Is ebay still viable?

[medieval_shoppe]

I will soon be paying $25,000 a year in ebay fees, and ebay seems to now be so strict with sellers that it has reached the point of "passive hostility" (I think). I would be interested in hearing other people's opinions. I run a website which has virtually no advertising budget, and costs me  about 2% of what ebay does. And yet it's not unusual for the website to perform better than my eBay! In my small specialized field, $25,000 would be a MASSIVE budget for targeted advertising in Australia; for that kind of money I could pay for some very heavy-duty, year-round, very focused GOOGLE & FACEBOOK marketing. Of course the easy answer is "do both" - but things are rarely that simple. I could only afford a $25,000 advertising budget if I pulled the plug on my ebay.

(I actually wonder if, from a strictly business point of view, whether eBay is sustainable long-term. Over the last 4 years it has become more expensive/irksome to use ebay as a sales platform, if this trend continues by 2016 it's going to be such an expensive, repressive and time-consuming environment to sell in, that it seems prudent to have an exit strategy.)

[medieval_shoppe]

That's not my experience with a website though - my website is generally about 50% slower than eBay, although some days it does more. My advertising budget for the website is next to nothing, it costs me about $80 per month. So to say that a website would be a ghost town compared to eBay simply isn't true. I REPEAT - IT'S NOT TRUE, I know this for a fact. I ask myself ........ eBay will cost me about $2000 a month soon (it has been costing me about $1500 so-far, but this will increase with the new fee system, and with a little organic growth of my business). I simply don't know what would happen if I transferred that that money into Google promotion for my website, but with a $24,000 annual budget.....  that's a real monster budget, for the small field that I am in, I could dominate Australian & NZ Google for all things medieval, and pop up on hundreds of thousands of Aussie's Facebook pages, just because they like something like World of Warcraft or Game of Thrrones  ...... I could then live without the eBay seller-hostile regime and possibly make consuderably more money for the $24k investment.

eBay has virtually no customer care (by customers I mean the sellers - we who give them money). I could be giving them $10,000 a month in fees, and I would not even get an account manager or know anybody to talk to within eBay. I could sell $1200.00+ suits of armour to 100 customers who might be delighted, but if I sell three or four 50 cent brass buckles that are not perfect, or refund people for items that Australia Post loses or damages, I will get restrictions on my account. It is truly a Nut Job system they run, and it's getting worse by the year.

[lane-ends]

Sucess of websites also depends a lot on what you are selling. They work best for specialty lines, where they will be found by people searching that topic topic on google, rather than just run of the mill Ebay stock. You also need to have definate lines not be just be like a general bibs and bobs store.

[chezzy]

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@cq_tech wrote:
You say that you've been a member of Facebook for around 20 years? That's a pretty neat trick considering that FB wasn't founded until February 4, 2004, or about 2 years after you joined ebay.

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Where does fairlaneltd say they have been a member of facebook for 20 years? I read that they are members of 20 groups (on facebook)?

[thecatspjs]

Thats exactly how I read it Chezzy. 

Can't see fairlaneltd mention anything about their length of facebook membership.

[cq_tech]

My apologies. I think it might be time for a new pair of glasses... 😞

[chameleon54]

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@medieval_shoppe wrote:

That's not my experience with a website though - my website is generally about 50% slower than eBay, although some days it does more. My advertising budget for the website is next to nothing, it costs me about $80 per month. So to say that a website would be a ghost town compared to eBay simply isn't true. I REPEAT - IT'S NOT TRUE, I know this for a fact. I ask myself ........ eBay will cost me about $2000 a month soon (it has been costing me about $1500 so-far, but this will increase with the new fee system, and with a little organic growth of my business). I simply don't know what would happen if I transferred that that money into Google promotion for my website, but with a $24,000 annual budget.....  that's a real monster budget, for the small field that I am in, I could dominate Australian & NZ Google for all things medieval, and pop up on hundreds of thousands of Aussie's Facebook pages, just because they like something like World of Warcraft or Game of Thrrones  ...... I could then live without the eBay seller-hostile regime and possibly make consuderably more money for the $24k investment.

eBay has virtually no customer care (by customers I mean the sellers - we who give them money). I could be giving them $10,000 a month in fees, and I would not even get an account manager or know anybody to talk to within eBay. I could sell $1200.00+ suits of armour to 100 customers who might be delighted, but if I sell three or four 50 cent brass buckles that are not perfect, or refund people for items that Australia Post loses or damages, I will get restrictions on my account. It is truly a Nut Job system they run, and it's getting worse by the year.

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Medieval, once again you reflect my thoughts exactly. While I have looked into my own website I,m not sure its for me. Do you just get people clicking and buying or do they drive you up the wall with questions and cheap low ball offers ? I,m in a similar situation to you ie. not selling generic products, but my two main concerns are achieving traffic flows and sales which ebay currently provide and the time I could waste talking to and answering peoples questions. ( at the moment most people just click and buy if they are interested, without wasting a lot of my time. Any questions I get are usually genuine enquiries and around half of the offers I get are at least sensible.  )

[medieval_shoppe]

I agree - but do most of the serious businesses on ebay run bits and bobs stores? I would say not.

I was really trying to challenge the notion of: "ebay gets 10,000 times more traffic than any website you could ever hope for, so why bother with a website?" argument -

Say 100,000 Australians go on eBay every day - great! But 90% will not be remotely interested in what you are selling anyway, unless your wares are extremely general (and if they are you're going to have a mountain of competition from China). Of the 10% that may look at your spacialized wares at some point (now down to 10,000 potential buyers) only 10% of that number may actively be looking for your type of wares on that particular day (so now down to 1000 potential buyers) of that 10%, about 90% will be tempted away by your numerous competitors on eBay from all over the world - even before they have looked at your stuff, so by this calculation you probably have about 100 good prospects looking at your eBay stuff every day. On a website, almost every visitor is a good potential prospect or they would not be there in the first place. So (by this very rough calculation) a website need only get 100 hits daily to compete with the entire eBay system. So the analogy of having a store in a big shopping mal as opposed to somewhere cheap and extremely quiet, isn't valid at all.    

[medieval_shoppe]

Actually, I find eBayers are 10 times more likely to ask pointless questions than website visitors. I think it's just the chatty culture of eBay, - which is all fine and dandy, but when you have got 15+ questions to plough through every morning, 90% of which lead nowhere - it becomes a chore. Time is money.  

[chameleon54]

Agreed, so do you get 100 hits per day on your website ? The questions thing is a biggy for me too as you say, time is money. ( ps. thanks for answering mine, what do I owe you ? )

[medieval_shoppe]

Yes I easily get 100 a day -