@gec2002 wrote:
If your on eBay as a business and the numbers say that you should being selling bestsellers that what you should do. Better to sell 10000 books with $1 each profit after all costs, than 1 book at $1000 profit. If your on eBay for the glory of selling the odd obscure book and showing your the worlds greater rare book hunter go for it. But, my guess is that eBay is a giant multinational and are in it for the profit and if the numbers say bestsellers are the way to go, then that is what they will do. If after some time it becomes obvious that rare books are the go then they will change back. The CEO's mega bonus is based on what the current profitability is, not what will be in 5 years time.
This is precisely the reason eBay finds itself in a hole ATM; it's much easier to manipulate spreadsheets to look good short term than to state and then live up to long term goals.
The fact remains that eBay has lost market penetration over the last decade since they went for boards focused on this way of thinking.
In the last year or so they are even losing that battle as reflected by the diminished long term share price and sub par forward projections.
Diversity was what made eBay great in the first place and I fail to see any improvement brought about by its reduction.
As for search, visibility and volume manipulation practises; these simply act to reduce diversity further and restrict growth by discouraging increased offering volumes.
As far as your profitability sums go, I feel you are failing to account for time.
10,000 sales at a nominal 10 minutes per item (sourcing, listing, packaging etc) at a $30 per hour labour price would represent a total labour cost of $50,000
You'd need a pretty good markup to cover that!
I see plenty of sellers in books making around $1.50 per sale after fees and they're still not selling in huge volumes.
Trying to build a business at $10-15 per hour is very hard yards indeed.
