posted on January 3, 2001 03:38:33 PM
Nothing in life is free, so unlike those of you who feel it is your right to list free auctions, I will keep using eBay and Yahoo.
posted on January 3, 2001 03:48:47 PM
Clearly, most Yahoo sellers will soon stop selling there. When that happens, do you think the customers will continue to be there? Why would they bother with Yahoo if it only has a tiny fraction of what's available on Ebay?
I'm going to stick around on Yahoo until it is no longer profitable for me. Unfortunately, I'm beginning to think that will happen fairly soon.
I sell video games too, but Yahoo has a 70% deadbeat rate. The amount of game I have in the auction, I have to pay $450 a month just to keep them in. Not profitable to stay. Besides, I thought Yahoo auction was like Yahoo chat. They said once a place to sell and trade. What's next, a charge to chat in Yahoo chat?
posted on January 3, 2001 04:54:04 PM
Nothing is about all Yahoo has to offer right now so why pay for it. If You want to pay for nothing then more power to you and your money which will soon be Yahoo's money. Until they can offer the sales that ebay has then it will be hard to attract the sellers that ebay does. No one would stay with ebay and their high rates if there weren't sales to cover it.
I am leaving my auctions that are there up but I will not list any more if this policy sticks or they can show me that the sales are there and don't forget the deadbeats that shut your auction down but do not respond or pay. How many of those can you afford. If you can afford that then yu probably do not need to be selling anyway and should just give your stuff away and your money to.
posted on January 3, 2001 05:21:14 PM
True, there's really no such thing as a free ride, but I do expect to get something in return for my money. With Yahoo, I made quite a few sales (I run 450 - 500 auctions at any one time) but most were for $1.00 trading cards or the like. For Yahoo to start charging fees comparable to what eBay charges (and my experience is that only a small fraction of potential buyers frequent Yahoo compared to eBay), it doesn't make good business sense to pay out more money to list my auctions than they bring in, especially since I can most likely expect even fewer sales once all the other sellers leave and the buyers follow soon after.
Plus, this whole thing isn't exactly being paid for by the good folks at Yahoo. They sell advertising on their site and they justify the ad rates they charge by the traffic their site generates from people buying and selling on their auctions, among the other features they offer.
I'm sure that my auctions generate 10's of thousands of hits for them over a few months time and that's the type of info they can use to charge higher advertising rates. Once the sellers like me leave, and the selection of goods offered on Yahoo auctions dwindles, so will the traffic as potential buyers shop elsewhere.
It would seem to me, who is no genius but does have 20+ years of retailing experience, that Yahoo has made a critically bad business move with this fees policy. They will most likely have a strong influx of listings up until 1/10/01, and for a month or so, everything will look cool (auto-relisting for free), but then the bottom will drop out as suddenly, there won't be hardly anything offered for sale.
Yahoo should have asked focus groups of sellers what would be a mutually equitable course of action to generate more revenue and yet not alienate all the sellers that have been using their service. Alas, they did not and here we are.
Yahoo WAS the #2 online auction service, soon, they will be history (but it's not too late to stop that from happening!). Watch out sellers - eBay is watching this all very closely!
Aaron
posted on January 3, 2001 06:00:47 PM
Plenty of things in life are free and they are more then nothing.
Free Auctions on yahoo has genorated more income and visabilty for yahoo then it ever would have received without it face it if yahoo really wanted to incress income to balance out its falling advertizeing income it could have started chargeing to some 18 or 20 million geocities websites users.
They could have started chargeing a fee for their thousands of webring.com users.
they could start chargeing for the free shopping cart on 321website.
My guess is these two yahoo holding geocities and webring.com get 50X more trafic then yahoo auctions and have more then 20X the users base useing 90% more of there system resources.
this fall yahoo auctions hot a high of 4 million auctions my guess is yahoo Management has never really surfed there own auctions cause if they had they would see of all these listings less then 80 thousand get bids and of them 25 to 35% will be relisted because of dead beat bidding some for there second and third round of dead beats.
posted on January 4, 2001 12:38:58 PM
Great thoughts on this thread. I think Yahoo should be paying attention to those of us who KNOW. Know the buyers, know the sites, know what we are doing. I sell my stuff for reasonable amounts but can't make it on the rates Yahoo wants to charge. I am not asking for FREE but reasonable would be nice. Final Value Fee would work all the way around and I would be willing to stay and help Yahoo make #1. I feel that after 2 years of selling there I have a big interest in it. But if they insist on charging for every listing and auto submit I am out of there!
posted on January 4, 2001 12:48:45 PM
If YooHoos buyer base was vaster I would have no objection whatesoever to paying a posting fee. I would agree even now to paying a closing fee. But it's a buying wasteland marked by occassional sales. Not worth the cost at this point in time.
posted on January 4, 2001 01:19:15 PM
This is business and we understand "Free" is a different concept than elsewhere.
Free coffee at my flea market booth was to attract your time and attention towards my offering.
Free sample is to introduce you to a product and to get you to use your valuable time to consider what is offered and possibly become a paying customer.
Free listings attracted volume postings and generated page views for advertising. Now it is time to pay for that service.
OK I'll pay, if the service is worth the fee.
Over the holiday selling season I sold seventeen times the number of units of a gift item at eBay when compared to YAHOO. Same item, same ads and eBay sales were at a 10% higher average price because I used BIN pricing as an option.
I'll pay FVF fees or some other fair fee structure but why would I pay similar fees for such poor sales results.
I want to have alternatives to eBay and have invested time in trying to build a YAHOO business as well as promoting the site in general for the overall good of the future of online selling.
I just can't afford to spend the time and money that their fee schedule forces with poor results.
They want quality items. I have a few from the early 1900's or late 1800's that I'm about to list.
On eBay I'm confident from their established track record and closed auction files that I can offer them starting at one dollar and have a reasonable chance of getting a fair market price.
YAHOO has no established sales record that I can find which would give me any confidence to list with anything other than a high reserve or opening bid.
Last week I listed some new electronics(150.00 range)Nine eBay sales, NO YAHOO sales.
You want to attract quality you have to be quality. It takes more than just changing the cover charge or admission fee.
I want YAHOO to succeed and I never have wanted/believed in something for nothing but I do strongly believe they have made a serious mistake in the form of their new fee structure.
