
eBay Is Conducting a 'Mass Layoff' in the Bay Area - rmason
http://fortune.com/2018/07/18/ebay-bay-area-layoffs/
======
NeedMoreTea
I can't say I am surprised as they have spent the last half decade or more
trying to reinvent themselves as some sort of Amazon marketplace for companies
selling new goods. Policies and rates have repeatedly penalised sellers ever
harsher. It is now so buyer-centric that eBay is a safe place for buyers to
experiment with their first fraud.

In the process they have thrown away their reason for being and why they grew.
At one point just about everyone I knew used to get rid of their spare tat on
eBay and post a link. One or two had nice little hobby businesses selling
collectables etc. Now I doubt many of them remember it exists. No one I know
sells on it any more. I used to get rid of all my old IT kit on eBay, yet now
I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot barge pole to sell anything.

That is equally reflected in what's there when looking as a buyer - mostly
company sales and endless cheap rubbish and far fewer private sales.

~~~
mattlondon
+1

eBay _used to be great_ when it was genuine people selling their spare stuff.
I used to buy and sell a lot on eBay and it was great - picked up a lot of
great secondhand stuff at decent prices, and found new homes for kit I didn't
need any more.

But for the past several years it seems to be dominated by "professional"
sellers doing buy-it-now bulk-sells of new cheap stuff shipped directly from
China/Hong Kong that takes 6-8 weeks to arrive then when it does it is often
awful quality and/or not what was in the listing. This ruined it for me.

There _are_ a few decent secondhand sales still happening though - e.g. I got
a really decent refurbished secondhand projector a year or two ago from a guy
that specialised in projectors, and in the UK you can now collect your eBay
orders from highstreet stores for free. It is just a shame that these genuine
sellers are drowned out by the crap-pushers selling cheap tat.

~~~
ssharp
I used to use eBay to buy/sell musical instruments. It was a typically a great
platform for that. Then in 2009, I had a terrible experience with PayPal
withholding my money because the buyer complained that the $1,000 keyboard I
sold's AC adapter wasn't working. I offered to refund the cost of a new
adapter and everything, but they buyer kept stalling and it was impossible to
get anyone on the phone at PayPal to help resolve the situation -- my money
just sat in limbo.

I think the whole ordeal took over 30 days to resolve. $1,000 held up in
uncertainty over a $10 part.

Thankfully, Reverb came around for people like me. They are truly a joy to
work with. I had one instance where the buyer seemed like he could be sketchy,
mostly because he was from a foreign country and the shipping on the item
would likely be a large percentage of the cost of the item itself. My item was
somewhat rare, but not sought after, high quality, or that collectible, so it
was only sold for around $500. However, I didn't want to expose myself to any
fraud risk, and Reverb walked me through everything I needed to do to ensure
that even if the sale was fraudulent, Reverb would take the hit and not me.

I'm sure running a massive marketplace at scale is hard and since eBay and
Amazon have both tipped the scales considerably towards the buyer, that that's
where problems tend to impact worse and occur more frequently. But the seller
horror stories are impossible to ignore. I'd have a hard time selling anything
worth more than $100 on eBay anymore.

~~~
oceanghost
Thanks for posting this. I have some vintage synths I've been hanging onto for
10 years precisely because I didn't know how or where to sell them.

------
TorKlingberg
I think eBay has a lot of what I would call "process debt". Not technical
dept, I don't know what their code looks like. It's all that extra complexity
that has built up over the years. eBay has so many menus and settings and
listing options that I just get lost.

The most obvious one is PayPal. That may have made sense in the '90s, but
today I should just pay money to eBay, they take their cut and send the rest
to the seller. Instead I pay directly to the sellers PayPal account, which may
be named something completely different from their eBay account. Then eBay
sends the seller an invoice at the end of the month or something. All
unnecessary complexity, but I'm sure someone would be outraged if they changed
anything.

~~~
Animats
_" I should just pay money to eBay, they take their cut and send the rest to
the seller."_

That makes eBay the seller, or auctioneer, which gives you consumer law rights
against eBay.

~~~
briandear
That’s not how it works with marketplaces. Otherwise Shopify would be on the
hook. eBay could process payments but that doesn’t make them the seller.

~~~
alaskamiller
Shopify uses Stripe to process payments because they don't want to be
responsible for it.

