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eBay CEO Has a Stark Choice: Show Growth or Break Up Company

75 points by petethomas 8y ago

StudentStuff 8y ago
The eBay/PayPal split has been a mess. eBay should have had its own, seamlessly integrated payments from the start, but lacking that PayPal was a good crutch. Since the split, you now get the choice of paying through eBay directly, through PayPal, or another way (depending on what the seller accepts). Simplifying this for small dollar transactions is critical if eBay is to stay competitive with Etsy, Amazon, Target, Walmart and the numerous others that are sharing the online shopping market.
- sjjshzvuiajhz 8y ago
  Are you sure this is a problem? It’s very common for retailers to offer multiple payment options. As long as they let you check a box to default to the same option in the future, I don’t think users mind.
- lozaning 8y ago
  Of all the reason I dont buy things from eBay, the payment options have very little to do with it.
- ericras 8y ago
  ebay did have its own integrated payments early on: Billpoint. (https://www.pymnts.com/digital-payments/2018/ebay-intermediates-payments-replaces-paypal-adyen-process-payments/ https://www.pymnts.com/digital-payments/2018/ebay-intermedia...) From what I recall, the fees were much higher then PayPal and it didn’t take long for PayPal to become the de facto standard.
- jonknee 8y ago
  > The eBay/PayPal split has been a mess It has been an absolute goldmine for shareholders. eBay bought PayPal for $1.5b in 2002 and spun it off in 2015 for ~$50b. PYPL is currently valued at $106b.
  - masonic 8y ago
    Why would eBay shareholders consider it a "goldmine" if eBay let PayPal go for half of what it was worth?
    - tolle 8y ago
      I have not checked the details, but I read it as someone who held a share in Ebay+PayPal prior to PayPal being spun of got an Ebay share + X PayPal shares at the time of the spinoff. I don't think PayPal was bought for $50B, it was valued as that as a separate entity. The PayPal share has doubled in value since the split.
    - jonknee 8y ago
      Because they didn't sell it, they spun it off. Shareholders got 1 PYPL share for every share of EBAY. EBAY was ~$28 a share and the combined value of both is currently ~$123. An 80% annualized ROI seems like a goldmine to me!
johntiger1 8y ago
What went wrong with eBay? I remember getting my first gaming console--a gameboy SP during the mid 2000s from the site. We did something like buy-it-now, essentially an early Amazon. While the rest of tech rushes forward, they seem to be forever stuck... Right now I'd say StubHub occupies a bigger slice in the consumer mindshare.
- SXX 8y ago
  StubHub is owned by eBay though.
  - masonic 8y ago
    Which is why eBay sabotages ticket sales on eBay by dumping thousands of StubHub "classified ads" in the tickets category so that genuine listings can't be found among the chaff. You can't even exclude the StubHub ads from your eBay search results. If a buyer buys direct on eBay from a seller, eBay gets about 10%. If it sells on StubHub, eBay gets 33-65%.
    - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      Ticket resellers are an absolute scourge on the music industry, anything that makes their life more difficult is fine by me.
gscott 8y ago
eBay should have bought Yahoo. They would have been perfect for each other.
- heyjudy 8y ago
  Lol? How? Yahoo and AOL seem to be perfectly happy riding into the non-innovation sunset with Verizon.
max76 8y ago
There are a lot of things I really like about Ebay. I have found myself using it more and more over the last year. I hope they highlight what makes them unique instead of trying to clone other e-commerce websites. * I know exactly which business is responsible for my purchase. A business with a good reputation cannot afford to sell counterfeit products, and no shared warehouseing means counterfeits do not get mixed in with actual goods. * Very cheap things are more competitively priced. Sometimes I like to buy things online that cost less than $5. * It’s possible to pay less for items and get them directly from overseas. It’s nice to get a discount for having a longer planning horizon. * It’s fairly easy to sell my unwanted items on the platform.
- fermienrico 8y ago
  Also, you can find some of the most obscure and rare items on eBay that’s simply impossible to find otherwise. For example, you can’t buy a Military APC[1] on Amazon :-) [1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/CUSTOMIZED-MILITARY-VEHICLE-BUILT-ON-A-6X6-CAIMAN-CHASSIS/122773527344 https://www.ebay.com/itm/CUSTOMIZED-MILITARY-VEHICLE-BUILT-O...
jurassic 8y ago
As a shopper I hate a lot of the recent shifts in their strategy. The only thing interesting enough to make me want to deal with all the hassles of eBay are the interesting vintage or collectible one-of-a-kind items: coins, camera gear, art, etc. These things are more work to list and describe but make for an always entertaining browsing experience. I loved eBay back in the day when it was like one big never-ending garage sale. The catalogization of eBay, moving toward SKU-based product pages with sellers providing fulfillment, ends up feeling like a weird me-too version of the Amazon FBA race to the bottom. Small sellers with interesting inventory have been bled to death with ever-increasing fees and seem ready to pack up the wagon and move on to greener pastures. The featured products on the homepage have the same bland sameness as every other e-com site and as a shopper I don't feel like I have much reason to ever go there these days. Right now I'm seeing a Patriots ballcap, some men's sneakers, and a small grill. Might as well be shopping at Target.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  I noticed the same thing. The front page is so boring it feels like a regular stores website. I don't know about the rest of their users but I don't come to ebay to buy sunglasses or phones. I'm looking for that obscure adapter that no store in the country sells. Or that game I used to play that has long since gone out of production. I can still find that stuff but there is no way to just casually look around at the interesting bits, you have to search for it.
