In virtually every copy of e-commerce bytes that I receive here, there's at least one story about eBay's income falling well below expectations and their exercising yet another lot of promotional listings in order to get people to list (and therefore buyers to buy) and I have to wonder why eBay don't just give everybody say 200 free listings monthly instead of the 40 we get now.
They clearly want sellers to list and they know that when they offer promotions a lot of sellers take them up (the ones who find out about them, at least) so if the name of their game is to make as much money as possible, it therefore follows that it would be in their best interests to encourage people to list by giving them as many free listings as they can use. Very few people pay insertion fees any more, apart from maybe the really big, high-turnover sellers whio can clearly afford to, so it makes sense to me if eBay were to abolish them altogether.
As far as I can see the only reason preventing them from doing so is that they are looking towards a fundamental shift in the type of goods they sell and ther type of sellers they want to attract, and I can tell you right now it isn't people like us. Trouble is, somebody must have forgotten to tell eBay that Amazon and Alibaba have already been done to death and there's no room for yet another on-line retailer of that type.
Hey, I've got a great idea! Why not run the site the way it was originally desiged, where people could flog their unwanted goods to each other instead of every second item you see being a bit of cheap Chinese tat? Seems to me that there's no longer a platform for those types of transactions and if eBay were to get back to the grass-roots style of trading that made them they great site they once used to be, until tools like Donohue came along and stuffed things up, then maybe eBay could again become the popular site it used to be when Meg Whitman was the CEO. Could it really be as simple as that?
