No wonder you're losing mass market share to Amazon

[heapskeen4x4]

It appears this is the only way to give feedback to Ebay themselves eveno though I doubt they even check these.

2 points that are causing extreme annoyance and causing me to shop anywhere but on Ebay.

1. Local sellers that aren't local - Ebay is letting sellers nominate they are in your country for local shipping, then when a product is ordered you get an internaional shipping number and postage takes double the time.. If I wanted to shop in China I'd use one of the 1000 other china based suppliers that are way cheaper than ebay sellers.

2. You can no longer sort by price. Whichever Genius allowed listings to have multiple options then didn't notice that **bleep**ty sellers are listing a piece of paper at $1 and the actual product at $200 so they hit the top of the list when sorted by price dosen't deserve their job.

Honestly Ebay you had such a decent opportunity to do more and you go and make decisions that eat at your clients trust. If I can't sort through the garbage and certainly can't guarantee where something is coming form I'm not going to shop here. And neither will most.

[padi*0409]

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@countessalmirena wrote:

Rich soft buttery brioche...as light as a handful of angel's cloud... mmm...

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Stoppit countess, I've just finished dinner and that still made me drool all over the keyboard.................

[springyzone]

When someone is obviously into cooking at your level, countessa, then I think it is entirely reasonable to buy the exact tools you need, even if it does cost a bit more because they have to be shipped here.

High tea at your place must be a royal experience!

I know they say a bad workman blames his tools but at the same time, quality tools do make a huge difference & I don't think you would ever have been entirely happy with lesser goods, it would always have been on your mind that they weren't what you had really wanted.

As for Amazon, I don't know how it is doing on the Australian site. I have looked for a couple of products but found the prices much the same as on ebay & catch and not particularly what I would call bargains (about $6 under RRP).

I'd love to know if ebay sales in Australia have been affected since the arrival of Amazon here and if so, by how much, but not sure if they will ever specifically tell us.

There have been a couple of times in the past (before Amazon hit our shores) when I looked at Amazon USA & there were a few  things I would have loved to have bought (mainly scrapbooking type items & cutters, some second hand or discontinued lines) but those particular sellers didn't ship to Aust so i wasn't able to.

[clubesquire]

Putting aside some of its inequities, I think eBay has a lot going for it compared to Amazon. Just the ‘look and feel’ for a start,mand likewise, just about every item I’ve had interest in, didn’t ship to Australia. The one item I did buy was obviously, I think, drop shipped and the packaging was appalling. It was lucky to have arrived unscathed. I find it a pretty messy site.

It would be nice to know what affect it’s had on eBay, but I’m thinking not too much at this stage. The items I’ve looked at are quite expensive. Shipping looks inflated in many instances.

The good advice too is to diversify, but you know what, as much as I don’t have a great deal of love for eBay, we’re finding results here better than at our other two venues, and much less work, much less. Looking after three venues when most of our stuff is all single listing is pretty time consuming.  We’re still thinking of consolidating here with a store for awhile. Troubles is, our current inventory is nor really compatible with other. It just present some new issues with buyer perception.

Would we list on Amazon? I don’t think so, at least not at this time.

Melina.

[cezm]

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@clubesquire wrote:

It would be nice to know what affect it’s had on eBay, but I’m thinking not too much at this stage. The items I’ve looked at are quite expensive. Shipping looks inflated in many instances.

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I'd be interested to know if it really has had any impact on eBay. I suspect not a lot. 

I have searched for items but I don't think the search criteria are as good as eBay's (saying something!). Trying to find a pair of white boxer undies for my son brought up all sorts of 'sexy' underwear and I gave up ploughing through it. I found a lot of the listings had price ranges too. E.g. Small = $28, Mediium = $38, Large = $34 and XL = $28. Postage for each size varied slightly too - but all around the $9 mark. Maybe it would just take a bit of getting used to but I won't be rushing off to buy there.

I am still finding a lot more choice here. I do buy from fishpond sometimes as they often have good prices and free shipping to Australia. 

[melbourneclearance]

By definition, when another player goes into the same market there will be impact. Some ebay market share would have been lost, how much is the only question. The market itself has also expanded a little as Amazon put out some ads.

Personally, my ebay sales have not been affected as far as I can tell, but my Amazon sales have increased in the last few months.

Amazon is still in its infancy in Australia. Everything about it is still underdeveloped. The buying interface is clumsy and the selling interface is even worse, but I guess that is why they give sellers like me free subscription fees for the moment.

