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Keeping in mind if costs are covered with no profits, everyone still retains their job at the salaries contracted.
@spudd57joe wrote:With all of the sales turn over, and having much much more of the market share than the other platforms... why are their profits so low??? Why are there so large losses????... Hmmm... management and Management performance may be in question.
If, from the turn over and billions being made World Wide, the company still shows minimal profit; then maybe a review of management practises, salaries and bonuses should be asked for by the share holders.
Just because the violins are being pulled out and played; dosen't convince me that some are not making a good good earner out of this poor little operation... I don't buy it.
The thing is, profit in the here and now isn't always the primary goal for a business like eBay. Sure, it's one of the top objectives, but sometimes it has to be conceded in favour of long term goals.
Again, in looking at their competition, you'll find that Amazon (who has a larger turnover) didn't ever return a profit until last financial year, mostly because they chose to reinvest in services, and operating efficiency (slightly OT now, but they have just won a patent for flying warehouses that deploy drones in order to deliver packages within minutes of being ordered.... 
I suspect if that actually gets off the ground [pun intended] it won't be for a few years yet, but certainly an interesting concept).
My point, though (I do have one 😄 ) is that while some of eBay's decisions have left me utterly confused, I can also see that sometimes decisions are made with an end game in sight, so no violin strings from me here.... Not yet anyway; probably never as I don't have any real loyalty to eBay, more just a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Also, when you look at eBay and where the fees you pay are going, yes it's things like staff salaries (and granted, some are disgustingly high just IMHO), general operating costs, but, since they don't hold or fulfil stock like Amazon does, and therefore can't implement much innovation in the way of order processing and fulfilment, or generate profit from their own stock (the closest they've come is whatever deal they managed to broker with Aus Post for the eBay postage labels, and a limited range of packaging products), so the bulk of it would be going to advertising, affiliate programs (affiliates can get up to 80% of the FVF on a sale they facilitated), and promotions (the ones where eBay cover a percentage discount, I mean, sometimes it's site-wide, other times it's for specific sellers only - i.e. big box retailers). The MBG would be costing them a little, too, as even though much of the time the funds are taken from the seller, eBay still do have to cough up on the odd occasion (as they rightly should, considering some of the decisions they make). More recently they sent out thousands of rolls of eBay-branded packaing tape as free samples to sellers. The tape istelf probably didn't cost them too much, but the courier and postage would have been a bit costly.
Buyers are pretty much spoilt for choice when it comes to online shopping; it doesn't matter to them if any one particular site is flourishing, that really only matters to the sellers who list there (or who owns the site in cases where it's an independent webstore) - if eBay is struggling, it's because they don't know how to keep themselves at the forefront of those choices, which is what they need to be able to do, so for the time being I'm happy to contribute to their efforts to do so.... In saying that, at the moment they seem to be attempting to do it by luring big fish here and offering virtually constant deals for their stores, which I do see as at the expense of smaller sellers (of which I consider myself one).
All of which means if I squint hard enough, I can kinda get an idea of an end game I don't particularly agree with, or rather can't fathom it will provide the kind of result that's ideal, so personally, I think it's a great idea to have as many eggs in as many baskets as possible.
Learning how to weave baskets is also a good idea. 
