posted on August 16, 2006 06:37:47 AM
As a former storeowner, I decided to pass-up this promotion; instead I canceled my store. We didn’t use the store to list a lot of items; instead we used to group our Auction and Fixed Price listing. There too many loop holes on this two-day promotion, I specially didn’t like to loan eBay money in the form of advanced fees for a month or two, which in my case would be substantial, since we list high price items.
Since eBay has became a mature industry, the only way to generate additional listings is through promotions, when the number of listings exceeds 12 Million, the market became saturated and the Sales Thru Rate falls. If one is to believe the Charts generated by medved.net. Reading some of the notes from that website, it seems to me that the number of listing are manipulated by eBay, before they are made available to medved.net. Why would otherwise eBay not publish their own Charts as to the Number of Listings and Sell Thru Rate, that would be a great tool for the sellers, it is because they want to avoid the liability, if they indeed are manipulating the figures as medved.net notes seem to indicate from time to time.
If you examine the Number of Listings Charts, you will notice that eBay has a promotion as soon as the number of listings falls below the magic 12 million listing number.
We have now decided only to list during the eBay promotion and only during these that makes sense to list. This is not one that makes sense to us!
1. An analysis of this two-day promotion indicates a limited success, in the first day only 1.1 million listings were generated and I don’t expect the total number of listing to reach 3 million. A very low amount considering this is a two-day promotion, other promotions have yield a much higher number of listing. See http://www.medved.net/cgi-bin/cal.exe?EIND
2. The Maximum amount that this promotion will generate on listing fees is perhaps $300.000; and probable little on FVF, since the Sell Thru Rate usually falls during promotions. The last promotion we listed 45 items with zero sales.
3. The only bright side for eBay is that they were able to borrow on the form of advance fees, between $12 Million and $1 Million Dollars, since probable most of the listings were these on the high end of the price scale, it is reasonable to expect that they realize about a $5 Million loan in the form of advance fees. Considering the low rate of interest on Money Market accounts at the present time, it was not such a great accomplishment, unless they were low on cash.
4. It would also inflate the number of listings and the revenues of the 3rd Quarter, a little Ponzi’s scheme, to confuse investors and analyst, hoping that their stock prices does not fall.
5. It since the promotion is in the form of a credit for future listing, it lock the eBay seller to list additional items in the future. However, it seems that storeowners were very smart and didn’t fall for this Ponzi’s scheme.
posted on August 16, 2006 06:56:47 AM
I wonder if numbers will move at all - remember there are no "new" listings being generated - just a conversion of SIF to auction/FP format.
I am participating in this promotion. For one thing it is a way to get me to "Clean up" my aging listings -
Maybe it was the effect of "PayDay" on the 15th but I did see an increase in store sales (not the ones I am converting) last night. I always think that this side-effect of running lots of listings during promotional periods is better than the actual sales generated from the promotion.
EBay could have handled this better and it is odd that they are not clarifying the promotion or answering questions (ie: is BIN going to be credited or not)on the boards. I wouldn't trust an answer given to me by "Live Help" because they generally are more clueless about anything that is "off the script" than we are.
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posted on August 16, 2006 07:16:00 AMI wonder if numbers will move at all - remember there are no "new" listings being generated - just a conversion of SIF to auction/FP format.
Yes, the number of listing will go up, since it is my understanding from http://www.medved.net/cgi-bin/cal.exe?EIND that only the totals of the listings that appear on search are counted. Otherwise the Sell Thru Rate would be decimal.
I am participating in this promotion. For one thing it is a way to get me to "Clean up" my aging listings -
Probably in your case it makes sense, since you are not loaning eBay too large of an amount in advance fees, however, in our case, because of the price range of most of our listings we would be loaning eBay $3.90 for most of our listings.
I hope that it works out well for you, with a lot of sales!
Semper Fi!
[ edited by usmarines on Aug 16, 2006 07:31 AM ]
