More on eBay's Analyst Day

Ina Steiner has a summary posted at AuctionBytes in four parts:

eBay Strategy Revealed: Overstock Inventory from Diamond Liquidators
EBay Analyst Day Notes
EBay Analyst Day Notes, part two
EBay Analyst Day Notes, part 3

I have read through Ina's observations and all of the comments from readers of her blog. I have compiled some of the more interesting thoughts and observations here.

Ina:

eBay telegraphed the contents pretty early, so there are no real surprises yet. PayPal is definitely being featured as the "Star" of the portfolio, with the most upside. Look for a PayPal/BML integrated checkout later this year, which eBay hopes will drive incremental purchases. eBay is still a disappointment, so hang on for more changes over the next few years.

Ina paraphrasing John Donohoe:

Today we will share with you a different eBay...EBay you know is not the eBay we are or the eBay we will become...EBay has a storied past, but we have held on to that past for too long.

I have to insert this here: What is his problem? You don't take a successful business model and run it into the ground.

Comment by MsFish213:

I think what alot of sellers arent seeing in all this, is that Ebay IS changing, it was planned, and its not going back. If anyone is still hanging on the hopes of the old Ebay, its not going to happen. That has been made clear today, IMO. Ebay will become one of many ecommerce platforms (they aren't even aiming for #1 anymore), and are going to focus on becoming the #1 internet financial institution..thats where the money/profit is now.

Comment by Mutley:

Having scanned through parts 1-3 it's clear Ebay have decided auction format is not part of their strategic direction. This seems a strange decision - apart from live auctions, Ebay is about the only viable site which small sellers can run auctions with reasonable certainty that they will attain market value. Others have tried and failed, yet Ebay seem to see no value in having this unique selling point.

Comment by shjames:

80% of my listings are unique, high quality hand made artisan items. I used to have more than 900 items listed on a regular basis...If ebay thinks I'm going to return to the days when I paid $8,000-$10,000+ a month for auction style listings in a category bloated with 35 cent, often misrepresented knockoff fixed price listings, they're crazy...When ebay introduced the Most Popular algorithm into Best Match last fall, my sales plummeted 65% in ONE week and have gradually declined since. People can't buy what ebay won't let them see...I've gone from Platinum to approaching Silver powerseller status in six months after being a Platinum powerseller for more than five years.

Comment by Pam:

Same problem with Best Match, same fall in sales, same fee amount we were paying before being destroyed by the poor decisions made by this company. That's $18,000-$20,000 in fees per month from just 2 sellers that they have lost and I'm sure we're not alone. I do understand what others are saying about running off the small sellers, but I would not consider us small and they have destroyed us.

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The last two comments were from large volume sellers—large in comparison to people like us, yet they have been destroyed by eBay. EBay does not want the small sellers or the bronze, silver, gold, or platinum Power Sellers. They want the large corporations—the diamond Power Sellers. They want to be Amazon.com.

From the comments made by representatives of eBay, they feel that PayPal is their strongest asset and plan to build their business model around it. For a long time, people have suggested that John Donohoe's plan involves breaking eBay into two companies and selling the part that contains the auctions. I am beginning to agree with that point of view. One person suggested that eBay will break into two companies, one for payment processing (PayPal.com and related parts) and the other for commerce (eBay.com). This person believes that the company will sell eBay.com when that happens. It would not surprise me.

A Few Quick Thoughts on eBay's Analyst Day

EBay's Analyst Day was today. I have read some brief summaries of what transpired. The gist of it is that CEO John Donohoe will keep eBay on its present path, which is to attempt to gain ground on Amazon. They admit that they are losing ground to Amazon, but they feel that by continuing this plan that they will ultimately gain ground. Um, I think they are losing ground because of this plan.

Scott Wingo has a summary of today's event in his blog, eBay Strategies. Several parts are interesting, but this one part is what stood out the most for me:

Q: Can you say more about this secondary market opportunity?

A: LT - yes, the old eBay was about cleaning junk out of your house, this is about cleaning junk out of your warehouse. The stuff retailers don't want

There you have it. EBay wants the big sellers, the department stores, and the closeout stores. They do want to become Amazon 2.0. They no longer want us, the people who collect vintage items.

Ina Steiner should have some good commentary about this event in her blog tomorrow. I'll write more once I know more about it.

eBay's Valued Customers

I must not be one of them. I heard about a free listing sale through the message boards but could find no evidence of it anywhere. I was puzzled until I learned that the free listing sale is by invitation only. From the announcement:

If you qualify for participation, you will have received an email and a Message Center message. Please look for these to see if you are eligible.

