of the top performing search word (in the now defunct eBay pulse) – it was in the top 10 for over a decade (and so noteworthy we blogged when it was pushed out of the top 10 by tech) and yet now they’re sold on Facebook. eBay was a once the definitive place to buy a dishwasher online and (a nod here to Steve who used to sell on eBay as 99pbatteries) the defacto place to buy batteries.

Part of what’s wrong with eBay is undoubtedly, says The Times, due to eBay being an idea that was so good and so simple that they did little to change it over the years. Whilst Amazon obsessed about shipping and Facebook obsessed about local sales eBay never got into managing shipping and offering convenience (and indeed allowed Chinese sellers with crappy shipping to flood the marketplace) and with a focus on new fixed price products lost their unique knack of connecting consumers with something to sell with consumers who wanted to buy.

There are two things worth remembering about eBay. Here in the UK we get the distinct impression that eBay is performing better than their worldwide results. Second that even in the dire straits eBay find themselves today, they still generate a pot full of cash and if they could only keep investors off their back and find a way to invest it to generate double digit growth, just about everyone – sellers, buyers and investors – would be a whole heap happier.

On the flip side, if eBay fail to perform in a very short space of time, the marketplace could easily find itself sold to the highest bidder. While the owners of NYSE might not have been that serious in their approach, once one potential buyer comes to the table more normally follow and if someone makes an eBay Best Offer that’s attractive to shareholders clicking that accept offer button will be all that’s left for the eBay Board to do.

114 Responses

  1. The sad fact about the failing of ebay is that most of the answers have been shouted at them for years.
    Loyal, long term, decent sellers leaving in droves… while ebay shirps about an influx of what appear to be just chinese sellers with 50 accounts each.
    A feedback system that is so beyond a joke that nobody really takes any notice of it… just look at how many dodgy sellers have massively poor feedback, but big sales~!
    A search engine that is, well….. dire. And don’t even start me on fast and free…get it in 5 days! Can i search for next day, even 2 days delivery? No….. Amazon for that.
    A system where the page setup you see completely relies on which link you hit… Same info, completely different setup, as devs tinker with new designs…. but don’t follow through. All very unprofessional and confusing.
    Strange changes that seem to have no point to them… look at dispatching stuff, suddenly we can only mark 50 items at a time as dispatched? WHY??? If i have 500 sales that day, why should I have to do 50 ata time, yet feedback i can do 200….
    I will skip over fraud and c.s as we all know the long and tearful story here.
    In fact, i will leave it there… We all know the stories, we have all experienced the glitches, lack of communication and the general woes. Just mention ebay down the pub… not long before the warnings and experiences come out and few are ever good.
    Yet somehow, with all this going on, voiced in public, voiced in all the ebay forums and web communities, in the news papers and on the news….. Ebay instead decide to listen to this mysterious groupm of buyers that tell them this is what they want… well it must be because they tell us they have listened to them and this is what they wanted.
    Just counting down the months now until we abandon ebay and continue our expansion onto the many other commerce sites now available. Oh, did nobody tell ebay they weren’t alone any more?

  2. Yep, as far as I am concerned eBay is broken. 20 years ago when I joined it was a great platform, sellers and buyers were engaged and there was the thrill of the chase. But now eBay want to focus on new items, the collectables market is on its knees. eBay has created a world of non-bidding watchers, with a terrible watcher to bidder conversion rate. As a seller i now have to start my auctions or buy it nows at a price I can accept, as there is rarely any competitive bidding and best offer just does not work seemingly. Items sell at maiden bid now, or if a 2nd bid comes it the price goes up one increment, the original bidder having gone in with no margins. I am just about to call in a clearance firm to take away my stock and sell at a general auction, a financial hit I will have to take. But when items wont sell at £1…..or get 6 watchers at 50p what can you do. And as for this Good Til Cancelled of fixed price listings – what a crock that is. I have given up trying to sell the oop collectable model aircraft, watchers, watchers and watchers but no bids. I just wish there was a way to talk to eBay, to explain to them what is wrong with their policies. I am sure we all have lots of ideas to improve things, but will they listen in time. Sadly not for me.

