@sylviebee wrote:
If you really believe that the way eBay is running things is hurting your sales and the problem is due to Google hassles etc. etc. etc, then post an item that is in high demand at a ridiculously low price.
It probably won't last more than a few seconds.
They'll be on it like white on rice.
I do agree with you that what I call "buyer fatigue" (i.e. buyer ennui) may be setting in, but where eBay is concerned I don't think we can attribute flagging traffic and sluggish sales completely to one phenomenon or the other.
I think that buyer overload -- whether it be just too much "stuff" on offer, or too many sites spreading buyers too thinly -- is just one component. It's something eBay may well have been able to overcome (or at least have significantly mitigated), given its dominating presence in the online marketplace, if it hadn't been for all the mistakes and misguided decision-making on eBay's part.
I believe that had eBay been more attentive and forward-thinking when it mattered, and less obsessed with feeding its shareholders' gaping maws at the cost of everything else, it could have trounced the competition and come out flying ahead. Alas, short-term thinking won the day, and here we are, sad to say, becoming just one among many sites flogging essentially the same stuff.
As far as posting a high-demand item at a very low price goes, I agree that such an item would sell in a flash, but not because there is particularly good traffic to eBay. EBay will always have its cadre of buyers, even if smaller than previously, who frequent the site on a regular basis, even daily, looking for ridiculously cheap deals, and amongst those will always be people who will snap up a desperately undervalued item. That wouldn't necessarily prove there is still great traffic onto the eBay site. It would prove there are still "bottom-feeders" on eBay, as there have always been.
I don't know that there is any "experiment" we sellers could conduct that would actually show whether traffic to eBay has slumped. I think that can only come from a broader sampling. Certainly the Omniture statistics, as unreliable as some claim they are in specifics, have demonstrated a downward trend in my (and other sellers') reported experience over the past year or so.
As an example, Google-directed traffic to my store currently accounts for only 6% of visitors; two years ago that figure was closer to 50%. Overall numbers are down, despite the fact that I've maintained my TRS, have no defects, 100% positive FB, free shipping on many items, and am listing more items than ever. I'm not trying to show I'm doing anything more than many sellers are, but the effort to maintain all of that has simply not translated into a better return (=more sales). Two years ago (i.e. prior to the Google fiasco and the hacker incident), it did make a big difference.
So what suddenly changed? Surely buyer fatigue didn't have an overnight effect on giant eBay, nor could it have driven away a lot of previously loyal eBay buyers. As an example, two or three months after the hacker attack, I began to notice that the FB profile of my buyers had changed significantly. Suddenly I was getting a predominance of new buyers (less than 20 or 30 FB), and very, very few of my usual experienced eBay customers. Unfortunately Omniture doesn't track those kinds of statistics.
The only explanation I could come up with was that many experienced eBay users were frightened off by the possibility of having their personal information breached. That trend, incidentally, has continued to the present time, although the proportions have changed somewhat. We sellers had no choice but to return to the site after the breach, but buyers certainly had the choice to go to a site they may have believed was more secure.
So in my view eBay did a good job of shooting itself in the foot in 2013, adding to what was probably already the marketing challenge of trying to keep buyers interested in the site and keen on coming back. In other words, they didn't do anything to lessen the effects of buyer fatigue, but rather added to it, and in a fairly dramatic and public way. Bottom line: I still think I'd give eBay a defect for its overall management of this venue in the past 2 or 3 years.
