Throughout its life, eBay has pointedly claimed it “only provides a venue” for the exchange of goods. Typically they’ve taken this corporate libertarian stance when they don’t want to enforce unctuous trade restrictions that would cost too much to implement. They back off of the purity stance when threatened with real boycotts and lawsuits: no porn, no teacher’s copies of textbooks, no bad words in auction listings.
It is, after all, a company.
Alas, clearly also a company whose margins are dwindling, so they’re passing along all the costs to the sellers. Today, just as Barbara and I have spent hours sorting Avon collectibles to sell for her mother on consignment, we’re presented with an announcement that (a) fees are going up for eBay stores, (b) the mysterious database “Item Specifics” plague that has destroyed 90% of the ability of buyers to browse is “identified as a problem and will soon be addressed”, and (c) without having fixed said problem, they’re soliciting thousands of listings from their less attentive customers by offering a cheap-listing day.
Please Mr. Google, give us something better.
I’m an ebay seller as well, and I must confess that this latest announcement has pushed me as close to the brink of giving up on the venue as I’ve ever come.
My two major objections are the obvious lie being told that store listings cost ebay more than the server space they require, and also the clear message that CEO Bill Cobb is giving that he considers ebay stores as a dead weight to the organization, in need of thinning out.
And, in my dealings with googlebase and froogle, it seems pretty clear that they’re still a ways off from providing a decent alternative to ebay.
There are cognitive conflicts within eBay, I have to imagine. The management and PR people inevitably talk as if buyers buy stuff from eBay — indeed, they actively promote this idea among the general populace. But of course they don’t; we sellers pay the bills.
eBay’s marketing, in turn, makes it seem in many cases like sellers are service providers for eBay. They’ve essentially outsourced inventory control to the sellers, and charge them for the privilege of aggregation.
At some point back two years or more, aggregation stopped working for collectibles sellers. For commodities sellers, it’s fine. For collectibles and one-of-a-kind items… aggregation is not good.