eBay plans to lay off 500 employees, about 4% of its workforce | Hacker News Reader

eBay plans to lay off 500 employees, about 4% of its workforce

cnbc.com

33 pointssaos16 comments

  >In a memo to employees, CEO Jamie Iannone said ... the cuts will strengthen eBay’s ability to deliver better experiences for its customers

I think my irony meter just exploded. I've never known a company hold its users in so much contempt as eBay does. And that's from using it both as a buyer and seller.

Surely if staff cuts improve experience, they should get rid of all their staff?

eBay horror story time.

I sold a used robot vacuum on eBay. Someone purchased it. Then they immediately asked for a refund. I tried to process the refund, but was not able to because between the time I had listed my auction and when it ended, eBay implemented a different payments platform that required sellers to provide their SSN and address.

So, I told the seller I was not able to process their return, and that customer support would need to step in and assist. (not interested in providing this info to eBay and not part of the terms and conditions I agreed to when I listed the auction.) so eBay closed the case “in the buyers favor” and refunded them. I thought that was the end of it.

The next time I went to list an item, I expected to need to enter my SSN and other details and was prepared for this, but I was greeted with the message “your account has been suspended, pay <cost of the vacuum> to restore your account.” In eBays shitty new system this meant I was on the hook for this transaction because customer service processed the refund, not me.

At least five different support calls to tier 1 support were unfruitful and ended with me being disconnected, or the agent implying that I was trying to pull a scam and _then_ disconnecting. When I finally spoke with an on-shore tier 2 agent he had the same attitude that I was trying to scam eBay for a petty amount of money.

I finally got through that the situation was as if I had put an item in a consignment store, and a customer purchased that item, then changed their mind before leaving the store and asked for a refund. When I returned to the store weeks later, the shopkeeper told me that the item wasn’t sold, but I owed them the price of the item because a customer purchased and returned it. They finally refunded all but $0.30. I was too beaten down at this point to fight it further so I gave them my CC for the petty charge and got my account back. I haven’t used them to sell anything since that absurd experience, but unfortunately eBay’s pricing is unmatched for a lot of markets.

If I got it correctly this is a push of investors in general to pressure developer salaries down. In the same way that much of the inflation is driven by opportunity to increase profits and not by costs.

This is another example of what happens when too much power gets accumulated in too few hands. The market freedom is drastically reduced and is easier to manipulate it.

But I doubt that this is any coordinated effort but like hiking profits when there is inflation is just opportunistic.

> Salaries hit record levels as competition raged for the top talent, and the media was full of stories of lavish perks. So, it’s not a shock to find that the median time a recently laid-off employee has been in their role is roughly two years. .... One possible reason for this statistic could be that longer-serving employees tend to receive higher salaries, and cutting them could help businesses meet their financial targets. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2023/01/30/the-real...

> But I doubt that this is any coordinated effort but like hiking profits when there is inflation is just opportunistic

You see profit hikes and inflation together because “profit hikes” are a mix of price increases and cost cuts, and the former literally is inflation.

Also, because inflation increases perceived near-term risk, and absent infinite risk tolerance, the natural course is to seek either to mitigate risk by cutting off more speculative activities.

If there was competition companies would not be able to increase profit. What allow for this cutting cost and at the same time increase prices is that consumers do not have much of an option. When a market is just a couple or three companies owning all the products (think Procter and Gamble, Microsoft or Nestle) the all prices go up and there is no real alternatives left as they own most of their respective markets.

So it is perfectly logical for companies to do this. It shows that the market economy is failing in that areas, thou.

> If there was competition companies would not be able to increase profit.

That’s true of economic profit, not financial profit, and only true of perfect competition. (In which case, there is also a fixed zero economic profit.)

eBay is awful, I don't understand why they haven't improved their site experience at all since becoming popular in the noughties.

This is starting to get comical.

I mean 4% is just a opportunity to cut really low performers

All of eBay's customer service problems boil down to the point that they have very little control over the process. The seller ships directly to the buyer. The money has already been exchanged. Dispute resolution is labour intensive and often requires a refund which are both expensive. They are unable and unwilling to do better.

In before the compulsory "Why does eBay need 12,500 employees?!"

Why does eBay need to cut staff?

Have they got massive loans to service or something?

I don't think HN have talked about it but there's new EU legislation that will force everyone selling €2000+ or 30 items a year to be reported to tax authorities by the sites. This will disrupt the whole industry. I've already heard numerous big sellers either stop or move to private second hand groups on Facebook.

Might not be the main reason but I'd be very surprised if eBay isn't impacted by the change in the upcoming two years.

eBay has 120,000+ employees?! For some reason I always it had the same amount as Craigslist.

I think you might be off by an order of magnitude.

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