eBay Mess

[painthistorian]

many of you have good responses regarding refining searches and that is important HOWEVER....

Browsing is different than searching and many of us browse and find era related material by era categories... what makes NO sense is collectibles such as coins still have easy to navigate & selling sub categories by era, US, foreign gold, US, professional graded & non graded (different wording, same thing) and they are a similar type rare collectibles with recent shiny junk too, but they are not MIXED TOGETHER...you can still search for lots or singles and not be lumped together. Their categories were NOT changed, ours were.....why? If e bay was to benefit on a profitable level for this stupidity, why destroy the cards categories and not do same w/ coins?

I can still browse gold coins and get a single search for all gold coins but if I want to find all Mickey mantle cards 1950-1959 graded(PSA,GAI,SGC BVG) etc. in one search (which I could last week), it will be Mickey Mantle reprint garbage mixed w/ good cards, graded mixed w/ non graded, now the search MUST be refined or you will lose the ability to "browse" not search.

Sellers are going to lose 1/2 of their watchers, we see our results last two days and it is way down from comparible watchers of similar items this month.

It just makes no sense from any point of view.....

[paul]

The worst part is that they didn't screw up the other categories. That means they will get only a minimum number of complaints -- probably a number similar to the number of people who read this board. There just aren't that many prewar collectors out there. So it will be much tougher to get them to change.

I originally thought these changes were across the whole website, and I was about to invest heavily in selling ebay stock short. With only cards affected, it probably won't make a difference.

[Exhibitman]

Originally Posted by painthistorian

many of you have good responses regarding refining searches and that is important HOWEVER....

Browsing is different than searching and many of us browse and find era related material by era categories... what makes NO sense is collectibles such as coins still have easy to navigate & selling sub categories by era, US, foreign gold, US, professional graded & non graded (different wording, same thing) and they are a similar type rare collectibles with recent shiny junk too, but they are not MIXED TOGETHER...you can still search for lots or singles and not be lumped together. Their categories were NOT changed, ours were.....why? If e bay was to benefit on a profitable level for this stupidity, why destroy the cards categories and not do same w/ coins?

I can still browse gold coins and get a single search for all gold coins but if I want to find all Mickey mantle cards 1950-1959 graded(PSA,GAI,SGC BVG) etc. in one search (which I could last week), it will be Mickey Mantle reprint garbage mixed w/ good cards, graded mixed w/ non graded, now the search MUST be refined or you will lose the ability to "browse" not search.

Sellers are going to lose 1/2 of their watchers, we see our results last two days and it is way down from comparible watchers of similar items this month.

It just makes no sense from any point of view.....

Actually, it does; here's another conspiracy theory to chew on: ebay wants to be rid of the auction format and has been doing things to favor fixed price sales for quite some time. Perhaps chopping out the browsing contingent is part of that strategy--drive the prices down on auctions and force everyone to go to fixed price listings to protect their suddenly much larger downsides.

[danmckee]

I agree with Larry, Matt and Adam. No searching can accomplish what the browsing of an era category did. The flip booklet with no year in the title is a great example, Matt is correct, listed now, that book brings $50 to $75 as many would not have seen it.

I also think Adam is on to something: Ebay is really pushing the direct sale and no auctions. This loss of sub categories will cause loss of revenue for sellers and for them to list with BIN's.

All sellers will do the inventory dumps.

Also, there are doctored fakes popping up like crazy now and the report item feature hasn't worked for 2 days.

Amazing!

[barrysloate]

Adam makes a good point, but I've been wondering: why does ebay want to get rid of the auction format? Why is a fixed price site to their advantage? Is it too costly to run the auction software?

It's easy for us to sit here and say ebay is really stupid to make the changes they have made, but the fact is a good deal of thought is put into these decisions. And it is done because the company believes it will make them more profitable. But why? That's what escapes me.

[Rich Klein]

Because in "fixed sales" mode EBay would have a higher percentage of high volume sellers instead of the Mom and Pop sellers who do auctions.

It's much easier for a business to deal with a smaller number of "distributors" then it is to deal with a large number of "retailers".

