posted on October 8, 2001 09:47:12 AM
Auction for America causing sales to plummet. Ebay has done a bad thing, while doing a good thing. The bidding on auctions not included in the Auction for America, has almost stopped. Many sellers are losing business, and still paying the ebay listing fee, while ebay steers potential bidders to the Auction for America site. I have donated to the Red Cross and the Fireman Fund, and this is a good cause, BUT, I cannot afford to pay Ebay fees and then have the bidders steered elsewhere. The charity auctions should be integrated into the regular ebay site if I am going to be charged a listing fee. I deal in high volume low priced merchandise, and run over 250-300 auctions per week on ebay, so my listing fees are high, and there are thousands of small business folks on ebay, who are dependent on a lot of traffic on ebay, for sales. We can have both by integrating the charity auctions into the regular ebay site.
posted on October 8, 2001 10:06:39 AM
There are about 6,000,000 auction listings on eBay right now and of those, only 16,631 are for A4A. That is way less than 1%. I think there are many reasons for slow sales, A4A being only a very small part of it. I think there are bigger problems out there than A4A, so don't put all the blame on charity auctions.
posted on October 8, 2001 10:37:05 AM
I agree imo - AFA had the biggest impact for the first couple of days and now it's a non-factor.
I think the biggest reason for declining bids/views is the excruciating slowness of the eBay site. They have cluttered the pages with so much junk, and AOL-related page transfers (I can't remember what they are called) that I think lots of potential bidders just give up in boredom and disgust.
There are loads of people who will never be able to get cable or DSL--either because of availability, or because of finances.
If a potential bidder finds 20 interesting items in search, but it takes 2 mins or longer to open up the page for one--then the bidder isn't likely to sit around for almost an hour going through every possible item. She'll either bid on the first thing she sees (and how likely is that?) or she'll quit in disgust.