[digital*ghost]

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@clubesquire wrote:

The good advice too is to diversify, but you know what, as much as I don’t have a great deal of love for eBay, we’re finding results here better than at our other two venues, and much less work, much less. Looking after three venues when most of our stuff is all single listing is pretty time consuming.  We’re still thinking of consolidating here with a store for awhile. Troubles is, our current inventory is nor really compatible with other. It just present some new issues with buyer perception.

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My strategy was to focus on one platform at a time - at least, that's how it turned out. It wasn't actually planned that way, I was just a chicken and hemmed and hawed about things until finally deciding to take the plunge. In hindsight, even though at the time when I started acheiving success with the new venues I kicked myself for not doing it sooner, I think being able to concentrate on one at a time to really give it the best head start and to be able to properly establish it in its own right, was of significant benefit - by the time I opened up the last one (on a third party site), I was pretty much able to hit the ground running.

I built my ebay store up for a while before I ventured to other sites, and then I concentrated on building a new store, giving it priority over eBay in terms of listings (at this point I was selling a lot of multiple quantity items, though, so it was easier for ebay to just keep ticking along for a bit while I spent my energy elsewhere, however I do also put exclusive items on each venue). 

I dropped a couple of ventures, and concentrated on the most viable, ultimately spending a minimum of a year establishing them before looking at additional venues. I now have 3 well established shops, plus the wesbsite that I finally lauched in August. It is indeed a bit more difficult to give that the time and dedication it needs (especially now that I am in my peak season), but I knew that was going to be a bit of a struggle, so I gave myself two years to work on that before I would even look at its long term viability. 

I'm not interersted in Amazon at the moment, TBH. If my website takes off and I got to a point where I was looking to expand again, I might be, but just for me personally there's enough third-party sites I funnel money into, and for now I'd rather invest time and money on establishing my own. 

[davewil1964]

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@melbourneclearance wrote:

By definition, when another player goes into the same market there will be impact. Some ebay market share would have been lost, how much is the only question. The market itself has also expanded a little as Amazon put out some ads.

Personally, my ebay sales have not been affected as far as I can tell, but my Amazon sales have increased in the last few months.

Amazon is still in its infancy in Australia. Everything about it is still underdeveloped. The buying interface is clumsy and the selling interface is even worse, but I guess that is why they give sellers like me free subscription fees for the moment.

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But only in Australia. I can't imagine less than 90% of the interface would be transferable, which would indicate that the rest of the world puts up with a sub-standard site.

[melbourneclearance]

I would be very surprised if the US Amazon uses the same seller interface as we do here. The one they force us to use here has all the listings in one huge list, it's impossible to figure out what you have or have not listed quickly. Then there is the bug of no end of line in the item description. Their customer service told me to manually type in some symbols everytime I want a new paragraph, but I couldn't get it to work. So all my listing descriptions contain one paragraph.

One huge plus is every listing shows exactly how much commission Amazon takes if it sells. It is lower than ebay's commission and no PayPal fees!

[*tippy*toes*]

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@melbourneclearance wrote:

I would be very surprised if the US Amazon uses the same seller interface as we do here. The one they force us to use here has all the listings in one huge list, it's impossible to figure out what you have or have not listed quickly. Then there is the bug of no end of line in the item description. Their customer service told me to manually type in some symbols everytime I want a new paragraph, but I couldn't get it to work. So all my listing descriptions contain one paragraph.

One huge plus is every listing shows exactly how much commission Amazon takes if it sells. It is lower than ebay's commission and no PayPal fees!

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I don't know about Amazon, but other sites that won't let you start a new paragraph (by hitting the enter key), you can by hitting shift-enter. Click and hold on the shift key, then hit the enter. If you want to go more than one space between paragraph, keep your finger pressing on the shift key, then hit and release the enter button the amount of times you want spaces.

I mostly use it in Facebook and Facebook Messenger because neither will allow you to easily start a new paragraph.

[melbourneclearance]

Thanks, tippy. I have just tried that but unfortunately it still did not show paragraphs. The paragraph problem in Amazon may be slightly different in that it allows me to have paragraphs when I'm actually making the listings. But when submitted, the listings will not show paragraphs.

I have just googled it and apparently I need to use html br and p in brackets to do it, but the forum also says Amazon may remove listings which contain html codes. Heh, I think I will stick with single paragraphs there for the moment.