Rich

[mintacular]

Originally Posted by barrysloate

Adam makes a good point, but I've been wondering: why does ebay want to get rid of the auction format? Why is a fixed price site to their advantage? Is it too costly to run the auction software?

It's easy for us to sit here and say ebay is really stupid to make the changes they have made, but the fact is a good deal of thought is put into these decisions. And it is done because the company believes it will make them more profitable. But why? That's what escapes me.

Just b/c this decision has been made doesn't mean eBay it works for the consumer or that their "research process" was conducted accurately. There are many companies (like Enron) that make poor decisions and pay for it--getting too big can contribute to MORE errors, not less.

There are two options of what happened here in my opinion:
1) Some wonk in corporate has no idea how collectors search/buy cards & proposed this reconfiguration to save $ on server space, etc.
2) This was a strategic & deliberate choice to kill off auctions/small sellers in their continued transition to fixed BINS/stores

I'm leaning towards option 2 at this point. The consequence of this change will immediately kill penny auctions which no doubt hurts the big seller who offers the same product in their stores, but at a higher price. Also notice the new seach options which allows you to easily search for specific sellers. To me, this option further confirms my suspicions regarding WHY this change was implemented.

[barrysloate]

Responding to Rich and mintacular, who both made good points, I guess the auctions are in some ways not as profitable as the fixed price format. It would seem like both large corporations and mom and pop sellers could live together harmoniously, as there's a need for both of them. So why not let the auction business grow too, even if they want to draw more attention to the bigger retail sellers?

I know that vintage baseball cards comprise maybe 1/10 of 1% of all ebay sales, so I don't think they are losing too much sleep over our issues. But for that reason alone, why not just leave it be?

[painthistorian]

If e bay wants to rid the auction format and that was their purpose, WHY DID THEY KEEP THE SUB CATEGORIES FOR COINS???????

You can still separate and BROWSE graded and non graded coins, I just think they wanted to consolodate categories as their "efforts to improve the e bay experience" and there was no one at e bay that really understood the severity regarding baseball card era categories...it does not mean they are not intending to long term go to a BIN/best offer/best match structure...it would be more evident if every collectible category was destroyed like cards were.

[mintacular]

From my last 10 years of experience on eBay, these changes usually fall like dominos--cards this week, coins next month, etc. I am still hoping this is one bad dream.

If not, I hope a new site that specializes specifically in sports cards, etc. can swoop in & offer a better alternative. eBay is clearly out of touch with how collectors shop and is too big for its own britches.

[D. Bergin]

I think the answer is simply a case of too many cooks spoiling the stew.

Too many salaries, too many people with input into the decision making process, too few people with actual experience using the platform.

I think the descent began years ago when Ebay first went from a private company to a public company.

The stock went crazy and with it came unrealistic expectations of continued growth in feeding the Wall Street machine. Dumb decisions were made in the chase for short term profits and eventually Ebay decided they wanted to become the company whose ass they were metaphorically kicking for years and years...........Amazon!!

Ebay keeps saying "auctions are dying"................that's because they have been killing them off themselves!

When Ebay began it was nothing more then a few people..........a server and some fancy software.

Ebay doesn't keep any inventory.............overhead should be nill. Every one of these poor decisions creates more overhead for them and in turn more pennies they are obligated to suck off it's users to meet demand from it's stockholders.

Pretty soon the vampire's going to run out of blood to suck.

I'll be rooting for Leon.

Meanwhile..............I've got some items to list on Ebay!

[tbob]

Originally Posted by mintacular

The consequence of this change will immediately kill penny auctions which no doubt hurts the big seller who offers the same product in their stores, but at a higher price. Also notice the new seach options which allows you to easily search for specific sellers. To me, this option further confirms my suspicions regarding WHY this change was implemented.

Bingo!

[Doug]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

Actually, it does; here's another conspiracy theory to chew on: ebay wants to be rid of the auction format and has been doing things to favor fixed price sales for quite some time. Perhaps chopping out the browsing contingent is part of that strategy--drive the prices down on auctions and force everyone to go to fixed price listings to protect their suddenly much larger downsides.

This theory makes a lot of sense. If you get all of your sellers paranoid that buyers won't find their item, they are all going to start listing items as Buy it Now to make sure that they don't take a huge loss on their item because nobody saw it.