How eBay Can Fix Things

I still have hope that eBay can fix things. But they're going to have to do things differently, and not just talk about making changes. I think it was in November that we saw Pierre tweet that he was stepping in to fix things. It's March. I'm trying to keep my hopes up, but I'm not really seeing the change I wanted to see by now.

I think the best way for eBay to fix things is just turn back the clock roughly to 2007. I had a very good year in 2007, as did most of our clients! :)

• Get rid of Best Match. If we got 100 eBay buyers in a room, and asked them about their experiences, I doubt many (if any) would say it was hard to find what they wanted. Finding wasn't a problem. Real problems on eBay include fraud, slow shipping, sellers who don't follow through on promises, etc... Finding is not the problem, so why are we working SO hard on it. Jeez, even the guy who had something to do with the origins of Best Match blogged that he didn't like where it had gone!
• So get rid of Best Match. It's gone. Sellers no longer have to scramble to change listings and strategies for unannounced reasons. Shoppers won't be shown sellers whose greatest quality (as of how Best Match is currently tweaked) is that they have a lot of inventory. DSRs are no longer the most important part of the algorithm, which leads me to....
• Forget about DSRs. DSRs are a binary system of good/bad. 5 stars= good, everything else = so bad eBay could stop you from listing ever again and shut down your business. I still shop by feedback percentage on the assumption that bad sellers will get bad feedbacks. Which leads me to...
• Let sellers leave negatives OR get rid of feedback completely. If you want to be more Amazon-like, remember that Amazon doesn't encourage conversation between buyer and seller, which means the buyer doesn't really get the chance to threaten the seller. If eBay wants to stop buyer blackmail, just follow through on all communication going through My Messages. Then, if you get a threatening email, you can click a report button, and the buyer won't be allowed to leave feedback at all. DONE. Nobody blackmailed or extorted. Feedback system can stay meaningful and honest.
• Advertise to bring buyers to the site. In 2008, I saw no ads on TV from eBay while I saw zillions from Walmart, capturing feelings about the economy. eBay could have jumped on that and didn't. Fewer buyers. Sales down.
• Get back in Google. Ever since eBay and Google broke up, I am seeing very few eBay items come up in Google searches. eBay says they are sending fixed price and Store format items to Google, but when I search, I am mostly seeing Amazon items in search results. eBay needs to fix that because that drop in traffic will help that drop in sales (while Amazon is up in sales).
• Don't change the View Item page the way eBay is saying that it plans to. Based on the incarnations I have seen of the View Item page, I believe that it will inspire fewer sales. There are too many distractions on it. The only thing that was wrong with the old one was that people didn't scroll down to see shipping pricing. SO FIX THAT and you're done. Don't re-lay out everything. Don't make designers design for a NARROWER space when the whole world is buying bigger screens. Our templates now look like bacon strips on huge monitors.
• Go back to the old fee structure. eBay is now taking too much of a % of sales. Most sellers can't afford it. In this economy, you need more sellers making more money, or you're putting them out of business. And what do sellers get for their fees? Right now, lots of scrambling and changes and trouble. Insertion fees aren't the problem. Stop lowering those. Insertion fees are a good barrier to entry for people who think they should put 50,000 items from drop shippers on eBay. It's the FVF that needs to come down.
• Stop with the self-fulfilling prophecies and junk science already. At this point, you have to offer free shipping or you'll be pushed down in search. You have to list things certain ways or you won't be placed higher than page 8 of search results. Whatever eBay wants to hand shoppers they float to the top of search. Then they can say, hey, that's what buyers want because that's what they buy! Well, if you hadn't put it at the top, maybe they wouldn't buy it.
• Get rid of off-site ads. You used to have one banner ad at the top that we could all ignore. Now, you have ads all over the pages. My question to any website owner looking to put ads everywhere is: which is more important? Keeping people on your site, or giving them lots of easy ways to leave your site? These ads are making it easy to leave eBay, which according to the numbers... people are doing, and in some cases, these ads are competing with sellers. Get rid of AdCommerce (for the third time), and get rid of all the other ads. Here is a good page to take from Amazon... every link on the site should keep you on the site!

eBay was better in 2007. Sure, it still had problems. Seller fraud and fakes needed to be fixed. An imbalance of power in feedback, and how meaningless feedback had become, needed to be fixed. VeRO needed to be fixed. And guess what. These are all still true. But things WERE better because you didn't have Best Match or DSRs making things difficult for good sellers, while being mostly meaningless to shoppers. Now is not the time to play Daily Deal or discussion forum upgrade. Now is not the time to fix things that aren't broken. Now is the time to fix what has been broken all along, and in some cases, is now worse. So we have the old, inherited Meg things to fix, plus the new John things to fix. It's a lot to fix, but it can be done.

I still shop on eBay. A lot. :) I always try buying there first when I am shopping online. And I still have the same % of bad transactions that I did before Best Match and DSRs. So to the buyer, this hasn't helped. These sellers are still frustrating. Clearly, DSRs and Best Match aren't keeping them away from me, so if that was the point, that's failing.

I do NOT want to see eBay try to become Amazon. I think Amazon and Zappos will handle that area quite well. eBay should be the eBay that millions of people loved and were passionate about. Shopping on eBay was fun and exciting! It can be that again.

I believe in Pierre, even if I didn't believe in anybody else at eBay. I believe in Pierre because people are basically good, and you can't be that into caring and charity, and not want to see this fixed. You can't watch your stock price drop below IPO price and be less than 1/3 of what it was in late 2007, and not want to do a lot to change it.

Posted at 02:00 AM in Just An Observation | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)