Can eBay Auction Off Its Laurels?

from the leaping-twenty-foot-chasms-in-two-ten-foot-jumps dept

Wed, Apr 20th 2005 1:16am — Dennis Yang

The luster on eBay continues to fade. As mentioned in Bambi Francisco's pessimistic long view on eBay, eBay's traffic has been on the decline for 9 consecutive months, according to ComScore. EBay is in a tough spot. Tough competitors lie in every direction: Amazon and Overstock are mounting a frontal assault with their own p2p auctions while Google and Yahoo quietly build marketplaces and drain talent away from eBay. Faced with the spectre of decline traffic and revenues, eBay raised their rates for their sellers, angering one of the most vocal groups of eBay loyalists. Though not all sources indicate declining traffic (Alexa, for example), eBay is feeling the difficulty of sustaining continued growth infinitely. EBay's operating income is almost twice that of Yahoo and Google; however Yahoo and Google have comparatively diversified revenue streams and opportunities. EBay needs to show that it can grow its revenue without simply trying to fleece their loyal seller base. EBay has not launched or acquired anything of note in the past few years (launching Craigslist clones don't count). Then again, maybe eBay is just resting on its laurels -- a business that makes over $1B in operating income a year is not too shabby.

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Anonymous Coward, 20 Apr 2005 @ 10:22am

whats wrong with being an income stock
Too many big companies (e.g. microsoft, entertainment industry) never get out of a mid-life crisis when they reach market saturation points. If they would learn to say ,"Hey, we're making lots of money. Lets increase our dividend rate and be happy" or, "Our revenue stream seems to have reached its natural summit, lets devote our energies into internal efficiency to raise our profit". Instead they and their share holders only seem to focus on the rate of revenue growth. When you've got all the customers you're going to get, the only thing left to do is to extract more blood from your customers (and drive them all away in the process).
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JS Porter, 20 Feb 2006 @ 9:54am

Decline of Ebay
From my perspective, that now covers 51 years, a term in Viet Nam, 4 wives and about $12MM, all that exists is either coming or going...nothing is stagnant and stays the same. Moreover, if something is good and wonderful, wait a while because inevitably more and more people will want it and will without exception "Ruin It". Yes of course ebay is in decline, it was only a matter of time.
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reverse auctions, 25 Dec 2006 @ 10:10am

New entrants
Ebay does not have a real competitor today. But, it needs to continue to add new features and services in order to keep their platform interesting and in constant improvent. If that is left out, new auction site entrants will topple it.
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online-auctions, 28 Dec 2006 @ 6:42am

they are safe in online auctions world
even if they decline, it will take time before they stop their activities. Moreover, there is a lot of ebay-related-businesses developing everywhere. They still have thousands of new members every minutes worldwide so I am sure it will keep them safe many years.
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