Is it all over for eBay? – Auction site traffic drops massively
EBay has been on the slide for a couple of years now. In an effort to change its core business, it has made numerous changes to how it does business in that time. The problem is that those changes have been wholeheartedly rejected by its users, and traffic has dropped massively in the last six months.
When I first ventured on the Web in those dark and distant days when dial-up Internet connections still felt fast, eBay was one of the first sites new users visited. It was cool, popular, fun, and exciting. A site where you can buy and sell your old tat, and either get a bargain or make some money; it seemed to be the very essence of this new-fangled Web thingamajig.
But eBay has changed beyond all recognition since then. There are still bargains to be had and money to be made, but the whole site looks and feels more like any other e-commerce site than the online flea market it once did.
Those small sellers, once the bread and butter of the site, have been moved aside to make room for the big sellers. The fees and feedback system were changed, Paypal became the dominant method of payment, promoted at every turn, and the site generally started to lack the frontier feel it once had. And users weren’t happy with this new direction.
Now, the inevitable has happened. According to The New York Times, referring to an AuctionBytes study, eBay’s traffic has dropped substantially in the past year, and particularly in the past six months. EBay’s visitor numbers are now lower than Amazon, which was always seen as the auction site’s nearest competitor.
Between May 2007 and May 2009, eBay lost around 14 percent of its traffic. Nielsen figures paint an even murkier picture, with total page views in May 2009 a full 32 percent less than in the same month last year.
It’s unlikely to all be over for eBay. After all, the site still boasts of 51 million users, which is a good figure by any company’s standard. But some serious work needs to be done to take the site on to a new level. The fun has gone out of it, and the brand awareness and early buzz along with it. If the company doesn’t act fast to turn the situation around then I doubt the traffic will bounce back anytime soon.
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July 11th, 2009
I actually closed my eBay Store this year, something I never thought possible even a year ago. I had reached a point where I was paying more in listing fees keeping the products up each month than I was making. eBay has no one to blame but themselves as they have run people out the door on fees alone, never mind that idiotic change to feedback where only buyers could leave it.
July 11th, 2009
“After all, the site still boasts of 51 million users, which is a good figure by any company’s standard.”
Ebay counts ID’s (I have 4 ID’s myself) many Ebay users have several IDs. So, if you disregard some of those 51 million users as being extra ID’s and you take out the thousands – perhaps millions of users who no longer bother with Ebay because, frankly, its become a PITA…what have you got left? Is it any wonder that Amazon (still small compared to mega-giant Ebay) can easily by-pass Ebay in page views? Ebay’s core is dying. John Donahoe and his crew are responsible. The board of directors are brainless idiots. I see no success at all in this picture! Ebay has become stagnant with the same losing management team and useless board of directors – there is no place else to go but DOWN.
An 11 year Ebay seller.
July 11th, 2009
Ebay & Paypal have no one but themselves to blame.
Their greed and outrageously high charges are nothing less than a stupid slow suicide.
July 11th, 2009
eBay sells nothing but services, no physical product. The vendor pays for hosting of the listing for their product and mandatory payment processing through PayPal.
eBay offers very little in the way of customer service to sellers below the level of Platinum PowerSellers ($25K per month)
I don’t care how many more sales I get on eBay, if each one pays eBay/PayPal a greater share of the proceeds than I get, it is not worth the effort.
Of 50 million registered users if one assumes that half have multiple IDs even if they only have two there is an immediate 25% shrinkage. 50% might be more realistic.
I visit eBay, I do price comparisons, contributing to page view counts but have not bought or sold there in a year.
July 11th, 2009
The writing was on the wall when eBay & PayPal became one. I’m just surprised it’s taken this long.
July 11th, 2009
Last time I even tried ebay the site was so messed up and loaded down with spyware and tracking garbage the pages wouldn’t even load.
For the most part I quit using it after that big hack job when the credit card numbers got posted on their forums. They lied.
July 28th, 2009
I ALSO CLOSED DOWN MY STORE,AND WILL BE MOVING OVER TO ECRATER.COM
I AM TIRED OF THE HIGH FEES AND PAYING THAT 12%
YEP,EBAY IS SLOWLY KILLING THEMSELVES,AND THEY ONLY HAVE THEM TO BLAME.
IT IS NOW CONCEDERED ONE OF THE WORST ONLINE AUCTION LISTED.
ALOT OF THE FORUMS WILL TELL YOU THAT.
