They could win back customers by thinking like a customer. Too bad they've forgotten most their "customers" are the people selling stuff to other people. They think they're the store -- they're not. They're more like a flea market.

! everyone loves cake!

Pipswich wrote:
I know some of you think sellers are paying the fees, but those fees come from your customers.  Without happy customers, EVERY business is doomed.

Then Ebay's strategy is an abject failure.  Since the business is failing, customers must be unhappy, and this was the cornerstone of Ebay's "changes"....getting back customers that "left".  The numbers are in and EBay blew it....so obviously the "customer" problem they found wasn't the answer.

Customer satisfaction is a red herring.  They used that excuse to switch everything to Paypal only to collect 100& of payment fees because it is supposedly "safer" which is a lie. The result being sellers left Ebay in droves, destroying buyer's ability to benefit from competition and choose different vendors.  

I have a B10 up for sale right now at $75.  The only other copy up on ebay right now is at $140.  I just had a potential buyer today ask if I would lower the price to $50. Why would I do that?  I'm underselling the only other seller by half.  It'll sell in a month or so at my price, simply because of someone wants one they have two choices and one is twice as much as the other.  I have no incentive to lower the price because I have no competition. Maybe if 4-5 other copies were up right now in the $50-$100 range I might think of cutting a deal. So much for customers benefitting in any way from the changes.

Before 2008, MY customers weren't unhappy.  Why should I have had to suffer because someone else was diddling around?  

Once again, sellers pay 100% of the fees.  As a matter of fact, if a buyer never again showed up on ebay, ebay would make money....because the seller pays all the fees to list items.    

I think people are realizing the failure of this business model was that Ebay stuck it's nose into something it had no business in....which was customer satisfaction with BUYERS, not the venue itself.  It's the SELLER'S job to make customers happy; if they are unhappy they leave or go to another seller. Ebay has been a failure at keeping it's venue up (customer service, as has been noted, is non-existent) and they source of unhappiness can be traced directly to them, not the seller.  By blaming the seller, putting all the onus of responsibility on them, and failing to help the seller they have destroyed a thriving business.

If ebay is going down the tube, my history suggest it is the disollution of seller integrity and the fact that some sellers figured out how to manipulate the system and are destroying the trust relationship for the buyers.

I disagree entirely. If you weren't having any problems until 2007, ask yourself what has changed to cause you so many problems?  It was 100 times easier for a bad seller to game the system before 2008 than it is now.  The seller has NO power now to do anything, yet they are manipulating the system now? How?

Problem is that Ebay chased off a lot of sellers, and more times than not they chased off someone that had been a "good" seller because they changed something that was non-negotiable.....making them use Paypal only, for example.  For every Creep1962 chased off, ten legit sellers you'd have been happy to buy from left for reasons large and small.  I'm not making this up; Ebay has empirical evidence of their failure in last quarter's numbers, and I don't see how on earth they are going to turn this around in 2009...expect the next two quarters to look even worse, and end JD's brief tenure as CEO.....

Mike B.

Pipswich wrote: I must have something in the neighborhood of 10,000 purchases or so on this account since 1997.

You know, I let it float the first time you posted it, I am not going to this time.  The very least that you could in this discussion is be HONEST and NOT try and significanty inflate your Ebay history.  I know who you are:



http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.d ... :MEFSX:FDB



As to your saying that you have had less problems than others, I heartily disagree.  Since you have "come back" to Ebay in the last year, you have managed to leave as much bad feedback for sellers than I have in in my whole Ebay 10 year history(and really most others as well) in 1/20th the transactions:



http://toolhaus.org/cgi-bin/negs?User=g ... rn=Left+by



30 Negs and 11 neutrals since October alone which works out to be roughly 1 every ten feedbacks you have left for sellers has been negative.  



Looks like your DSRs as a seller could use some work as well.



And I have got news for you, up until about 6 months ago, I used to be the KING of trolling for BINs and never had any of these problems.  It has nothing to do with it.

gyg wrote:
know that you outright asked previously and that there was no answer forthcoming, so I am intrigued. (And I must say that I, for one, wouldn't doubt Brian's 'nose' for these things for a nanosecond )

Alabama, same as Pipswich:



viewtopic.php?t=7899&highlight=pinball



Which goes along with:




** expired/removed eBay auction **




The previously mentioned broken D&D Chess set discussed earlier, which can be found in his feedback left.





I absolutely HATE being lied to, particularly when there is not a single good reason to.

I swear Brian should work as an investigative journalist.

ShaneG.

As someone who is 97% Buyer, and 3% Seller, it is completely obvious to me that the Sellers have been completely screwed on eBay over the past year. And in the current state of affiars, eBay is completely and unilaterally to blame.

Yes, a few years ago it was not all that pretty of a picture for Buyers at times. eBay became infested by Power Sellers of junk whose listings screwed the searches, got away with far-less-than-good customer service because of their volume (eBay would simply turn a blind eye to obvious patterns of poor feedback), and generally made the eBay experience easy for a Buyer to simply walk away from.

eBay, however, TOTALLY mis-read the situation (perhaps*) and instituted a series of draconian measures that treated all Sellers like crap, and for the first time pitted all Buyers against all Sellers. Today eBay is home to an instantly adversarial relationship between Buyers and Sellers, in large part due to the hideous DSR system. eBay's "fixes" completely missed the target, and didn't come at all close to curing what had made eBay so unpleasant in the first place. Instead, eBay trashed the element of verified, 2-way Trust that had made it work so well in the first place.

