eBay's Core Auction Business Is Looking Like A Drag
from the show-me-the-money dept
eBay has reported its latest quarterly earnings, and like Intel's latest results, they offer something of a mixed bag. eBay's revenues and profits are up strongly, but its auction business is stagnating. While it showed revenue growth in the quarter, that's attributed to currency effects and increased commissions for sellers, rather than growth in the number of listings or the value of goods sold. eBay's been able to generate growth by expanding its scope of operations, which is certainly helpful, but the weakness in its core auctions business remains a concern. Questions still remain about some of those expanded operations: for instance, though Skype's earnings grew, usage is flat. But perhaps the bigger problem for eBay is that it's struggling to get the new units to feed off of each other. Buying PayPal was a masterstroke for the company, since a simple and comprehensive payments system delivers benefits to (and derives benefits from) the auctions business. But other new businesses don't integrate so well. Part of the justification for buying Skype was to ease communications between eBay auctions' buyers and sellers, but that hasn't panned out, or turned into a money-spinner. Similarly, some observers say the US launch of its Kijiji classifieds site will drive usage of Skype and PayPal, but judging by the Skype acquisition, that's far from being a sure thing. Clearly eBay's got the ability to get some M&A work done, but its ability to meaningfully integrate its purchases to spur growth among its other businesses still isn't so clear.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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crap sellers
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Re: crap sellers
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As a seller. There are too many idiots there, nobody reads the auctions any more and they flood you with dumb questions that are already answered in the item description.
Also, eBay removed my listings several times for having the word "not" in the title, like "Apple AirPort, orginal not the AirPort Extreme", this is keyword spamming according them, while the Chinese are allowed to post thousands of penny auctions with inflated shipping and that's cool with eBay. They just pissed me off few times with their dumb rules that do nothing to improve eBay only irritate people.
There are still good people there but they very rare.
Adam
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This is why you get bad side effects like people lowering the price and adding it to the shipping and handling charge (which still doesn't escape paypal's exorbitant rates). The other side effect is that selling is not as fun as before because it's harder to make a profit because of these fees. This is why the auction business is not doing well.
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This is why you get bad side effects like people lowering the price and adding it to the shipping and handling charge (which still doesn't escape paypal's exorbitant rates). The other side effect is that selling is not as fun as before because it's harder to make a profit because of these fees. This is why the auction business is not doing well.
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Re:
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saturation
Business growth is not infinite or indefinite for the same reasons that ponzi schemes implode - eventually, you run out of customers. In a traditional business model you may reach an equilibrium, where you are neither growing or shrinking based on repeat business.
Somehow, this has become painted as the evil "stagnation". This prods businesses to go to no end of gymnastics trying to "grow". Gymnastics like restructuring, higher fees, layoffs, so on and so forth. Many of these actions ultimately end up hurting a business. That a business has "stagnated" - or is merely no longer growing - is not automatically an evil as long as it is still profitable.
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Re: saturation
I buy and sell on eBay, but part of the problem I have with it is the ridiculously limited search system. If it were more robust I could cut out a large portion of the sellers from China when doing a search - sadly, there are some categories of goods that I don't even look through anymore because they are inundated with thousands of these sellers.
- Jesse
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This is not right and should be against the law. There should only be two fees one for posting and one for selling. Ebay should allow you to use Google checkout.
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Re:
As for the PayPal fees, that doesn't go into eBay's pocket, or at least not all of it does. That's the fee the credit card companies charge for using their system. Every business that accepts credit cards has to pay fees like that. eBay simply passes that cost on to the sellers. I do know that when you have a business account, you get charged the fee even when you accept a payment that didn't come from a credit card, so eBay is obviously padding their pockets a little, but again, that probably pays for maintenance and improvements on the PayPal system. It has to make money somehow.
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Wanna be Rich?
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infinite growth obsession.
That said, I've never bought anything on eBay- it takes time and effort to check out the sellers, and then my bid is over taken at the last minute. Lame. I buy and sell on Amazon.
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Regardless of the realities - that's the perception by many now.
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selling sucks
This whole time I'm racking up eBay fees for the same damn item...and I'm going to have to go through the whole dispute process to get them back. The killing thing is that I still have the item I was trying to sell because I can't get a valid auction.
I think that's a major problem for eBay too, the fact that they are up to their eyeballs with fraudulent transactions.
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On eBay and Skype
On a larger scale, Skype and other VOIP services are trending towards, not away from, traditional phone services, and if phones were the answer to eBay interaction glitches they'd be used effectively for this today.
Add to this the old videophone dilemma (both parties need to have it installed and set up for it to be useful) and you have a bad bet from the start.
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the fees didn't bother me then, it was all free money but now as the other blogger posted ,its lost its luster due to e-bay letting professional seller sell there
e-bay don't care you you don't get your stuff u bid for ,they get paid weather you get your stuff or not
E bay works best if you got some things you was going to throw in the trash and decide to see if any one wants it
If your trying to make a living on e-bay , its going to be tuff
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ebay to you sellers!!!
YES.
You sellers are stupid. And lazy too. That's why we can stick it to you a little at a time, and you'll stick around for more.
You chumps will be paying 50% FVFs before I get to the governor's office, baby!
Also, in May we are introducing eBay's brand new product exclusively for sellers, eLube.
It will be mandatory for sellers to keep their eLube at their work stations. However, sellers without their eLube will get screwed anyway.
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check the catagory listed in click on that, its been up for over 24 hours, so yeah if its not inside work then yeah they wanna stop scams...
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How Ironic!
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