I am a buyer.
I had a 15% off coupon for ebay pre-xmas that went un-used.
why !?
because of the 10 or so things I wanted to use it for , 6 were not on ebay anymore and 4 were actually cheaper on the high street even after the 15%.

I am still predicting that ebay will get an offer for the auction site this year and sell it…..
they are useless at developing it so why not let someone else do it who can !?
I just can not see room for a “focused” amazon and an “identity crisis” ebay in a sluggish economy.
and in a sluggish economy its usually survival of the fittest.

Take heed Ebay !!

” in order to have a hosted sale on your site , you need a BUYER and a SELLER “.
without one of these , you can not have the sale.

example – SELLER of size 44 CAT vinsons sells on amazon but not ebay on the grounds ebay is a farce now. hence his buyers buy on amazon.
notice how there are no BUYERS for the size 44 CAT vinsons on ebay , this is because there is no SELLER of them.

what is it about this that ebay do not understand. and why do people bother to debate who is more important buyers or sellers !?!?!?
This is very very simple , is it not ?

April 13th 2007, the day I finally managed to insert a picture in a listing using the html code in photobucket

I still use the same system now, I put a load of ****** in the description, flip it over to html, find the stars and delete them, then paste in the code where the stars used to be, god I am a retard.

oh for the good old days, when you were delighted you even managed to work out how to get a picture to show

28% of our sales on ebay are repeat buyers but they wouldn’t give a monkey if we disappeared tomorrow because there will always be someone else selling in our place that they’d buy from if we were gone. The same goes for sellers we buy from. If they left ebay we’d find someone else to buy from. That’s what ebay is all about. Finding a product you want. Not a seller you want.

I do get tired of people complaining endlessly about ebay and everything that is wrong with the site – usually the people who have been suspended/couldn’t manage to achieve the new requirements of the site. If you don’t sell on ebay any longer and don’t like the site then why are you here reading about it? Go off and set up tamebid.com or tamewasteoftime.com or wherever it is that you’re all buying and selling from one another fooling yourselves into believing it’s the alternative to ebay with loads of buyers. It’s not and never will be.

But I have 4 or 5 eBay projects lined up and I have had them since early last year, it’s hard to introduce a new product when the blasted goal posts keep moving.

Baked Beans is a huge market in which large retail vendors compete with each other quite viciously over volumes and prices. But consider, if you will, if you had a passion for Raspberry Vinegar (which I do) and one supermarket sells it and another won’t, because the margins and volumes are too low, where do you think the shopping gets done and what effect does the price of beans have on that choice? That’s the overall problem with Ebay’s recent policies. People are following the specialist small sellers to wherever they go. And that’s off Ebay and onto Google and all those other places. The “pot” is being disruptively diluted.

Buyers are not some kind of bovine herd ranging the savannah of commerce looking for somewhere to dump their money. Buyers are after many different things in may different categories for precise personal reasons. As a seller, the tendency can be to see other sellers as competition, but sellers not in your niche actually aid you if the combined effect of all sellers together is to create a global bazaar. Attempting to convert that bazaar into a cathedral cannot succeed, any more than Ebay Express succeeded, when what buyers actually want is the bazaar; a place where almost anything could be bought at a really keen price. What remains is Baked Beans. Millions of tins.

The first thing I sold was a Nottingham Forest European Cup winners commemorative shirt. It was a child’s size & had a slight iron mark. I got £70 for it!

O/T The first thing I ever bought on eBay was a “Xircom parallel port network adaptor”. There is one available from a US seller at the moment

The few that I can remember is because I’ve met them or talked to them on forums. Mostly though it’s just hundreds of “eBay purchases” and I’m betting the average buyer is pretty much the same.

Yes there are new sellers who will step into your shoes but will the new seller be an asset to eBay as a whole or will they downgrade the buyer experience?

I feel that the changes of the last year have given eBay a bit of a lift but one day eBay will be Woolworths, I don’t give it 99 years though

Sellers might buy a bit on eBay, but their main aim is to make money, and sellers can only do that by selling significantly more than they buy. Now if other sellers are the same then collectively we all need people that buy a lot more than the sell, and that’s why buyers are more important. If everyone buys just as much as they sell, then on average we’re just swapping goods and not making money, and that won’t pay my bills.

Buyers put nothing into ebay’s ‘pot’, ebay make their money off the sellers, not buyers ???
If everyone stopped buying for a week ebay wouldn’t give a stuff as they still get their listing fees….if everyone stopped selling then that would crucify ebay and this is the problem…..Ebay has alienated sellers so they have given up and moved, affecting Ebays revenue, so they need ways to hammer more $$$ out of those that are left….but the majority of those sellers leaving are also excellent buyers, so it goes round and round until it ends

Sellers make their cash off buyers, it’s the buyers who are the ebay sellers customers not ebay.

You can go on all day saying we need more buyers, but if all of these changes are driving decent sellers away then the buyers are limited to what they can buy and eventually even the buyers go

This star ratings they brought in is a travesty to good honest sellers, I charged .15p over cost for handling on my P+P and my stars went down and so did my “Best Match” visibility, I even offered free P+P and my stars went DOWN !!!

After years on Ebay I moved on and YES I am not taking no where near so much on the other site but my profits are up ….Now, what does that tell you ???

Ebay has had it’s day, and all of those people it kicked when it was on the way up are now kicking harder now that they are on the way down

I don’t assume number of buyers will go up if the number and diversity of good sellers goes down. The opposite is true though, lose the buyer and the sellers WILL go too. Nothing on eBay matters as much as a steady source of spenders pouring money into the sellers purses, that’s what drives the market. On diversity I’m of the opinion that there is no where near sufficient choice on eBay, many categories are either full of the same or very similar products from multiple sellers or simply don’t have the merchandise available.

No, you’ve lost me there. What exactly is the pot you keep referring to and in what way is Ebay putting any money into it?

Yes, Ebay is a significant corporation with very large revenues but it has no inventory of its own. The money it makes, it makes from sellers. Ebay can afford to scrape off its good small sellers. Ebay can afford to cutthroat its own margins for the very largest sellers. It can’t afford to do both at the same time, without causing losses to earnings, when traffic and sales are significantly declining. The point must inexorably arise when it must recover revenues by either ramping the margin on the big sellers and risk driving them off, or ramping the margin on the next smallest sellers and risk driving them off. On what basis do you assume that the numbers of buyers will go up if the number and diversity of good sellers goes down?

I already shared those details in the past. If you check out http://www.diamondhaus.com/observations.shtml?seller=buy there are 30 negatives that BUY received since December 8th regarding one grossly oversold product (6 different listings running simultaneously). Randy Smythe originally blogged that BUY had oversold as a result of eBay’s mistake with the Deal of the Day but he later retracted that statement. I’m not sure how he originally knew the items were oversold (unless he tried to buy one) or how it was originally eBay’s fault. BUY has received many more neutrals over the same product for the same reason though eBay hasn’t removed those thus they don’t appear on the site.

What I’m asking is if it really was eBay’s fault, is it still right to silence those buyers without giving them any explanation or recourse? Is that an eBay that looks after your buyers?

meg whitman deserves credit and respect
ebay is the eighth wonder of the world and has transformed the way the world trades