What Happen To Ebay ?

One of the main reasons prices are depressed.

I can't see any slowing down on ebay, sales are OK and there are plenty of buyers at the Auction Houses purchasing stock to put on ebay and they all comment that sales are good otherwise they would not be buying.
If certain sellers are having problems then that is because they are selling basic material that nobody wants or their prices are too high,

Pagoda

Pretty much agree with Pagoda. When I am buying on ebay for myself I still feel like there is much buying competition. On the sell side I haven't seen a drop off, in fact I have noticed many brand new buyers entering that marketplace. A comment to those sellers that might be thinking about leaving ebay for greener pastures - please do! I will be happy to service your old ebay customers after you are gone, and I promise to treat them very well.

A lot of our new buyers or well known people seem to buy from us on a 2 week cycle.

So looks like a lot of people get paid every 2 weeks.

I just checked the category United States stamps on ebay. There are a total of 839,000 listings. Of that total only 85,000 are auctions. Approx 10%, the rest, are fixed price. I can only wonder what that ratio was 10 years ago ???

It's even worse on Bid Start. Out of 1,258,000 US listings only 417 are actual auctions. lol

Delcampe fared much better. Of 408,000 US listings there were 125,000 auctions, over 25 % !

I have actually found a partial answer as it pertains to the entire ebay site. It would appear that about 87% of offers across the site are buy-it-now, vs. 13% (using 2013 data). In 2013 Bloomberg Business published the graph below indicating that about 85% of lots were auctions in 2005. I would think this reflects the philatelic market fairly closely. Although the decline has been steady, it's noteworthy that the steepest drop occurred between mid-2008 and mid-2009. Not sure why this would be; perhaps sellers didn't want to do auctions during the beginning phases of the Great Recession? (Who can forget how the US economy was on virtual lockdown in 2009?)


I find it very interesting that although auctions only accounted for 13% of lots in 2013, they accounted for 40% of sales! This confirms the notion we all seem to have on SCF that a large volume of buy-it-now lots just don't sell.




Here is the link to the actual article where Bloomberg provides their take on the evolution of selling models on ebay:

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/article...ime-for-that

Thanks SHERMAE ,your graph tells the story . This was the reason of my original posting because the guy who for years was buying some of mine excess stuff decided to quit selling .I have since send the stuff to be consigned and auctioned at the next Chicago stamp show . Thanks again the posting really shows the way it is now as from the past years .

Glad it was helpful... VERY eye opening for me as well.

I think the reason why the higher value for Auctions as against BIN is that better material without fixed values are using Auctions whilst basic, run of the mill material items which have retail values are using BIN,

Pagoda

In looking at the graph, I'll note that John Donahoe took over as CEO on March 31, 2008. Coincidence? LOL.

His quote from late 2008: "We embarked on a series of fundamental changes that will ultimately span a three year period...This was critical because not everyone felt the impetus to change, given the amount of success we were experiencing. There's a real push to keep doing what you're doing because it's working."

As several folks have pointed out, we should be careful of drawing any conclusions; there are probably many factor which might influence these variables.

After reading the article and looking at the graph, I had additional questions. As the 'Auction Share Over Time' graphs shows, starting around 2009 there appears to be a gap between 'Share of active listings' and 'Share of revenues'. What constitutes an 'active' listing? (Implies there are 'inactive listings'?) But more importantly, we need to understand how 'revenues' were calculated. Are 'revenues' in this case confined only to revenue from auction listings? Or is this total revenues which would encompass all kinds of things such as income from PayPal. Unfortunately the article doesn't define how the chart metrics were generated and that makes me cautious.
Don

Brilliant!

The word 'active' begs redundancy. Why not go all the way, and call them 'pro-active listings'?

Years ago, dealers would publish price lists ... in return for an SASE, in display ads in print publications and, later, on their own website(s).

There were never a lot of undiscovered bargains to be found on dealer price lists in The Good Old Days, and there are not a lot of undiscovered bargains to be found on dealer price lists (a/k/a BIN listings) on ebay today.

That dealer price lists would migrate to ebay is not, in hindsight, a big surprise. They only have to be cheaper, or more profitable, than a display ad in Linn's (et al).

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Here's what you get with free listings:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/stamps-/121...AOSw5VFWJ-zK

In days gone by, this would have cost the seller $20/$30 just to list. It never would have gotten listed.

there has always been someone willing to put something crazy up there even when they had to pay.

I guess you can ask whatever you want for an item. At least this forum has the sense to ignore it. It was a waste of time even looking.