EBay Losing Traffic To Amazon After Strategy Shift | Hacker News Reader

EBay Losing Traffic To Amazon After Strategy Shift

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eBay's mantra should be, "make it easy to buy, sell, and trade shit". Unfortunately they lost sight of that a long time ago when they were trying to hard to woo bigger sellers with "Buy it Now" and all the other professional features they built into eBay. Their vision was too vague and looked more like, "build a big, online marketplace". Unfortunately for eBay, Amazon started with this vision and executed it much better.

I don't use eBay anymore because its hard to list an item and deal with all the emails about it. Instead, I buy stuff on Amazon much easier at about the same price without all the aggravation of bidding. If I want to sell something, like a book, I can list it on Amazon and sell it without answering a billion emails and typing up a big description.

Amazon is kicking eBay's ass.

I was at a party a couple of weeks ago, and the subject of eBay came up. The people there were all 30-something professionals, and none had ever bought or sold anything on eBay! Few even bought stuff online. These people are my friends, and I had just presumed that their buying habits were like mine. As I stood in front of them with my mouth open, they asked, "What kind of stuff do you buy on eBay?" in a gee-wiz sort of way.

We at HN are not at all representative of Americans. Everyone in that room had at least one college degree, and the average earnings were probably $100K. Even then, they weren't buying online.

It baffles me that eBay is trying to kill its own core competency: connecting people with unusual stuff to sell with people who have unusual things that they want. Auction fees are ludicrously high, and the process is increasingly hostile (and expensive) to small time sellers.

I understand that they want to expand their market into new goods, but given that they have vast competition in that area, why hurt the revenue stream that they had a virtual lock on?

Auction fees are ludicrously high, and the process is increasingly hostile (and expensive) to small time sellers.

Indeed. Isn't it ironic that eBay used to be a community of people (many of which were buying and selling at the same time) and just as social media started ascending, eBay moved in exactly the opposite direction - towards a warehouse model that pissed off the little people who were selling things to clear out their attics.

I am so annoyed at them that I have literally given stuff away rather than sell it on eBay. Right now as a retail site, they are a dead man walking, no matter what their uniques and cash-flow is. I can't see Ebay lasting another 3 years in its current model.

On the plus site, etsy.com seems to have done a great job picking at least one niche of the old eBay market (handmade goods).

I agree -- Craigslist is far easier, and suits me much better. generally I don't even have to mess with shipping, but can just drive over and pick something up or have them drop by.

its all about $$$.

eBay used to save you a crapload over other web stores. Now the difference is so tiny, that there is no reason to take the risk with eBay

On the contrary, I think it's all about eBay has long been a market for new goods, instead of the used stuff that the original idea was based off of. Auctions just aren't a very good means to sell new goods.

Go search for any product you like on eBay - the overwhelming majority of the results are new items, from large-scale eBay dealers, using the Buy-it-now feature instead of real auctioning.

In this case eBay has simply become another webstore - and Amazon has had third-party sellers for quite some time also. As a webstore, Amazon's brand name is considerably more powerful than eBay. Not to mention Amazon takes payment on your behalf as a trusted entity - which is more than can be said for the money order and PayPal-based payment system of eBay.

Oh, also, so many eBay listings lowball the selling price and then destroy you on shipping. This is the primary reason why I stopped using the service - it was too much work having to figure out exactly how much it would cost to get it shipped to me. Amazon third-party sellers are locked to certain shipping rates.

Even as a web store eBay sucks -- it's hard to search for something and not get swamped in accessories/manuals/related junk for an item.

Nowadays you can list listings by price + shipping. Amazon sufferers from USAitis really bad compaired to eBay, where shipping anything out of the usa (like canada) adds ridiculous shipping fees like $50 extra from a $5 to USA shipping fee. And most of it is not even available to ship to canada.

I assume you mean the risk of using PayPal. That's the main reason I don't use eBay.

Not to me - PayPal doesn't enter into why I don't go to ebay. It's like vaksel said: I used to be able to actually save money by buying things on ebay. Now I often find that ebay's sellers are so unrealistic that they have higher prices than even B&M stores. Also, from a seller's perspective, the fees that ebay charges today are so much more expensive that it makes it far less attractive for me to put my goods on ebay in the first place.

So true! I'm no Apple fanboy, but just to drive the point home, 99% of the time I can buy a brand new Apple product _cheaper_ from the online Apple store than I can from eBay! Where's the fun in that?

risk of using paypal, risk of getting scammed(never getting an item, getting a box full of rocks, getting a refurbished item as new, getting a knockoff etc)

Question: If you pooled together a ton of people through some social networking, etc (say 1k people per each state across the US), and got these people to commit to selling their "junk" on a new service for say 1-year, would this be enough of a critical mass to get the ball rolling in terms of creating a real competitor to ebay?

You could start a grass roots movment and have people sign an online petition that says they will boycott ebay and use your service instead. There's enough people that are tired of ebay's overpriced fees that they would probably sign the petition and create some internet awareness.

Is this crazy talk?

Facebook has their marketplace, but to be honest, craigslist is better traffic wise than that.

Where do you guys sell your old stuff online? E.g., old laptop you don't need, old GPS navigation when you get a new one, etc?

Ebay is too much hassle, and afaik Craigslist is only local. Any ideas?

Amazon, if you close your eyes and ignore the egregious fees. You'll still probably get more money than Craigslist and less danger/hassle than Ebay.

Can you sell things on Amazon that they don't sell? E.g., a five year old GPS?

Actually I use craigslist & another local classifieds website. Shipping is "instant", you usually can get lower prices than online, and you can inspect the item, and you have the persons address if they screw you over. It's only really speciality stuff that doesn't sell/can't buy. Also when I sell locally, I usually get a higher price than I would online.

I use tech forums, mainly HardOCP, Anandtech, and Xtremesystems. While most of the stuff bought/sold there are tech items, you can find some non-tech goods there. You might also have better luck buying/selling niche equipment on niche forums, e.g. headphones on head-fi, AV equipment on AVS forums.

Ebay lost sight years ago...first with greedy fees, commisions and other pricey features. If they had followed the route necessary to maintain an honest and even keeled market for both sellers and buyers they would be enourmous. It happens so often that corportate greed and shortsightedness does them in. Ebay is no different. Also, Amazon.com is on its way to the same corporate debacle hurting both buyers and sellers with higher fees and controlling the shipping charges. WE NEED A TRUE FREE INTERNET MARKET...

I've always thought it would be a grand adventure to try to create a startup that could take over ebay. I was hoping Google would come up with a better model and put them out of their misery but I don't think that's going to happen.

Does anyone know if any up-and-coming startups that are trying to take ebay's market? I'd be glad to support them.

Even though I criticized them in another comment on this very thred, hell, maybe this stretagy is working better for them? Of course we as intelligent free-thinking HN readers might not agree with their curret strategy, but if it's making you megabucks, would you actually care?

Meg Whitman bailed out on a ship she caused to start sinking.

two words: PayPal lol

Ebay was so awesome when it was the wild wild west and you had to actually email back and forth with buyers and sellers to establish a repoire before you trusted them. It baffles me that a smaller auction company has never really risen from Ebay's apparent ashes. I really had my money on Gbay for a while...

Between Ebay, Craigslist and Amazon (who charges say a 15% fee to sell video games), I'll get the most money in my pocket selling on Amazon and that is bullshit.

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