I can't say I am surprised as they have spent the last half decade or more trying to reinvent themselves as some sort of Amazon marketplace for companies selling new goods. Policies and rates have repeatedly penalised sellers ever harsher. It is now so buyer-centric that eBay is a safe place for buyers to experiment with their first fraud.
In the process they have thrown away their reason for being and why they grew. At one point just about everyone I knew used to get rid of their spare tat on eBay and post a link. One or two had nice little hobby businesses selling collectables etc. Now I doubt many of them remember it exists. No one I know sells on it any more. I used to get rid of all my old IT kit on eBay, yet now I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot barge pole to sell anything.
That is equally reflected in what's there when looking as a buyer - mostly company sales and endless cheap rubbish and far fewer private sales.
We launched a new brand of cell phone mount products several months ago. We were set up and going on sales with Amazon in a trivial amount of time. Meanwhile, on Ebay. Tried to start a new account to match our brand name. Pretty much immediately banned, I think it was because I used a Chinese cell phone number in my contact info with the account, but not sure, as it was never actually clear why I was banned. Then, after about a week of back-and-forths proving I personally am an American and we were selling with an American corporation. Got the account reinstated. Finally, trying to list the products in coordination with our shopify store was a nightmare, the products wouldn't list, and as I recall we had another round of account troubles due to just trying to list our products. I finally said screw Ebay, I give up. Well, surprise. If you can't onboard sellers then good luck staying in business!
eBay used to be great when it was genuine people selling their spare stuff. I used to buy and sell a lot on eBay and it was great - picked up a lot of great secondhand stuff at decent prices, and found new homes for kit I didn't need any more.
But for the past several years it seems to be dominated by "professional" sellers doing buy-it-now bulk-sells of new cheap
stuff shipped directly from China/Hong Kong that takes 6-8 weeks to arrive then when it does it is often awful quality and/or not what was in the listing. This ruined it for me.
There are a few decent secondhand sales still happening though - e.g. I got a really decent refurbished secondhand projector a year or two ago from a guy that specialised in projectors, and in the UK you can now collect your eBay orders from highstreet stores for free. It is just a shame that these genuine sellers are drowned out by the crap-pushers selling cheap tat.
My wife used to run a small volume eBay shop, maybe 50 listings at a time. About once a month she would have to deal with outright fraud, and eBay almost always sided with the buyers. I'm talking about things like brand new items of clothing returned completely destroyed by the buyer---huge tears, burn marks, etc---and my wife would be forced to refund the purchase price and shipping costs. It certainly wasn't worth her time or all of the stress.
I totally agree. I have largely abandoned eBay, and I was an early adopter. Their policies are definitely buyer-centric, but the prices frankly are rarely that great, so when I am looking to buy something I can usually find it somewhere else cheaper with less hassle. When I want to sell something, I just put it on Facebook or Craigslist. Not great, but no worse than eBay and less likely to get scammed.
For me, eBay is the 99 cent store of online shopping. I'm not interested in the auctions anymore, and if I am there to buy something, it's because I was trying to save a buck & it showed up as the cheapest place to buy something on Google Shopping.
I enjoy using eBay. I can sometimes get faster and cheaper shipping than using Amazon. I have also bought all of my smartphones and laptops from here for the past 5 years.
I wonder if this layoff has more to do with the online tax reform on small businesses.
I think eBay has a lot of what I would call "process debt". Not technical dept, I don't know what their code looks like. It's all that extra complexity that has built up over the years. eBay has so many menus and settings and listing options that I just get lost.
The most obvious one is PayPal. That may have made sense in the '90s, but today I should just pay money to eBay, they take their cut and send the rest to the seller. Instead I pay directly to the sellers PayPal account, which may be named something completely different from their eBay account. Then eBay sends the seller an invoice at the end of the month or something. All unnecessary complexity, but I'm sure someone would be outraged if they changed anything.
FYI, on the open data angle, the California state WARN site (named after the law which requires public disclosure of mass layoffs) publishes all the announcements -- unfortunately, in Excel Saved As PDF format:
The reason it's a "mass layoff" is because that's what the California law requiring notification calls it. Better articles about this news mention facts like EBay's end-of-2017 employee count being 14,100 people.
This is bad news IMO. I get a lot of great deals on things on Ebay that I wouldn't find on Amazon, or that would require me to be a Prime member to not get socked with a high shipping charge without buying a bunch of other stuff, or would require me to wait a long time to get it because I'm not a Prime member.
