posted on March 12, 2009 01:58:50 PM new
My hubby says there was a segment on CNBC that eBay was going to go back to selling used items. The segment said they acknowledge they can't compete with Amazon, etc. Did anyone see the segment? How great it would be if they go back to what made them great in the first place, auctions!!
posted on March 12, 2009 02:59:43 PM new
This must come from the WSJ article. On the other hand, Scot Wingo and others say that eBay is aiming for big box liquidators etc.
posted on March 12, 2009 04:12:50 PM new
I don't understand why big box retailers/liquidators would want to bother with eBay when they could have their own web sites far cheaper?
posted on March 12, 2009 04:55:52 PM new
Big box retailers were lured by Ebay traffic and thought they would sell mucho!
CNBC -auction revenue will account for 51 % and the growth will come from PAYPAL.
Ebay thought by setting up Half.com,Ebay Express and store formats ,they could compete,me think the auction is what kills Ebay express and stores,people think the whole Ebay is about used,refurbished,returns and damaged goods,so they go to AMZN if they want good service and new items.
Now Ebay is stuck with us,going down the path of no and low return ,watching us toiling over the Ebay format,listing one item at a time ,leaving feedback and collecting nickels and dimes.
*
Economic Reform act of Chairman Obama of the socialist States of America :
10 ounces of meat per month,half a yard of cotton per year per adult.
Hellilujah!
posted on March 13, 2009 02:52:55 AM new
The 16% drop could have been the result of a lot of good sellers leaving and taking their quality antiques with them.
I think it's about time for ebay to admit they have made some very poor changes this past year and a half.
I for one would love to see the auctions regain their popularity but please don't take away Fixed Price. Two thirds (or more) of my sales come from that format now. That's the one thing ebay got right this last year.
posted on March 13, 2009 03:33:10 AM new
I could not read the whole article since I am not a Wall Stree Journal subscriber but 'used and overstocked goods' does not sound good. Doesn't sound like collectibles and antiques to me. Does it go on to say they will concentrate on auction type again? I sure wish eBay would announce to US what they plan to do. Thanks in advance.
posted on March 13, 2009 06:19:51 AM new
I think if ebay had not been soooo greedy, continuing to increase rates way to often and taking away almost all power to the sellers, such as payment choices, feedback, etc. They would not be in the position they are in now. I would love it if they would go back, but I doubt they do. I loved selling on ebay at one time ( for several years) and I made money, then it seemed that the fees were eating at most of my profit. In my case, it was a simple decision to leave ebay as a seller, I still buy there several times a week, usually.
Company Will Return to Its Roots as Internet Flea Market, Put More Focus on PayPal
By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER
EBay Inc., a onetime Internet star that thrived with its pioneering auction model, is retreating from its strategy of competing across the board in online retailing as it contends with its own missteps and changing consumer behavior.
EBay Chief Executive John Donahoe told analysts Wednesday that the San Jose, Calif., company plans to focus its online-marketplace business on used and overstocked goods, rather than on the retail market for new goods that is dominated by competitors such as Amazon.com Inc.
EBay's visitor traffic fell over the recent holiday season and the company reported a 16% drop in fourth-quarter revenue for its marketplace business. The online-marketplace business constitutes about half of eBay's $8.5 billion in annual revenue.
EBay's focus on its "secondary market" includes the used and vintage goods that the company is already known for selling, as well as clearance and out-of-season items. The move is a shift from just a few years ago when eBay developed sites such as eBay Express to sell new goods, and when many in the retail industry expected eBay to dominate all forms of online commerce.
"We aren't a retailer," said Mr. Donahoe, who took over as CEO from Meg Whitman early last year. "We're going to focus where we can win." Mr. Donahoe valued the global market for secondary-market goods, online and otherwise, at $500 billion a year.
EBay spent Wednesday trying to persuade analysts that it is no longer just an online auction company and that its greatest hopes for growth rest in PayPal, an online payment company it acquired in 2002 that is able to benefit from overall growth in e-commerce, not just sales on eBay's sites. It announced a deal with Research In Motion Ltd. for PayPal to become the exclusive payment method for the application store on BlackBerry smart phones.
Still, the move amounts to an acknowledgment by eBay that it can't compete with Amazon and other e-commerce companies that represent the online equivalent of a shopping mall. Instead, eBay is returning to its roots as the Web's flea market by focusing on used and overstocked items, albeit with an effort to rethink the classic eBay shopping interface that has grown stale in recent years. EBay had taken off as an early leader in e-commerce in the late 1990s with an auction model that guaranteed consumers could find the best price on many used and leftover items.
