Is eBay dead?

[grasswire]

I'm sure not seeing much activity the last couple of weeks.

[hollysmom]

1. truthfully any foray's into e-bay lately have been painful,

as a seller I did really well when it started but after the last second sniping started the prices were pitiful, no more price wars. Add on the new paypal and e-bay fees requirements and you have a seller unfriendly site. I just may sell things around thanksgiving now, but didn't even bother last year.

[JimDandy]

2. I've never bought or sold anything on Ebay,

but I heard that their fees are now excessive from someone who has stopped selling there.

[TeamPooka]

3. ebay only cares about large brand and producet resellers now.

the little guy is not part of their long term business plan.
also they have lost a lot of their current customer base.
Anyone who has bought anything from my little ebay store recently has a feedback store below 30 so they are all newbies.

[sinkingfeeling]

4. I still use Ebay. Whenever I need something that's not easy to find, like

shiny brass bathroom stuff or an antique, I turn to Ebay. I've never sold anything on it, but have been a buyer since 1997.

[Vinca]

5. I'm only doing "buy it now" on ebay and it's always a surprise when something sells.

As an earlier post noted, ebay is now for big sellers who list thousands of items in one key stroke. The original intent of ebay has been lost in a quest to become Amazon.

[GP6971]

9. I'm not sure.

Over the last 3 months, I've been purchasing a lot of items and have dealt with 15 sellers......only 2 have been what I consider to be large. Most seem to be private sellers with limited inventory.

[Vinca]

10. There are plenty of small sellers, but if you search for many items

you'll get page after page of people who are megasellers. Oddly, if you search their "solds," most of the thousands upon thousands of items they list don't sell. What they do is crap up the works for the small sellers. I have a friend whose sister is a megaseller and she lists things 1,500 at a time. You can still find good things on ebay if you look, but it's like wading through a lake to get to them. I still don't sell using auctions. Unless you have a real rarity and can set a reserve price, it's not worth giving stuff away.

[wyldwolf]

6. Life support

I believe their business model isn't nearly as viable as it once was in light of the vastly superior Amazon Marketplace.

[DaveZale]

7. Selling has been very hot and cold for the past year

About the time you first posted, there were numerous problem For one thing, google changed it's search algorithms to something less favorable to ebay. For another, there were security breaches with ebay passwords. If that's not enough, there were numerous outages later in the year due to ebay going to the cloud, also the new global shipping program which added Fedex complexities to the picture, and the looming presence of Carl Icahn forcing layoffs and a split from paypal.

I have been doing okay with my unique items but it's never consistent. May be trying BigCommerce soon.

Let me know if you have any questions, have grown sales about 3x over the past two years. TRS+

[grasswire]

8. welcome to DU! nt