------
danso
FYI, on the open data angle, the California state WARN site (named after the
law which requires public disclosure of mass layoffs) publishes all the
announcements -- unfortunately, in Excel Saved As PDF format:

[https://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/layoff_services_war...](https://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/layoff_services_warn.htm)

The eBay listings seem to have been announced 2 weeks ago, on June 29:
[https://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/warn/WARN-Report-
fo...](https://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/warn/WARN-Report-
for-7-1-2017-to-06-30-2018.pdf)

~~~
justboxing
Thanks! Did not know about this site. Annoying that they convert to PDF.

Any idea how frequently this is published?

Looks like Al Jazeera is shutting down it's office in San Francisco. 68 people
getting the Axe on Aug 5th

> 05/07/2018 08/05/2018 05/11/2018 Al Jazeera International (USA), LLC San
> Francisco San Francisco Closure Permanent

Source: PDF link in parent comment.

~~~
danso
Did a quick check on Internet Archive. According to this April 23, 2018
snapshot, the most recent file is said to cover July 1, 2017 through April 10,
2018, so 1 to 2 week delay?

[http://web.archive.org/web/20180423074904/https://www.edd.ca...](http://web.archive.org/web/20180423074904/https://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/layoff_services_warn.htm)

Over the years I had some reason to analyze them, and I do some half-assed job
of collecting and parsing them into useable data. This repo from 2 years ago
contains the PDFs as translated by ABBYY FineReader (in my experience, the
best converter on the market, at least sub $100):

[https://github.com/datahoarder/ca-warn](https://github.com/datahoarder/ca-
warn)

Today I started a new repo (forgetting about my previous one). I've been
wanting to create a series of repos showing how I "casually" practice
programming and data analysis. That is, satisfy and iterate upon a curiosity
without going all-in on best software engineering practices. It's aimed at
people who've tried to learn coding themselves, but don't have a job in it but
don't know how to practice it in the wild and just for "fun":

[https://github.com/hackbashscoop/california-
warn](https://github.com/hackbashscoop/california-warn)

Not much there except a simple wget invocation to pull the latest files, and
the use of Poppler's pdftohtext to convert into plaintext files. Even though
it's unstructured text, I _think_ it's regular enough to be parseable with
some regular expressions. For reference's sake, I've done an ABBBY PDF-to-
Excel conversion (and will write a Python script to do the remaining data
wrangling), but you can do what you want with the spreadsheets as they
currently are:

[https://github.com/hackbashscoop/california-
warn/tree/master...](https://github.com/hackbashscoop/california-
warn/tree/master/data/abbbyxls)

~~~
seltzered_
somewhat OT, but fwiw I recently stumbled upon the Fonduer project which does
some interesting extraction methods beyond just OCR.
[https://hazyresearch.github.io/snorkel/blog/fonduer.html](https://hazyresearch.github.io/snorkel/blog/fonduer.html)

They have a pdf-to-tree package which i haven't had good results from but
perhaps i need to finally learn ML and try to train models for this a bit:
[https://github.com/HazyResearch/pdftotree](https://github.com/HazyResearch/pdftotree)

------
greglindahl
The reason it's a "mass layoff" is because that's what the California law
requiring notification calls it. Better articles about this news mention facts
like EBay's end-of-2017 employee count being 14,100 people.

That's 2%.

~~~
fiveFeet
Thank you for mentioning this. It gives a much better perspective.

------
magduf
This is bad news IMO. I get a lot of great deals on things on Ebay that I
wouldn't find on Amazon, or that would require me to be a Prime member to not
get socked with a high shipping charge without buying a bunch of other stuff,
or would require me to wait a long time to get it because I'm not a Prime
member.

I get all my cellphones on Ebay, for instance: I get high-end models when
they're about 2 years old, from high-volume sellers who specialize in
refurbished/used cellphones. People are always jealous of my nice phones,
thinking I spent $800+ when I usually only spend $100-150.

Many times, if I want something that's only $10 or $20, Ebay is the way to go
because I don't have to wait long to get it, and don't have to get $50 worth
of stuff to get the "free" shipping, so Ebay ends up being a better deal.

Also, avoiding Chinese sellers is easy on Ebay: just click the box that says
"North American sellers only" (or "US sellers only") and you don't have to
worry about stuff being shipped from far away and taking a month. Amazon
doesn't make it quite so obvious, nor do they allow you to actually exclude
such sellers with a search.