But in the last few years, eBay has been felled by a shift in consumer behavior as shoppers revert to the buying habits that were familiar in the pre-Internet era. Before the Web, typical consumers preferred going straight to brand-name stores selling new goods, with the best customer service, to purchase the latest goods. The growth of malls across the nation reflected this preference; flea markets and thrift shops were a small sliver of commerce.
For a while, eBay appeared to cause a blip in that behavior, as new online consumers went to its site to snag deals by outbidding other people. But as the novelty of online auctions wore off -- and as the demographic of online shoppers broadened beyond the adventurous "early adopters" -- consumers began defaulting to huge online retailers like Amazon.com, Buy.com and Wal-Mart.com to buy their items. EBay, too, began shifting its focus to fixed-price sales but wasn't able to keep up with the competition on mainstream retail items.
EBay also is dealing with its own fumbles, many under the leadership of Ms. Whitman, the former CEO. The company rested too long on the laurels of its auction business, even as rivals like Amazon built their online retail offerings. EBay later tried to diversify into other areas for growth, purchasing Internet telephone service Skype Technologies SA for about $2.6 billion in cash and stock in 2005. But the deal didn't result in major revenue or customer growth. EBay later took a write-off on the acquisition, and there has been speculation the company wants to sell Skype. EBay has declined to comment on the speculation.
In addition, eBay is being hurt by the recession. As consumers searched for online deals during the recent holiday shopping season, many gravitated to Amazon.com, which experienced a big jump in visitor traffic and posted a record holiday quarter. But eBay -- which had benefited in the dot-com bust and economic slowdown earlier this decade when many consumers dumped used goods for sale on the site -- saw a drop in traffic, according to figures from comScore Inc.
EBay has been scrambling to reverse its slowing growth. After Ms. Whitman retired last year, her handpicked successor, Mr. Donahoe, made a series of changes. These included emphasizing fixed-price sales and giving preference to merchants who get positive customer ratings.
But the changes have yet to pay off. EBay reported its first-ever quarterly revenue decline, 7%, in the fourth quarter as profit fell 31%. Increasingly, eBay has relied for growth on its nonmarketplace businesses, such as its PayPal unit, which has doubled in revenue over the past 18 months.
EBay's emphasis on the secondary market is an "attempt to differentiate themselves from Amazon," said Scot Wingo, the chief executive of ChannelAdvisor Corp., a company that helps merchants sell across a variety of e-commerce sites, including eBay and Amazon. (EBay has a minority share in the company.) "It was an admission that they have a competitor out there that they previously wouldn't address," Mr. Wingo said.
An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.
As part of its sharpened focus, eBay Wednesday sketched out changes to its marketplace to help bring back shoppers who have migrated to other sites. The company said it is refining its search engine and developing a catalog of its products, which will let shoppers find what they're looking for more easily and choose from different colors or sizes of an item from a single page. EBay also is experimenting with new interfaces that enable shoppers to explore products via photos, based on similarities in color or style.
Such moves, along with growth at PayPal, should boost revenue to between $10 billion and $12 billion in 2011 from $8.5 billion last year, the company said. EBay executives said they expect operating earnings to grow by mid-single digits through 2011.
Still, the company predicted this year will be difficult. Its 2011 revenue goal and prediction that operating earnings would grow in the single digits "assumes that the global economy returns to some sense of normalcy," said eBay Chief Financial Officer Bob Swan.
Mr. Donahoe predicted PayPal will produce revenue of $4 billion to $5 billion by 2011, compared with $2.4 billion last year, and could become the largest portion of eBay's business.
EBay also warned that, as it makes changes to its marketplace, sales in that business will underperform that of other e-commerce companies this year. The company forecast its online-marketplace unit will generate $5 billion to $7 billion in revenue by 2011, suggesting sales could remain flat from $5.6 billion last year.
Mr. Donahoe didn't name companies that he had wooed into using eBay for secondary-market sales, but signaled that they might include some middle-market players that buy overstocked items in bulk. He said his company's "sweet spot is as much with intermediaries as with retailers."
Analysts were receptive to eBay's emphasis on the secondary market. "But it comes down to executing on them," said John Aiken, an analyst with Majestic Research. "If they can make the buyer experience incrementally better, there will be more buyers, and therefore more sellers."
eBay Strategy Revealed: Overstock Inventory from Diamond Liquidators
eBay delivered a broad overview of its business to analysts on Wednesday and painted a rosy picture - for the year 2011. But it was during the Question and Answer segment of eBay Analyst Day that sellers got a sense of eBay's strategy with regard to its marketplaces business. "Secondary Markets" was the terminology executives used throughout the day. ("The secondary market is a sweet spot with a global opportunity of $500 billion dollars a year." Translation: overstock inventory served up by Diamond level PowerSellers advantaged in a number of ways, including lower fees and better exposure in search results. Just the message that small, longtime sellers on eBay didn't want to hear.