NEVER AGAIN,EBAY WILL I COME BACK TO SELL ON YOUR WEBSITE.
August 7th, 2009
Money is the root of all evil. Ebay executives are greedy SOBs. I too have taken my wares elsewhere.
August 9th, 2009
The mafia doesn’t even take that big of a cut. Sheesh!
August 14th, 2009
I am now looking for alternative sites. Ebay fees you to death. I’m paying more than I’m bringing in sometimes. If you have a problem,they don’t even respond. I’ve been waiting two weeks,4 emails & 2 phone calls.(put on hold after being transfered.waited 10 minutes)
August 17th, 2009
Tried to play with them about two months ago.. First time in at least six, seven years..
Got into my account, just needed to reset the password.. Then hit the message you need to reverify yourself or something like that so I clicked the requisite buttons.. No answer 24 hours later so I tried to go back into my account and contact them again..
GONE. Totally wiped off the site..
Was it something I said..?
Starting to think so.. Two things come to Mind..
Back in ~2000, I sent at least one email scolding them that I saw a serious problem in being able to see my password as part of URL at the time.. That never changed that I noticed at the time then a few years later I heard about them getting hacked somehow, just never heard the details.. I couldn’t help but wonder..
If not, then maybe.. Recently read that one of the $$’d folks with the company.. was playing pretty heavy in politics.. THAT would do it..
Too.
Their loss.. I was thinking of starting a business and found a very nice, seemingly dependable resource at their site.. Have opted elsewhere since (not to mention making sure I let others know, also, where appropriate along the way).. :WINK:
August 18th, 2009
Yes I have see big drops in site traffic as well. It may also be the economy. At the start of the month people have money towards the end it slows down. This is bad sign in many ways for whats to come. Thanks Primeonly27.com
September 8th, 2009
It is all over for eBay traffic continues to drop to record lows, they are just about finished this will teach John Donahoe, eBay (EBAY) CEO are lesson in management,
A. You do not make drastic changes to eBay in the middle of an economic crisis.
B. You not hike advertising fees is middle of an economic crisis.
C. Listen to the sellers they are not as stupid as he thinks. (or as he is)
D. Fix the RSS feeds to Google
E. Any one performing like Johnny would have been fired long ago
Fix the feeds you Stupid Idiots
google-base is not reading ebay feeds because google-base
has added and changed several of their attributes and values
but ebay did not update their fmt=g feed information; rather,
ebay decided to upload items on behalf of their customers.
Check out the crap they are telling the sellers all leis and excuses.
(Counters don’t lie people do) http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml
In my humble opinion eBay will have a takeover by mid 2010 and I do hope Johnny finds him self un-employed.
As he needs to feel the pain he is giving to eBay sellers just because he is on a big salary, does no make him intelligent his performance speaks for it self.
All I would like to say to him is.. “Donahoe your fired”..
October 4th, 2009
Yup! Ebay blows, now with the new changes on items i used too get 500+ hits end with only 100 hits. Ebay is over. All the sellers hate them and buyers only come for the flea market clearance crap thier site is congested with.
October 7th, 2009
Love this Blog tells it like it is.
John Donahoe’s Latest announcement he is going to brake up eBay and PayPal
What do you think comes next I say the sale of PayPal and the death of eBay just follow eBay stock prices I say SELL SELL SELL before its to late..
October 14th, 2009
Ebay has sucessfully earned the loss of my business. What a royal pain in the a$$ it has become with the worst, most ignorant, ill-informed, and NON-UNDERSTANDABLE customer service I’ve ever experienced.
Not to mention the greediest and most subversive business tactics this side of a 3rd rate car salesman.
Bye Chumps…see you in hell.
November 24th, 2009
I agree with everybody here, the eBay’s fees is killing all the sellers. I have a small business that selling some products on eBay and the fees is a really big problem. Even thou I’m new to eBay as a 2 years seller now, but I do see the point that the traffic is dropping. Every body know the economic is going down, but eBay still charging high fees on everything. Lets think, eBay charge 8-12% after we sold an item, and then we have to face PayPal fees which end up eating all our profits.
For example, I bought a product of $13 and trying to sell for $18. eBay then charge $0.35 for listing, and then around $2 after its sold. PayPal then charge around $2, so the total lost is around $4.35 which make my profit is only around $0.65 left. Yup, its sucks!!
