posted on February 22, 2001 02:04:08 PM new
Dimview
The sad part of all of these articles is that apparently these people understand little to nothing of auctions, and think it was merely the fees that ran sellers off; when, in my opinion, had it been FVF vs. listing fee, the exodus wouldn't have amounted to much. The lack of comprehending the difference in the eBay venue and the Yahoo auction venue is what both Yahoo and the media are missing. These (i.e.) Yahoo & eBay, aren't oranges and oranges but apples & oranges and can't really be compared.
posted on February 22, 2001 04:41:23 PM new
Dimview, the quote after the sentence you posted "He also said sellers on Yahoo Auctions continue to record the same number of sales as they did before the listing fees were instituted."
Let's see, if the average seller listed 100 ads at a time and sold 3 before the fees but now lists 5 ads at a time and sells 3 I fail to understand how that's great. I believe the average seller is moving 95% of their ads to eBay or a free site because either choice is a lot better risk than paying Yahoo. The fact is doing a search on all my favorite past sellers doesn't even turn up 5 ads, I keep getting 0 listings across the board. I have enough free credits to run 1,400 more $9.99 ads. Even at free I only listed 10 ads for 10 days and only 1 sold. Pageviews were lower than ever even though the categories were 90% cleaned out. That tells me alot more than anything Yahoo spindocs have to say. I may try another 10 ads this week but I doubt it's worth my trouble.
posted on February 22, 2001 04:49:10 PM new
kasmoon,
Yes, and look at that quote again:
He also said sellers on Yahoo Auctions continue to record the same number of sales as they did before the listing fees were instituted.
In the process of Yahoo!Auctions reinventing itself as Yahoo!AuctionsLITE, the number of listings declined from 2,400,000 to around 240,000 today.
That's a net loss of 2,000,000 listings and what Fitzgerald is suggesting is that these items received ZERO bids during their tenure at Yahoo!Auctions and will now attract ZERO bids on any of the alternative auction sites.
posted on February 22, 2001 05:10:04 PM new"He also said sellers on Yahoo Auctions continue to record the same number of sales as they did before the listing fees were instituted."
Do they really think this bolsters their opinion of success? If a seller is not improving the number of sales, but is now paying for those sells in fees charges, how does that make this a good thing?
Mint
posted on February 22, 2001 05:58:49 PM new
dimview, actually Yahoo peaked at 2,800,000 listings and is now 225,000-240,000 (depending upon which count you believe), so it lost more than 2-1/2 million listings....all of which, as you pointed out, would have to have netted virtually NO bids AT ALL for the total number of successful auctions to remain unchanged (UNLESS, of course, NEW listings by NEW Yahoo sellers have COMPLETELY REPLACED ALL of our winning auctions----impossible, in my opinion, since countless others like myself sold a steady 1% of listings every single day, and now sell almost nothing).
The number of bids per item doesn't reveal much, either, since our "high opening/no reserve/one bid" auctions may very well have been replaced by "low opening/high reserve/multiple bids" auctions, or even "$1.00 opening/no reserve/multiple bids/lose-my-shirt-like-I-often-do-on-eBay" auctions.
Until YaWho announces FACTUAL NUMBERS of listings, successful auctions, average price realized per auction, and average listing fee cost, I won't believe a word they're saying. I think it's MORE THAN JUST SPIN; I think they're lying.
and here:
"says Fitzgerald, is that the auctions that have left are the ones for relatively unattractive items that were cluttering up the site. "The nature of the listings that have dropped off are the ones that were not going to sell anyway"
http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/tech/internet/1316639.html
and there was yet another place he said even more insultingly that I can't locate right now.
