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

[imastawka]

I'm more than happy with 0 fb's.

Once they get a hassle free transaction, they come back and spend a lot of money -

again and again.

Mostly I have collectors who've just realised they can re-ignite their childhood passion,

and then go overboard in their excitement.

Who am I to deny them?  

Spoiler

 

[wide-world-of-stamps]

Totally agree.

[eol-products]

0 feedback buyer who gets what they purchased is happy.

10 feedback and they may have been burnt a few times and are now aware what they can get away with.

[digital*ghost]

---

@etb321 wrote:

. My thinking, hopefully incorrect, is there has been a fairly  steep decline in new ebay accounts.

---

Here's some published stats:

In it’s 2018 4nd quarterly report to shareholders, eBay mentioned two growth metrics:

1. Adding two million new active buyers, for a total of 172 million global buyers on the marketplace. Which represents a 5% growth vs. same quarter last year.
2. Marketplace GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) increased by 9% vs. last year’s quarter, to a total of $23B

https://crazylister.com/blog/top-selling-items-on-ebay/

And:

The top 10 most visited local and international shopping sites in Australia between January and June 2018 were:

Ebay.com.au — 404.67 million
Am**n.com — 111.82 million
Ebay.com— 80.46 million
Jb**fi.com.au — 74.02 million
Bun***gs.com.au — 68.87 million
Woo***rths.com.au — 53.65 million
Am**on.com.au — 52.44 million
Ko**n.com.au — 42.82 million
K**rt.com.au — 42.81 million
Co**s.com.au — 41.51 million

https://www.smartcompany.com.au/industries/retail/most-visited-shopping-websites-australia-revealed/

eBay AU gets more visits than the next top 5 sites combined, in fact eBay AU is the 5th most popular website of any kind, only behind sites like google, Youtube and Facebook - the first link also shows that approximately 8 million items are sold on eBay AU per 30 days. It goes on to show some stats for individual countries. Australia actually has a lower sell-through rate for items, which is 27.8% while the US, UK and Germany are each above 35%. 

Here's a link to only some eBay Australia-only stats - one to highlight is that according to this, eBay receives 62,189,401 monthly website visits, and 12 million of those are unique vistiors, which means approximately half of Australia is on eBay at any given time:

https://www.netohq.com/blog/30-ebay-australia-statistics-and-facts

[imastawka]

62,189,401 Aussies a month?

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

[digital*ghost]

Actually, now that you mention it... I wonder if part of the reason for the high visitor stats is seller visits? They don't exactly clarify that (and I'm sure they could, at least to some degree), and most of the other sites aren't marketplaces, so would exclusively get visits from buyers. 

[imastawka]

Inflated statistics then.

It's also what I assumed.

They lumped all the visits into one statistic.

[digital*ghost]

Possibly, but the A site (next highest stat) is a marketplace that has sellers as well, so even if you halved eBay's number of visits and compared, it's still nearly twice the next highest shopping site. (And I daresay you couldn't halve it because I assume a high percentage of sellers are buyers as well). 

Visits don't translate to sales, of course, and the sell-through rate here is comparatively low, but to understand that stat you'd need to take a pretty deep dive into the consumer base for each site, what they're looking for compared to what sellers list etc.  

[enigmabear]

Methinks in a lot of ways, they are both 'A' sites

A as in arts ......to be polite 

[digital*ghost]

I wonder what the rate of art sold is?

Pretty high?