Of course, Ebay lets you buy stuff (usually used, or perhaps secondhand but
never-used) from non-commercial/individual sellers. Amazon has removed the
ability for individuals to resell their stuff unless you sign up for a special
seller's account for $35/year.

~~~
paxys
You basically gave the reason for its decline. Somewhere along the way it
changed from being a place for people to sell their second-hand stuff to a
storefront for cheap Chinese goods. For most people it is too hard to sort
through the mess and find actual good deals.

~~~
magduf
That description sounds much like Amazon, except you have to change the "for
people to sell their second-hand stuff" to "for merchants to sell their
genuine products", and modify "cheap Chinese goods" to "cheap Chinese goods
and counterfeits".

------
LyndsySimon
I don't understand why there hasn't been a significant challenger to eBay in
their space. They are notorious amongst sellers for their high fees and
dispute resolution that almost always sides with the buyer.

~~~
jdietrich
Network effects. Sellers use eBay because buyers use eBay because sellers use
eBay. eBay dominate the long tail of e-commerce and will do for the
foreseeable future.

You can challenge eBay locally, as shown by Craigslist and Gumtree. You can
challenge eBay in a specific niche, as shown by Etsy. Facebook tried to take
on eBay directly with Marketplace, with limited success. Amazon Marketplace
competes fairly directly with eBay, but at a significant cost to Amazon's
reputation - it has flooded their platform with counterfeits and fake reviews.

~~~
phatfish
For reference Gumtree was only challenging eBay before 2005, when they were
bought by eBay.

Shpock (mobile only I think) seems to be the nearest thing to a competitor at
the local level, in Europe at least.

~~~
icebraining
OLX is a pretty big competitor in many countries:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLX)

------
redmattred
There is a service called Layoff-Aid that helps SF tech workers line up new
jobs: [https://www.layoff-aid.com/](https://www.layoff-aid.com/)

~~~
propman
That’s neat. High probability of employee taking your offer and not just
shopping around because they are layed off and good for the employee who needs
to make ends meet quick. I like that they try to exclude companies that had
mass layoffs within the last 3 years as well.

Though if I were the employee, I’d take that severance and try to stretch it
for a couple of months and depending on the engineering field, do a bunch of
interview questions and apply at FAANG or other high paying ones. I feel like
a large portion of layed off employees aren’t the ones who jump companies and
get promoted regularly. Those ones can smell the end is near and jump ship
probabaly beforehand. If finances are stable, getting laid off might be a
great opportunity if one can maintain focus and is willing to put in the time.

~~~
gaius
_Those ones can smell the end is near and jump ship probabaly beforehand_

If you sense it coming and you work for a company that treats people decently
(dunno if eBay does or not) then why wouldn’t you hang around for the payoff?
A good company will give a months pay per year of service.

~~~
michaelt

      why wouldn’t you hang around for the payoff?
    

If you took a job as a developer because you love creating useful things that
people like; and you know after the layoff the product is going in the trash;
that's going to cut into your job satisfaction a lot.

Plus there's the risk you'll be among those who _aren 't_ laid off, but your
working conditions will worsen.

------
tiatia123
Not sure I want to have shares in ebay.

Have you heard about OpenBazar?

Besides this: They had paypal. Lost They had Skype. Lost.

They could have build the first social network on skype. Nothing. They have
skype on the phone. They could have been the major western payment processor.
The Alipay or Wechat of the West. Nothing.

It looks to me like a long series of lost opportunities. A one trick pony, a
fly that is looking for a windshield.

~~~
briandear
A fly looking for a windshield! Brilliantly describes Yahoo! as well.

------
ashelmire
How is ebay not making money? They are a glorified e-commerce site that does a
huge amount of business, taking a cut of each transaction with very low per-
transaction cost.

~~~
jorblumesea
Poor business decisions, strategic mistakes, and improper spending? The usual
reasons, probably. $1B loss so obviously huge spend with little return.

~~~
chillacy
Well on the home page right now ebay is offering a 20% off coupon for products
that they don't directly sell, and $100 for $90 in gift cards. Ebay takes a
big cut but it's not 20% big, so they're probably losing money to acquire
customers through deals.

------
code4tee
I just don’t understand how they have $9 billion in revenue but are
unprofitable. A slightly simpler version of the site could probably be run by
a few people in someone’s basement plus some outsourced support staff.

