posted on February 15, 2001 06:31:02 AM new
Search "bid wins"
68449 Jan 10
11262 Feb 9
11296 Feb 10
11319 Feb 11
11036 Feb 12
11161 Feb 13
11090 Feb 14
10876 Feb 15
another search:
835 Jan 11
95 Feb 9
91 Feb 10
105 Feb 11
105 Feb 12
104 Feb 13
110 Feb 14
118 Feb 15
During the past week, much happened! Yahoo declined to 3rd or 4th place among auction site, it you take seriously Bidbay.
The number of Number of Listings at All Auctions increase by 4 or a negligible percentage. Number of Listings with Bids declined by 499 or 28.4%.
Playboy Auctions had the second largest decline in number of Listings 309 or 28.0%. Playboy had a decline in Listings with Bids of 40 or 20.4%.
eBay experience an increase in the number of Listings 613 or 8.7% and the largest decline on Listings with Bids 475 or 32.2%.
At Playboy Auctions, the Total Number of Listings are 796 with 156 bids or 19.6%, that means that your chances of one of your Listing receiving a bid are almost 1 in 5. The total numbers of bids are 156 and multiple bids are 64, or 41.0%. That means that you have almost 1 in 2 chances of obtaining more than one bid for your listing.
The best site to list Playboys this past week was Playboy Auctions 19.6% of the listings have bids and 41.0% have multiple bids.
posted on February 15, 2001 07:42:55 AM new
As low as Yahoo's auction numbers are now, their situation is even more dire than those low numbers suggest. In the category I list in, there are about 3,000 items. I personally account for about 100 of those (only because I have funny money to do free listings with). I am just one average seller. With 50 states in the union, you have to assume that there are at least a couple of dozen guys nationwide like me, listing in that category with free credits. I would guess that nearly all of the listings still there are there without producing ANY significant listing fees for Yahoo.
I'd like to pose a question for sellers and industry followers to ponder. To what extent has Yahoo Auctions fallen and to what extent has it shrunken to its true size?
posted on February 15, 2001 08:58:12 AM new
GenXMike: "Looks like it is not quite at its true size yet. I'd bet on another 15-20% drop in the next 2-3 weeks."
GenXMike,
I would agree with you. The sharp plunge has ended and it will likely drift gradually lower from here. 15-20% isn't much though, but that's not what I meant by "true size". If you followed my calculation a few days ago the true size before the listing fee was 1/25th of Ebay -- about 200-250K items, IMO. How the listing fee affects that isn't clear, though I think Yahoo REALLY ought to allow at least one free relisting.
People see a 90% drop and they conclude that Yahoo Auction has declined. Is that true?
A true measure of an internet auction is gross merchandise sales. That's a true measure of the auction activity on the site, without regard to the number of items. In the recent TheStreet.com article someone from Yahoo indicated:
"though she said that the aggregate dollar value of completed transactions hadn't declined."
Another error in logic that I've seen is that people will look at a category with, say, 5% of bids on all items and conclude that things are dismal there. Wrong. Those people are including the items that close in the more distant future into their average and also aren't including people who'll bid during the last hour. A category with 5% bids on all items could have a 20% (or higher) overall success (sell-through) rate.
Anyway, just trying to get people to question popular assumptions.
posted on February 15, 2001 09:53:53 AM new
I have read some of the new articles at "TheStreet.com" The real numbers are finaly sinking in. Only yahoo is still pretending that everything is "much better now than ever before"
heikejohn everywhere else!
posted on February 15, 2001 10:16:46 AM new
dimview: "Remember, ALL statements made by Yahoo!Auctions spokespersons cannot be substantiated.
As such, they should be considered nothing more than spin-doctoring."
DimView,
You're right about that. This person could have been someone from their Investor Relations department and for Yahoo their auction may not be an important department within the company, so it's possible she isn't necessarily knowledgeable about it and doesn't follow it as closely as you would expect.
Assuming she isn't being untruthful or mistaken, her statement on gross merchandise sales is very interesting. This is still a transition period, though.
Personally, I prefer to gather my own information rather than trust what gets reported about auctions in the media.
posted on February 15, 2001 10:42:23 AM new
John10101
This arguement would be easy to settle. Track the number of listings ending on a certain day. Then go to the closed sold and compare the number of sales. Do this for several categories over the period of a week or more. You would have to take into consideration any items that sold at a buy price or first bid wins.
I don't have the time myself but it would be interesting to see the results.
posted on February 15, 2001 11:01:33 AM new
Yahoo has also made another stupid move in the way it structures the listing fee.
In the past I have often listed multiple quantities. I was surprised to find that instead of charging the listing fee based on price x quantity, Yahoo calculates the fees as if each item was a separate auction. For example, if I was to list one auction with a price of $9.00 and a quantity of 2, Yahoo would charge a fee of 40 cents (2 x 20 cents) instead of 35 cents which would be applicable for a single item priced at $18.00.
posted on February 15, 2001 04:33:52 PM new
outoftheblue: "This arguement would be easy to settle. Track the number of listings ending on a certain day. Then go to the closed sold and compare the number of sales. Do this for several categories over the period of a week or more. You would have to take into consideration any items that sold at a buy price or first bid wins."
OutOfTheBlue,
Wouldn't it be better to look at all the categories instead? The problem with tracking just a few categories is it's highly inaccurate and you can't extrapolate it out to get valid overall sitewide results.
posted on February 15, 2001 04:57:19 PM new
John10101 >
Wouldn't it be better to look at all the categories instead? The problem with tracking just a few categories is it's highly inaccurate and you can't extrapolate it out to get valid overall sitewide results.
