Wednesday 14 May 2008

Ebay's been Credit Crunched!

Anyone who deals on ebay know how many changes it has gone through over the past few months. There have been price hikes, listing regulations added, feedback changes and a hell of a lot of disgruntled sellers!

I sell a lot through ebay as I repeat...well, repeatedly. This changes have affected me heavily as they have everyone selling either dichroic glass jewellery and other handcrafted goods-to the point that a lot of sellers have simply abandoned ebay altogether.

What ebay don't seem to grasp is that those who sell on ebay also buy via ebay-I myself, buy a lot of findings etc on ebay simply out of conveinience. As the sellers have packed up shop, this in turn has had a knock-on affect on our sellers all noticing a slump in sales.

A few months back, Ebay announced the restoration of visibility to the US and Canadian markets via ebay.co.uk. This change will have a similar affect in reverse on ebay.com. This means that items placed on auction on the UK version of ebay will be advertised on ebay.com also...for a fee of course! This change couldn't come soon enough for me as before the drop in visibility ,I was regularly posting 3-4 items to the US daily, after the change 2-3 per week.
Check Spelling
Ebay have now also announced that this summer, the gallery listing-the picture that appears on the auction listing will be free , all summer!

This is unprecedented for ebay, and I can only assume it's due to the amount of people no longer bothering with auctioning item, coupled with people's strained finances at the moment.

Hopefully this incentive to list, along with access to overseas buyers will restore people's faith in ebay-myself included.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi it's Steve (kipper workshops) from the forum. Love your designs. You are so right about ebay. I think ebay are feeling it at the moment. Not before time too. I think it is suffocating itself. It's weighed down by it's own growth. It should change direction I think and become 'good value'. There is no doubt it has a briliant infrastructure. Good value would bring back the sellers and buyers.