
eBay CEO Has a Stark Choice: Show Growth or Break Up Company - petethomas
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-22/ebay-ceo-has-a-stark-choice-deliver-growth-or-break-up-company
======
jurassic
As a shopper I hate a lot of the recent shifts in their strategy. The only
thing interesting enough to make me want to deal with all the hassles of eBay
are the interesting vintage or collectible one-of-a-kind items: coins, camera
gear, art, etc. These things are more work to list and describe but make for
an always entertaining browsing experience. I loved eBay back in the day when
it was like one big never-ending garage sale.

The catalogization of eBay, moving toward SKU-based product pages with sellers
providing fulfillment, ends up feeling like a weird me-too version of the
Amazon FBA race to the bottom. Small sellers with interesting inventory have
been bled to death with ever-increasing fees and seem ready to pack up the
wagon and move on to greener pastures.

The featured products on the homepage have the same bland sameness as every
other e-com site and as a shopper I don't feel like I have much reason to ever
go there these days. Right now I'm seeing a Patriots ballcap, some men's
sneakers, and a small grill. Might as well be shopping at Target.

~~~
baroffoos
I noticed the same thing. The front page is so boring it feels like a regular
stores website. I don't know about the rest of their users but I don't come to
ebay to buy sunglasses or phones. I'm looking for that obscure adapter that no
store in the country sells. Or that game I used to play that has long since
gone out of production. I can still find that stuff but there is no way to
just casually look around at the interesting bits, you have to search for it.

~~~
zrobotics
To be fair, Amazon has 10 years of purchase history on my account, and they
can't manage to put up anything on the home page that I'm interested in.
Personally, I'm very much starting to doubt algorithmic recommendations for
shopping sites. They work for books and music, but as Amazon has morphed into
offering everything they can't recommend anything decent. I just get the same
generic recommendations for products similar to my last few purchases, similar
to Google advertising products that I've already searched for and bought.
Adtech has promised a lot, but in my experience it hasn't delivered on most of
those promises.

Oddly, I find the ebay homepage more useful, since it also displays a
selection of products from sellers I watch, and has figured out I have a
fetish for vintage test equipment. I don't think I've ever bought anything
from the Amazon homepage, but I bought at least 3 items that I saw on the eBay
homepage (from sellers I watched) in the last year. This relies on active
participation from the user, however, and benefits people who have used the
site for a long time. And I can't kid myself, eBay can't grow selling used
test equipment and motorcycle parts, but they still do the online sale of
unique items better than anyone else.

I do miss the 'rummage sale' aspect though, it's now nearly impossible to
browse and find weird items, you have to just search for specific items rather
than browse.

~~~
hutattedonmyarm
My housemate recently got a suggestion for a food processor dash button

~~~
ahartmetz
Haha, brilliant. A good example of "AI" gone wrong. I wonder whether Amazon's
recommender has a flag for durable goods, and if so, how it failed.

------
taneq
This expectation of perpetual rapid growth across the board is bonkers. Are
there any online auction sites that approach eBay's popularity? Are there that
many new people who want to sell stuff online for eBay to serve? What's it
going to take for the market to start accepting a large company with a healthy
revenue stream as "big enough"?

~~~
beatgammit
I think they could expand by taking over Craigslist's marketshare. In some
areas, Craigslist is super popular, in others it's virtually nonexistent. If
they can find a way to connect local sellers with local buyers and make money
doing it, they could make a killing.

~~~
zengr
That's only in US. ebay classifieds is massive everywhere else out of US.

------
tasty_freeze
15 years ago, I would visit ebay multiple times a day. I bought or sold
something an average of once a week. Over time I used it less and less because
it became a marketplace for cheap mass market consumer goods instead of an
amazing bazaar. Part of the fun was not knowing what you'd find if you kept
looking a little bit longer.

These days I have to look up my password when I log in. When I do and search
for, say, "arduino", I get 85 different Chinese vendors selling what appears
to be the identical product for prices that are lower than the cost of just
the CPU chip that is on it.