EBay once offered its sales to all customers. Earlier this year, eBay had a sale in which only people who had sold in the last month could get free listings. Now, eBay has a sale in which users must receive an invitation. I wonder how eBay decides who should receive the invitation?

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EBay made an announcement today concerning the books category. From eBay's announcement board:

From now through the end of 2009, pay only 5¢ Insertion Fees when you list books, music, movies, and video games on eBay.com in Fixed Price with product details. Your listings will show up on both the new eBay product pages and in search results. That’s double exposure for just 5¢. Plus, get Subtitle free with Fixed Price and Auction-style listings in these categories when you list with product details.

We’re extending this promotion as part of our commitment to make eBay a top destination for books, music, movies and DVDs and video games. The goal: give today’s buyers the deals and selection they demand, and give sellers the pricing and exposure they need to succeed.

Also, starting in May, Half.com sellers will be able to choose to have their listings show up on eBay product pages at no extra cost. With almost 60% of the inventory on Half.com not currently being offered on eBay, this will go a long way to delivering the selection buyers expect.

The five cent listings promotion means more poorly-described listings with stock photos of books that we do not want to buy. I know someone out there thinks that I, as a buyer, should be very grateful, but I am not. These will not be books that I want to buy.

Even worse, Half.com's inventory will begin to be listed on eBay. Check out the 150 matches for a Nancy Drew books category search on Half.com. I do not feel that the presence of any of these listings will enhance my eBay search experience. I do not want new books; I want old ones. More clutter will be added to my searches.

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This is interesting. EBay's Board of Directors met today. According to Ina Steiner,

eBay's Board of Directors found the company under-performed in 2008 and is awarding no eBay Incentive Plan bonuses to top executives. In addition, the board is freezing executive salaries this year. The board's compensation committee also created a new peer group by which to measure executive performance going forward.

So, they are just now noticing that something is wrong?

The Race to the Bottom

The large resellers of books such as Buy.com undercut each other in pricing, thus causing what booksellers refer to as a "race to the bottom." Modern fiction is a perfect example of this phenomenon. The average modern fiction title can easily be had for $0.01 plus shipping and handling. The large resellers make a very tiny profit on the shipping and handling, and by selling in a very large volume, they do have what is apparently a successful business model. I am skeptical of how well this works, but supposedly when a company sells many thousands of books at $0.01 and charges around $4.00 shipping, it does work out for them in the long run.

For sellers of vintage series books, this is not the way to do business. In recent weeks, the resellers on eBay have begun to lower their prices in order to attempt to make sales, no doubt due to our struggling economy. I have been a bit surprised at a few of the prices for books that are offered in fixed-price listings from people who are not new to selling series books. Some of the prices are quite low.

I realize that some people may desperately need to make a few sales in order to pay bills, so my comments are not really directed at people to which that applies. I can understand why someone would sell a book at below value in order to bring in some quick, much-needed money.

My comments are also not directed at people who list books at auction with very low starting bids. After all, low starting bids can cause bidding wars, thus resulting in books that sell for approximately or above current value. A seller always has a chance at a higher price when listing books in auctions.

My comments are only directed at sellers who use Buy It Now and list at prices that are way too low. I have to wonder about people who take a book that is worth $10.00 or more and sell it at a Buy It Now price of $1.00. Why do this? There have been many times when I have purchased a book for a mere pittance, and I would have gladly paid a higher price, sometimes a much higher price.

This has happened to me in the last few weeks. In one of my searches, I noticed a Buy It Now listing for a Patsy Carroll book that had a dust jacket. I am casually working on a set of the Patsy Carroll books; it is not a priority. So when I saw the Patsy Carroll book for a Buy It Now of $1.00, I took it.


I already had one Patsy Carroll book, and I paid $15.49 including shipping for it. As I recall, it was an auction, and the winning bid was around $11.00-12.00, so the above book is definitely worth more than $1.00. After I bought the book, I looked at what else the seller had. I found a Grace Harlowe book that had a Buy It Now of $3.00, so I bought it too.


The Grace Harlowe book is an Altemus edition, and the Altemus editions are very hard to find, especially with dust jackets. Most of the available Grace Harlowe books are the ones published much later by Goldsmith with cheap quality paper. While the dust jacket has a significant flaw where a previous owner wrote her name on the front panel, it is still worth more than $3.00.

The seller charged $6.00 shipping for the two books, which included at least a $3.00 handling fee. The seller's cost for packaging was definitely not $3.00. This is a seller who must feel that items should be priced low to sell fast and plans to make a profit on the handling fees. As I have already stated, sellers of vintage series books should not do this. I would have gladly paid at least $10.00 each for the two books plus the postage charge for combined shipping.

