Twitter
EmaileBay Death Watch Continues. . .
Nov 29
eBay Traffic Plummeting (EBAY)
eBay’s (EBAY) core business continues to fall apart. Some of the decline is likely the result of the declining economy. The rest of it is likely the result of the trends that have been clobbering eBay for the past two years: competition, overpricing, and the deterioration of eBay’s value proposition. eBay’s efforts to turn around this business do not appear to be working.
Also, TechCrunch has a chart showing how Amazon is gaining on eBay.
Nov 29, 2008 @ 01:39:39
Having been an eBayer since almost DAY ONE, as well as someone with a background in marketing – I’ve been predicting the decline of eBay for a while now. One thing that made eBay so popular was the “community” feeling it once had, when you were buying something very often a few e-mails would be traded between seller & buyer just saying HI back & forth, and more than once sometimes people even shot extra stuff in – it was fun. It also wasn’t all stores or resellers selling a mass of extra stock, it was everyday people who normally had no other outlet to sell their goods. Along with all that, was a chance of getting a real bargain on something. Seems to me, that last 2 or 3 years, eBay has dumped this “people having fun at the world’s largest garage sale” market, for an easier to manage retailers outlet – with fixed prices – rather than the bargains once had.
Maybe what eBay has to do, is focus on making it again – a fun place for people to find lost treasures at. There’s still enough people out there that haven’t used eBay – that there’s still time to bring them into a new and fun experience. This positioning could also be used to bring old eBayers back into the fold.