I'm not saying it was better or worse, just different, and not what I loved
about it a decade ago. But I'm in my 50s, and not the younger target
demographic they think they can capture.

~~~
philpem
I'm in the younger demographic, and they're not doing a great job capturing
me!

Half my test equipment collection came from ebay at one point or another,
almost all of it bought "broken, parts only" and repaired. The bottom has
completely fallen out of the market, these days it's all massive T&M vendors
trying to shift junk at hugely inflated prices.

It's really raised the barrier to entry for quite a few tech-related hobbies.

------
bredren
Surprised no one else has said this, but eBay was ugly as sin for a very long
time! Even now, the pages are crowded with variant font sizes and styles.

There are offers galore as though the site competes with itself to get you to
click on various things. I gotta say, it is downright horrendous to look at an
ebay listing still!

Look at this example from just now.
[https://i.imgur.com/1cjoT36.png](https://i.imgur.com/1cjoT36.png)

I mean, it wants me to write a review for this item as though this is possibly
something I would do looking at it for the first time.

It wants me to "make more cash and sell whats hot" it wants me to shop with
confidence and learn more what that means. It wants me to buy it now and add
it to the cart. Oh but don't forget 3-year protection plan from blah for $26.

Is there any site on the internet that has such a mess for a product page than
this? I can't think of something worse.

eBay should break up the company if it means it can create reasonable item
listings. What they have now is a a travesty of a product page. This hasn't
been okay outside eBay, ever.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Yet Amazon isn't better at any of this.

Same jumble of fonts, ropey hostile layout, it asks for reviews on products I
haven't bought, suggests I might like to sell one, take out a subscription and
shows ads for competing products. They also try and make the distinction
between Amazon and marketplace as vague as possible.

~~~
nikkwong
Whenever I bring this up I get contested at the fact that Amazon has A/B
tested the customer-facing e-commerce portion of their site down to the very
pixel. If any page on the web has the incentive to go through massive amounts
of A/B testing, its those product pages for sure.

Yet, then I look at those pages, and think to myself... really? This
monstrosity is the result?

Still so confused.

~~~
the-dude
Are you aware of the 'Belcher button' ?

------
max76
There are a lot of things I really like about Ebay. I have found myself using
it more and more over the last year. I hope they highlight what makes them
unique instead of trying to clone other e-commerce websites.

* I know exactly which business is responsible for my purchase. A business with a good reputation cannot afford to sell counterfeit products, and no shared warehouseing means counterfeits do not get mixed in with actual goods.

* Very cheap things are more competitively priced. Sometimes I like to buy things online that cost less than $5.

* It’s possible to pay less for items and get them directly from overseas. It’s nice to get a discount for having a longer planning horizon.

* It’s fairly easy to sell my unwanted items on the platform.

~~~
fermienrico
Also, you can find some of the most obscure and rare items on eBay that’s
simply impossible to find otherwise.

For example, you can’t buy a Military APC[1] on Amazon :-)

[1] [https://www.ebay.com/itm/CUSTOMIZED-MILITARY-VEHICLE-
BUILT-O...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/CUSTOMIZED-MILITARY-VEHICLE-BUILT-
ON-A-6X6-CAIMAN-CHASSIS/122773527344)

------
packeted
I want to love eBay but I can see why the board is so unhappy and the rot has
been infiltrating the company for a long time.

Back in the 00's I was a PowerSeller, shifting over $20k a month. At first it
was an incredible experience and I was selling high value items to people all
over the world with high margins and almost always a great experience. I was
long on eBay and became a shareholder, passing up on Amazon whose business
seemed much less appealing to me at the time.

Then came along PayPal with their 3.5% uncapped fee, which on expensive items
was significant. Buyers started expecting to be able to pay via PayPal and
eBay stopped allowing trusted sellers to offer a small discount for paying by
wire or cash. PayPal eventually became mandatory.

Later, eBay's fees went up significantly. Those along with PayPal's fees ate
in to my margins and I eventually lost interest, packed up shop and sold my
stock at about break-even.