  - shittyadmin 8y ago
    I think the issue is that many people use eBay less than sites like Amazon or AliExpress where you're out to pick a product - I used to use ebay quite often for buying things like phone cases and electronics components directly from China. Now I choose AliExpress when I want it cheaper and Amazon when I want it faster. eBay has lost a lot of marketshare in this space - yes, there's business in auctioning collectibles and second hand stuff, but it's much smaller than that direct purchase market and they'd likely have to scale back the site in some respects.
  - cft 8y ago
taneq 8y ago
This expectation of perpetual rapid growth across the board is bonkers. Are there any online auction sites that approach eBay's popularity? Are there that many new people who want to sell stuff online for eBay to serve? What's it going to take for the market to start accepting a large company with a healthy revenue stream as "big enough"?
- Tepix 8y ago
  They should never have gone public in the first place.
- beatgammit 8y ago
  I think they could expand by taking over Craigslist's marketshare. In some areas, Craigslist is super popular, in others it's virtually nonexistent. If they can find a way to connect local sellers with local buyers and make money doing it, they could make a killing.
  - zengr 8y ago
    That's only in US. ebay classifieds is massive everywhere else out of US.
tern 8y ago
See Reverb.com for an example of eBay done better, for music gear: https://reverb.com/ https://reverb.com/
heyjudy 8y ago
So, basically greedy investors want eBay to ruin what's cool and useful about it... that it's not Amazon and not quite AliBaba either. Perhaps if they carefully tested expanding into less cool arenas like freight-forwarding, freight in general or delivery (merge with FedEx)... that might keep the capitalists at bay.
- beering 8y ago
  I don't see how spinning off Stubhub into a separate company will "ruin what's cool and useful about [eBay]". The rummage-sale aspect of eBay has and will change no matter how they choose to restructure their conglomeration.
cft 8y ago
I used eBay for buying expensive IT equipment (routers, IO accelerator cards) that quickly lose their value, as well as buying rare collectable items (coins, car parts for my old Audi). After reading the headline, my first thought was I will have to use AliExpress, but with collectables it's going to be harder. It's a sad reading, because there's always been room for department stores and for antique stores.
tasty_freeze 8y ago
15 years ago, I would visit ebay multiple times a day. I bought or sold something an average of once a week. Over time I used it less and less because it became a marketplace for cheap mass market consumer goods instead of an amazing bazaar. Part of the fun was not knowing what you'd find if you kept looking a little bit longer. These days I have to look up my password when I log in. When I do and search for, say, "arduino", I get 85 different Chinese vendors selling what appears to be the identical product for prices that are lower than the cost of just the CPU chip that is on it. I'm not saying it was better or worse, just different, and not what I loved about it a decade ago. But I'm in my 50s, and not the younger target demographic they think they can capture.
- philpem 8y ago
  I'm in the younger demographic, and they're not doing a great job capturing me! Half my test equipment collection came from ebay at one point or another, almost all of it bought "broken, parts only" and repaired. The bottom has completely fallen out of the market, these days it's all massive T&M vendors trying to shift junk at hugely inflated prices. It's really raised the barrier to entry for quite a few tech-related hobbies.
chrischen 8y ago
It’s really difficult to sell used items on Amazon but much easier on ebay despite their legacy UI (from when they used to actually charge for listings). If you really want to be green, buy used items and sell your things which you aren’t using so it’s not wasting resources.
opportune 8y ago
eBay kind of got eaten from all sides: Amazon took over the regular stuff, Etsy got the niche and handmade stuff, Alibaba and Aliexpress got the cheap Chinese stuff outside of Amazon. So a lot of what's left as a regular user are scams or simple resellers. Amazon also has a lot of the "garage sale" type of stuff these days
- Springtime 8y ago
  > Etsy got the niche and handmade stuff, Alibaba and Aliexpress got the cheap Chinese stuff outside of Amazon In my previous searches of Etsy so many of the results were comprised of cheap (originally), mass-produced products masquerading as 'hand-made'. Peppered among them are actual hand-made or vintage goods but I'm not sure if Etsy was intending to address such listings, though things may have changed from when I stopped browsing (a couple years ago).
- yzb 8y ago
  I use eBay mostly for the resellers, i.e., when I need to buy some Chinese crap but I can't wait 2-3 weeks until it arrives here, so I buy it from some reseller in my country. Back in the day, before aliexpress, it was good too because you could rip off the sellers. Just claim the thing never arrived and since for cheap stuff they had no tracking numbers the seller always had to refund you. You could get TONS of free stuff that way. Now aliexpress does this right and it's significantly harder.
  - opportune 8y ago
    that seems pretty immoral
zanny 8y ago