I get all my cellphones on Ebay, for instance: I get high-end models when they're about 2 years old, from high-volume sellers who specialize in refurbished/used cellphones. People are always jealous of my nice phones, thinking I spent $800+ when I usually only spend $100-150.
Many times, if I want something that's only $10 or $20, Ebay is the way to go because I don't have to wait long to get it, and don't have to get $50 worth of stuff to get the "free" shipping, so Ebay ends up being a better deal.
Also, avoiding Chinese sellers is easy on Ebay: just click the box that says "North American sellers only" (or "US sellers only") and you don't have to worry about stuff being shipped from far away and taking a month. Amazon doesn't make it quite so obvious, nor do they allow you to actually exclude such sellers with a search.
Of course, Ebay lets you buy stuff (usually used, or perhaps secondhand but never-used) from non-commercial/individual sellers. Amazon has removed the ability for individuals to resell their stuff unless you sign up for a special seller's account for $35/year.
> just click the box that says "North American sellers only"
That doesn't necessarily block Chinese sellers. There is one seller named X-Channel that is based out of China. They sell used phones as new, they lie on many of their listings about the devices the sell -- they have a terrible reputation that is well-earned. They have at least 3 different seller accounts on Ebay doing the same scam: two of them, 'x-channel' and 'lotus-online' I can recall of the top of my head.
They must have an address in NYC they use for Ebay's billing purposes or where they distribute the imports, but the items they sell are the shadiest crap from China that you'd want to avoid by ticking Ebay's 'north america only' box.
Anyway, my point is that the 'North American-only' box can be gamed, and is not a surefire way to avoid the Chinese scam sellers.
You basically gave the reason for its decline. Somewhere along the way it changed from being a place for people to sell their second-hand stuff to a storefront for cheap Chinese goods. For most people it is too hard to sort through the mess and find actual good deals.
> This is bad news IMO. I get a lot of great deals on things on Ebay
I wouldn't worry. This is nothing close to existential. Large companies like this use a downturn or bad quarter as an excuse to cull weak performers or just stop the unchecked needless growth that successful companies tend to have when no one's paying attention.
Is it bad news? 300 doesn't even sound like that many for eBay -- but the article provided no context for their size. According to wikipedia they have (Had?) 14,100 employees.
> People are always jealous of my nice phones, thinking I spent $800+ when I usually only spend $100-150.
Assumption on your part. I see people that really do spend $800+ on their phones and I don't think jealousy ever entered into the equation, more like 'wow, they can't handle money'.
I don't understand why there hasn't been a significant challenger to eBay in their space. They are notorious amongst sellers for their high fees and dispute resolution that almost always sides with the buyer.
Network effects. Sellers use eBay because buyers use eBay because sellers use eBay. eBay dominate the long tail of e-commerce and will do for the foreseeable future.
You can challenge eBay locally, as shown by Craigslist and Gumtree. You can challenge eBay in a specific niche, as shown by Etsy. Facebook tried to take on eBay directly with Marketplace, with limited success. Amazon Marketplace competes fairly directly with eBay, but at a significant cost to Amazon's reputation - it has flooded their platform with counterfeits and fake reviews.
As a buyer, where else can I find the insanely wide selection of goods on a listing-type site?
Consistently siding with the buyer is the reason I use Ebay (and Amazon with A-Z) with confidence. You sell me what you listed, we're good. You don't? I'm probably going to be made whole by Ebay. That does open the door for scammer buyers. I hope, for sellers' sake, that Ebay has some kind of attention that they pay to patterns of bad behavior.
Amazon is much more expensive and even more buyer-centric.
Groupon isn't particularly busy and definitely aren't good with sellers. I've heard a lot of horror stories.
Overstock is probably the worst, and I'd say downright abusive to their sellers. They also have no API or FTP.
Rakuten, nee buy.com is a strange beast. They will pause your account for strange reasons. No API either.
Walmart has little useful online presence for 3rd party sellers and no API.
Newegg also has no API. I haven't heard any real bad things about them otherwise.
There are a lot of niche marketplaces that do very well in their domain. They aren't using APIs. Some are absurdly expensive and others are cheaper.
It doesn't really matter. No online market takes care of the seller, and honestly, the buyer is far more common than a seller. One seller leaves and another takes their place.