  3. It very simple ebay haven’t invested in anything new, they were once number one and still act like they are biggest or only game in town. They have never listened to sellers, happy (and therefore complicite in buyer fraud), with zero monitoring or reporting facilities, or even allowing sellers to even state simple facts like claimed non-receipt demanded a refund straight away, rather then re-sending an item), . Allowed the site to flooded by dropper shippers, delivering goods from Amazon, in Amazon packaging clearly highlighting to any customer unfortunately enough buy via a drop shipper, that they purchase would have been cheaper if they started on they search on Amazon and not ebay.

    They are tied to there old technology that was built in the early 90s , I bet if you worked in technology for ebay, it’s held together by rubber bands and pieces of strings!!!. I can sell an item for less then 8% seller fee’s in health and beauty if it’s less then £10, paypal alone charge 5% to process the transaction and ebay 10%, and now they want more to promoted listing, placing fee’s above good customer service. Its a dinosaur, dying a slow death. In ten years time it have been brought and sold by another venture capital (probably having around gone through the hands of 2 or 3 others VC firms prior to that), claiming they will reboot it Ebay version 6.0 or whatever, they will just strip out whatever fee’s they can from the bones of the company.

  4. It has been run by greedy shortsighted YES people for far to long, with no fresh ideas, no innovation, just more stupid metrics (which are a total sham) and fees fees fees. Stealth FEES with Pay to Play are totally abused.

    Fakes goods and seller misrepresentation have sky-rocketed ( because the can get away with it). Lots of bad buying experiences.

    Private sellers cannot sell anything so DO not even bother switching onto eBay where they might buy something. Honest my mates all use Facebook and buy on Amazon.

    Since 2017 it has been a complete disaster for myself, and complete race to the bottom, sales are not the issue it is the HUGE fees are eating up all the margins.

    We used to be 24 hour fast free right up to 4pm. Now we are 48 hour with 1 day dispatch. It is just not worth the time and we need to try and keep our margin up. The amount of merchants we see come and go also BOOM and Bust chasing pennies is unreal, 2 year lifecycle.

    It is far to EXPENSIVE for sellers and buyers…that simple.

  5. eBay unfortunately manipulate all their figures to try and appeal yet everyone has now unravelled it.

    They say sell a mobile on ebay and get a lot morein comparison to other places.
    Rubbish!!
    example £150 on ebay minus the 10% minus the paypal minus the safe shipping leaves around £110 to £120.
    Facebook or Gum tree £150 no shipping unless they want it shipping and no fees.

    Oh then ebay buyer says it was cracked and returns an item you did not send then ebay side with them and your huge sale is now zero and no phone.

    Then on top of that we have a spate of buyers not reading listings and then saying the item is not as described to be able to return for free at our expense.
    we send messages to them and they reply giving us all the ammunition we need for ebay return process abuse.
    They get us to fill in a form and attach the invoice that ebay have charged.

    Then just totally ignore it and never refund the shipping. All they are interested in is grabbing more fees.
    They are just abysmal at defending sellers making eBay one of the most unsecure selling platforms.
    we use them now as just an advert to get people to look up the item online and they always buy from us on another cheaper outlet.
    Keep up the good work eBay of steering our customers to a more profitable outlet of ours.

  6. eBay is now my platform of last resort and I started my business from scratch 14 years ago solely on eBay. I now sell over €1 million a year and eBay effectively gets none of it

  7. Back when sales were good and to some degree predictable, I used to buy alot on Ebay in turn.

    Alas I’m a domestic tax paying seller and hence sales are not very good or predictable, hence I buy not much on ebay.

  8. “Here in the UK we get the distinct impression that eBay is performing better than their worldwide results”

    GMV here in the states declined 9% in 4th quarter, as sellers *still* report of problems related to last years botched October catalog updates.

    It’s also refreshing to see a major publication call out eBay’s technical issues that underpin many of eBay’s other failings.

    I have yet to see any of the major media outlets in the US shine a light on eBay’s chronic tech and ops misexecution as the root cause of many other problems (would US GMV have declined 9% if Q4 if it weren’t for the catalog and promoted listings boondoggle?)

    Always enjoy Tamebay’s expert take on things like this, though calling the Times’ piece a “hatchet job” seems a bit severe. After sharing this blog post on Twitter earlier, an ex-eBayer remarked that “Tamebay’s ostensible defense of eBay management and culture in response reads much more like an indictment.”

