hi guys,
thought some sellers here might be interested in reading this article from "the australian" which contains parts of an interview with jooman park, the CEO of ebay australia for the past 4 years.
it talks about the opening of amazon in australia and ebay's thoughts as a company on that. it's probably a lot of what we've heard before, or expected to happen - but mostly seems like a well-polished "we're awesome" piece 
it confirms what we've pretty-much always known, that the buyer is king on ebay.
@brerrabbit585 wrote:
“The marketplace model is to partner with as many as possible,” he says, “so the invisible marketplace mechanism, versus one company – who’s going to win?”
I can't comment on this because it went straight over my head.
Uhhhh... eBay only does one of those things, Amazon does both, so acting like it's a given that the business that only does one of those things is obviously going to win out in the end on that basis alone, seems naively optimistic. (I don't think Amazon is going to destroy eBay, but offering the equivalent of "meh" on the subject is disconcerting).
I know nothing about Amazon but I've seen you mention that their fee is 20%, or starts at 20%. While I only pay 9.5% (+gst) in selling fees, by time I take into account the selling fees on postage and the store fee, my fees worked out on my item price are over 17%. It's way over 20% on my items that are sent as parcels so I'd imagine a few sellers might seriously look at using Amazon, depending on what other conditions they have to meet.
The first quote is Mr Park responding to the question of Amazon being serious competition, and how it will affect eBay, and he's essentially saying Amazon is just one company, while eBay is a collective of thousands of companies. Which clearly neglects the fact that many businesses (big and small) use Amazon the same way they do eBay.
With regards to the fees on Amazon, it actually varies by category like eBay's FVF do, and it;s worth mentioning this is all applicable to the US site, which is where I got approval to sell there, but in my categories the FVF was 20%, it can be as low as 8%, and the most common is 15% (on the total, including shipping, and any other extras the buyer paid for - eg giftwrapping), and a USD$40 per month subscription fee because otherwise it's USD 0.99c per item sold. The fee includes payment processing, as they have their own, and submit the funds to you.
If someone wants to do fulfillment by Amazon, then there'd be additional costs in getting the stock to their warehouse (it has to be packaged in specific ways, as well).
For a lot of people, if that structure is maintained when they come here, selling there might be quite comparable to here in terms of fees. For me personally, eBay would have to be failing for me to consider Amazon, more because I already have 2 major channels via third party sites, and any further investment (of time and money) in expanding to another channel I feel would be best spent on my own site.
Both eBay and Amazon focus on attracting and retaining buyers, and as it stands, Amazon is better at doing that (their policies are, generally, much more buyer-centric than eBay's), and I think some people who find themselves needing to choose between them as a sales channel, will stick with "the devil they know", and some will abandon eBay in a heartbeat. Maybe some will come back here when Amazon ask them to replace an item for a buyer that the buyer's pet destroyed a couple of days after it was delivered (that actually did happen - it wasn't a demand, just a request, but 
).
But they both co-exist in the UK and US, and have done for a while, and I don't think Australia is the marketplace that will become the deciding factor for who wins and who loses.