How is it that billion dollar companies with legions of employees cannot recognize why people don't use their product? What is ebay? The online auction site. If you have something to sell, you should be going there. If you want something you can't find in a normal store, you should be checking ebay first. If you aren't selling on Ebay, or aren't checking Ebay, those are the areas they need to improve on. You don't take the most successful business in a market (peer to peer auctions) and try to spin it into some other store to keep up with impossible growth expectations. So you go look at why people aren't using your service... I don't sell on Ebay because either the fees are too high to justify going through the effort making a listing, shipping the thing, and losing about 20% of the sale price to Ebay on something that I'm often getting poor margins on anyway. Or I'm not selling on Ebay because I don't trust their buyer contention system to be honest. I've heard enough horror stories of sellers getting refunded against and losing their often expensive products in the process with no recourse despite mountains of photo evidence of what they sold. I don't buy on Ebay because its so hard to find legitimacy. I have never figured out why I should ever trust feedback scores - every single seller is always gold starred maxed out positive feedback, some are "Top Rated Plus" which I have no idea what that even is supposed to mean, and you can't comment on most listings or seller pages to call out the bad actors. I got some fake batteries for a Note 4 a few years back and while Ebay accepted my complaint and refunded me the batteries while letting me keep them because they were falsely advertised as NFC capable when they weren't, I had no real way to indicate to others a seller with 100,000 feedback score was selling counterfeits. Generally their search is pretty good and their filtering is solid. I can almost always find what I'm looking for and figure out the right place to list what I want to sell. Those aren't problems. If they want more of my business, I need to have confidence that when I act legitimately I won't get scammed, and when I buy something the buyer is also legitimate. Its the exact same reason I shop so much less on Amazon nowadays and it seems zero tech company wants to take responsibility for actually insuring their storefronts are selling what the pages say they are and that sellers can expect not to be screwed over illegitimately too.
bredren 8y ago
Surprised no one else has said this, but eBay was ugly as sin for a very long time! Even now, the pages are crowded with variant font sizes and styles. There are offers galore as though the site competes with itself to get you to click on various things. I gotta say, it is downright horrendous to look at an ebay listing still! Look at this example from just now. https://i.imgur.com/1cjoT36.png https://i.imgur.com/1cjoT36.png I mean, it wants me to write a review for this item as though this is possibly something I would do looking at it for the first time. It wants me to "make more cash and sell whats hot" it wants me to shop with confidence and learn more what that means. It wants me to buy it now and add it to the cart. Oh but don't forget 3-year protection plan from blah for $26. Is there any site on the internet that has such a mess for a product page than this? I can't think of something worse. eBay should break up the company if it means it can create reasonable item listings. What they have now is a a travesty of a product page. This hasn't been okay outside eBay, ever.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Yet Amazon isn't better at any of this. Same jumble of fonts, ropey hostile layout, it asks for reviews on products I haven't bought, suggests I might like to sell one, take out a subscription and shows ads for competing products. They also try and make the distinction between Amazon and marketplace as vague as possible.
  - nikkwong 8y ago
    Whenever I bring this up I get contested at the fact that Amazon has A/B tested the customer-facing e-commerce portion of their site down to the very pixel. If any page on the web has the incentive to go through massive amounts of A/B testing, its those product pages for sure. Yet, then I look at those pages, and think to myself... really? This monstrosity is the result? Still so confused.
    - the-dude 8y ago
      Are you aware of the 'Belcher button' ?
- 8y ago
shay_ker 8y ago
Hmmm... I'm surprised eBay didn't go the Amazon route - see what's working well in the marketplace, and then sell it yourself. For instance, there are clearly a lot of electronics that sold at below-market rates just because of the hassle of an auction. If eBay could "pose as a buyer" and buy items at a certain price point, re-sell them for a little more, they could make money on the margins. In fact, I'm certain a lot of people use eBay to do exactly this, I just don't know how large the market is.
- notahacker 8y ago
  When you have a business model which make a steady 10% per sale for hosting a seller-updated web page and shopping cart, why would you adopt the far more risky strategy of employing more people to analyse, buy, hold and handle items in the hope you'll eke out net profits from reselling at higher prices on the same platform in future? Especially if doing so is likely to irritate part of your existing customer base.
puranjay 8y ago
An understated reason for Amazon's dominance is the popularity of the Amazon Affiliate program. Because of Amazon's strong conversion rates, a massive number of bloggers use it as their primary revenue source. Google any "money" keyword such as "best Bluetooth speakers' and virtually all top 20 results will have Amazon affiliate links This allows Amazon to dominate SERPs. No matter what people Google, the links eventually end up leading to Amazon
twblalock 8y ago
eBay should not be having such a big problem. Look at all the niche trends that are being empowered by the internet: - Vintage mechanical watches - Vintage fountain pens - Vintage mechanical keyboards - Vintage woodworking hand tools - Vintage European bicycle parts - Vintage film cameras, especially SLRs and Leicas - New things that look like those vintage things (often superficially) and make a lot of money on Kickstarter and Massdrop and Hodinkee and get resold when the hipster buyers move on to the next thing. eBay is the best place to buy this stuff. It's hard to believe they can't figure out how to make money.
- dagw 8y ago
  It's hard to believe they can't figure out how to make money. Making a bit of money is not a problem. Making so much money that all their investors are happy is a problem. Their investors don't want a modest company that makes modest profits on modest revenue.
smaili 8y ago
To this day I still can't list any of my extremely valuable items because of "seller limits" even though I've been a member for over 15 years and have not once gotten a negative review. Pretty disappointing considering the money they could be making off my sold transactions.