Auctions trend towards being natural monopolies since the network effect is so strong: more buyers -> higher prices -> more sellers -> more items -> (infinity)
The alternative is Amazon Marketplace, which has even higher fees and is even tougher on sellers, yet it's taking marketshare from eBay. They are not 100% competitors, but most of eBays volume is competing directly with Amazon.
They have to be a bit biased towards buyers because scammers want money, and sellers get money. Buyer scams are mostly items that can be easily converted to cash, like laptops and phones.
Besides this:
They had paypal. Lost
They had Skype. Lost.
They could have build the first social network on skype. Nothing.
They have skype on the phone. They could have been the major western payment processor. The Alipay or Wechat of the West. Nothing.
It looks to me like a long series of lost opportunities. A one trick pony, a fly that is looking for a windshield.
How is ebay not making money? They are a glorified e-commerce site that does a huge amount of business, taking a cut of each transaction with very low per-transaction cost.
I just don’t understand how they have $9 billion in revenue but are unprofitable. A slightly simpler version of the site could probably be run by a few people in someone’s basement plus some outsourced support staff.
I don’t use eBay much as a buyer. My primary dealings on eBay tend to be in collectibles categories, and they have a real problem with fakes. It’s better to go to a reputable specialized auction house, and just mentally subtract buyers’ fees from your maximum bid, IMO. Stuff I still buy there tends to be low value, but moderately uncommon stuff I can find there simply because they have so much of it.
We sell on eBay and Amazon (and Walmart). eBay is a fraction of the business and traffic that Amazon is, but it's 100 times the headache that Amazon is. The layout, getting around, finding settings is just completely horrible. To do simple things some times we have to resort to googling the answer because everything is hidden and obfuscated.
For me eBay always had some niche products I couldn't find on Amazon. Now I just look for it on AliExpress.
Unless you're looking for used items, most items on eBay are sold by Chinese sellers or US resellers with a markup.
I'm guessing AliExpress is much easier to use and friendlier to Chinese sellers.
I wonder what effect niche sites have had on eBay’s bottom line.
I bought my last 3 phones on Swappa and just spent a few hundred dollars buying vinyl on discogs. Did not even consider eBay for these purposes, and perhaps that is true for many shoppers across many niches.
eBay has created a one-sided marketplace, where sellers are getting ripped off with impunity. It's great for buyers like me, but I would never sell anything on there because it's so easy to get ripped off.
When you have an unhealthy marketplace like this, of course it will suffer.
eBay sucks. I haven't used it in quite a while and last month I decided to sell some small electronics that I had around the house. 2 items sold at auction but then the buyers didn't pay (a common occurrence), oh well, not eBay's fault.
I went through the eBay procedure of waiting 2 days, open an unpaid item case, then waiting some more before closing the case for non-payment and re-listing the item.
Today I got my eBay invoice and I got charged the 10% Final Value Fee for those items. And now I have to call customer service to get some type of support.
The fact that Shopfy is crushing it in an era where Ebay and Amazon should be able to take that space is really interesting.
One interesting thing is the crazy UI complexity of both Ebay and Amazon interfaces. I wanted to find something that provided fairly quick shipping, I couldn't figure that out. Text and presentation seem to be half-hazard - and this is not even getting into the softer issues such as brand/image/placement, my god man, I wouldn't want my 'upmarket' product jammed into those byzantine pages.
Instead of trying to be 'everything' it may make sense for EBay to focus very narrowly on their differentiating factor, and instead use their process and infrastructure to attack other opportunities under a different brand.
The accessibility of eBay is a nightmare. I would need an assistant to get anything done with that beast. Pretty much the same with Etsy. Digital divide, thank you. You will not be missed.
[+] [-] NeedMoreTea|7 years ago|reply
In the process they have thrown away their reason for being and why they grew. At one point just about everyone I knew used to get rid of their spare tat on eBay and post a link. One or two had nice little hobby businesses selling collectables etc. Now I doubt many of them remember it exists. No one I know sells on it any more. I used to get rid of all my old IT kit on eBay, yet now I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot barge pole to sell anything.
That is equally reflected in what's there when looking as a buyer - mostly company sales and endless cheap rubbish and far fewer private sales.