While I continued to be an occasional buyer, I recently started selling a few
items again. I was met with frequent time waster winning bidders and the same
high fees that I remembered. My last sale was an iPhone X that went to
Thailand, "covered" under PayPal's seller protection and sent with a shipping
label printed directly from eBay's site. A few days after I had sent it, the
buyer filed a dispute with PayPal saying he hadn't received it. PayPal almost
immediately sided with the buyer with a boiler plate reply, removing the money
from my account (including all fees) before the phone even had time to arrive.
I sent an email to appeal which was met with a curt denial. I was almost $1500
out of pocket.

Don't even get me started on their site and mobile app - so much could be
improved and way too many clicks to do anything meaningful. One of my last
battles was spending 3 hours on the phone to try and resolve an account bug as
I had transitioned from UK->US which seems to be an edge case they didn't
finish working on.

It makes me sad because the idea behind eBay is fundamentally a fantastic one,
you can still find great stuff on there and the prices are often much lower
than Amazon (even more so with the recent coupons they must be burning through
cash on). They still have the audience to make a global market place, although
perhaps not for much longer.

~~~
compuguy
This is why most sellers don't ship to international addresses....

------
StudentStuff
The eBay/PayPal split has been a mess. eBay should have had its own,
seamlessly integrated payments from the start, but lacking that PayPal was a
good crutch.

Since the split, you now get the choice of paying through eBay directly,
through PayPal, or another way (depending on what the seller accepts).
Simplifying this for small dollar transactions is critical if eBay is to stay
competitive with Etsy, Amazon, Target, Walmart and the numerous others that
are sharing the online shopping market.

~~~
jonknee
> The eBay/PayPal split has been a mess

It has been an absolute goldmine for shareholders. eBay bought PayPal for
$1.5b in 2002 and spun it off in 2015 for ~$50b. PYPL is currently valued at
$106b.

~~~
masonic
Why would eBay shareholders consider it a "goldmine" if eBay let PayPal go for
half of what it was worth?

~~~
jonknee
Because they didn't sell it, they spun it off. Shareholders got 1 PYPL share
for every share of EBAY. EBAY was ~$28 a share and the combined value of both
is currently ~$123. An 80% annualized ROI seems like a goldmine to me!

------
zanny
How is it that billion dollar companies with legions of employees cannot
recognize why people don't use their product?

What is ebay? _The_ online auction site. If you have something to sell, you
_should_ be going there. If you want something you can't find in a normal
store, you _should_ be checking ebay first.

If you aren't selling on Ebay, or aren't checking Ebay, those are the areas
they need to improve on. You don't take the most successful business in a
market (peer to peer auctions) and try to spin it into some other store to
keep up with impossible growth expectations.

So you go look at why people aren't using your service...

I don't sell on Ebay because either the fees are too high to justify going
through the effort making a listing, shipping the thing, and losing about 20%
of the sale price to Ebay on something that I'm often getting poor margins on
anyway. Or I'm not selling on Ebay because I don't trust their buyer
contention system to be honest. I've heard enough horror stories of sellers
getting refunded against and losing their often expensive products in the
process with no recourse despite mountains of photo evidence of what they
sold.

I don't buy on Ebay because its so hard to find legitimacy. I have never
figured out why I should ever trust feedback scores - every single seller is
always gold starred maxed out positive feedback, some are "Top Rated Plus"
which I have no idea what that even is supposed to mean, and you can't comment
on most listings or seller pages to call out the bad actors. I got some fake
batteries for a Note 4 a few years back and while Ebay accepted my complaint
and refunded me the batteries while letting me keep them because they were
falsely advertised as NFC capable when they weren't, I had no real way to
indicate to others a seller with 100,000 feedback score was selling
counterfeits.

Generally their search is pretty good and their filtering is solid. I can
almost always find what I'm looking for and figure out the right place to list
what I want to sell. Those aren't problems. If they want more of my business,
I need to have confidence that when I act legitimately I won't get scammed,
and when I buy something the buyer is also legitimate. Its the exact same
reason I shop so much less on Amazon nowadays and it seems zero tech company
wants to take responsibility for actually insuring their storefronts are
selling what the pages say they are and that sellers can expect not to be
screwed over illegitimately too.

------
chrischen
It’s really difficult to sell used items on Amazon but much easier on ebay
despite their legacy UI (from when they used to actually charge for listings).

