eBay

hlmacdon · ‎04-04-2018

Looks like they are surveying sellers about this again.

Good luck chuck.

momcqueen · ‎04-04-2018

Yeah, read that last night. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I'm fairly confident we are safe from this type of attention north of the border. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, hard to say, but I'm pretty sure we won't ever need to worry about it here in Canada.

hlmacdon · ‎04-04-2018

@momcqueenwrote:
Yeah, read that last night. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I'm fairly confident we are safe from this type of attention north of the border. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, hard to say, but I'm pretty sure we won't ever need to worry about it here in Canada.

I imagine they are less concerned with the Canadian market, but there are some large national distributors here that are faced with dealing with declining categories and declining levels of national retail fulfillment. There are partnerships to be made but I'm not sure what problem it would actually solve for domestic sellers here once you divvy up the costs between three parties.

The impetus of the program seems very US centric to counter Prime 2 day shipping. That means locating at all the major UPS/FedEx hubs in the US in lieu of building any real logistics infrastructure like Amazon has done. It will ultimately be more of a play with Chinese sellers who are already leveraging 3PL providers in the US. Sellers who have to compete in related categories would feel a squeeze. For US inventory they'll be left trying to claw a bit of share from merchants unhappy with their lot at Amazon or those facing inventory level restrictions there.

I'm not sure what they really hope to achieve given much of the US mail volume is delivered within 2-4 days. Unless your name is Amazon there isn't much more you can grind off existing rates, especially given there will be increased scrutiny there. They aren't really solving a problem and ultimately they are increasing their inventory cost and ultimate selling price. If they want more inventory to power their catalog a better approach would be to convert to a free listing model. That is a smarter approach as it keeps seller's inventory cost flat, and with greater availability comes more competition to drive prices down. The speed with which something gets to a customer is important, but it hardly matters when you are trying to sell the same junk to the same customer base.

momcqueen · ‎04-04-2018

'Any port in a storm' seems to me at times to be ebay's approach to new business ventures or opportunities.

femmefan1946 · ‎04-04-2018

They aren't really solving a problem and ultimately they are increasing their inventory cost and ultimate selling price.

Not just thinking inside the box but thinking inside someone else's box.

I'm fairly sure that a lot of AZ's success is based on publicity rather than facts.

Your mention of fast USPS shipping making "prime" just a $99 annually cash cow, for example.

And I wonder how many people think AZ actually does delivery by drone?

Even Trump's current twitterfahrts about how AZ is destroying USPS makes the company seem more important than it is. (If anything, AZ parcel load has helped USPS, which has been suffering from the loss of first class and bill service mail.)

Just as at the turn of the millennium, eBay was able to be on the tip of everyone's brain when they thought of online shopping (and was making money at it!), AZ today is the flavour of the week.

https://www.recode.net/2017/4/27/15451726/amazon-q1-2017-earnings-profits-net-income-cash-flow-chart

This sounds really good about AZ profitability, until you realize that 10 quarters is two and a half years of profit, after being in business for 24 years.

Here is eBay's profit from 2012 to 2017.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/507881/ebays-annual-net-revenue/

Since neither company pays dividends to stockholders, the holders are gamblers who buy it when it is low (look for a sudden rise in the number of AZ stocks purchased while Trump's attack is still news) and sell it when it rises at the next quarterly report.

mcrlmn · ‎04-04-2018

Ha! Somebody's on the ball!

"send us your inventory", "we will pick it, pack it, and deliver it within the time frame that the customer selects for the order." "The service will be competitively priced"

It is a good day!

I was really hoping they'd bring this back.

hlmacdon · ‎04-04-2018

@femmefan1946wrote:

Not just thinking inside the box but thinking inside someone else's box.
I'm fairly sure that a lot of AZ's success is based on publicity rather than facts.
Your mention of fast USPS shipping making "prime" just a $99 annually cash cow, for example.

Just as at the turn of the millennium, eBay was able to be on the tip of everyone's brain when they thought of online shopping (and was making money at it!), AZ today is the flavour of the week.

Prime has it's uses, primarily as a customer retention tool as Amazon's prices aren't that great when doing an end to end comparison. The price of shipping is loaded into their margin model so it is there regardless if you pay the annual toll. In many categories you can consistently get better deals if you don't mind an extra day or three of delivery.

You hit the nail on the head with respect to awareness/publicity. Ebay had that relevance across demographics when there was a broader cross-section of sellers. It was the place to go to find what you couldn't find elsewhere. Outside of the vintage side Amazon has really taken that space over via their FBA program which has given them a huge catalog backed by logistics better than many countries. The rest of that seller demographic has scattered to Facebook, Etsy, or even their own web platforms now that starting an ecommerce site is not much more difficult than a blog.

The "buyer protection" marketing of chargebacks temporarily gave ebay a leg up over the competition, but between increasing consumer awareness of the fact that chargebacks cover all online purchases and improving customer service for etailers that advantage is now gone. For your typical mainstream consumer items there isn't really a compelling reason to buy on ebay. Worse yet for the younger demographic ebay no longer has the mind share it once had. Coupons don't solve awareness.

esclyons · ‎04-04-2018

i truely believe a fulfillment center is only good for seller's who are selling new in the box, identical items.. It would never , ever work for a seller who sells one off's or item's that vary slightly, (collectibles), stamps, coins, cards. etc.. because you can't use a stock photo..

Any item that can use a stock photo would in my opinion qualify for a distribution center, otherwise, i can't see it happening..

silverpinups · ‎04-05-2018

while using patch work software and not expanding the hardware to accommodate the increase in listings that Ebay has attained.... imagine how much Ebay could improve if they paid for quality programmers who actually worked in the same country and could communicate with each other at least weekly to discuss what each ''Team'' is doing, or actually upgraded their servers to handle all of the listings so we don't have the rolling blackouts or the throttling of accounts.

I found this to be an interesting statement from the blog and it does explain the feast or famine theory when it comes to sales.....

hlmacdon · ‎04-05-2018

@silverpinupswrote:
while using patch work software and not expanding the hardware to accommodate the increase in listings that Ebay has attained.... imagine how much Ebay could improve if they paid for quality programmers who actually worked in the same country and could communicate with each other at least weekly to discuss what each ''Team'' is doing, or actually upgraded their servers to handle all of the listings so we don't have the rolling blackouts or the throttling of accounts.

I found this to be an interesting statement from the blog and it does explain the feast or famine theory when it comes to sales.....

I agree that eBay's outsourced IT ranks at the bottom of the barrel in the industry and there is a huge disconnect there. There is an even bigger disconnect with getting customer service, developers and product managers on the same page. And that is for very basic policy things.

That being said the visibility or "blackout" issues are more algorithm by design driven. I suspect the inconsistency in sales has as much to do with pushing customers way too hard to a simplified mobile experience. When you do that you train them to expend the minimum amount of calories when finger swiping. If ebay was a physical store, the analogy would be that customers only bother looking at the endcaps are too lazy to walk down an aisle, much less wander over to a sales person to ask a question. The only consistent sales activity I have comes from repeat regular customers that buy multiple times a week/month. Everything else is random noise.