[+] [-] bobjordan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattlondon|7 years ago|reply
eBay used to be great when it was genuine people selling their spare stuff. I used to buy and sell a lot on eBay and it was great - picked up a lot of great secondhand stuff at decent prices, and found new homes for kit I didn't need any more.
But for the past several years it seems to be dominated by "professional" sellers doing buy-it-now bulk-sells of new cheap stuff shipped directly from China/Hong Kong that takes 6-8 weeks to arrive then when it does it is often awful quality and/or not what was in the listing. This ruined it for me.
There are a few decent secondhand sales still happening though - e.g. I got a really decent refurbished secondhand projector a year or two ago from a guy that specialised in projectors, and in the UK you can now collect your eBay orders from highstreet stores for free. It is just a shame that these genuine sellers are drowned out by the crap-pushers selling cheap tat.
[+] [-] lph|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootusrootus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amorphid|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamredwoods|7 years ago|reply
I wonder if this layoff has more to do with the online tax reform on small businesses.
[+] [-] risotto_groupon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megaremote|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TorKlingberg|7 years ago|reply
The most obvious one is PayPal. That may have made sense in the '90s, but today I should just pay money to eBay, they take their cut and send the rest to the seller. Instead I pay directly to the sellers PayPal account, which may be named something completely different from their eBay account. Then eBay sends the seller an invoice at the end of the month or something. All unnecessary complexity, but I'm sure someone would be outraged if they changed anything.
[+] [-] danso|7 years ago|reply
https://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/layoff_services_war...
The eBay listings seem to have been announced 2 weeks ago, on June 29: https://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/warn/WARN-Report-fo...
[+] [-] justboxing|7 years ago|reply
Any idea how frequently this is published?
Looks like Al Jazeera is shutting down it's office in San Francisco. 68 people getting the Axe on Aug 5th
> 05/07/2018 08/05/2018 05/11/2018 Al Jazeera International (USA), LLC San Francisco San Francisco Closure Permanent
Source: PDF link in parent comment.
[+] [-] greglindahl|7 years ago|reply
That's 2%.
[+] [-] fiveFeet|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OnlyRepliesToBS|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] magduf|7 years ago|reply
I get all my cellphones on Ebay, for instance: I get high-end models when they're about 2 years old, from high-volume sellers who specialize in refurbished/used cellphones. People are always jealous of my nice phones, thinking I spent $800+ when I usually only spend $100-150.
Many times, if I want something that's only $10 or $20, Ebay is the way to go because I don't have to wait long to get it, and don't have to get $50 worth of stuff to get the "free" shipping, so Ebay ends up being a better deal.
Also, avoiding Chinese sellers is easy on Ebay: just click the box that says "North American sellers only" (or "US sellers only") and you don't have to worry about stuff being shipped from far away and taking a month. Amazon doesn't make it quite so obvious, nor do they allow you to actually exclude such sellers with a search.
Of course, Ebay lets you buy stuff (usually used, or perhaps secondhand but never-used) from non-commercial/individual sellers. Amazon has removed the ability for individuals to resell their stuff unless you sign up for a special seller's account for $35/year.
[+] [-] culot|7 years ago|reply
That doesn't necessarily block Chinese sellers. There is one seller named X-Channel that is based out of China. They sell used phones as new, they lie on many of their listings about the devices the sell -- they have a terrible reputation that is well-earned. They have at least 3 different seller accounts on Ebay doing the same scam: two of them, 'x-channel' and 'lotus-online' I can recall of the top of my head.
They must have an address in NYC they use for Ebay's billing purposes or where they distribute the imports, but the items they sell are the shadiest crap from China that you'd want to avoid by ticking Ebay's 'north america only' box.
Anyway, my point is that the 'North American-only' box can be gamed, and is not a surefire way to avoid the Chinese scam sellers.
[+] [-] paxys|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdulli|7 years ago|reply
I wouldn't worry. This is nothing close to existential. Large companies like this use a downturn or bad quarter as an excuse to cull weak performers or just stop the unchecked needless growth that successful companies tend to have when no one's paying attention.
[+] [-] rconti|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|7 years ago|reply
Assumption on your part. I see people that really do spend $800+ on their phones and I don't think jealousy ever entered into the equation, more like 'wow, they can't handle money'.
Maybe their jealousy is just in your head?