Although it was less than a year ago that executives spoke about moving eBay to a more "retail-like" experience, CEO John Donahoe was firm on Wednesday that eBay was not a retailer. All the talk about Secondary Markets, where there are "inefficient supply chains and sellers looking for velocity," deflected analysts from comparing the company with Amazon.com, which has beefed up its third-party seller business and performed well in the fourth quarter.
Donahoe said the marketplaces business would be down in 2009 as eBay fixes the fundamentals by doing the following: improving the user experience, innovating through technology, and strengthening complementary formats.
eBay created a special deal with Buy.com last spring; introduced Diamond PowerSellers in June; and launched a "large merchant services" API just before Thanksgiving. Mercent, a third-party vendor, launched "catalog merchandising and order integration software" integrated with the new API and began bringing on large multi-channel retailers on to the eBay site.
Mercent CEO Eric Best participated in a dialog on the Twitter service with others who were following the Analyst Day webcast. He wrote, "Stay tuned for upcoming Mercent news regarding eBay Large Merchant Services APIs and new FP seller stores in coming days and weeks."
eBay's strategy of advantaging a class of sellers is different from the company's early years, when managers simply brought buyers and sellers together. Founder Pierre Omidyar championed the concept of the level playing field, and former CEO Meg Whitman frequently told the story of how it was users who inspired the idea for eBay Motors by listing autos on the site without guidance from eBay. But today's executives reject the "invisible hand" philosophy and are instead using a heavy hand to influence what will be sold, who will sell it, and how.
The first part of Analyst Day was consumed with messaging about eBay's "portfolio" of businesses (eBay, PayPal and Skype). eBay as a company is undervalued to the point that it keeps Chief Financial Officer Bob Swan up at night, "miffed."
PayPal, clearly positioned as the star of the portfolio, will launch a new checkout later this year integrated with its new acquisition, Bill Me Later. Skype is the enigma, not providing synergies with eBay or PayPal, but according to John Donahoe, "not a distraction," either.
Two eBay executives talked about the eBay marketplaces. Lorrie Norrington, President of eBay Marketplaces, defined what eBay meant by the term secondary market in answering a two-part question from one of the analysts in attendance. "At the highest level, this is a pretty natural extension of the business that we're in. When you think about what we built eBay on, the used segment of the secondary markets, this is about looking in off-price retail, in warehouses, in liquidators, and bringing those things that are literally sitting offline to online. It's as simple as that."
Norrington also said it's about "making sure that we are doing right the acquisition and right marketing with those sellers together. We're changing how we actually show some of those sellers, those larger sellers, on eBay."
Stephanie Telenius, SVP & GM, North America Marketplaces, gave some examples of secondary market sellers, including Buy.com, SmartBargains for clothing, TigerDirect in the electronics space, and Act and Powell in the book space. She said eBay was ramping up its business development.
Telenius also said eBay is letting companies brand themselves on eBay. "We're creating branded pages where the merchant can control the experience, and we're working with them to onboard lots the inventory."
Mercent's Best liked what he was hearing from eBay. He tweeted, "Focus on expanded sell formats, search and catalog fixes - should bode well for Mercent and our ecommerce clients," and "Love the Amazon-like approach to single detail pages including FP, auctions, classifieds and ads - with real merchandising options."
A commenter in the AuctionBytes Blog who was following Analyst Day wrote that they saw eBay trying to become the shopping destination of the Internet. "Now I see them as moving toward a search portal. Trying to be like Google for shopping, they will still have the small seller listing through or directly via ebay. But somehow they want all the items sold on the internet to get exposure through ebay, should be interesting."
posted on March 13, 2009 08:50:21 AM new
They might screw things up, but if they're going to assign value to auctions, i.e., the selling of "used and overstocked" items, then they're at least playing to their strengths.
Trying to out-Amazon Amazon isn't going to work for them. They should stick to their knitting.
posted on March 13, 2009 04:43:51 PM new
Trying to out-Amazon Amazon isn't going to work for them. They should stick to their knitting//////////////
Unfortunately there is not much future in sticking to their knitting-providing a venue for used/worn stuff and overstock stuff.
It may be fine for other companies say Epier which would be grateful to pick up some decent nickel and dimes from all these low price transactions,but not Ebay a publicly traded company with high overhead.One of these days,their expenses will overwhelm their revenue,they will start posting losses and eventually fold.