mcintyre1994 8y ago
Ah, Elliott. I worked at a company they took an interest in, this sucks for employees. They’re a powerful force and they seemed to get what they wanted.
- cagataygurturk 8y ago
  Care to elaborate how you were affected
  - mcintyre1994 8y ago
    They made the CEO leave, layoffs just before he left, another round of layoffs after we were repeatedly told there wouldn't be when the new CEO came on board, spun off a successful unit, it devastates morale and makes you pretty keen to leave quickly. I figure it works for them but it sucks to work at a company they're doing that to.
setquk 8y ago
Drop seller fees right down. £45 on a £450 item and then to shaft you for fees on postage for a virtual listing is a fucking joke. You can tell how bad it has got because eBay has no new listings unless there’s a seller fees offer on.
- kogepathic 8y ago
  Indeed. Paying 10% of the sale price in fees is quite unpleasant, especially when there are equivalent services that will let you post an ad for free (e.g. Craigslist, Kijiji, eBay Kleinanzeigen, PAP) Also, eBay doesn't really offer you much in this era. You can't include videos, and you're limited to a small number of photos. Arguably the worst non-feature of eBay, is that they make it incredibly difficult to calculate the average price of an item. I end up lurking for months on items to build a history of the average price of a product before I decide whether to buy it. Their aggressive policy of deleting closed auctions makes historical comparisons extremely difficult.
- entity345 8y ago
  Fees aren't cheaper on Amazon.
carboy 8y ago
It took Sears 126 years to fall apart, eBay is doing it in 23, but I doubt anyone will be upset
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  To be fair it is one of the longest-lived of the original dotcom bubble companies. 23 years is multiple lifetimes when you're talking about the internet.
packeted 8y ago
I want to love eBay but I can see why the board is so unhappy and the rot has been infiltrating the company for a long time. Back in the 00's I was a PowerSeller, shifting over $20k a month. At first it was an incredible experience and I was selling high value items to people all over the world with high margins and almost always a great experience. I was long on eBay and became a shareholder, passing up on Amazon whose business seemed much less appealing to me at the time. Then came along PayPal with their 3.5% uncapped fee, which on expensive items was significant. Buyers started expecting to be able to pay via PayPal and eBay stopped allowing trusted sellers to offer a small discount for paying by wire or cash. PayPal eventually became mandatory. Later, eBay's fees went up significantly. Those along with PayPal's fees ate in to my margins and I eventually lost interest, packed up shop and sold my stock at about break-even. While I continued to be an occasional buyer, I recently started selling a few items again. I was met with frequent time waster winning bidders and the same high fees that I remembered. My last sale was an iPhone X that went to Thailand, "covered" under PayPal's seller protection and sent with a shipping label printed directly from eBay's site. A few days after I had sent it, the buyer filed a dispute with PayPal saying he hadn't received it. PayPal almost immediately sided with the buyer with a boiler plate reply, removing the money from my account (including all fees) before the phone even had time to arrive. I sent an email to appeal which was met with a curt denial. I was almost $1500 out of pocket. Don't even get me started on their site and mobile app - so much could be improved and way too many clicks to do anything meaningful. One of my last battles was spending 3 hours on the phone to try and resolve an account bug as I had transitioned from UK->US which seems to be an edge case they didn't finish working on. It makes me sad because the idea behind eBay is fundamentally a fantastic one, you can still find great stuff on there and the prices are often much lower than Amazon (even more so with the recent coupons they must be burning through cash on). They still have the audience to make a global market place, although perhaps not for much longer.
- compuguy 8y ago
  This is why most sellers don't ship to international addresses....
nikanj 8y ago
I’ve read enough horror posts to have an innate understanding that selling on eBay is going to end with me losing the item I’m selling, and having to pay merchant fees and postage for the privilege of losing it. Their appeals process is pretty straight forward, in that they always side with the scam...buyer, no questions asked and no exceptions.
kosherbeefcake 8y ago
I have only had good experiences with eBay over the last 10 years. I’ve sold thousands of things over the years, and I’ve never had any run-ins with scammers. Then again, I’m not selling items that generally attract scammers. I have been trying to use eBay more, in place of amazon, when I don’t need it immediately.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
  I also generally have had decent experiences as of late. The article touches on discoverability of items as a key factor and I have to agree: my wife’s car had a catalytic converter warning light come on. To have them replaced by a mechanic is obviously quite expensive, and we had a make and model that looked like it was going to be not too much work to do ourselves. I’m not a car guy per se, but if you give me something that’s just unscrewing and screwing stuff in and it’s not too complex I can do it with a YouTube video. So on eBay you can just put the make, model and engine type in and it gives you the correct part. That’s pretty cool, albeit not terribly special. But the part I really enjoyed was that eBay told me I needed a gasket and a new O2 sensor as well (I wouldn’t have known about the gasket) and gave me a nice bundle to do it. In the end I just ended up replacing the O2 sensor and it was pretty simple to return the other parts. Print label, slap it onto the box, and drop it at the UPS store.
- dplgk 8y ago
  You don't mind the effectively 20% fee they charge you? Between eBay fee and PayPal fee.