  9. My Daughter purchased an item from Basildon Essex (so it said) 7 days delivery to Suffolk 60 miles away (lol), checked listing and VAT number was for a Health shop in Abingdon, Finally got the item with customs form on from China with returns address to a warehouse beside Heathrow Airport !
    Looked at listing and couldn’t see how to report the seller, so another buyer lost as she will not use eBay anymore.
    Have now reported them through eBay’s facebook page, but will they get banned from the site ?
    eBay cannot continue with sellers like this, they are ruining it for everyone, but does eBay care ?

  10. Ebay: Start with a normal customer service by email or chat instead of letting a questioner circling around automic generated answers, which do not answer the question at all. It’s a shame that such a big company has such a bad customer service.
    Also the listing of an item is pain in the ass because of all the boxes that have to be filled in. The fees on the postage costs is a shame. The promotional listings is setting the sellers up to each other. Also, since this started, sales have plummeted to all time low.

  11. eBay need to introduce a way for customers to personalise personalised items, it’s very simple on amazon but not eBay. The amount of orders I cancel due to customers not providing anything as there is no proper way for them to do it is staggering. It’s not easy for customers due to no process, they don’t then reply to messages etc, if there was simply a custom box like amazon that is mandatory the issue would save multiple cancelled orders across many sellers

  12. We The People must take a stand against the eBay platform for refusing to force sellers to follow their rules.

    When ebay refuses to enforce their rules it destroys the market for buyers.

    I’ll NEVER purchase anything from China or made in China ever again. I have eBay/their lack of appropriate response to thank for this.

  13. I have been selling on eBay since March of 2004. I have the same store and 100% feedback. eBay used to allow negative feedback. Bad sellers were weeded out. The bad seller would just reopen another store, why they could is a mystery to me. It was easy to check their history. I would just check the seller’s feedback, and click ID History. There it was, the actual history of their store names and how long they used them. To my disbelief, a seller’s ID history is no longer available for review. I have a speciality in gemstones. I could tell just by looking at the picture that an”emerald” was glass. There was no way I could report this. eBay has systematically destroyed the integrity of the gemstone trade. The layman buyer has purchased junk for terribly high prices. I would buy this junk and report it to eBay. Once I had proven it was junk, my ability to leave feedback was taken away. eBay allows unscrupulous sellers an unbridled avenue to continue using this outlet. Many buyers have discovered this, just look at the feedback “Buyer Beware”.

  14. As much I could drone on for hours about the faults with selling on eBay, I do have to acknowledge the simple fact that our sales on eBay are forever increasing and have done for the past 15 years or so.

    I spend all day, every day, complaining about the site, the poor choices, the dodgy buyers and duff options on the site, but when all said and done, all the changes over the past few years have never impacted our actual sales. We are busier than ever, continuously beating turnover records and we can be sending anything up to 400 parcels a day.

    Just saying it isn’t all doom and gloom, very hard work, yes, but still a very viable outlet.

    I currently only sell on eBay, no other channels which in this day and age is frowned upon, but I have never felt the need to look elsewhere.

  15. We decided to close up shop in December (on eBay) after seeing our overall eBay fees, FVF, Store fees and Promoted Listings spend (excl.) payment processing, reach a record 35% of our eBay REVENUE for the month. INSANE.

    We had 20k listings (non variation) these were individual listings with an Anchor Store subscription.

    We ran free shipping, promotions, promoted listings, top rated seller, massive feedback, all item specifics data filled, yet eBay couldn’t produce the revenue it once used to for us anymore, to the point that our fees reached a whopping 35% of our eBay revenue by the time we decided to close the store and remove everything.

    Complete corporate greed and mismanagement has destroyed this once vibrant marketplace which is now almost beyond repair imho. If it goes to the wall I wouldn’t be even at all surprised, or bothered for that matter.

    In fact, it’s enabled us to realise that eBay wasn’t really profitable enough to warrant the volume of work required to maintain it. We’ve cut back, scaled down and we’re actually in a much stronger position financially even though we’ve reduced our turnover significantly.

    I’d recommend highly that anyone selling on this marketplace right now and currently seeing a long downward trend of spiralling sales decline, does take a real hard look at their eBay numbers, work out your actual net profits from this place, and divide that by the number of hours you put into it. The results for many will be bleak indeed.

    Sellers are leaving by the thousands every month and the buyers are following them. Don’t think that at any moment now your sales are bound to improve, they won’t. Not unless you pay more fees. You a pay a bit, they give you some sales, You pay a bit more, they give you some more. Reduce what you pay, they’ll take those sales away, and you’ll be left with less sales than what you started with. From here it then becomes a fee trap and a slippery slope with a warehouse full of stock that you can’t sell without discounting it to near cost, all the while your costs keep rising and your prices are being driven into the ground. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

    My advice. Get out now, and get out early.