~~~
Waterluvian
It always feels that way doesn't it? Except then there's the other 99% that it
takes to run eBay.

------
pmiller2
I don’t use eBay much as a buyer. My primary dealings on eBay tend to be in
collectibles categories, and they have a real problem with fakes. It’s better
to go to a reputable specialized auction house, and just mentally subtract
buyers’ fees from your maximum bid, IMO. Stuff I still buy there tends to be
low value, but moderately uncommon stuff I can find there simply because they
have so much of it.

------
throwawaylalala
We sell on eBay and Amazon (and Walmart). eBay is a fraction of the business
and traffic that Amazon is, but it's 100 times the headache that Amazon is.
The layout, getting around, finding settings is just completely horrible. To
do simple things some times we have to resort to googling the answer because
everything is hidden and obfuscated.

~~~
j79
Funny, as a buyer, I'm finding the same to be true of Amazon. There was a time
where I would just trust Amazon to have the lowest prices and to have
legitimate reviews. That time is long gone.

Anything higher than 4 stars is now taken with a grain of salt. I'm running
every listing through fakespot.com and even then, I still have to research the
reviews to verify the items are actually any good. I'm certain that I've
decided against purchasing an item because the reviews looked too good. It
just screams "FAKE!"

But the biggest issue (and headache/hassle) I have with Amazon reviews is the
mixed reviews they lump together for different items. This just recently bit
me in the ass when I totally missed that an item I purchased had a bunch of 1
star reviews, but was lumped together with a much more popular item boosting
the item(s) to a 4 star review. That was a month ago, and I've refused to
purchase from Amazon because the headache just isn't worth it. Amazon's
customer service is great - but I'm tired of having to deal with them...

Factor in actual co-mingling of items (I've been the victim of this as well)
and now I can't even trust that the item I ordered from Amazon is even real.
As a seller, I hope you understand that as a buyer, I no longer have faith in
the item you are selling actually being sold by you. At least with eBay, where
there is no fulfillment, I'm working directly with the company.

------
httpz
For me eBay always had some niche products I couldn't find on Amazon. Now I
just look for it on AliExpress.

Unless you're looking for used items, most items on eBay are sold by Chinese
sellers or US resellers with a markup. I'm guessing AliExpress is much easier
to use and friendlier to Chinese sellers.

------
rednerrus
They just have too many employees. They make plenty of money. If they get
lean, they should be fine.

------
subpixel
I wonder what effect niche sites have had on eBay’s bottom line.

I bought my last 3 phones on Swappa and just spent a few hundred dollars
buying vinyl on discogs. Did not even consider eBay for these purposes, and
perhaps that is true for many shoppers across many niches.

------
pfarnsworth
eBay has created a one-sided marketplace, where sellers are getting ripped off
with impunity. It's great for buyers like me, but I would never sell anything
on there because it's so easy to get ripped off.

When you have an unhealthy marketplace like this, of course it will suffer.

------
willart4food
eBay sucks. I haven't used it in quite a while and last month I decided to
sell some small electronics that I had around the house. 2 items sold at
auction but then the buyers didn't pay (a common occurrence), oh well, not
eBay's fault.

I went through the eBay procedure of waiting 2 days, open an unpaid item case,
then waiting some more before closing the case for non-payment and re-listing
the item.

Today I got my eBay invoice and I got charged the 10% Final Value Fee for
those items. And now I have to call customer service to get some type of
support.

Really eBay?

------
sonnyblarney
The fact that Shopfy is crushing it in an era where Ebay and Amazon should be
able to take that space is really interesting.

One interesting thing is the crazy UI complexity of both Ebay and Amazon
interfaces. I wanted to find something that provided fairly quick shipping, I
couldn't figure that out. Text and presentation seem to be half-hazard - and
this is not even getting into the softer issues such as brand/image/placement,
my god man, I wouldn't want my 'upmarket' product jammed into those byzantine
pages.

Instead of trying to be 'everything' it may make sense for EBay to focus very
narrowly on their differentiating factor, and instead use their process and
infrastructure to attack other opportunities under a different brand.

~~~
fizwhiz
> The fact that Shopfy is crushing it in an era where Ebay and Amazon should
> be able to take that space is really interesting.