December 8th, 2009
I only did ebay part-time and made about $600 per month. Now I make $0-40 per month on ebay. Sad but true. I thought things were suppose to get better after October 1st. Well, I guess it did for the big companies that us little guys can’t compete with. Ebay took the fun out of bidding by encouraging buy it now. Now, what happens is that people don’t buy right away because they think they have plenty of time or you have plenty of that particular product. Right now I’m just selling enough to pay postage for my Amazon and Half.com accounts. Forget ebay I’m doing very well creating easy products with my niche creator website. Good bye ebay.
December 16th, 2009
One huge correction the biggest repeated misquote of all time – money is the root of all evil. Not true, correctly quoted its “the lust of money is the root of all evil.” eBay lusts after the money and that is their downfall.
eBay no longer provides value for the money given to them for advertising. I’ve been selling on eBay and online for over a decade, I’ve sold literally millions and millions of dollars of product on and off eBay. At one point I was making $2000 or more a day in real clear profit after fees. Good money for a two person operation. $2000 per day seven days a week and twice on Sunday.
eBay kept lusting after the money and lost sight of who their customers are. eBay’s customers are the sellers not the buyers. The high fees charged to sellers has finally killed the site. The buyers and bidders are not eBay’s customers they are my customers and the other seller’s customers.
Now eBay is a stale ghost town of the same tired stock photos, low quality, low priced products. There’s no profit in it and no fun in it. I closed my eBay store as the profits tanked along with the page views. I used to get 1200 to 1300 page views on a $1000 product in 7 days. When that happened it had a 1 in 3 chance of selling. Now the same product gets maybe 100 to 120 page views and almost never sells on eBay.
My eBay related profits dropped from about $50,000 to $70,000 per month to less than $2,000 That is why eBay is doomed. There is no point in selling on their site.
January 4th, 2010
I agree that it is dying I remember I could pay for things via post now I have been forced into Paypal. it just needs to think what is important to the users. I think listing fees may vanish in the future.
March 7th, 2010
In response to Kelly,
I wonder if the main fault in falling profits is the fact that the consumer can find the same item for sale in 1000 places for different prices and it’s pretty easy to find the cheapest price and buy from someone who has little idea of business overhead and therefore sells a $1, 000 item for a $50.00 profit and will go out of business as they always do. Overhead is a main killer of business and very few people who start a business actually realize it until the business has failed.
Or is it truly the lack of traffic and other ebay issues.
I find our business, not on Ebay by the way, has horribly shrinking margins due to the very low overhead of the internet, as the market shrinks for our product (money) more and more out of work employees of our competitors have started their own one man business and our margins in general have shrunk to approximately 40% of what they were 10 years ago on the net making it difficult to show a profit.
By the way our biggest year on the net was $700,000,000.00 in loan applications, and due to poor credit and good credit in the mix we earned a decent living though not woderful.
Is their an alternative site to Ebay that works? We are new to auction business having never sold anything on ebay, though I have listed approximatley 10 items that I own personally, I figured maybe I was doing something wrong? I have a couple of motorcycles and travel trailers to sell, am I simply wasting my time and money, I have sold a few (less that 10) on craigs list in my area but figured I need national coverage to sell $10,000 items not just the local market.
April 10th, 2010
I think that E-Bay should listen to their sellers and talk to them and find out what their concerns are and then go back to square one and make some changes that would benefit both of them. Because without sellers there wouldn’t be any E-Bay business period. If E-Bay would put a little time and effort into it, maybe they could work out a compromise where both parties would be satisfyied.
May 11th, 2010
I also left ebay after being a very good seller…hundreds of positive feedbacks and such. Haven’t used them in close to a year. Enough of high fees and buyer problems. Money I was making after all the fees made me laugh and grin all the time. There are other places to sell. most classifieds are free people, then there are plenty of other auction sites now too. I’ve been loving it for the past year without ebay and have sold hundreds of things locally and through other means.
June 21st, 2010
Selling on E-bay for over ten years, and ending my relationship of these Doomsters. If the post office charges that really killed E-bay was not bad enough, the paypal and listing, final value fees. Now the most contemptable thing for sellers is this CHARGEBACK if you do not purchase shipping lables by paypal for one charge and some hallucinating “do nothing” of a tracking number for another 80 cents. If person “says” they did not recieve product, they will chargeback not only the product charges but also the shipping and insurance charges, no proof of when item was sent by post office is no longer proof. Then, witnessing on u-tube where others that have purchased the shipping lables and tracking numbers, if buyer merely states, that item was not described acurately, they move to chargeback the entire sum with no return of the item mentioned.