If you really want to be green, buy used items and sell your things which you
aren’t using so it’s not wasting resources.

------
cft
I used eBay for buying expensive IT equipment (routers, IO accelerator cards)
that quickly lose their value, as well as buying rare collectable items
(coins, car parts for my old Audi).

After reading the headline, my first thought was I will have to use
AliExpress, but with collectables it's going to be harder. It's a sad reading,
because there's always been room for department stores and for antique stores.

------
shay_ker
Hmmm... I'm surprised eBay didn't go the Amazon route - see what's working
well in the marketplace, and then sell it yourself.

For instance, there are clearly a lot of electronics that sold at below-market
rates just because of the hassle of an auction. If eBay could "pose as a
buyer" and buy items at a certain price point, re-sell them for a little more,
they could make money on the margins. In fact, I'm certain a lot of people use
eBay to do exactly this, I just don't know how large the market is.

~~~
notahacker
When you have a business model which make a steady 10% per sale for hosting a
seller-updated web page and shopping cart, why would you adopt the far more
risky strategy of employing more people to analyse, buy, hold and handle items
in the hope you'll eke out net profits from reselling at higher prices on the
same platform in future? Especially if doing so is likely to irritate part of
your existing customer base.

------
twblalock
eBay should not be having such a big problem. Look at all the niche trends
that are being empowered by the internet:

\- Vintage mechanical watches

\- Vintage fountain pens

\- Vintage mechanical keyboards

\- Vintage woodworking hand tools

\- Vintage European bicycle parts

\- Vintage film cameras, especially SLRs and Leicas

\- New things that look like those vintage things (often superficially) and
make a lot of money on Kickstarter and Massdrop and Hodinkee and get resold
when the hipster buyers move on to the next thing.

eBay is the best place to buy this stuff. It's hard to believe they can't
figure out how to make money.

~~~
dagw
_It 's hard to believe they can't figure out how to make money._

Making a bit of money is not a problem. Making so much money that all their
investors are happy is a problem. Their investors don't want a modest company
that makes modest profits on modest revenue.

------
puranjay
An understated reason for Amazon's dominance is the popularity of the Amazon
Affiliate program. Because of Amazon's strong conversion rates, a massive
number of bloggers use it as their primary revenue source.

Google any "money" keyword such as "best Bluetooth speakers' and virtually all
top 20 results will have Amazon affiliate links

This allows Amazon to dominate SERPs. No matter what people Google, the links
eventually end up leading to Amazon

------
johntiger1
What went wrong with eBay? I remember getting my first gaming console--a
gameboy SP during the mid 2000s from the site. We did something like buy-it-
now, essentially an early Amazon. While the rest of tech rushes forward, they
seem to be forever stuck... Right now I'd say StubHub occupies a bigger slice
in the consumer mindshare.

~~~
SXX
StubHub is owned by eBay though.

~~~
masonic
Which is why eBay sabotages ticket sales on eBay by dumping thousands of
StubHub "classified ads" in the tickets category so that genuine listings
can't be found among the chaff. You can't even exclude the StubHub ads from
your eBay search results.

If a buyer buys direct on eBay from a seller, eBay gets about 10%. If it sells
on StubHub, eBay gets 33-65%.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Ticket resellers are an absolute scourge on the music industry, anything that
makes their life more difficult is fine by me.

------
opportune
eBay kind of got eaten from all sides: Amazon took over the regular stuff,
Etsy got the niche and handmade stuff, Alibaba and Aliexpress got the cheap
Chinese stuff outside of Amazon.

So a lot of what's left as a regular user are scams or simple resellers.
Amazon also has a lot of the "garage sale" type of stuff these days

~~~
yzb
I use eBay mostly for the resellers, i.e., when I need to buy some Chinese
crap but I can't wait 2-3 weeks until it arrives here, so I buy it from some
reseller in my country.

Back in the day, before aliexpress, it was good too because you could rip off
the sellers. Just claim the thing never arrived and since for cheap stuff they
had no tracking numbers the seller always had to refund you. You could get
TONS of free stuff that way. Now aliexpress does this right and it's
significantly harder.