Do we not already have several folks counting up ALL the auctions, each coming up with a differant number.
I don't see the answer as the time consuming task of counting up ALL the auctions, when a reasonable representation of several dissimilar categories should work just as well.
For those of us posting our findings, this methodology has worked well, and unless someone can point out major flaws there's really no reason to change now.
posted on February 15, 2001 06:59:56 PM new
dimview says "I don't see the answer as the time consuming task of counting up ALL the auctions, when a reasonable representation of several dissimilar categories should work just as well.
For those of us posting our findings, this methodology has worked well, and unless someone can point out major flaws there's really no reason to change now."
Dimview is quite right. A representative sampling provides a very accurate view of what is going on with the whole. The Nielsen television ratings are based on a very tiny fraction of actual TV viewers yet advertisers are willing to bet millions of dollars that those ratings provide a representative view of all TV viewers. There is nothing new about sampling and while it won't give you an exact count it will be accurate to within 3 or 4 percentage points either way.
[ edited by InternetEdge on Feb 15, 2001 07:00 PM ]
posted on February 15, 2001 10:18:44 PM new
Folks,
The Yahoo counts now that they're down don't necessarily tell you if it's doing badly, anymore than the Yahoo counts at 2 million necessarily told you that it was doing well.
How did Yahoo's 2 million items with no listing/success fees compare to Ebay's 5 million with both listing and success fees? Was Yahoo Auctions 2/5ths Ebay?
The measures of how well Yahoo auctions is doing now are number of items, success rate and average closing price. From that you can get an idea of gross merchandise sales.
There is only one thing that matters for an auction, internet or land-based. It's not number of visitors (does't matter how many people stroll through to glance at the items), it's the amount of merchandise moved.
posted on February 15, 2001 11:43:26 PM new
John, you said, "There is only one thing that matters for an auction, internet or land-based. It's not number of visitors (does't matter how many people stroll through to glance at the items), it's the amount of merchandise moved."
I can tell you one thing....I WAS moving 100 items a month through Yahoo (out of 250-300 constant listings), and NOW I'm moving 0 items a month through Yahoo.
And if you don't think there's a STRONG CORRELATION between "how many people stroll through to glance at the items" and "the amount of merchandise moved", then all I can say is
you've got more rocks in your head than YaWho does!
posted on February 16, 2001 01:08:56 AM new
From personal experience. I sold 100 items in December. Since the listing fees Jan 10 I've sold 17 items. I closed all auctions for items that have been sitting (unsold) and included new "quality" merchandize. If, as Yahoo says, the sellers that stayed are reaping the benefits of their new fee structure, I'm not one of them.
I also follow the categories in which I list closely. I did this before I knew anything about listing fees. I follow the amount of items that are selling in each category and the number of outstanding bids. Listings have decreased about 85% and the sell through has decreased (not increased).
I'm still waiting for things to get better. I did pick up three bids today so maybe there's hope.
posted on February 16, 2001 06:50:50 AM new
Hey ... I also closed all of my Yahooooo auctions and haven't a sale since then either ... must be some connection here?
posted on February 16, 2001 07:48:44 AM new
granee: "And if you don't think there's a STRONG CORRELATION between "how many people stroll through to glance at the items" and "the amount of merchandise moved", then all I can say is
you've got more rocks in your head than YaWho does! "
Granee,
What you say is true if you hosted a big auction and one guy showed up. Naturally, your auction isn't going to do well. How about if either 1 million or 2 million showed up? Does 2 million equate to 200% more merchandise moved? Could an auction with 1 million move much more merchandise than an auction with 2 million?
QXL in the UK is the best example of this, and I've participated on the discussion board for it on Motley Fool's UK site. For the past few quarters the poor misguided QXL investors touted it for its leadership over Ebay in registered users and MMXI (European Media Metrix) rating. Conclusion? That QXL was the leader in the UK. (Yahoo Finance shows a 52 week range of 1 5/8 - 586 7/8).
It was like that all the time, QXL has more registered users, more unique visitors, more page views, blah, blah, blah. Of course, some of us knew different since some of us counted items (exluding duplicates of course, ~25%) and discovered that QXL had far fewer items than Ebay had within the UK. Couple that with the fact that Ebay charges a listing fee and success fees in the UK vs. QXL being then a free auction and someone experienced in evaluating internet auctions, like myself, could conclude that Ebay had taken the lead in the UK.
Those QXL believers couldn't for some reason also reconcile the high traffic with the meager revenues that QXL would report for an operation that spanned 13 countries. During last summer and fall it would report figures of gross profits (revenues - cost of goods sold) of, like, £450,000 <----- that's NOT in quantitity of '000. After a quarter of hard work just half a million Pounds from almost ALL of Europe to show for the effort.
Beyond just the item count some of us also found their other vital auction sitewide statistics. Ebay and QXL have evened up in MMXI, but I would estimate that Ebay moves around 5 times more items (and 2 times more gross merchandise sales) than QXL from just its UK site. The British also use Ebay's US site extensively.
Interestingly, it's still being reported that QXL leads in the UK even though that hasn't been the case for perhaps a year.
I've learned a lot here from the Yahoo sellers. I hope this community of sellers here have learned something from someone from the investment community on how to evaluate an internet auction.