  16. selling much the same product from the same source in the same marketplace
    Could be the problem

  17. K.Moore :”We The People must take a stand against the eBay platform for refusing to force sellers to follow their rules.”

    The people have taken a stand against Ebay, they simply use Amazon instead and Ebay is dying, as clearly shown by the number of comment by sellers above!!!!

  18. The mess with ebay is that it is too unregulated. Low regulation is good, but no regulation is horrible as people use horrendous business tactics for short term profits.

    The site is flooded with garbage and bots are used to automatically scrape and relist every listing off Amazon 100x.

  19. Too many sellers complaining about decreasing sales and concentrating on the “negatives” of ebay.

    A positive approach is required. Concentrate on the positive initiatives ebay have introduced and work WITH the platform – then you might get somewhere.

  20. were happy to work with ebay
    they owe us nothing,
    in turn we owe them no loyalty,
    unless they cut the mustard , we will dine elsewhere

  21. as chris dawson points out.
    ” I remember a time on eBay when you could list SIF (Shop Inventory Format, defunct for over a decade) for 3p insertion fee and final value fees were 5.25% of the first £29.99, 3.25% for the portion of the sale between £30 and £599.99 and just 1.75% for anything over £600.”

    IS THE ANSWER AND THE SOLUTION to the problem

  22. philosophy, the customer is always right. problem. they are not. buyers shaft sellers. ebay implements philosophy. sellers get hammered

  23. Ebay where to start

    Safe place to buy and sell No
    supports sellers definitely No
    Supports Buyer Not so sure.

    Seller offer an item with the title.

    “Carl Zeis Telescopic gun sights”.

    That’s great a brilliant find for any potential buyerhighest quality gun sights and these are only £129 instead of the usual £749.

    the description reads all technical jargon about magnification and sizes and all the normal stuff brand new and in box.

    But right in the middle it says ” facsimile / clone” not highlighted or made clear.

    So these are not genuine they are not by world renowned Carl Zeiss at all. those two words mean copies or fake.

    So you contact eBay nothing is done you get 31 other people to report the listing and nothing is done.
    I ring eBay and they explain sorry we are not sure they are fake as Carl Zeiss have not contacted us themselves.

    Now 2 issues with that answer.

    If they are not fake then they are “not as described”
    If they are fake they should be removed.
    If the seller states they are fake and eBay allow it then what chance have honest sellers got.

    Please all look no further for how eBay have got your back.

  24. @Alan Paterson

    Ok I have struggled with promoted listings including running a month test before as a control, then a month with promoted listings and then a month without again and found no significant uplift to justify the cost.

    We are a small printers specialising in “personalised” printing. So fake items from abroad etc does not significantly affect us but that does not mean we do not believe it is out there.

    Ebay is a mega monster and what ever it thinks of as a good idea today will take months or years to implement. We feel that Ebay is trying to become amazon which they are not and should not aspire to be. They have their own identity and that is what they are loosing (in our opinion).

    Our sales are down year on year and you can say “that’s your own fault” and we are not going to shoot you down for that but..

    Within Tamebay, recent posts show that Ebays visits dropped during the lead up to Christmas. ebay’s GMV has flat lined and forget our sales being down, we are much more interested in our ponds sales being down by an average of 25% almost every month. That’s our piers sales are down not just us.

    We check our competition to see what our world is up to and many big feedback score companies have got their feedback in the past and are doing next to nothing now. Ebay (as per a Tamebay post) even bought in fashion listings on a deal with one of their bigger partners because they had too little to offer. All that did was kick in the teeth a seller who was doing well until swamped by the influx. ebay admitted they over did it.
    The drive to “get it out the door before you even ordered it” does not work in our world because we need input from the buyer before we can process. 11 million “personalised” listings that could be improved dramatically if ebay made people enter personalisation before you can buy or improve the message system to allow various files and real communication to take place. Amazon recognised this and did something about it. Ebay should have been there.

    The only thing we can say has been implemented and really works for us is the multi buy promotion allowing single pack items to be discounted in a real helpful way. But our view is that before they pushed you to include postage which inflated a single item package out of proportion, this should have been implemented 1st.

    Ebay seem to be drunk falling one way and fixing it and then falling another.

