@gifts_of_elegance wrote:
When the supply is greater than the demand, prices go down.
We all know that many of the sellers that have left eBay were also its buyers. Add to it a bad search engine, bad publicity and lots of people don't want to buy from eBay anymore.
eBay is desperate, they need to show lots of listings to cover up its decline. They have to look good to Wall Street and for their shareholders and that is why they are giving us all these free listings. The truth is, now they are doing even more black outs to keep their expenses down. But then what do we expect for nothing?
As tempting as it is, we got to stop listing more items. We are increasing the supply but the demand stays the same, so prices are crashing. It started at the end of 2014 and has been steadily declining.
It's hard not to agree with most of this. I would add to your list: bad site management/site design and bad policy decisions. I'm entering my 15th year here, and it certainly isn't the great place to sell that it once was.
I would think many sellers are now experiencing a huge decline in sell-through rate, and I agree with you that it seems to have started seriously in early 2015. My sell-through rate this year has dropped to close to 3%, although on another site on which I sell, it's nearly 10% (and I have far fewer items listed!). What exactly happened on eBay this year, I can only guess -- perhaps the cumulative effect of "all of the above" finally taking hold? Nonetheless, when it gets to the point where one has to list 500 items to sell 10 in a month, you are probably right that adding more fuel to the fire is not going to solve the problem.
Yet it's hard to change sellers' attitude towards promos when they think that listing more for free will necessarily be a better thing. I think that particular ball is in eBay's court. In my opinion eBay has shot itself in the foot with ill-conceived ideas and just plain blunders over the past 3 years or so, and has as a result lost its "head of the class" status in the world of online selling venues.
It seems ironic to me now that eBay CEOs are trying to woo back their core of traditional, smaller independent sellers. Three years ago, when the debacle for smaller sellers began, I recall saying over and over that eBay would rue the day it turned its back on its original cadre of sellers. These are the people who offer interesting items, who know how to make customers happy (and coming back) and who would never leave if eBay would simply make this venue a "comfortable" place for them to run their businesses. Such short-sightedness on eBay's part, because now legions of those sellers have either gone elsewhere or are spreading their efforts around to hedge their bets.
By the way, I've heard people mentioning "black-outs" before, but I've never actually seen anyone describe precisely what that means. I'm not even sure whether it's legend or fact. Can you elaborate?