There are a lot of folding going on out there these days!
As to selling their proprietary software,how much value should you assign to their miles and miles of program codes dealing with 13,000 rules and the robot running constantly looking for shillbidding and other destructive behavior!
SOftware is not like scrap metal,you can always sell copper wires and scrap steel to the junk dealers!
*
Economic Reform act of Chairman Obama of the socialist States of America :
10 ounces of meat per month,half a yard of cotton per year per adult.
Hellilujah!
posted on March 13, 2009 06:01:29 PM new
the VALUE in eBay as it always has been for the most part - you can find that *one thing* you were looking for.
i.e. - my husband gave me a bracelet for Christmas one year and somehow I lost it. I didn't want to break his heart and tell him I lost it because he would tell me he would never buy me expensive jewelry again.
so...eBay. It took me a few months BUT I did find the exact match. I'm happy. He's clueless. If I find the missing bracelet I'll eBay the new one.
posted on March 13, 2009 06:34:16 PM new
WELL,good for you that you found an identical bracelet,in the mean time,Ebay staff will be eating sphagetti without meat sauce for dinner waiting for those who are looking for their lost bracelets!
I would love to watch the investment banker trying to sell Ebay,touting with a straight face how valuable are those program codes for 13,000 rules!
BTW,growth coming from Paypal,one of the unique features of Paypal is that it is tied to Ebay,you sell something on Ebay and build up that Paypal balance and use it as you wish,even getting 1 1/2 to 1 % rebate when you use it as a credit card.
So if you dont sell on Ebay,you may not be bothered using Paypal.
It becomes just another card!
*
Economic Reform act of Chairman Obama of the socialist States of America :
10 ounces of meat per month,half a yard of cotton per year per adult.
Hellilujah!
posted on March 14, 2009 04:16:52 PM new
well,eating sphagetti without meat sauce ?
Someone once said to me,without a good paying job,he would be eating sphagetti without meat sauce every night,meaning he cannot afford ground beef,all he can afford is tomato sauce with his sphagetti.
*
Economic Reform act of Chairman Obama of the socialist States of America :
10 ounces of meat per month,half a yard of cotton per year per adult.
Hellilujah!
posted on March 14, 2009 09:06:17 PM new
I don't think ebay can really go back. There are two things ebay has to overcome, and it isn't going to be easy:
1) It isn't 1998 - meaning that many people aren't going to bother with an auction. While as a seller I love sniping, I can't tell you how many buyers I've talked to that are so turned off by it they don't even bother. There are certainly exceptions to the auction format. I know fluffy is very successful with it. I also have been doing wholesale auction lots and have seen a decent amount of success with it.
2) Sellers aren't buying it - Ebay has alienated SO many sellers that I don't know if they are ever going to find their way back. There are just too many sellers who will never trust ebay, and often with good reason.
The interesting thing for me is that after trending away from ebay as a venue for sales over the past 5-7 years, I've now been able to find a way to make ebay work for me, and after going to under 10% of my total sales, in 2008 they were about 40% of my total sales, and might even hit 50% in 2009.
posted on March 14, 2009 09:11:04 PM new
I used to really like to buy auction style, but now if I see a buy it now, I'll do that instead, everytime. The excitement even as a buyer is long gone, now it is like going to Wal-Mart (something that I need or want but hate the process).
posted on March 21, 2009 08:20:22 PM new
In their Media area all I see with bringing all these diamond powersellers items to the top of the search is the prices being driven into the dirt like it is on Amazon. I am not going to even offer my goods in that type of selling no matter what they call it. The stuff I have is paid for without credit cards and I'm not needing to file Bankruptcy. I know they will sell just to unload, they have already went under.
posted on March 30, 2009 07:54:04 AM new
DEICHEN said:
"I think if ebay had not been soooo greedy, continuing to increase rates way to often and taking away almost all power to the sellers, such as payment choices, feedback, etc. They would not be in the position they are in now. I would love it if they would go back, but I doubt they do. I loved selling on ebay at one time ( for several years) and I made money, then it seemed that the fees were eating at most of my profit. In my case, it was a simple decision to leave ebay as a seller, I still buy there several times a week, usually."
DITTO!! I haven't sold on ebay since last Sept. Don't miss it, don't intend to start up again.I am not making nearly the money on Ruby Lane that I used to on ebay BUT RL does not drive sellers nuts with do this and don't do that cr--.In my case my sanity does have a price.
Less $
Has it been worth it ... for me it has been.
Translation: overstock inventory served up by Diamond level PowerSellers advantaged in a number of ways, including lower fees and better exposure in search results. Just the message that small, longtime sellers on eBay didn't want to hear.