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.)

[clarry100]

Yes we have also asked ourselves this same question.

We don't know the answer until we give it a try. And this is why we are getting close to going live with our own web site independent of ebay.

We have chosen a very professional web site developer who just also happens to be a family friend. He is also very good at SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

He thinks we might have to spend some amount of $$$ in the first 6-months to advertise our presence but once Google "learns" about the new site and sees the increasing amount of traffic/sales then you can cut back the amount you spend on advertising.

Apparently once your site sees increasing traffic it comes up higher in the free search results on Google. And you just have to "tickle" the advertising budget occasionally to keep it up there.

Anyway these questions and lots more will be answered for us in the runup to Xmas peak season. If we reach a level of sales on the new site that we feel comfortable with we will cease trading on ebay altogether for all the many reasons we and many other sellers put forth on these boards.

In the meantime we intend to put up info on our progress on here so that the many others can see if/not its a worthwile way to go.

[clickbaitoz]

i read this thread with interest both as buyer & very small time seller. Had thoughts of selling professionally over the years but never go my act together!

                  As i have posted in other threads, its less & less worth it for me to buy on ebay when postage prices are closing the gap between how much i save on ebay & cost of buying in a b&m store, theres also the convenience factor to weigh up too. Part of the reason i was buying alot on ebay was because i was selling more & had money in my paypal account whereas now not selling much & relying on bank account/credit card funded purchases, makes me think twice about items i can get elsewhere. 

              Anyway i am also trying to get into the habit of checking prices on other non ebay online stores, its got to the point i don't really want to give ebay my business because of the way they treat sellers & their greedy new policies.  My main reluctance in buying non ebay is theres no feedback system, i have no idea how reliable the business is until i try it which i think would a shared concerned amongst others. So i don't know how you deal with that problem as a non ebay seller, maybe offer discount coupons for new customers then prove your worth.

       A bit off topic but when i looked on Facebook for stores i couldn't see them, are they hidden away somewhere? Also just seen ad banners on ebay for shopify, surely ebay must own them, why would they advertise the competition??

[digital*ghost]

These are some of the things I've started to think about, although I'm currently at a much lower volume of turnover   I sell in some of the most saturated categories on eBay (jewellery and craft supplies) but thankfully still experiencing growth. Likewise, though, I have started to try and build viable alternatives, as while I can cope with most things, ultimately my presence here is not in my control - that's the scariest thing as a small business owner, I guess, in that my success (here) can be subject to the whims of eBay or just a few buyers that didn't like something despite the vast majority having no issues with my items / service at all.

My primary strategies are to focus on building a brand name, which is the one thing I can have working for me on an independent website from day one (if I can establish it well enough) if I one day can't or won't sell here, or even if I outgrow the third-party sites I'm currently using. 

What worries me the most, though, is that this is now a deep concern for many business sellers on eBay. I said once before that an environment where the seller's primary goal is to grow and maintain a business on eBay seems like a much more sustainable environment in the long term than one where a growing number view eBay as a place they will try to "stick out" until a certain point where they have either outgrown eBay enough to move on, or at least have their primary focus elsewhere and use eBay to supplment income or to redirect traffic, or get booted due to factors beyond their control, and I still believe that because I think it will affect eBay's greatest asset - search traffic (that is, if eBay is not a place populated with a good variety of confident sellers, where you can easily find just about anything you can think of, from just about anywhere, and/or get the best deal, it is nothing more than a limited and flawed search engine, albeit with some in-built buyer confidence (which does have value, but IMHO probably not enough for this place to be the first port of call over google when payment methods themselves have relatively reliable protections).

Business itself is never stable, but that doesn't mean an environment like eBay can't be, and I think it needs to be stabilised for sellers, not just for buyers at the expense of sellers.

[2106greencat]

$25K a year in fees - means you are selling a hell of a lot - so add to those fee's postage (just for a start) then paypal fee's - why would you not seriously look at BM ?

Not sure where you are located, but I am on the Sunshine Coast and currently have a BM store (80m2) in a busy centre on the tourist strip and pay $3.5.K per month.

Okay - that equates to $42.5K, but I have no postage (all purchases from suppliers FIS), no eBay fee's, no paypal fee's, NO NPB's or late payers, damaged good claimed back to my suppliers, and when I close the doors at EOD I go home to rest.

Or - you could have a 'permanent stall' in the same kind of centre for 1/3 of the normal BM cost.

I know what works best for me.

Of course in saying that, the hours are long and you will need family to help in some area's when you are needing to deal with suppliers etc, but seriously, if you are doing that well on line, you could make a killing in the RW.

[medieval_shoppe]

That's an interesting angle, but I have a few concerns, re BM store - I know from market stall experience that a small but consequential minority of the general public get very stupid around my stuff, and they treat my set-up as a free photo parlour, trying stuff on without even asking and taking photos with their phones - annoying!!! And then there's the fact that I sell swords; which people want to handle, - and you can't always say "no" if you want a sale; you can imagine the risks and complications dealing with people face-to-face. Mail order is so much easier in my game - for me, a non-descript warehouse posting non-descript boxes is definitely the way to go!     

[medieval_shoppe]

I agree - the big traditional draw of eBay was VARIETY VARIETY VARIETY, no matter how rare and obscure, you could find it on EBAY. That was the big draw, not "buyer safety" - buyers would just check out how long somebody had been selling for, and what their feedback score was before doing a purchase, it was a beautiful self-regulating system. Ebay got it into their heads that buyers want perfection and protection (which isn't really true) and to this effect they started restricting sellers and banning people left right and centre, which has cut down on the quantity/quality of stuff on offer, and put off a lot of hobby sellers that gave the site so much spice and zest in the first place. They are just unwittingly encouraging cheapo Made in China cloned plastic goods that will always get positive feedback because it's all boring functional identical stuff, and they stamp on anybody that's selling interesting and exotic items because only 97% of their clients think they are fantastic! It's madness.

[2106greencat]

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@medieval_shoppe wrote:

That's an interesting angle, but I have a few concerns, re BM store - I know from market stall experience that a small but consequential minority of the general public get very stupid around my stuff, and they treat my set-up as a free photo parlour, trying stuff on without even asking and taking photos with their phones - annoying!!! And then there's the fact that I sell swords; which people want to handle, - and you can't always say "no" if you want a sale; you can imagine the risks and complications dealing with people face-to-face. Mail order is so much easier in my game - for me, a non-descript warehouse posting non-descript boxes is definitely the way to go!     

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Sorry -  did not even look at your listings.

I see what you mean, but the worst of it is, there is a medieval castle here on SC (Bli Bli Castle if you want to google) and your stuff would soooo rock in there.

[clickbaitoz]

i would think your liability insurance premium might be on the expensive side in a bm store LOL. greencat that would be so cool to have a medieval store in a castle but i could imagine lots of kiddies in there causing all sorts of blood shed

[medieval_shoppe]

Never knew about BLI BLI - thanks for them info. Don't want to move state though (-;

[chameleon54]

Kyral Castle at Ballarat is a similar themed place, with jousting, torture chamber etc. Your gear would be a shoe in there and when we all give up ebaying we might have time to visit . ( maybe even settle a few discussion forum debates with a sword fight or pistol duel ) LOL