If you trade online ie; vis ebay, then the High street is secondry & we are taking sales from there.

By bringing the High street sellers onto ebay. are we (they) not cutting their own throat.

A thriving town has both chains, individual boutiques and also market stalls.

It can happen on ebay too, I think. BUT the one thing that ebay is doing that is anti thriving town is that they are also allowing buyers to bleed away from the town with sponsored links.

Which is really very stupid of them.

However, I am curious about what the effect is on all sellers when one of these well known brands has an abysmal sell through rate orders of magnitude (literally) lower than the typical Diamond Powerseller and who can’t even maintain a feedback percentage higher than 60%? As a seller, should I be worried?

Look at argos the other day, 7000 phones sold in one day, you really think anyone ,let alone ebay, is going to turn that sort of thing away?

They need to be aware however that sellers are getting tuned in to different selling platforms and that eBay is not the only platform.

And yet if those high street retailers sell on ebay everyone is up in arms.

I don’t like the way High Street retails are being given what appears to be preferential treatment and I really don’t like the way that ebay has changed since I started trading.

Former big players like Steve Antony Williams clearly hates ebay with a passion. Steve’s business at its height was considerable. Its loss or indeed the loss of many other small independent sellers is not going to make much difference to ebay.

EBay can survive the loss of sellers, heaven knows there are millions of us. What they can not survive is the loss of buyers. Just take a look at ebid – a reasonably well structured selling platform with no buyers.

I have read comments by Steve here on Tamebay and other blogs and he is not alone. There is a real feeling of ‘Dissatisfaction’ about the way ebay treats small independent sellers. This is what eBay really should be concerned about.

It is pointless getting the big high street retailers on board if buyers start leaving in droves. I know that recent changes have forced my hand and as a result I now operate my own web shop. Lots of small sellers like me are now actively looking to attract former ebay customers to their own shops. OK I know that ebay will not even notice the loss of a few customers, but this seems to be a growing trend.

I can now compete with the big high street retailers directly. I can offer a shopping cart with multiple purchase discounts on free post products and generally run my shop as I want. eBay have chosen to ignore repeated requests for a cart and a discount system.
By forcing small sellers to look for other channels ebay risks loosing these sellers and this in turn will have a knock on effect to customers.

My gut feeling is that in the fullness of time ebay are going to regret many of the decisions being made at the moment.

The eBay brand is nothing like lidl in my eyes but it is also never going to be the online equivalent of the High St with all the latest product ranges from the top/popular brands.

**’what goes around’**, etc

**Perhaps ebay need to learn that lesson

I’m not sure why eBay want to go from being the Lidl of the ‘net – nothing wrong with that – to trying to be the Marks and Sparks. I just don’t think that’s their demographic, by the types of customers I get queries from on their site.

Just can’t see some of the more exclusive brands making the move.

Also, I think that lesser quality brands will just use eBay to ‘harvest’ customers and drive them off site. I notice, for example, that Littlewoods Clearance has its own site of the same name where many of the products are cheaper than eBay.

I think to be beholdened to a few large scale sellers in this way is dangerous.

It reminds me of a high flyer I used to work with in a sales office who had a major retailer as his (only) customer and he was bringing in £1m profit a month. The company didn’t want to lose him, so they let him work from Spain.

Long story short, he lost his customer and this represented a huge loss in our company’s profits…..

Made me thankful that I had always maintained a good spread of medium spending customers so that if I lost one, it wouldn’t be the end of the world (or my career).

Ebay’s expected dependence on diamond sellers, whilst they expunge the smaller guys, will be their folly.

Smaller sellers, who are concerned by this new strategy, are learning about different forms of eccomerce and other internet market places and are unlikely to sell in the volumes that the once did on eBay when eBay tries to get them back.

And most importantly give them access to a large database.

“big brand names are simply doing the same only in reverse” Not at the moment they’re not.

I really don’t see the incentive for an established & successful high street name to sell on eBay (or Amazon for that matter).

If you’re in a business where it is just about moving units, that’s a different story.

“sell other places as well as ebay”

How often do you see the above advice given?

big brand names are simply doing the same only in reverse.

oh and ebay was never a level playing field, it just liked you to think it was

Had anyone seen this?

Yet another example of eBay’s “non level playing field”. I hope this rotten company ends soon.

Steve