Raphael wrote:After receiving some fairly incomprehensible emails from eBay yesterday evening, I started to understand the matter after doing some research on ADYEN, the company mentioned in eBay's emails.
Basically, eBay is terminating it's somewhat exclusive arrangement with PayPal. I say "somewhat exclusive" because even though they are separate companies, they share proprietary information and try to control the entire money chain generated by eBay sales. Woe to the seller who dares to mention that he will accept checks, wire transfers or cash, whereby PayPal does not rake in a nice commission. This arrangement, apparently, has been so successful for PayPal that their market value is twice that of eBay.
Never to be satisfied, and I suppose never happy with their friendly divorce from PayPal a few years ago, eBay now wants to retake total control of the money chain. ADYEN will process all sorts of back-room transactions, but the front-room will be eBay, who promise "substantial savings to both buyers and sellers". Really.
I remain fully convinced that eBay truly wants to eliminate small-time sellers (especially of used goods) in lieu of volume sellers of everything new, from cupcakes to condoms. They want to become an Amazon with no inventory, warehouses or distribution centers.
If you are an eBay seller, keep tuned because I think your world is about to be shaken up big-time.
Raphael
eBay is in it for eBay and they don't seem to care much who they steamroll in the process. I was there almost from the beginning. The formula was right in the beginning but it's just been regulated to death.
I had a great run with eBay and thought about closing my regular business and doing just eBay for awhile in 2000-2001. I was uneasy about relying on a loose "agreement" with what was quickly becoming a huge corporate entity. My unease proved correct.
Etsy actually seems a viable alternative, as they are fast becoming THE place for vintage, but they don't have auctions and they are also a publicly traded corporation now.
I actually am a principal in a little site that could one day be a contender in this field AND we have auction software, but we lack traffic and our software has more and more limitations that we keep discovering and do not like. I have made some really major sales there, though, of random people wandering in off the WWW from all over the world. People are out there looking for what we have, and people out there have what we want. eBay used to be THE conduit but it's also a problem.
My experience with eBay shows exactly why you can't make a business plan with eBay.
I was on there from 1998 just throwing stuff up on auction and watching it sell to my disbelief. Hell, lots of times we didn't even use pictures yet- if we did it was analog photos we took of an item, took the film to Fotomat, then scanned the photos. I had a sell through rate of over 90% until about 2003, when they started on their stupid "change- for- change's- sake" road they're still on 15 years later.
They introduced "Buy It Now" and eBay Stores. I swear those eBay happy idiots were calling me up twice a week to pitch me on Stores. Finally did it just to shut them up. Fees were so nominal in those days I didn't even really pay attention.
I never got around to populating the Store until well over a year later when auction sell throughs started sagging to around 50%. I relisted my non sellers in the Store. It was great because it started really moving my "dead stock" for me. People would win auctions and then buy other items from the Store, too. I loaded the Store with all sorts of stuff... spent a lot of time setting it up.
A few months later, eBay doubled Store fees- and removed Store items from "core listings", e.g., you had to search Store items separately from regular search.
My Store sales dropped like a rock.
I lumbered on with the Store for 18 more months with the fees really beginning to eat into ever dwindling profits.
Finally, I closed out the Store to ditch all the fees.
Two months later eBay moved Store items
back into Core search.
At that point I knew building any sort of business model on eBay was like building a skyscraper on quicksand. I didn't have time for all the additional busywork that the eternal changes and change- backs were generating, either. Their ever increasing micromanagement just kept getting in the way as well.
The other thing that they did that really boinked me was forced PayPal. I was mainly a record seller, and at least 30 to 50% of my payments from auction winners would come into my PO box every auction cycle. A lot of these collectors are "cash and carry" types who either didn't trust PayPal or didn't want their spouses/ significant others to know how much they were spending.
Whatever their reasoning was isn't my concern. What DID concern me was that when eBay went "PayPal Only" those frequent buyers just disappeared.
I see the same sort of ratio on here when I sell stuff. Lots of people would rather snail mail payment. Fine by me; money is money.
I finally just decided to take some time off from eBay in mid 2010 because all the micromanaging was turning my fun hobby into too much like work. I've never started back up selling there again. Not interested.
Incidentally, one of the twists that this new change where buyers pay eBay then eBay pays you that nobody seems to have caught is that you won't see the buyers email address with payment any more. I just bet you dollars to doughnuts.
This is significant because what I did was I got all the email addresses of everyone who ever bought from me off PayPal and sent out a brief email telling everyone I would no longer be on eBay but would be having twice or thrice yearly email auction lists, and to email me if they wanted to be on 'the list'. Over half did.