And now it comes down to this: Sellers (who, yes, pay the fees) have to give up a significant portion of their Sales to eBay, and have received little in the way of tools or increased volume over the years to justify it. In fact, they run the risk of undeserved punishment (DSR) with every transaction.

And Buyers like me are finding less of what they're looking for, not so much because of the flood of crap, but because the good Sellers are leaving in droves, and the tools get more and more broken with each passing quarter (search with favoritism and the so-called success of "My eBay", candidate for the single worst UI since the term "Web 2.0" was coined).

I feel for the Sellers, I really do. No matter what, I never leave less than 5 Stars because it is such an unjust system. I'd rather leave nothing at all (unless the day comes that there is a serious infraction!). If they really are bad Seller, someone else will nick them some day. OTOH, I don't think the next year is going to be very good for eBay, or for any of us who want to use it. I definitely feel my enthusiasm as  Buyer winding down. Time and frustration is money, and if that means I have to buy at a higher list price directly through a store or Amazon in return for what I want and good service, so be it.

Sorry for the length of this rant.
______
* I say "perhaps" but I'm not sure eBay mis-read the situation... I think the lure of easy money from crap high-volume Power Sellers and distractions like PayPal and Skype made them arrogantly think they knew exactly what they were doing.

Pipswich wrote:"Buyers pay NOTHING to ebay, in either ebay or paypal fees."

Buyers pay all the fees.  Without buyers there is not ebay, no walmart, no business anywhere, anytime.

E-Bay sells listing space and access to a market to their sellers.  E-Bay's customers are the sellers, not the buyers.  If E-Bay wants to be successful, they should be creating a seller-friendly environment.

Equating them to Wal-Mart makes no sense.  It would be more accurate to say E-Bay is like a shopping mall, making money from the individual businesses renting within.

I think the post by Mecha is a REALLY GOOD explanation of a lot of things I've been dancing around, myself being more long winded than able to make a good point...he's summed up my feelings perfectly.  

mechascorpio wrote:Yes, a few years ago it was not all that pretty of a picture for Buyers at times. eBay became infested by Power Sellers of junk whose listings screwed the searches, got away with far-less-than-good customer service because of their volume (eBay would simply turn a blind eye to obvious patterns of poor feedback), and generally made the eBay experience easy for a Buyer to simply walk away from.

 Exactly true, the Ebay experience was much more weighted in favor of the Seller, and sometimes, the "Bad" seller like a Cougar.  Certainly a lot of buyers were frustrated, and negative experiences led to them leaving Ebay.  However, in the long run, this was mostly their own fault.  First of all, I can't believe that like Pip I absolutely NEVER had a bad experience, except I really didn't, during this time.  Simply put, I only bought from 98 percent or higher feedback buyers, I carefully checked shipping fees, I checked feedback left for AND by someone I was thinking of buying from, and most importantly I didn't let threats of negative feedback curtail my leaving the same for bad buyers.....

eBay, however, TOTALLY mis-read the situation (perhaps*) and instituted a series of draconian measures that treated all Sellers like crap, and for the first time pitted all Buyers against all Sellers. Today eBay is home to an instantly adversarial relationship between Buyers and Sellers, in large part due to the hideous DSR system. eBay's "fixes" completely missed the target, and didn't come at all close to curing what had made eBay so unpleasant in the first place. Instead, eBay trashed the element of verified, 2-way Trust that had made it work so well in the first place.

I think it's finally being seen how badly Ebay misread the situation and how badly an effect their new policies had. The relationship between Buyer and Seller is much, much worse than ever, even in the bad old days when Seller's had all the power.

And now it comes down to this: Sellers (who, yes, pay the fees) have to give up a significant portion of their Sales to eBay, and have received little in the way of tools or increased volume over the years to justify it. In fact, they run the risk of undeserved punishment (DSR) with every transaction.

Basically, we are paying more money for less. I would totally agree. It's probaby the reason why the majority of seller left last year.

And Buyers like me are finding less of what they're looking for, not so much because of the flood of crap, but because the good Sellers are leaving in droves, and the tools get more and more broken with each passing quarter (search with favoritism and the so-called success of "My eBay", candidate for the single worst UI since the term "Web 2.0" was coined).

Another nail on the head....less choice is a bad thing, a lot of buyers are finding out. When only one ebay seller has, say, a Dungeon #1 in their store, don't be shocked when it's $100....like the ONE copy on ebay now is priced at.  It was not out of the question for 4-5 at one time to be available in Ebay stores a year or two ago.

I feel for the Sellers, I really do. No matter what, I never leave less than 5 Stars because it is such an unjust system. I'd rather leave nothing at all (unless the day comes that there is a serious infraction!). If they really are bad Seller, someone else will nick them some day. OTOH, I don't think the next year is going to be very good for eBay, or for any of us who want to use it. I definitely feel my enthusiasm as  Buyer winding down. Time and frustration is money, and if that means I have to buy at a higher list price directly through a store or Amazon in return for what I want and good service, so be it.

If anything good comes out of this year, it's going to be because things will only get worse for them. Unfortunately, that will probably mean things get worse for me and other sellers there, but I'm committed to the long run.  I'm expecting an awful, awful year, with hope on the horizon after this summer when Ebay will either have to change, or die.  At that point I and many others will probably be making decisions also....whether to switch to Amazon/Bonanzle/individual web site or gut it out a few more months.  A lot will depend, in my case, on whether I see Ebay admit in the next few months they have screwed the pooch. At this point, anything less than kissing my rosy red ass will probably mean I depart for greener pastures....

Mike B.