EBay Losing Traffic To Amazon After Strategy Shift (opens in new tab)

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?

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

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?

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?

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.