[+] [-] javabean22|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gowld|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LyndsySimon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdietrich|7 years ago|reply
You can challenge eBay locally, as shown by Craigslist and Gumtree. You can challenge eBay in a specific niche, as shown by Etsy. Facebook tried to take on eBay directly with Marketplace, with limited success. Amazon Marketplace competes fairly directly with eBay, but at a significant cost to Amazon's reputation - it has flooded their platform with counterfeits and fake reviews.
[+] [-] jacquesm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|7 years ago|reply
Consistently siding with the buyer is the reason I use Ebay (and Amazon with A-Z) with confidence. You sell me what you listed, we're good. You don't? I'm probably going to be made whole by Ebay. That does open the door for scammer buyers. I hope, for sellers' sake, that Ebay has some kind of attention that they pay to patterns of bad behavior.
[+] [-] dizzystar|7 years ago|reply
Groupon isn't particularly busy and definitely aren't good with sellers. I've heard a lot of horror stories.
Overstock is probably the worst, and I'd say downright abusive to their sellers. They also have no API or FTP.
Rakuten, nee buy.com is a strange beast. They will pause your account for strange reasons. No API either.
Walmart has little useful online presence for 3rd party sellers and no API.
Newegg also has no API. I haven't heard any real bad things about them otherwise.
There are a lot of niche marketplaces that do very well in their domain. They aren't using APIs. Some are absurdly expensive and others are cheaper.
It doesn't really matter. No online market takes care of the seller, and honestly, the buyer is far more common than a seller. One seller leaves and another takes their place.
[+] [-] pbreit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magduf|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slededit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TorKlingberg|7 years ago|reply
They have to be a bit biased towards buyers because scammers want money, and sellers get money. Buyer scams are mostly items that can be easily converted to cash, like laptops and phones.
[+] [-] ggg9990|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gscott|7 years ago|reply
https://www.cnet.com/news/merchants-pull-out-of-amazon-aucti...
[+] [-] redmattred|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiatia123|7 years ago|reply
Have you heard about OpenBazar?
Besides this: They had paypal. Lost They had Skype. Lost.
They could have build the first social network on skype. Nothing. They have skype on the phone. They could have been the major western payment processor. The Alipay or Wechat of the West. Nothing.
It looks to me like a long series of lost opportunities. A one trick pony, a fly that is looking for a windshield.
[+] [-] briandear|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ashelmire|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code4tee|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmiller2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaylalala|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] httpz|7 years ago|reply
Unless you're looking for used items, most items on eBay are sold by Chinese sellers or US resellers with a markup. I'm guessing AliExpress is much easier to use and friendlier to Chinese sellers.
[+] [-] rednerrus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subpixel|7 years ago|reply
I bought my last 3 phones on Swappa and just spent a few hundred dollars buying vinyl on discogs. Did not even consider eBay for these purposes, and perhaps that is true for many shoppers across many niches.
[+] [-] pfarnsworth|7 years ago|reply
When you have an unhealthy marketplace like this, of course it will suffer.
[+] [-] willart4food|7 years ago|reply
I went through the eBay procedure of waiting 2 days, open an unpaid item case, then waiting some more before closing the case for non-payment and re-listing the item.
Today I got my eBay invoice and I got charged the 10% Final Value Fee for those items. And now I have to call customer service to get some type of support.
Really eBay?
[+] [-] sonnyblarney|7 years ago|reply
One interesting thing is the crazy UI complexity of both Ebay and Amazon interfaces. I wanted to find something that provided fairly quick shipping, I couldn't figure that out. Text and presentation seem to be half-hazard - and this is not even getting into the softer issues such as brand/image/placement, my god man, I wouldn't want my 'upmarket' product jammed into those byzantine pages.
Instead of trying to be 'everything' it may make sense for EBay to focus very narrowly on their differentiating factor, and instead use their process and infrastructure to attack other opportunities under a different brand.
[+] [-] mlang23|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] futureSH|7 years ago|reply
1- TM is licking down access to the tickets, making it hard for Stubhub.
2- AEG and other primary concert ticket issuers are building their own ticketing system.
3- StubHub acquisition of ticketbiz and their international ambitions are failing because of very soft secondary landscape.
4- StubHub leadership and culture inspires politics, back stabbing and values BS over innovation.
5- New StubHub CTO is known failure at Amazon. He is bringing a lot of ex-Amazon to SH. There is feeling that something is fishy!
6- Vivid is spending much more in Marketing than SH.
Based on these, I think eBay will spin off StubHub in next 6 month.