[Jewelry making - Article 00453] - [Orchid] Ebay down the tubes?

[Elaine Luther]

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Here's an interesting article about ebay:

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/63500-how-donahoe-broke-ebay 

    by Dinah Balk 

          eBay (EBAY) used to be "just a venue" where sellers could list
          rare, unique, or unusual items for sale and buyers could find
          them. Now it appears that eBay is much more than "just a forum"
          and specializes in iPods that can be purchased anywhere. What
          happened to eBay's magic? John Donahoe gave it away. 

          His gross mismanagement of the site has resulted in an
          unprecedented erosion of listings as a direct result of Donahoe
          making one fatal mistake after another while trying to
          implement his "buyer experience" plan. Now he blames sellers
          for his failure and raised their fees. This did not go
          unnoticed and sellers are leaving. 

          How did Donahoe break eBay? 

          1) Off site advertising competes with sellers. When Donahoe
          took away the free advertising premium store owners got and
          replaced it with off site advertising, a number of seller
          listings started looking like a toboggan run. When was the last
          time you saw Microsoft (MSFT) put Apple (AAPL) advertising on
          their site or Wal-Mart(WMT) put ads on Target's (TGT) site? 

          2) He opted millions of buyers into guinea pig tests without
          their consent. These buyers vowed never to visit eBay again
          because tracking cookies were downloaded into their computers
          making escape difficult if not impossible. 

          3) The site is technically unstable. What buyer is going to
          tolerate a site where they are stalked by tracking cookies,
          links that don't work, abundant page loading errors, page
          loads as slow as molasses if at all, and site issues that are
          never announced much less fixed? 

          4) Best Match doesn't work! What buyer is going to search
          through thousands of meaningless search results just to find
          one item? There are literally thousands of complaints on eBay
          Discussion Boards because buyers can no longer find it, causing
          listings and sales to plummet. 

          5) Seller tools are broken. The shipping calculator doesn't
          work because is not designed to calculate dimensional weights
          (a well kept eBay secret). Markdown manager never has worked
          and the "sell your item" form works intermittently at best. 

          7) Rolling server blackouts. Sellers pay for their listings to
          be shown 24/7 yet eBay selectively shows listings to
          predetermined regions of the country and blacks out all other
          areas. 

          8) Sellers are canceling Paypal accounts. Donahoe's new "plan"
          includes a provision by which all a buyer need say is "I'M NOT
          HAPPY 

          - GIVE ME A REFUND" and a 21 day hold is automatically placed
          on the seller's Paypal account - even after the purchase has
          been shipped. 

          Hello Amazon (AMZN)! 

          Disclosure: Author is a long time eBay seller 

    and there's more on the subject at http://jewelryblogger.com 

Elaine
http://www.CreativeTextureTools.com
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