    We are a massive fan of Ebay but think they have got some serious problems at the mo. If you can help us with “promoted listing ” as being cost effective and properly done then please lead the way.

    We are positive thinking but finding Ebay very hard work at this moment in time.

  25. I keep in touch with a few othr sellers and here is the whole scenarion in a nutshell

    They have a 98.2 feedback score we have 100.

    we sell an item for £29.99 because we have to. Its called over heads.
    Recentley we were allowed to write it off.
    so for a trial i sent half to the other seller who like us was selling about 2 per month.

    He then lowered his price by £8 matching a chinese seller with a chinese address shipping from a uk storage using a students account.

    He now sold 8 per month until all 24 had gone. Whereas in reality he lost £3.99 per sale and 1 was returned so he lost an extra £3.20 shipping on that one. So 24 sales returning a loss of £98.96.
    So i will not be visiting my accountant to ask if thats good business practice but i may ask Alan to show me the way to proceed.

    Improve customer relations. Dont know how as 100% was the max the last time i went to scholl and thats over 20 plus years.
    Pay promotion ads. oh yes pay more to have my listings actually shown to the ever dwindling customer base in the hope of more sales.
    Pay google ads.
    Put and ad in the national press.
    But i have worked it out myself.
    I should send eveyone the item free who clicks on it just to look. They may then go viral as the best business in the uk and everyone will come to me and i can start to charge and hope they dont go away.

    As at a loss rate like that adding to the full fee holding thats coming from paypal on any returns the final nails are being hammered.

  26. What’s wrong with ebay?

    They don’t have a good strategy. Ebay should focus on improving the marketplace, improving buyer and seller experience. In the end if done right this is the only way to a sustainable increase in revenue, the only way to survive.

    Make listing easy and cheap, make browsing the website a breeze, make searching, finding and buying items a pleasure. Setup a good feedback system. Focus on the fundamentals of a good marketplace, let the right people find each other. Use common sense to resolve issues.

  27. In all, Ebay needs to return to the way it used to be , without the tampering, Get rid of listing fees alltogether! (will get more people and listings through the door) and certainally GET RID OF PROMOTED LISTINGS! it is getting alot cheaper to put items through our local auction in Newcastle (and thats saying something) after all costs are taken into account. Ebay is still the best, act now so it is not destroyed for good!

  28. @Alan P “yet sellers throw mud at ebay for this one when in fact ebay have given you the tool to exert some control over the Cassini algorithm while not necessarily effecting your net profit.”

    Well with due respect Alan, if most of the ebay staff don’t know how Cassini works then how are us mere mortals supposed to know? 😉
    I have a business with 3 of the 4 criteria in the red, and bar giving away things for free there is little else we can do with our antique auctions and few buy it now listings. Thanks for the advice though!
    Rachael

  29. its all dark arts , in effect to succeed on ebay you need the skills of dynamo the magician, gaming cassini [at a cost] using promoted listings
    were all circus animals having to do tricks for the ebay ring master to get our tit bits
    what happened to a good product, at the right price ,with good service,

  30. @Alan Paterson Is there a way we can get in touch? I regularly read your comments and find them helpful. We’re a bunch of data nerds here and I’m on the lookout for an ebay consultant. The business has sales in excess of £1m but ebay is sadly falling behind. If you could let me know a way of getting in touch with you it would be great. Thanks

  31. weve learnt our trade make no mistake ,we do very well out of ebay
    neither you or anyone at ebay has more experience or sales then we do

    we have no problem selling
    its ebay fees, conditions ,and ineptitude, we have trouble with

  32. and alan our complaining all the time is an exaggeration.
    we have a grand lifestyle because of ebay
    yet we dont think they are beyond criticism , they are far from perfect
    its not always selling methods and seller inexperience to blame which you constantly imply

  33. What is the world coming to when everyone feels it is fine to have your items lifted in the searches as long as you pay more.

    We have shops selling antiques for people in our local area from lovely glass cabinets and when i asked them about cost.
    None of them said its £5 per week per cabinet but they are out in the back gaeden these in here are £10.

    Surley if you take the same money for a shop you should offer the same deal.