75 points by petethomas 8y ago

The eBay/PayPal split has been a mess. eBay should have had its own, seamlessly integrated payments from the start, but lacking that PayPal was a good crutch. Since the split, you now get the choice of paying through eBay directly, through PayPal, or another way (depending on what the seller accepts). Simplifying this for small dollar transactions is critical if eBay is to stay competitive with Etsy, Amazon, Target, Walmart and the numerous others that are sharing the online shopping market.

sjjshzvuiajhz 8y ago
Are you sure this is a problem? It’s very common for retailers to offer multiple payment options. As long as they let you check a box to default to the same option in the future, I don’t think users mind.
lozaning 8y ago
Of all the reason I dont buy things from eBay, the payment options have very little to do with it.
ericras 8y ago
ebay did have its own integrated payments early on: Billpoint. (https://www.pymnts.com/digital-payments/2018/ebay-intermediates-payments-replaces-paypal-adyen-process-payments/ https://www.pymnts.com/digital-payments/2018/ebay-intermedia...) From what I recall, the fees were much higher then PayPal and it didn’t take long for PayPal to become the de facto standard.
jonknee 8y ago
> The eBay/PayPal split has been a mess It has been an absolute goldmine for shareholders. eBay bought PayPal for $1.5b in 2002 and spun it off in 2015 for ~$50b. PYPL is currently valued at $106b.
- masonic 8y ago
  Why would eBay shareholders consider it a "goldmine" if eBay let PayPal go for half of what it was worth?
  - tolle 8y ago
    I have not checked the details, but I read it as someone who held a share in Ebay+PayPal prior to PayPal being spun of got an Ebay share + X PayPal shares at the time of the spinoff. I don't think PayPal was bought for $50B, it was valued as that as a separate entity. The PayPal share has doubled in value since the split.
  - jonknee 8y ago
    Because they didn't sell it, they spun it off. Shareholders got 1 PYPL share for every share of EBAY. EBAY was ~$28 a share and the combined value of both is currently ~$123. An 80% annualized ROI seems like a goldmine to me!

johntiger1 8y ago

What went wrong with eBay? I remember getting my first gaming console--a gameboy SP during the mid 2000s from the site. We did something like buy-it-now, essentially an early Amazon. While the rest of tech rushes forward, they seem to be forever stuck... Right now I'd say StubHub occupies a bigger slice in the consumer mindshare.

SXX 8y ago
StubHub is owned by eBay though.
- masonic 8y ago
  Which is why eBay sabotages ticket sales on eBay by dumping thousands of StubHub "classified ads" in the tickets category so that genuine listings can't be found among the chaff. You can't even exclude the StubHub ads from your eBay search results. If a buyer buys direct on eBay from a seller, eBay gets about 10%. If it sells on StubHub, eBay gets 33-65%.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Ticket resellers are an absolute scourge on the music industry, anything that makes their life more difficult is fine by me.

gscott 8y ago

eBay should have bought Yahoo. They would have been perfect for each other.

heyjudy 8y ago
Lol? How? Yahoo and AOL seem to be perfectly happy riding into the non-innovation sunset with Verizon.

max76 8y ago

There are a lot of things I really like about Ebay. I have found myself using it more and more over the last year. I hope they highlight what makes them unique instead of trying to clone other e-commerce websites. * I know exactly which business is responsible for my purchase. A business with a good reputation cannot afford to sell counterfeit products, and no shared warehouseing means counterfeits do not get mixed in with actual goods. * Very cheap things are more competitively priced. Sometimes I like to buy things online that cost less than $5. * It’s possible to pay less for items and get them directly from overseas. It’s nice to get a discount for having a longer planning horizon. * It’s fairly easy to sell my unwanted items on the platform.

fermienrico 8y ago
Also, you can find some of the most obscure and rare items on eBay that’s simply impossible to find otherwise. For example, you can’t buy a Military APC[1] on Amazon :-) [1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/CUSTOMIZED-MILITARY-VEHICLE-BUILT-ON-A-6X6-CAIMAN-CHASSIS/122773527344 https://www.ebay.com/itm/CUSTOMIZED-MILITARY-VEHICLE-BUILT-O...

jurassic 8y ago

As a shopper I hate a lot of the recent shifts in their strategy. The only thing interesting enough to make me want to deal with all the hassles of eBay are the interesting vintage or collectible one-of-a-kind items: coins, camera gear, art, etc. These things are more work to list and describe but make for an always entertaining browsing experience. I loved eBay back in the day when it was like one big never-ending garage sale. The catalogization of eBay, moving toward SKU-based product pages with sellers providing fulfillment, ends up feeling like a weird me-too version of the Amazon FBA race to the bottom. Small sellers with interesting inventory have been bled to death with ever-increasing fees and seem ready to pack up the wagon and move on to greener pastures. The featured products on the homepage have the same bland sameness as every other e-com site and as a shopper I don't feel like I have much reason to ever go there these days. Right now I'm seeing a Patriots ballcap, some men's sneakers, and a small grill. Might as well be shopping at Target.

