posted on January 10, 2008 08:08:22 PM new
Another eBay Powerseller shifts its business to Bidtopia.com.
By Karen Clark
January 10, 2008
Blondy’s has been a large volume Power Seller for several years on Ebay selling positioning themselves as one of the largest sellers of New and Resale luxury apparel for both men and women.
According to T.H.Kerr, we chose the Bidtopia auction marketplace so we could better execute what we were able to do so well in the initial years selling on eBay - provide a vast variety of exciting items each week to our customers, answer their questions in a reasonable manner, and ship their items as quickly as possible.
In the past 6 months, we felt we were no longer able to achieve this level of execution with the instability of eBay.
Unlike anytime in the past, we had seen a large number of a “new breed” of Winning Bidders who actually began leaving random negative feedbacks, followed by an immediate telephone call where they would offer to remove the negative feedback if we would give them free shipping, or most recently numerous attempts to renegotiate a reduction in the winning bid amount in trade for removing the negative feedback (s) they had just left.
These new type of savvy bidders began cropping up following the new eBay seller performance policy hoping to leverage the negative feedback against the possibility of us becoming restricted as a result of the negative feedbacks.
In other cases, non paying bidders grew to 35%. A non-paying bidder action would be initiated and if the buyer would actually pay for the item, they would make a payment 3 to 4 weeks later directly through PayPal and become angry that the item they won was no longer available on the eBay “lay-away” plan resulting in additional negative feedbacks. In the meantime, all of eBay selling fee’s continued to skyrocket.
As a result, the number of items we could list on eBay dropped from an average of 2,000 items per month down to a significantly lower number. This action was then followed up with a simple no-notice cancellation of all live items about 30 minutes prior to the items ending from week to week. Customer service at eBay had become non existent and when you were able to get through to your account representative, they had no answers.
This type of hasty behavior had an immediate negative impact on the customers experience, diminishing the number of bidders on eBay.
Today’s customers have many choices to choose from when it comes to spending their leisure time and dollars with many other auction platforms such as bidtopia.com, bidz.com and other value added sites such as Amazon.com where they have a certain expectation and are generally pleased with the experience.
From what we have seen is that many of those customers are now taking advantage of the variety of new marketplaces they have to choose from resulting in a shrinking number of bidders on eBay with a vast number of sellers.
Simply put, the choice was simple for us. It no longer made good business sense for us to leverage our entire business within a Company that had created a hostile environment and had become unstable to the point where we could no longer predict sales volumes or customer service levels. The bulk of our business has always been generated through repeat customers who have grown with us through the years and know exactly what to expect.
While we are maintaining our active account on eBay in hopes that sometime in the future new leadership may change the culture, we simply are not going to hinge our entire future on it for now.
Our family of employees are a fantastic group ranging from college students, parents, single mothers to a wonderful grandmother who are all passionate about the quality of their work and the level of customer service they are able to give, and rely on our business to support them and their families.
As a company we know that we will not always hit the mark, but more often than not we do. One of the nations largest insurance Company’s – Geico Insurance boasts on their national television ads that they have a 95% customer service satisfaction rating. Our lowest customer satisfaction rating has been 98% and a highest of 99.8%.
We believe in our business model and our ability to deliver truly value added products and service to a very loyal group of customers. We are very excited to once again have the ability to “reliably” offer our products and service to our existing loyal customers as well as Bidtopia bidders in an auction format that is fun and exciting for both the bidder and seller.
The culture of the Bidtopia organization is rich with innovative and forward thinking leadership and a common goal – to provide a platform where the buyer and seller have a truly great experience.
