Lack of new members

[etb321]

Just looking down my list of sold items, there are almost no buyers with feedback less than 100.  I used to get members with feedback scores of zero or one, stumbling their way through inital purchases. My thinking, hopefully incorrect, is there has been a fairly  steep decline in new ebay accounts.

Tom

[enigmabear]

Bummer 

[twyngwyn]

[unique_pre-driven]

Ebay's Board Members ????

[lotsamagsnbags]

IMO ebay is still an excellent website... however a little of cut off the nose to spite the face... as I've sold most of my higher priced items through as previously mentioned FB marketplace as 10.9% and also on post.... and also pp payment is a lot. .  Yep you get lots of idiots who suggest low prices but you get some on ebay too despite putting your lowest offer in your listing. sad for ebay that they missed these sales but good for me that as a seller I have another option.  more new buying members would be in ebays and sellers favour though....

[brerrabbit585]

But how many new buyer members on ebay are really new? I'd suspect a lot of them are existing members opening a new account.

A lot of my buyers are low feedback ones, which makes me think all the others have fled to greener pastures (fb) where prices are lower.

[countessalmirena]

I theorise that the lower numbers for Amazon are due to Amazon's announcement at the time of the GST on low value imported goods coming into effect - that Australian buyers would no longer be able to buy from Amazon, but only from the skeletal .au site.

Even though Amazon never actually put this into practice, and indeed there was a later announcement (less widely known, apparently) that Australian could continue to buy from Amazon, the damage was done. I think many former Amazon buyers in Australia still don't know that they can continue to buy from the US Amazon site. It's just the third-party sellers on there from whom they can't buy, because Amazon is not about to do the GST paperwork and administration for its third-party sellers as well as for itself... which I perfectly understand.

[countessalmirena]

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@imastawka wrote:

62,189,401 Aussies a month?

I think 22M (give or take) of those might be me    

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<-- Stawka??

[digital*ghost]

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@countessalmirena wrote:

I theorise that the lower numbers for Amazon are due to Amazon's announcement at the time of the GST on low value imported goods coming into effect - that Australian buyers would no longer be able to buy from Amazon, but only from the skeletal .au site.

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Unlikely - GST (on low value imports) came into effect July 2018, and those numbers are for January to June, 2018. The announcement (about geoblocking us) was made around May, so if anything that would have increased visits to the US site May - June, as people would have bought while they thought they still could. (They did actually geoblock us for a while, but it didn't last long). 

[chameleon54]

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@etb321 wrote:

Just looking down my list of sold items, there are almost no buyers with feedback less than 100.  I used to get members with feedback scores of zero or one, stumbling their way through inital purchases. My thinking, hopefully incorrect, is there has been a fairly  steep decline in new ebay accounts.

Tom

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It might depend a bit on what you sell. One of my accounts sells fairly hard to find, specific items that people actually need. I get a lot of zero and low feedback buyers, many who register as new buyers on ebay just to buy my stuff. ( register as new members, the day they buy my items. )

This weeks stats on that account show 19 sales THREE of which are zero feedback buyers and several other sales to very low feedback buyers. They are not scammers. Just buyers who have come to ebay, because they cant find what they need anywhere else.

[4476.iveco]

I guess we all have different opinions on which is the best platform.  My 2 Ebay accounts are way ahead of the others as follows in order of sales.

Ebay1

Ebay2

Our own website

FB

Amazon AU

I spend quite a bit of time on FB marketplace & groups, trying to make sales but have a lot of time wasters.  Sales on Amazon are almost non existant which took ages to setup listings.

Ebay for us has had continuous reasonable sales every day since last November.  We have been expecting a crash, but not as yet & the best time of the year is creeping up.

We also have plenty of zero feedback sales with no problems.  We sell only within Australia.