So Ebay Yanked Down All My Bin Store Listings...why? I Really Still Don't Know.

Yes, the cartel still operates with apparent impunity. LOL

I agree with the comment that if eBay follows the route of Amazon, it may become obsolete. It seems impossible for a fish so big but when you turn your nose at your roots and aim to compete in a different pond, it can sometimes backfire. I would also stop using it entirely and would delete my
eBay bookmark if it wasn't for the oddball fun unique stuff. Amazon is my go to for commercial. eBay for everything else.

Some metrics to consider.





Don

Amazon definitely wins the e-marketplace share and that's not even their big money maker - selling cloud services is Amazon's big money ticket. At some point I can see eBay gobbled up by Amazon or even Walmart for that matter if some private vulture equality firm doesn't get a hold of it first. eBay's plan to be like Amazon isn't going to pan out nor end well.

Admittedly I'm no market analyst (feel free to quote that in reply to my naivity) but I see a consistent sales amount for eBay. I see a newer player crushing a retail market. I see it as apples and oranges. Amazon is heavily pulling the trigger on department stores while eBay keeps chugging along doing what it's doing best. Apples and oranges and room for both in the fruit bowl. But if you try to jam too many apples into the same bowl it gets crowded. For a company known to be an online auction giant to make consistently greater and greater moves to drive away its base and roots in order to compete with a massive competitor in a parallel market is company suicide.

But I'm no market analyst. Just a lowly collector fumbling around in the big eBay pond.

I agree eBay revenue can be called 'consistent', but many investors call it 'stagnate'.


eBay projected revenues for 2020 is projected to be US$10.7B, a 4.2% reduction from last year. This is during a pandemic year when other online sellers are seeing significant growth.

But even last year eBay was getting pressure from its shareholders to change.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/01/e...m-investors/

https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/14/e...hip-layoffs/

https://www.fool.com/investing/2019...elivery.aspx

https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/bl...1450215.html
"Regardless of who's running the company, it's about what categories or verticals make sense for us." "Schenkel said this year eBay will be expanding a number of categories and experimenting with different revenue models, with different seller engagements, different capabilities for sellers within those categories, and different visualization for buyers."

I think that Battle has just experienced eBay's "experimenting with different seller engagements".
Don

"so they have to have checks and triggers in place. It is easier and less resource-intensive to just do it automatically"

triggering it automatically might be cheap, but reviewing the requested data and the live chatting is not cheap.

Don - very interesting charts. eBay's dream of becoming Amazon appears to be a pipe dream.

As for " If I were an eBay seller, I would have started building my own transactional website years ago and prepare for controlling my own destiny.", far easier said than done.

I hear you Don. It's always about dollars and cents even if it should be about dollars and sense. Such is.

Eyeonwall, I also agree, but it would be resource-impossible to manually scan for issues. That said, the flagging system would be best to flag a support person so they could review it rather than just shutting things down. I guess only eBay really knows what's up. Pretty inconvenient and an incredible hassle for anyone experiencing this.

Overall, eBay is very good at what it does (blips and glitched aside). To see it shifting away from a market for unique items from a global marketplace rather than simply churning over bulk-made production-line goods would be a shame.

OP, glad you got it sorted out.

Don: Your article mentioned eBay's "Managed Delivery" program. That raised hairs on the back of my neck. It would have been a deal killer if that was ever required. Luckily, after some research it looks like that program is dead in the water - https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/bl...1003739.html I hope they put a stake in its heart.

Your third article had a comment at the end that sums up eBay perfectly. "ebay's problem is not buyers, not sellers, not taxes. eBay's problem is eBay.".

stamps101: I guess it's sorted out. I just got blindsided by eBay - a hit and run with no compensation.

It's a shame that it was an issue; you had some nice things up. Alas, I played the useful underbidder role.

"That said, the flagging system would be best to flag a support person so they could review it rather than just shutting things down."

101 - I agree.

On the more general note, I've recently been hit by a slew of eBay notices about 'adding item specifics' -- I never had this before, but since 2 weeks ago they put this on every item I list.

Adding such details would consume a huge amount of time, and , I suspect, add almost nothing in sales. Clearly it would be of benefit to those selling dozens or hundreds of the same thing, which is the direction eBay seems to want to head in.

Also, I was at an auction viewing the other day and a dealer was complaining about the direction eBay was heading in -- he said he had 25,000 items listed, and that half of them would become uneconomic if eBay pursued some proposed changes. Not sure what those changes are, but clearly something directed at the low-end stuff.