The seller undercut herself by offering the books at such low prices. The books might have taken slightly longer to sell, but they would have sold. The listings were 30-day listings, so the seller did use the lowest cost option available on eBay. When a seller lists a book for 30 days, it is not sensible to undercut oneself so dramatically.

Go to eBay and do a search for "Patsy Carroll" and just see how many dust-jacketed books you find. One one is available right now with a starting price of $32.50. Next, search for "Grace Harlowe" and see how many Altemus editions with dust jackets are listed. As I write this, eBay has none. Neither book should have been sold at such ridiculously low Buy It Now prices.

eBay Investor Day

The word is that eBay's Big Announcement will be revealed on Wednesday, March 11, at the eBay Investor Day meeting. Whatever is about to happen is not going to be free listings, so says CEO John Donohoe. AuctionBytes wrote the following comments regarding Donohoe's remarks:

When asked whether insertion fees could go all the way to zero, he said it would vary by category and country, but, "It won't go up. It will go down over time. But there's nothing planned this year in that front. We made the structural changes we needed to on that front last year."

Part of eBay's announcement will certainly be about the "new and improved" search that I will be forced to use next month. Additionally, I believe that more and more users are getting opted into the new item pages, which are designed to be more like Amazon's and other retailers.

EBay is also rolling out changes with the seller dashboard so that sellers can get more information about which types of buyers give certain types of ratings. Some sellers have already been opted into the new version of the seller dashboard. I do not have access to the new version, but my seller dashboard has a link to a detailed page that explains how to use the new seller dashboard. At the bottom of this page is a very interesting message:

It's against eBay policy to question buyers about the ratings they left. It's also against policy to use these reports to interfere with the anonymity of detailed seller ratings.

It astounds me that eBay actually is making it "illegal" to ask buyers about their ratings. Now I stated many months ago that it is a very bad idea to ask buyers about their ratings, and I would never do so. However, I find it disconcerting that eBay is forbidding sellers from asking.

It is further amazing that eBay states that we cannot use the detailed "reports to interfere with the anonymity of detailed seller ratings." I have a newsflash for eBay: for small sellers such as me, the detailed seller ratings have never been anonymous. Now eBay has made it against policy for me to use my own brain on any given day to determine that the one buyer who left a rating that day is the one person who made the average rating go up or down that same day. The only time that I have not known who left a certain rating was the time my ratings went down significantly, and two people left feedback on the same day. So long as I do not receive multiple buyer feedbacks in one day, I know who left which kind of rating. As a buyer, I am very aware that all of the lower volume individual sellers will know whether I left good or bad ratings.

EBay can tell me not to do this or that, but they cannot prevent me from making observations about the seller dashboard among other things. In spite of the hidden buyer IDs, I have finally satisfactorily proved to myself that a certain bookseller shill bids on his or her auctions with another ID. I have suspected this person for years, and I knew which buyer ID I suspected. I finally spent around an hour running searches and making detailed comparisons, and I proved the connection between the IDs. I plan to do nothing with the information since it would be too hard to try to get eBay to see it, but this is a free world, and I can sleuth all I want.

Note: I will not under any circumstances reveal which seller, and I will not give any additional information. I did email one person in private and ask whether he saw it too. He did, so I know I am not seeing something where there is nothing. This is something that has nagged at me for the longest time, and I decided to prove it once and for all.

Updates to Searching on eBay Coming in April

The title of this post is the title of a message that I just received from eBay. In the message, eBay explains that the new search has everything the old search has but is better. More specifically, eBay states that the new search has "Better results--you'll see more relevant items." Let's discuss this.

In a recent post, I explained what I noticed about the new search in comparison with the old search. I wrote:

Since the number of results were low for "Textbook, Education," I used that subcategory to compare the results. In the old search, four results were returned and only one of them was a result that had little to do with Nancy Drew, How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen. The other three results all contained Nancy Drew books.

In the new search, nine results were returned: the three results from the old search that contained Nancy Drew books and six results that did not contain Nancy Drew books. The six results were three listings for How Reading Changed My Life plus two listings for As We Remember Her: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and one listing for First-Aid Kit for Mothers. So the new search returned the three relevant items from the old search plus five additional irrelevant items that the old search did not return.

EBay tells me that I will see more relevant items. By my own observations, I will see more items, but those items are irrelevant.