baroffoos 8y ago
I noticed the same thing. The front page is so boring it feels like a regular stores website. I don't know about the rest of their users but I don't come to ebay to buy sunglasses or phones. I'm looking for that obscure adapter that no store in the country sells. Or that game I used to play that has long since gone out of production. I can still find that stuff but there is no way to just casually look around at the interesting bits, you have to search for it.
- shittyadmin 8y ago
  I think the issue is that many people use eBay less than sites like Amazon or AliExpress where you're out to pick a product - I used to use ebay quite often for buying things like phone cases and electronics components directly from China. Now I choose AliExpress when I want it cheaper and Amazon when I want it faster. eBay has lost a lot of marketshare in this space - yes, there's business in auctioning collectibles and second hand stuff, but it's much smaller than that direct purchase market and they'd likely have to scale back the site in some respects.
- cft 8y ago

taneq 8y ago

This expectation of perpetual rapid growth across the board is bonkers. Are there any online auction sites that approach eBay's popularity? Are there that many new people who want to sell stuff online for eBay to serve? What's it going to take for the market to start accepting a large company with a healthy revenue stream as "big enough"?

Tepix 8y ago
They should never have gone public in the first place.
beatgammit 8y ago
I think they could expand by taking over Craigslist's marketshare. In some areas, Craigslist is super popular, in others it's virtually nonexistent. If they can find a way to connect local sellers with local buyers and make money doing it, they could make a killing.
- zengr 8y ago
  That's only in US. ebay classifieds is massive everywhere else out of US.

tern 8y ago

See Reverb.com for an example of eBay done better, for music gear: https://reverb.com/ https://reverb.com/

heyjudy 8y ago

So, basically greedy investors want eBay to ruin what's cool and useful about it... that it's not Amazon and not quite AliBaba either. Perhaps if they carefully tested expanding into less cool arenas like freight-forwarding, freight in general or delivery (merge with FedEx)... that might keep the capitalists at bay.

beering 8y ago
I don't see how spinning off Stubhub into a separate company will "ruin what's cool and useful about [eBay]". The rummage-sale aspect of eBay has and will change no matter how they choose to restructure their conglomeration.

cft 8y ago

I used eBay for buying expensive IT equipment (routers, IO accelerator cards) that quickly lose their value, as well as buying rare collectable items (coins, car parts for my old Audi). After reading the headline, my first thought was I will have to use AliExpress, but with collectables it's going to be harder. It's a sad reading, because there's always been room for department stores and for antique stores.

tasty_freeze 8y ago

15 years ago, I would visit ebay multiple times a day. I bought or sold something an average of once a week. Over time I used it less and less because it became a marketplace for cheap mass market consumer goods instead of an amazing bazaar. Part of the fun was not knowing what you'd find if you kept looking a little bit longer. These days I have to look up my password when I log in. When I do and search for, say, "arduino", I get 85 different Chinese vendors selling what appears to be the identical product for prices that are lower than the cost of just the CPU chip that is on it. I'm not saying it was better or worse, just different, and not what I loved about it a decade ago. But I'm in my 50s, and not the younger target demographic they think they can capture.

philpem 8y ago
I'm in the younger demographic, and they're not doing a great job capturing me! Half my test equipment collection came from ebay at one point or another, almost all of it bought "broken, parts only" and repaired. The bottom has completely fallen out of the market, these days it's all massive T&M vendors trying to shift junk at hugely inflated prices. It's really raised the barrier to entry for quite a few tech-related hobbies.

chrischen 8y ago

It’s really difficult to sell used items on Amazon but much easier on ebay despite their legacy UI (from when they used to actually charge for listings). If you really want to be green, buy used items and sell your things which you aren’t using so it’s not wasting resources.

opportune 8y ago

eBay kind of got eaten from all sides: Amazon took over the regular stuff, Etsy got the niche and handmade stuff, Alibaba and Aliexpress got the cheap Chinese stuff outside of Amazon. So a lot of what's left as a regular user are scams or simple resellers. Amazon also has a lot of the "garage sale" type of stuff these days

Springtime 8y ago
> Etsy got the niche and handmade stuff, Alibaba and Aliexpress got the cheap Chinese stuff outside of Amazon In my previous searches of Etsy so many of the results were comprised of cheap (originally), mass-produced products masquerading as 'hand-made'. Peppered among them are actual hand-made or vintage goods but I'm not sure if Etsy was intending to address such listings, though things may have changed from when I stopped browsing (a couple years ago).
yzb 8y ago
I use eBay mostly for the resellers, i.e., when I need to buy some Chinese crap but I can't wait 2-3 weeks until it arrives here, so I buy it from some reseller in my country. Back in the day, before aliexpress, it was good too because you could rip off the sellers. Just claim the thing never arrived and since for cheap stuff they had no tracking numbers the seller always had to refund you. You could get TONS of free stuff that way. Now aliexpress does this right and it's significantly harder.
- opportune 8y ago
  that seems pretty immoral