~~~
opportune
that seems pretty immoral

------
tern
See Reverb.com for an example of eBay done better, for music gear:
[https://reverb.com/](https://reverb.com/)

------
nikanj
I’ve read enough horror posts to have an innate understanding that selling on
eBay is going to end with me losing the item I’m selling, and having to pay
merchant fees and postage for the privilege of losing it.

Their appeals process is pretty straight forward, in that they always side
with the scam...buyer, no questions asked and no exceptions.

------
setquk
Drop seller fees right down.

£45 on a £450 item and then to shaft you for fees on postage for a virtual
listing is a fucking joke.

You can tell how bad it has got because eBay has no new listings unless
there’s a seller fees offer on.

~~~
kogepathic
Indeed. Paying 10% of the sale price in fees is quite unpleasant, especially
when there are equivalent services that will let you post an ad for free (e.g.
Craigslist, Kijiji, eBay Kleinanzeigen, PAP)

Also, eBay doesn't really offer you much in this era. You can't include
videos, and you're limited to a small number of photos.

Arguably the worst non-feature of eBay, is that they make it incredibly
difficult to calculate the average price of an item. I end up lurking for
months on items to build a history of the average price of a product before I
decide whether to buy it. Their aggressive policy of deleting closed auctions
makes historical comparisons extremely difficult.

------
kosherbeefcake
I have only had good experiences with eBay over the last 10 years. I’ve sold
thousands of things over the years, and I’ve never had any run-ins with
scammers. Then again, I’m not selling items that generally attract scammers. I
have been trying to use eBay more, in place of amazon, when I don’t need it
immediately.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
I also generally have had decent experiences as of late. The article touches
on discoverability of items as a key factor and I have to agree: my wife’s car
had a catalytic converter warning light come on. To have them replaced by a
mechanic is obviously quite expensive, and we had a make and model that looked
like it was going to be not too much work to do ourselves. I’m not a car guy
per se, but if you give me something that’s just unscrewing and screwing stuff
in and it’s not too complex I can do it with a YouTube video.

So on eBay you can just put the make, model and engine type in and it gives
you the correct part. That’s pretty cool, albeit not terribly special. But the
part I really enjoyed was that eBay told me I needed a gasket and a new O2
sensor as well (I wouldn’t have known about the gasket) and gave me a nice
bundle to do it.

In the end I just ended up replacing the O2 sensor and it was pretty simple to
return the other parts. Print label, slap it onto the box, and drop it at the
UPS store.

------
smaili
To this day I still can't list any of my extremely valuable items because of
"seller limits" even though I've been a member for over 15 years and have not
once gotten a negative review. Pretty disappointing considering the money they
could be making off my sold transactions.

------
carboy
It took Sears 126 years to fall apart, eBay is doing it in 23, but I doubt
anyone will be upset

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
To be fair it is one of the longest-lived of the original dotcom bubble
companies. 23 years is multiple lifetimes when you're talking about the
internet.

------
heyjudy
So, basically greedy investors want eBay to ruin what's cool and useful about
it... that it's not Amazon and not quite AliBaba either. Perhaps if they
carefully tested expanding into less cool arenas like freight-forwarding,
freight in general or delivery (merge with FedEx)... that might keep the
capitalists at bay.

~~~
beering
I don't see how spinning off Stubhub into a separate company will "ruin what's
cool and useful about [eBay]". The rummage-sale aspect of eBay has and will
change no matter how they choose to restructure their conglomeration.

------
mcintyre1994
Ah, Elliott. I worked at a company they took an interest in, this sucks for
employees. They’re a powerful force and they seemed to get what they wanted.

~~~
cagataygurturk
Care to elaborate how you were affected

~~~
mcintyre1994
They made the CEO leave, layoffs just before he left, another round of layoffs
after we were repeatedly told there wouldn't be when the new CEO came on
board, spun off a successful unit, it devastates morale and makes you pretty
keen to leave quickly. I figure it works for them but it sucks to work at a
company they're doing that to.

------
gscott
eBay should have bought Yahoo. They would have been perfect for each other.

~~~
heyjudy
Lol? How? Yahoo and AOL seem to be perfectly happy riding into the non-
innovation sunset with Verizon.