I now sell on other sites, the first thing I say is absolutely NO PAYPAL. SEND ME A CHECK OR MONEY ORDER. AS WAY BACK WHEN, WHEN WE SOLD, BEFORE PAYPAL FIASCO, OF SEVERE CHARGES. THERE WAS A LONG TIME WHERE PAYPAL WAS FREE. THEN, E-BAY TOOK OVER AND MADE THIS A HORRIBLE ADVENTURE IN COMMERCE.
I NOW SELL LESS AND MAKE WHOLE BUNCH MORE MONEY NOT A BIT OF IT GOES TO E-BAY OR PAYPAL.
AND, TO THE POST OFFICE? THOSE FLAT RATE OVERPRICED PACKAGES, ANYONE WITH A BRAIN, KNOWS NOT TO BUY THOSE OVER PRICED SMALL DINKY BOXES NOTHING FITS INTO. I DO A LOT WITH FED EX, THEY ARE CHAMPIONS WHEN IT COMES TO INSURING ITEMS AND PAY WITHIN 3 DAYS. TOOK ONE TIME 6 MONTHS TO GET A INSURANCE CLAIM FROM CANADA, AND, THEN THEY WANTED PICTURES, AND SUBMIT SOME CLAIM FOR REPAIRS AND MORE CRAP, THAT I DECIDED NOT TO SEND ANY BREAKABLES TO FOREIGN BUYERS. I still remember the day I sent package to Austria, and, it went to Australia, back to states and on to Austria, took 4 dang months. Do they hire folks that cannot read? perhaps.
They did refund my Chargeback, some accounts I have read and listened to on u-tube, they lost 1,000′s of dollars. People kept the product for free.
E-bay and Paypal can go stuff themselves.
March 2nd, 2011
I have sold on eBay since 1997. Like others who have posted here, I use to make a FORTUNE on eBay. At one point around 2000-2003 I was making a good $5000 a month profit selling on eBay. My items were flying off the site as fast as I could list them. At that time I knew this was too good to last because it was just too easy to make money this way and sure enough by 2004 eBay started changing things that have ruined their site.
eBay use to be just a VENUE where SELLERS could set their own terms. This is the root of the problem. eBay ONLY needs to provide a Neutral venue and stay out of the why sellers run their business. Some people have commented here that eBay had on customer service… Well the buyers need to contact the SELLER for customer service, not eBay. Don’t ask eBay to help you out when you have a problem with a SELLER. eBay WAS just a venue. Today, they are trying to act like a governing body telling everyone what to do and of course, when GOVERNMENT get’s involved you have ruined the free market that existed with rules and regulations and FEES.
Today, eBay actually LIMITS the number of items you can list on eBay at one time to 10 items!!! Can you believe that Bull_hit!!
I stopped selling about 5 months ago.
Please SOMEONE OPEN A NEW eBay site like the OLD eBay. Just provide a VENUE and STAY OUT of the selling process!!
August 21st, 2011
If things were bad when this blog was started then I would say eBay has hit rock bottom as of Aug, 2011. I have been selling on eBay for over 12 years and I have been saying for the past 5 things are bad, now its over for eBay. There is just no traffic. I am lucky to get hits on my auctions let alone bids.
I just don’t understand why the management has done what they have done. The one thing eBay’s management can’t control is the merchandise selection and price. Because of that fact, when sellers flee eBay , it is no more. Its that simple.. That is what is happening.
All it would take is for Dateline or 60 mins. to do a story about the shill bidding & sniping that is ramp bid on the site and that would put a nail in the casket. Very sad because it was one time so great.
September 17th, 2011
My last auctions are finishing tomorrow, and after that I will close my Ebay account. Once I’ve been paid for my auctions I will close my Paypal account and that will be the end of that. I can’t believe how few visitors I’ve had to my listings – this is unprecedented. Some of my listings are auctions, others are BIN. Just under half of my listings have sold for the starting price of .99p. I understand that we are in a recession and this would impact how much I can sell, but my prices are very competitive to other online retailers. This winter I will build a website and list all of my stuff for sale MY way, selling for however much I want with no fees and NO PAYPAL! Ebay used to be excellent, when it was on planet Earth.
December 11th, 2011
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