The second point eBay makes in the message is that "New options on the left side of the page make it easy to expand or narrow results." I opted into the new search again to see what is on the left side of the page that makes it better. Honestly, I do not know. I'm not trying to be difficult; it just does not look that different to me. I think the place to select auctions versus stores or Buy It Now is in a different location, but the page seems to have the same functionality.

The third point made by eBay is that "Snapshot View enables you to get a quick glance at the results." I am lost on this one. I see nowhere to find a "snapshot view," unless eBay means that little window that sometimes opens up for me on the saved searches page when I am trying to see all of the search results. Maybe that is it. I do not want to see a sample of the results; I want to see all of them.

The fourth and final point made by eBay is that "Now you can select multiple brands or colors to see what you want faster." This is good for people who are searching for new items, especially clothing. I cannot see how it is going to help a buyer of vintage books. This final point just proves that eBay wishes to cater to the buyers and sellers of new items and is not interested in helping people like me.

eBay Glitches Continue

I won six auctions this weekend from one seller. The seller had already sent an invoice for the first two books and later sent one presumably for all of them. When I went to pay for the books, the first two books were separated from the last four. This meant that two payments were required in order to pay for the books. I knew that I would pay too much postage, but I went ahead and paid. This has happened too often in the last year for me to try to figure out what is wrong.

After I paid, the seller mentioned not understanding why eBay separated the books. He further stated that he would send the books priority since I had paid too much postage. I was actually quite happy to be getting priority since priority is my preference for very hard to find books such as these.

This is not a new seller, so I feel confident that whatever was wrong with the invoice was not the seller's fault. This has happened to me as a seller several times in the last year. In those cases, I knew that I did the invoices correctly, yet the buyers reported problems like the one I just experienced.

When what should be one payment is processed as two, the seller gets more for postage, and PayPal gets additional fees. PayPal is owned by eBay, and eBay freely admits that PayPal is their strongest asset and the one part of the company that is growing rapidly. It is probably just incompetence as usual, but I do wonder.

I made a few comments to my seller which included verifying that the books were separated into two invoices, thus causing the multiple payments. The seller replied with a few comments. He stated that eBay frequently underestimates the postage and that he often takes a loss. He also stated that eBay is all we have right now. It is so true, and so sad. It is a shame that veteran users such as he and I are frustrated with the direction that eBay has taken.

I told my seller about Bonanzle, and he thanked me for the information, stating that eBay has become very "seller unfriendly." I'm feeling rather pleased with myself.

eBay's Big Announcement Is Coming

I had previously reported that eBay has a big announcement for us. This has been confirmed in eBay's town hall from February 26. AuctionBytes posted a summary of the town hall in its blog. Ina Steiner wrote, "eBay said it would be making some changes to give sellers more visibility into DSRs."

While it is good that eBay will give sellers additional insight into who is leaving which DSRs, it is only going to help large sellers. When I sold, I only received one or two feedbacks per day, so I could usually pinpoint who left me the low ratings. From what has been described, eBay will let sellers see how the ratings are different for international transactions versus domestic, with some other variations thrown in.

Ina Steiner also wrote that eBay "would announce additional changes affecting sellers next month."

I can't wait. This is not sarcasm; I really am curious as to what eBay has in store for us. I doubt that it will be altogether good, so I am eagerly anticipating this "big announcement." It ought to be very interesting. The announcement will come as soon as the next few days or as late as the end of the month.

My expectation is that eBay will make an announcement about free listings in the very near future for at least some items. EBay always tests its new features on the international sites, and eBay just announced free listings on eBay.UK.

Here is the text of the announcement from eBay.UK:

From 12th March 2009, there's no Insertion Fee if you’re a private seller and you list your item in the auction-style format with a starting price of up to 99p (eBay.co.uk) or €1.49 (eBay.ie). Final Value Fee rates are also changing.

Fees for business-registered sellers using the auction-style format will be unchanged.

Pay only when you sell

In 2008 we made it free to include a picture for your listing. We’re continuing our commitment to moving the cost of selling on eBay.co.uk and eBay.ie away from front end fees so that the majority of fees are paid only when you successfully sell an item.

Learn more about the new zero Insertion Fee on eBay.co.uk and eBay.ie.

The final value fees for free listings on eBay.UK will be 10%, which is a significant increase for low-priced items. I have no doubt that a variation of this new policy will soon be implemented on the U.S. eBay site.

What will this mean? The result is that more garbage will be listed on eBay for low prices. After all, if the seller only pays when the item sells, all sorts of worthless items will be listed. Yay! If eBay.com does this, I will be unable to find anything to buy but I will have a bigger selection! Okay, that was sarcasm.