eBay reported Increased sales last quarter

[postit4me]

It`s laughable that eBay is reporting higher sales in the last quarter and taking bows for it. It is the sellers who drive eBay with products for their buyers to purchase - let alone millions having to stay home in that period. Yet no very large free listings offer - 200 is not going to cut it monthly when we in fact lost 50 from the months before ( 200 plus monthly 50 free).  It is about time eBay understands that the more free listings to sellers the better their bottom line becomes. In the past, the offer was 5000 in a month or 20000 for back to school or Christmas starting in October. Does anyone remember these? The search engines of the internet always come up with the bigger site due to larger amounts of listings. This is one of the big struggles with eBay's understanding of market share. What do you think

[brettjet38]

COVID19 is the ONLY reason SALES are up, it has NOTHING to do with eBay or it's "improvements" ...

...almost as laughable this! eBay keeping us safe!

[femmefan1946]

Like most eBay sellers I did see a huge uptick in my sales from March to mid-July after which there was a drop to normal (ie slow) summer sales.

EBay is disingenuous taking any responsibility for the surge in sales and was slow to deal with the problems caused by slow delivery by overwhelmed shipping services.

Many sellers were offered 10,000 to 50,000 Free Listings early in the pandemic response.

And there is a current announcement that small sellers who only use the 50 Free Listings will have that number boosted to 200(?) from now on and Store Subcribers will also be getting more cheap listings (Basic goes from 250 to 350, I believe).

Many sellers dislike Free Listing promotions, believing flooding the site with products that are not profitable if the seller needs to save 35c on the listing is counter-productive.

But it seems eBay agrees with you since they are giving more freebies.

[hlmacdon]

Like many other sellers I saw a pretty positive boost in sales. A strong part of that has been the complete mess of international shipping, and many buyers switched from trying to save a buck or two by buying from China once they realized how long delivery times were taking. 

I do wonder how much revenue ebay made from price gouged pandemic related products. As we know only a percentage of those listings and transactions were actually flagged. 

[zee-chan]

They probably do track how many sales they get from the free-insertion fee listings versus paid listings. I for one welcome the increase to 200 free listings a month. But yes, I'm also a bit annoyed by eBay taking credit for the increased sales when literally all it provided is a platform; the sellers are doing the majority of the footwork.

[femmefan1946]

I'm not sure that the buyers from Chinese listings are sophisticated enough to realize that it can take months in normal times for their purchase to arrive.

And also sophisticated enough to understand that shipments from overseas will take even longer than that.
I'm a snob, I guess.

[skylarstuff]

Free listings = more variety and choices, and of course more incremental sales. The 50,000 free listing promo was a big reason for the success.  Promos worked in the past so no surprise that it would work now.  Ebay should go the free listing route just like amazon.

[ypdc_dennis]

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@skylarstuff wrote:

... Promos worked in the past so no surprise that it would work now.  Ebay should go the free listing route just like amazon.

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AZ charges a fee if you have more than 100000 items for sale.

Plus there are some big differences.

* All listings on AZ are part of their catalog system. One UPC for all.

* AZ takes a bigger slice of any sale money to make up for the "free".

* No easy way for a buyer to see what a particular seller has for sale.

More free listings is good. Free-for-all is not.

-..-

[hlmacdon]

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@femmefan1946 wrote:

I'm not sure that the buyers from Chinese listings are sophisticated enough to realize that it can take months in normal times for their purchase to arrive.

And also sophisticated enough to understand that shipments from overseas will take even longer than that.
I'm a snob, I guess.

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In my niche they've all started catching onto it now that they have orders that have been taking 3+ months. From the various community discussions the holdouts seem to be the type that just make very low value occasional orders that were already used to waiting a few months for Aliexpress orders. Many of the sellers in China that were just dumping Taobao feeds into ebay have closed up shop after tiring of all the INRs so that has had an effect as well. For the few points of margin they were making in the end the INRs killed their model.