Um, source?

~~~
sonnyblarney
"(Shopify) Fourth-Quarter Revenue Grows 71% Year on Year Fourth-Quarter ... to
$128.9 million, driven primarily by the growth of Gross Merchandise ..."
"Fourth-Quarter Gross Profit Grows 78% Year on Year" [1]

Shopify custom storefronts are growing explosively.

There is nothing in EBay's financial releases which indicates they are doing
this well in this area, moreover, the non-Ebay branded interfaces are somewhat
of inconsistent with their core business model.

[1] [https://www.shopify.com/press/releases/shopify-announces-
fou...](https://www.shopify.com/press/releases/shopify-announces-fourth-
quarter-and-full-year-2017-financial-results)

~~~
alaskamiller
Lol calm down.

Shopify is SaaS product that's like Wix + Stripe, it's growth is driven by the
personality cults that made use of Facebook ad networks to convince others
that they can make millions dropshipping or printing tshirts.

$128.9MM Q4 is ~$500-$600MM annum. At $30/mo that's maybe 1 million paid
users.

$637MM was eBay's marketing budget for one quarter.

The only thing going for Shopify right now is the huge margins and cash
accumulation they're doing. Which is pretty fantastic, and they're smart
enough to know how precarious that position can be so they then reinvest back
into other things, like a POS in an already very crowded POS market.

eBay in the beginning was also doing gangbuster numbers. Then they too
invested that money into things and grew into a major corporation.

And that's the whole point. Those bets either pan out or they don't.

And when they don't it completely obliterates the margins on a long enough
time line.

~~~
sonnyblarney
$5 Billion dollar valuation, 70% YOY growth, $580M sales last year, will blow
past $1B in sales soon - that's 'crushing it'.

FYI those are market, i.e. public valuations, not fantasy VC hype valuations.

"At $30/mo that's maybe 1 million paid users."

1M users at $30 a month is spectacular at that rate of growth. (Though thats
not actually how their revenue model works entirely)

... and they just secured the government of Ontario's Marijuana program worth
billions.

While 'Dropbox', a YC darling: "Dropbox is filing for a $500 million IPO—but
also saying it may never be profitable" [1]

"(Shopify) it's growth is driven by the personality cults that made use of
Facebook ad networks to convince others that they can make millions
dropshipping or printing tshirts."

No, there is quite a lot cost to 'switch over' to another platform, even for
small companies, and they have tremendous buy in.

Shopify is basically sucking in the massive long tail and mid-market of
companies who don't want to handle so many of those issues - while EBay and
Amazon have failed to do that well.

They are in a spectacular position, and if they continue on this trajectory
for a couple of years they will not only blow past Dropbox, they will probably
eventually leap frog Stripe once the later's actual numbers start to come
public.

If anything, YC darlings Stripe and Dropbox are in precarious positions,
because both are heavily commoditized markets, and neither of them have a
distinct competitive advantage.

[1][https://qz.com/1214822/dropbox-is-filing-
for-a-500-million-i...](https://qz.com/1214822/dropbox-is-filing-
for-a-500-million-ipo-while-warning-it-may-never-be-profitable/)

------
mlang23
The accessibility of eBay is a nightmare. I would need an assistant to get
anything done with that beast. Pretty much the same with Etsy. Digital divide,
thank you. You will not be missed.

~~~
calvinbhai
do you mean, eBay/Etsy are difficult or impossible to use with any of the
assistive technologies? (on desktop web or on smartphones?)

------
futureSH
Here is my analysis of StubHub business:

1- TM is licking down access to the tickets, making it hard for Stubhub.

2- AEG and other primary concert ticket issuers are building their own
ticketing system.

3- StubHub acquisition of ticketbiz and their international ambitions are
failing because of very soft secondary landscape.

4- StubHub leadership and culture inspires politics, back stabbing and values
BS over innovation.

5- New StubHub CTO is known failure at Amazon. He is bringing a lot of ex-
Amazon to SH. There is feeling that something is fishy!

6- Vivid is spending much more in Marketing than SH.

Based on these, I think eBay will spin off StubHub in next 6 month.

------
honglonglong
There are more and more challengers now with slight niche market, for example
local exchange or second-hand market.

------
gaius
Good luck to all affected. Hope you get decent packages.

------
ConcernedCoder
So long, and thanks for all the phish...