zanny 8y ago

How is it that billion dollar companies with legions of employees cannot recognize why people don't use their product? What is ebay? The online auction site. If you have something to sell, you should be going there. If you want something you can't find in a normal store, you should be checking ebay first. If you aren't selling on Ebay, or aren't checking Ebay, those are the areas they need to improve on. You don't take the most successful business in a market (peer to peer auctions) and try to spin it into some other store to keep up with impossible growth expectations. So you go look at why people aren't using your service... I don't sell on Ebay because either the fees are too high to justify going through the effort making a listing, shipping the thing, and losing about 20% of the sale price to Ebay on something that I'm often getting poor margins on anyway. Or I'm not selling on Ebay because I don't trust their buyer contention system to be honest. I've heard enough horror stories of sellers getting refunded against and losing their often expensive products in the process with no recourse despite mountains of photo evidence of what they sold. I don't buy on Ebay because its so hard to find legitimacy. I have never figured out why I should ever trust feedback scores - every single seller is always gold starred maxed out positive feedback, some are "Top Rated Plus" which I have no idea what that even is supposed to mean, and you can't comment on most listings or seller pages to call out the bad actors. I got some fake batteries for a Note 4 a few years back and while Ebay accepted my complaint and refunded me the batteries while letting me keep them because they were falsely advertised as NFC capable when they weren't, I had no real way to indicate to others a seller with 100,000 feedback score was selling counterfeits. Generally their search is pretty good and their filtering is solid. I can almost always find what I'm looking for and figure out the right place to list what I want to sell. Those aren't problems. If they want more of my business, I need to have confidence that when I act legitimately I won't get scammed, and when I buy something the buyer is also legitimate. Its the exact same reason I shop so much less on Amazon nowadays and it seems zero tech company wants to take responsibility for actually insuring their storefronts are selling what the pages say they are and that sellers can expect not to be screwed over illegitimately too.

bredren 8y ago

Surprised no one else has said this, but eBay was ugly as sin for a very long time! Even now, the pages are crowded with variant font sizes and styles. There are offers galore as though the site competes with itself to get you to click on various things. I gotta say, it is downright horrendous to look at an ebay listing still! Look at this example from just now. https://i.imgur.com/1cjoT36.png https://i.imgur.com/1cjoT36.png I mean, it wants me to write a review for this item as though this is possibly something I would do looking at it for the first time. It wants me to "make more cash and sell whats hot" it wants me to shop with confidence and learn more what that means. It wants me to buy it now and add it to the cart. Oh but don't forget 3-year protection plan from blah for $26. Is there any site on the internet that has such a mess for a product page than this? I can't think of something worse. eBay should break up the company if it means it can create reasonable item listings. What they have now is a a travesty of a product page. This hasn't been okay outside eBay, ever.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Yet Amazon isn't better at any of this. Same jumble of fonts, ropey hostile layout, it asks for reviews on products I haven't bought, suggests I might like to sell one, take out a subscription and shows ads for competing products. They also try and make the distinction between Amazon and marketplace as vague as possible.
- nikkwong 8y ago
  Whenever I bring this up I get contested at the fact that Amazon has A/B tested the customer-facing e-commerce portion of their site down to the very pixel. If any page on the web has the incentive to go through massive amounts of A/B testing, its those product pages for sure. Yet, then I look at those pages, and think to myself... really? This monstrosity is the result? Still so confused.
  - the-dude 8y ago
    Are you aware of the 'Belcher button' ?
8y ago

shay_ker 8y ago

Hmmm... I'm surprised eBay didn't go the Amazon route - see what's working well in the marketplace, and then sell it yourself. For instance, there are clearly a lot of electronics that sold at below-market rates just because of the hassle of an auction. If eBay could "pose as a buyer" and buy items at a certain price point, re-sell them for a little more, they could make money on the margins. In fact, I'm certain a lot of people use eBay to do exactly this, I just don't know how large the market is.

notahacker 8y ago
When you have a business model which make a steady 10% per sale for hosting a seller-updated web page and shopping cart, why would you adopt the far more risky strategy of employing more people to analyse, buy, hold and handle items in the hope you'll eke out net profits from reselling at higher prices on the same platform in future? Especially if doing so is likely to irritate part of your existing customer base.

puranjay 8y ago

An understated reason for Amazon's dominance is the popularity of the Amazon Affiliate program. Because of Amazon's strong conversion rates, a massive number of bloggers use it as their primary revenue source. Google any "money" keyword such as "best Bluetooth speakers' and virtually all top 20 results will have Amazon affiliate links This allows Amazon to dominate SERPs. No matter what people Google, the links eventually end up leading to Amazon

twblalock 8y ago

eBay should not be having such a big problem. Look at all the niche trends that are being empowered by the internet: - Vintage mechanical watches - Vintage fountain pens - Vintage mechanical keyboards - Vintage woodworking hand tools - Vintage European bicycle parts - Vintage film cameras, especially SLRs and Leicas - New things that look like those vintage things (often superficially) and make a lot of money on Kickstarter and Massdrop and Hodinkee and get resold when the hipster buyers move on to the next thing. eBay is the best place to buy this stuff. It's hard to believe they can't figure out how to make money.

dagw 8y ago
It's hard to believe they can't figure out how to make money. Making a bit of money is not a problem. Making so much money that all their investors are happy is a problem. Their investors don't want a modest company that makes modest profits on modest revenue.

