@rose-deewrote:
@hlmacdonwrote:
Their product managers like categories where aging of listings is less than 30 days and with mid to high double digit conversion rates. In other words, the traditional ecommerce pipe dream where everyone assumes everything turns over quickly and a relatively high percentage of customers buy what they look at.
This is what I find ironic. That was the usual case for a great many sellers prior to the 2012/13 Chinese floodgates opening. In years prior to about 2012, it was unusual for any of my items to sit more than 60 to 90 days, and most sold within a month or so. I think many of us who have been here for more than 5 or 6 years remember that scenario. EBay's determination to get even bigger than it was, compete in the mass-produced product market, and divest itself of hundreds of thousands of small, independent sellers is what has led to this juncture. So which is better? Having an enormous site that's often a mess for both seller and buyer to deal with, swamped with goods anyone could buy anywhere, scratching for every dollar in fees, or a specialized site that keeps its sellers and buyers turning over goods at a reasonable rate?
There are two ways to do that -- force sellers to sell faster (and more), and expand the seller base as quickly and as far as possible. I see the UPC/product grouping concept as the former strategy, and the Shopify concept as the latter (clearly the Chinese tsunami hasn't worked well as a longer-term strategy, for many reasons). Now eBay is hoping to lure independent website owners -- for the moment only those in the U.S. -- who, it must assume, are professional or semi-professional retailers and know a bit more about selling online in the U.S. market.
Whether one seller sells a listing at $100, or ten sellers sell at $10 ultimately probably makes no difference to eBay, especially if they're able to get those 10 sellers to sign up for a store subscription as well. You're right I think, this will be a race to the bottom for the majority of eBay sellers. The winners will be those who can hold out the longest at the narrowest margins.
EBay's assumption is that their bounce rate is due to uncompetitive pricing (hey guys, it's a consequence of how expensive it is to sell here and how much we have to buffer for a customer base with a substantially higher of issues then other sales channels) and presentation (because sorting and interpreting ascending and descending values is "hard"). Forcing listing grouping to a "Ebay says you should buy this one" approach is a sledgehammer to fix both problems. What they don't realize is they are killing any individuality of the seller and reducing the sum of the shopping experience to another glorified dropship experience lacking any value add. You aren't building any relationship between buyer and seller and in the meantime the buyer experience is still going to vary. Ebay execs like this as they would much rather the public think they are buying from ebay and not XYZ retailer on ebay, hence the push to take away any individuality in photos and any seller branding. It is no coincidence that these changes are designed to appeal to mass merchants by guaranteeing them visibility, all they have to do is implement their standard retail policies and leverage their cost advantage and they will get top billing.
Amazon deals with this by controlling the logistics process and offering an unbeatable logistics proposition. They own the planes, trains, and automobiles and dictate their contacted rates, ebay doesn't. You don't enjoy shopping there, but you will go though the painful process because the experience is predictable, you'll get your item in X number of days, it will be poorly packaged, but if there is a problem you can rely on every support inquiry you get an extra free month of prime. The new ebay approach doesn't build any incentive for the buyer to repeat buy on the platform. The "old" eBay's greatest value add was developing sellers that were known for being the people to go to for "x" product. Whether it is our resident stamp sellers or other niches that require specialist insight, you come to ebay to buy from those sellers, not ebay. The new system is going to diminish that and you have to wonder how many of those sellers will justifiably look to focus on other channels.
I don't think the Chinese sellers ruined ebay per se. I would make the argument that the reduced success of sellers has as much to do with ebay completely ruining their relationship with google through spammy blackhat practices and killing their external traffic. That lines up with the time frame and coincides with ebay making changes to reporting tools to hide your ability to see where your buyers were coming from. You can manage the listings issue by managing your categories logically and having all the necessary filters to narrow results. Capturing the buyer who knows exactly what they want is easy, maximizing that buyer's total spend and getting a higher attach rate requires you to make filtering (not sorting) product easy.
EBay's product managers don't really understand a great deal of the categories and hence those categories have filters which don't make a lot of sense and don't really help the buyer narrow their listings. It is the same problem that Amazon has and for the same reason it is a pain in the butt to shop there. This is what happens when you have product managers that don't understand the product and just sit there analyzing sales figures and other metrics that are completely unrelated to the actual characteristics of the product. That may be "ecommerce" analysis but it isn't retail analysis.
Product identifiers were a good idea in the sense of forcing sellers to adopt characteristics that could be added to products to generate relevant filters. Where ebay sucks is not knowing what characteristics are relevant to categories. This is why you see the likes of ebay and amazon trying to manage things via algorithms, a bandaid approach that sucks for your conversion, bounce and attach rates. You curate or you die in ecommerce. Ebay needs to better manage this rather than strictly focusing on MPN/UPC and the price side.
As far as the shopify bit goes it is just low/no cost acquisition of listing inventory. I see it as more of an extension of their current affiliate marketing, but it is also an admission that they have trouble attracting merchants to the platform. I don't think you'll see a ton of uptake there. Like everything else ebay is attempting to implement, nothing here is revolutionary or new, this is literally what everyone has been doing for years. If you wanted to export your website listings to ebay you didn't need shopify or any help from ebay.
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