  34. The ebay way Is if you dont pay it wont sell
    If it sold in any event why would you use the promote feature

  35. you pay
    Shop subscriptions
    Listing fees
    & many more associated costs if an item fails to sell
    Its evangelistic tunnel vision to claim no sale no fee

  36. How long before eBay take further fees from sellers for sale of non promoted items “because the buyer accessed your product via a promoted listing” ?
    Just a thought

  37. I will say the same as a lot of others in these comments i.e.

    WE HAVE BEEN SHOUTING ALL THIS AT EBAY FOR YEARS

    They do not listen, the platform appears to be dying and that’s a shame but it is how it is.

    I just don’t get it, they’ve been concentrating too hard on being Amazon #2 and they’re not and never will be, their success has and could be as an alternative to Amazon, not it’s smaller sidekick.

    I do honestly feel the clock’s ticking now, and we’re working flat out to make eBay one of the platforms that we sell on, and not just THE platform that we sell on.
    We’re just tired of being shafted by stealth fees, hidden costs and other sneak tactics. If they’d look after their sellers then they’d be ok, they’re not doing and as a consequence, they’re failing.

    Who was it that said a few years ago – ‘We succeed together’…….

  38. You can get an idea of what’s happening on ebay year on year using the seller hub

    Our click through rate and sales conversion rate have stayed pretty constant.

    As far as I am aware our products have stayed constant in search with us generally having 10 in the first 200

    Impressions measured over 1 week in January for last 3 years
    Jan 20 – 163781
    Jan 19 – 296724
    Jan 18 – 281507

    So I would say ebay has had a drastic fall in buyers searching for products, down 44% on last year.

    We sell wedding Decorations, so January is generally our biggest month for sales

  39. Dear eBay, I have a simple message, like many sellers feel it’s not hard to fathom- you hide my listings and I don’t pay you money. In fact, you hide my listings and I take those listings and list elsewhere. Simple really. We aren’t jumping through promoted listings hoops, we pay more than enough in listing and final value fees thank you very much.

  40. Hi to all the team at eBay
    I would Thank you all for your support and prompt reply’s you have replied you have been really very helpful during the period I was trading with eBay,
    Unfortunately I had enough with eBay fees which I have been charged my last bill really put me off ,in purpose I haven’t listed any items at all just to try and see all these fees how are generated and I found them all unfair and without my permission they just help themselves and get the funds from my account
    I already have some bindings for the coming 7 days
    And I will CANCEL my account completely and deal with several other selling sites
    I am sorry but EBAY is unfair and greedy and I will not take this anymore ,once ahgain a big THANK YOU to all the kind team
    Have a good evening
    Regards to all
    Nick
    I wish eBay becomes more simplified ,and clear explanatory on their charges
    Nicholas Joseph spinocchia
    [email protected]
    BH22 8HL

  41. I have been looking on comments and complaints on eBay for this subject which are horrendous,hope eBay looks at them and be more easy explained
    And not charge you for items you don’t want to relist without your approval and charge you
    Thank you again
    Nick

  42. Unfortunately all eBay thinks is money and how to charge you for fees they are like vouchers
    Waiting for you to list an item and grab you for unfair charges
    Without your knowledge
    Trying to get intouch with one of the superiors,every time I call and wait for hours they are at the back desk,whatever this means ……………

  43. Unfortunately all eBay thinks is money and how to charge you for fees they are like vouchers
    Waiting for you to list an item and grab you for unfair charges
    Without your knowledge
    Trying to get intouch with one of the superiors,every time I call and wait for hours they are at the back desk,whatever this means ……………

    NOT ENOUGH THOUGH

  44. Internet sales are still growing year on year, yet ebay sales are in decline or stactic, which clearly shows that it is losing market share. When I launch my business just over 10 years ago, I was an ebay only business, then Amazon came along. Now Ebay accounts of less 5% of my revenue (my expected turnover will be somewhere between £3.5m to £4m this year), I’m not saying that show off, but to say I’m not a one man band selling a few items from my bedroom, moaning my revenues have fallen from a few hundred quid to zero . The fact is that Ebay is maintaining it’s margins whilst selling less shows that it is simply squeezing more fee’s from sellers. Ebay has never listened to Sellers, as the problems that where highlighted years ago are still there. Not to mention the £32K that was stolen from me over a period of around 9 months from my Ebay account, from the number of I seller that reported similar this showed that Ebay security and monitoring like most things Ebay related is slow, lax and poor. Amazon this year introduced 8% selling fee’s on items priced below £10 in the health and beauty category (which covers about 90% of the items I sell). Paypal charge you 5% just process your payment, when you look at item priced below £10. Then Ebay charge you 10% plus whatever extra fee’s they can squeeze. This makes a massive difference, and will continue to erode sales on Ebay, as you can sell cheaper and still maintain healthy margins on Amazon. I continue to see growth on all the Amazon Marketplaces on which I operate in, Ebay is just flat or falling and I expect this to continue, unless there is new owner that genuinely cares, listens and wants to change things and not just squeeze extra margin from falling sales.