smaili 8y ago

To this day I still can't list any of my extremely valuable items because of "seller limits" even though I've been a member for over 15 years and have not once gotten a negative review. Pretty disappointing considering the money they could be making off my sold transactions.

mcintyre1994 8y ago

Ah, Elliott. I worked at a company they took an interest in, this sucks for employees. They’re a powerful force and they seemed to get what they wanted.

cagataygurturk 8y ago
Care to elaborate how you were affected
- mcintyre1994 8y ago
  They made the CEO leave, layoffs just before he left, another round of layoffs after we were repeatedly told there wouldn't be when the new CEO came on board, spun off a successful unit, it devastates morale and makes you pretty keen to leave quickly. I figure it works for them but it sucks to work at a company they're doing that to.

setquk 8y ago

Drop seller fees right down. £45 on a £450 item and then to shaft you for fees on postage for a virtual listing is a fucking joke. You can tell how bad it has got because eBay has no new listings unless there’s a seller fees offer on.

kogepathic 8y ago
Indeed. Paying 10% of the sale price in fees is quite unpleasant, especially when there are equivalent services that will let you post an ad for free (e.g. Craigslist, Kijiji, eBay Kleinanzeigen, PAP) Also, eBay doesn't really offer you much in this era. You can't include videos, and you're limited to a small number of photos. Arguably the worst non-feature of eBay, is that they make it incredibly difficult to calculate the average price of an item. I end up lurking for months on items to build a history of the average price of a product before I decide whether to buy it. Their aggressive policy of deleting closed auctions makes historical comparisons extremely difficult.
entity345 8y ago
Fees aren't cheaper on Amazon.

carboy 8y ago

It took Sears 126 years to fall apart, eBay is doing it in 23, but I doubt anyone will be upset

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
To be fair it is one of the longest-lived of the original dotcom bubble companies. 23 years is multiple lifetimes when you're talking about the internet.

packeted 8y ago

I want to love eBay but I can see why the board is so unhappy and the rot has been infiltrating the company for a long time. Back in the 00's I was a PowerSeller, shifting over $20k a month. At first it was an incredible experience and I was selling high value items to people all over the world with high margins and almost always a great experience. I was long on eBay and became a shareholder, passing up on Amazon whose business seemed much less appealing to me at the time. Then came along PayPal with their 3.5% uncapped fee, which on expensive items was significant. Buyers started expecting to be able to pay via PayPal and eBay stopped allowing trusted sellers to offer a small discount for paying by wire or cash. PayPal eventually became mandatory. Later, eBay's fees went up significantly. Those along with PayPal's fees ate in to my margins and I eventually lost interest, packed up shop and sold my stock at about break-even. While I continued to be an occasional buyer, I recently started selling a few items again. I was met with frequent time waster winning bidders and the same high fees that I remembered. My last sale was an iPhone X that went to Thailand, "covered" under PayPal's seller protection and sent with a shipping label printed directly from eBay's site. A few days after I had sent it, the buyer filed a dispute with PayPal saying he hadn't received it. PayPal almost immediately sided with the buyer with a boiler plate reply, removing the money from my account (including all fees) before the phone even had time to arrive. I sent an email to appeal which was met with a curt denial. I was almost $1500 out of pocket. Don't even get me started on their site and mobile app - so much could be improved and way too many clicks to do anything meaningful. One of my last battles was spending 3 hours on the phone to try and resolve an account bug as I had transitioned from UK->US which seems to be an edge case they didn't finish working on. It makes me sad because the idea behind eBay is fundamentally a fantastic one, you can still find great stuff on there and the prices are often much lower than Amazon (even more so with the recent coupons they must be burning through cash on). They still have the audience to make a global market place, although perhaps not for much longer.

compuguy 8y ago
This is why most sellers don't ship to international addresses....

nikanj 8y ago

I’ve read enough horror posts to have an innate understanding that selling on eBay is going to end with me losing the item I’m selling, and having to pay merchant fees and postage for the privilege of losing it. Their appeals process is pretty straight forward, in that they always side with the scam...buyer, no questions asked and no exceptions.

kosherbeefcake 8y ago

I have only had good experiences with eBay over the last 10 years. I’ve sold thousands of things over the years, and I’ve never had any run-ins with scammers. Then again, I’m not selling items that generally attract scammers. I have been trying to use eBay more, in place of amazon, when I don’t need it immediately.

SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
I also generally have had decent experiences as of late. The article touches on discoverability of items as a key factor and I have to agree: my wife’s car had a catalytic converter warning light come on. To have them replaced by a mechanic is obviously quite expensive, and we had a make and model that looked like it was going to be not too much work to do ourselves. I’m not a car guy per se, but if you give me something that’s just unscrewing and screwing stuff in and it’s not too complex I can do it with a YouTube video. So on eBay you can just put the make, model and engine type in and it gives you the correct part. That’s pretty cool, albeit not terribly special. But the part I really enjoyed was that eBay told me I needed a gasket and a new O2 sensor as well (I wouldn’t have known about the gasket) and gave me a nice bundle to do it. In the end I just ended up replacing the O2 sensor and it was pretty simple to return the other parts. Print label, slap it onto the box, and drop it at the UPS store.
dplgk 8y ago
You don't mind the effectively 20% fee they charge you? Between eBay fee and PayPal fee.