posted on January 28, 2001 08:07:32 AM new
The decline in Yahoo auctions is continuing at a very rapid pace. They have gone from being #2 to #3 in just three weeks. BidBay currently has more auctions running than Yahoo (actually they may be #4, depending on Amazon, whose numbers are somewhat impossible to calcuate, plus they alienated sellers as well last week by requiring everyone to sign up for their paymant system).
I don't use any models to forecast these counts, but Yahoo, when all of the free relists are done, the credits (I have $400 and won't even bother to use them, bidding is so slow and the site is unstable - taking notes from ebay?) are used up, and the buyers and sellers have moved on because there just isn't any good merchandise, the final count will be less than 500,000, probably lower.
OK, they kiled their auction business. What else did they do while shooting off their own foot? They blew off both of their legs because not only is there no significant revenue from the auctions, they will have lost an even greater amount of advertising revenue. If the pageviews fall by 1/2 or more (I think that's reasonable to assume), how much money will they lose in ad revenue? A more serious question might be, how much potential revenue did they lose by killing what WAS and COULD HAVE BEEN an outstanding place to 1. buy and sell goods at auction, 2. advertise like products, 3. cross promote.
Personally, I believe the people who made the decision to charge for auctions should be fired (after being executed first, of course), Yahoo should admit their horrible underestimation of the intelligence of the people who do business as buyers and sellers, and reinstate the FREE listings, no FVFs and go back to making their money on advertising.
However, these geniuses will not admit they were wrong, they've damaged their customer relationships possibly beyond repair, and generally just lost all chance at being taken seriously in this business. This is what happens when you get greedy trying to fix something that isn't broken.
Yahoo and eBay auction counts updated every Wednesday at noon:
The Wednesday Report http://www.dtmagazine.com/auctioncounts.html
posted on January 28, 2001 11:38:02 AM new
ebaY is the leading e-aution site, ebaY has fees, therefore, to better compete, yahoo! auctions has added fees.
ebaY is the leading e-aution site, ebaY has frequent outages, therefore, to better compete yahoo! auctions has added frequent outages.
posted on January 28, 2001 11:43:43 AM new
Now if they could toss in the most important thing buyers.
Ebay has buyers I sell on yahoo nearly a year and a half a sale or 3 per month started selling on ebay in august sales of 40 to 100 Item monthly or more.
No matter How they try to imatate they still havent figured out people pay on ebay because they sell what they list there.
posted on January 28, 2001 12:15:55 PM new
fearlessrick
Yahoo should admit their horrible underestimation of the intelligence of the people who do business as buyers and sellers, and reinstate the FREE listings, no FVFs and go back to making their money on advertising.
I've read your comments here and the commentary on (your site?). Sorry, but I have to disagree. Sites like Yahoo and Ebay have to charge fees to survive. There's no way around it. The problem is that they could do it without p***ing off their customers.
Charge customers for results and services rather than charge them more for what they are already doing. Yahoo could have charged a FVF and most of us would have been fine with that. Not a problem! They could use the extra income to advertise and get more buyers. That's how they could improve their site, as they say they are attempting to do. Ebay could just add more useful services and charge for them, rather than raise their listing fees (even though they were reasonable about their increase, in my oppinion). I rarely list an item with a starting value of over $24.95, and will just run 7 instead of 10 day auctions. Not a big deal... I liked some of Ebay's new features (like listing in 2 categories) and use it regularly. If they added more [useful] features and charged for them they would increase their revenues almost as much and wouldn't tick people off....