  45. Gav, ebay fee structure is much higher then Amazon on stuff under £10, so if you just one of something and not 2, 3 or 4, of the same thing plus the fact that repricers push prices down, means that I would have agreed with you in past, now I don’t think ebay is much cheaper also consumers don’t trust ebay they do Amazon.

  46. Too many buyers on eBay are bottom feeders that don’t wanna pay what an item is worth. eBay has cultivated this type of buyer for many years by attempting to push buyers to the cheapest items regardless of quality. It’s as if they’re just begging for a cheap sale so they can collect fees because they know nobody will buy better quality higher priced items. They do it all over the site: On your own listing pages, in search results, spamming buyers with messages about items they viewed, even messaging buyers after a sale that they missed a cheaper price which induces order cancellations. Then you have eBay always trying to get sellers to lower prices. It’s an absolute joke. The truth is prices may be lower on eBay for some things because of SELLER DESPERATION. No sales leads to sellers undercutting each other on prices. You see, if there’s actually BUYERS and SALES sellers wouldn’t need to keep lowering prices. You can absolutely get more money per item on Amazon, many times much more, simply because most buyers don’t bother checking eBay or have never used them at all. eBay is becoming more irrelevant by each passing day and it’s never going to get better. eBay has a reputation of being CHEAP, but in the worst way. An alternate question to ask is this: What’s RIGHT with eBay today? Answer: NEARLY NOTHING.

  47. @Dev, agree a lot with what you are saying. ebay encourage best offer and keep pushing sellers to send best offers as that is what customers like. What customer would not like receiving something for less. I have never had a buyer on Amazon ask me for money off or something for less as they see the price and know that is what they have to pay.
    ebay is fast becoming a car boot sale where buyers try to haggle for everything. Amazon I don’t have to worry about competing with non business sellers as you know once they hit a certain limit they have to send in HMRC info and register as a business. ebay, I am competing against sellers with over 500 items yet not declared as a business. So do they pay their fair share of taxes? Who knows!
    We kept getting told ebay want to raise standards to give customers a better experience, yet I have seen some of these sellers run a “business” for 3 or 4 years yet ebay not bother one bit about it that they show no business info, sometimes no returns policy.
    Sales are down by 1/3 compared to the last couple of years, yet have more stock and better quality stock. Yet pushed down below many “business” sellers who have no business info in listing.

  48. Alan you can blow smoke up the backside of eBay as much as you like.

    You cannot compare paying more in a newspaper for a bigger advert. The newspaper does not make up posh names for algorythms to get you better rankings it checks the adverts and you are all able to be read. They do not throw the poorer advertisers in the bin you are all still visible as there is only 24 pages. They also do not take 11% of your sales and 11% of your shipping and tell you how to ship and to lie about shipping being free.

    The next one to be introduced will be extra fees if your delivery company do not drive electric vans and the drivers be vegan.

    At no point in all my years on ebay have they said to me to get anywhere you must be prepared to pay us more money to be seen and learn how to use our complex systems to try and be visible using things even our customer service do not understand.

    If they do tell them to stop sending messages how to improve my sales by reducing my prices and add more images images from all angles are enough usually about 5

    6 more of a hamster ball are not going to show it any different.

    what a bunch of wallys.

  49. Been on Ebay for years but we had 2 events in past 2 days that we never knew even existed….

    1) buyer able to “return this item” with reason “does not fit” just 2 mins (yes, two!) *after* we marked the order as posted. delivery with RM Tracked. why don’t require the buyer to actually get the delivery? and the “doesn’t fit” is just a gateway to freebies return delivery. hate it.

    2) buyer buys through GSP. I see notification later on but item nowhere on “sold list”. buyer probably canceled it (we heard nothing). so we sold it but not physically. item now “out of stock” on eBay (we had single qty) but we haven’t sold it. it will be proper nightmare to manage if such cases were more frequent and having few thousand listings.

  50. Be very care full when selling on e-bay they do not support the seller
    You have no rights and the no return policy does not mean anything
    This is a third world company

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