Ebay Profits up Big this Year!

[The_Cynic]

An interesting link is the ebay listings count, wall street types watch it to give them a heads up on ebay's quarterly profit #s

Auction Count Charts

Follow the link and you will see that year over year 2007/2008 Ebay listings have risen significantly (15-20%?). The boycott noise has been a total failure. Not only have listings and therefore GMV risen but the new DSR and Best match policies have had the effect of moving shipping fees into the item prices thereby increasing Ebay's take. You may not like it but Ebay should have blow out profits this year

Don't get me wrong, I despise the new ebay policies and the reason I am here, is to set up back up accts for the day ebay or a competitor axes me. I just think we should look at the world the way it actually is, instead of how we would like it to be. The ebay changes have added billions in profit to their bottom line.

The problems will come down the road. Especially when ebay starts to lose it's long tail. No, google will not set up a competing auction site anytime soon. The problem is not sites like Ioffer, ebid or ecrater. those will fail because they cannot deliver the needed traffic to their sellers that ebay can.

NO, the only real threat to ebay is from 2 places Amazon and niche sites like etsy. etsy has a million users and over 100k sellers of niche handmade goods, a market ebay used to OWN. As more niche markets open Ebay's long tail will die the death of a thousand cuts.

I am just waiting for a real collectibles market to open.

[GreenBean]

I tell you, your name really suits you! Quite the cynic. We hear the sad story on the forum
quite a lot. Yep, it would be great if ebay could be overtaken.

[The_Cynic]

There is nothing wrong with being cynical. In fact, it is an honest man's response to the lies and propaganda shoved in our faces everyday. We have to look at the world the way it really is, not the way we would like it to be.

That said, even though ebay's numbers will be up by a huge amount this year, down the road they have serious problems with Amazon and the emerging niche sites. Their 2009 numbers should be a huge disappointment as sellers adapt and move to other channels, GMV growth will be nonexistent.

[jscan]

as said, everyones waiting for that day, people are begging google to do somthing, until that time ebay is will remain a powerhouse.

[mantisinc]

You know, we are all saying that Google is the prime candidate for launching a new auction platform. However, what about the likes of Yahoo or MSN?

[jscan]

Yahoo, i remember when they use to be the number 1 search engine, it was yahoo everything, the adds on tv etc, now they have fallen behind.

MSN, microsoft, i cant really seem them competing against eBay, i actually think Facebook's team could come up with something, i mean they went against myspace and had great resultings, now facebook is leading myspace isnt it?

id have to say eiather google or facebook.

[The_Cynic]

I remember Yahoo auctions, it was a huge failure, even at the time yahoo was the #1 search engine, being the #1 search engine did not help them with auctions. Amazon auctions? remember them?

No, even if google set up an auction service there is no guarantee they would displace Ebay. Ebay has huge advantages over any new player who takes a broad approach. Ebay has the traffic, 13 million + listings, the true long tail. That is very hard to compete against straight up.

The threat to ebay is from the margins,
---- Etsy, and other niche sites that cannabalize the their long tail.
---Google base, which draws off enough traffic to wound them and expose other players.
----Amazon, their 3p seller base is growing hugely and taking a lot of ebay sellers.
----Sellers wising up and moving to their own sites, getting traffic from google base and duplicating their ebay listings on other sites, ebid, ioffer, ecrater, blujay etc..
When the sellers finally see ebay as just another channel, watch out ebay!

Those are the real threats to ebay and those threats will take years to mature, but have no doubts, ebay will not hold their dominant position in this space forever.

[HateEbay]

First time hear of Etsy. Has anyone tried Etsy? Does it generate a lot of trafic? Have you sold anything on this website?

[The_Cynic]

from a blog I follow

---Etsy, Reaches a Milestone

"Greetings from Etsy, your place to buy and sell all things handmade.

We've grown to over 150,000 sellers in 171 countries, and we're just about to reach 1,000,000 members total. This is an exciting milestone for us, and we've made some recent changes to help keep things running smoothly.

With over 1.7 million products on Etsy, we're trying to help buyers more easily find what they are looking for ------

They are niche, - ONLY HANDMADE ITEMS--Their listings show up Google search and Google Base. I know a couple people selling there and they say it's okay, not as much traffic as Ebay but a good channel.

On the numbers in comparison to ebay

Ebay claims 250 million users (USA), 1 million + sellers, and has about 13.5 million listings right now.

[411guru]

Etsy is a site for selling hand crafted stuff only. Yes I agree, if you want to kill ebay, you have to be a niche site. Ioffer is doing great now, not because they are better, but because they have become the number one place to buy ⊗⊗⊗⊗ LV, Gucci, Rolexes etc, ⊗⊗⊗⊗ Vista, ⊗⊗⊗⊗ DVD sets. And they don't care its ⊗⊗⊗⊗. I don't know if they set out to be the ⊗⊗⊗⊗ goods website in the beginning but this has carried them to 4 million listings now, becoming the obvious 2nd behind ebay.

[ebayhateluv]

Those of you not here last year-- I was being boo'ed for not going along with the Strike..
I was in the Minority-- I have too much stuff to sell, and I never thought a small strike would work, PLUS--many of my friends who are PS, would tell 1 person theyre striking, then at lunch let it slip they were gonna sell like Carzy while everyone else is striking, I have always said--
Our strikes will make no diff to ebay.. (Its not their Jugglar Vien)...

[Jonas]

On livejournal.com, after a company SUP who bought them made changes that people didn't like.

Livejournal.com's management even was so ebay-like with this quote:

"Other changes you may have noticed are the logged-out homepage and registration process for new users. We streamlined and simplified things so that now it’s faster and easier than ever to create a LiveJournal account."

That was their way of trying to euphamistically say they got rid of the free accounts. It resulted in people being furious.

There were a lot of other change, too, like them banning millions of accounts based on false accussations by an outside organization (similar to VERO complaints on VERO but this was some crazy group that falsely accused millions of innocent people of being pedophiles when most weren't and livejournal banned them all without even looking)

There were lots more bad policy changes, too. Well, on 3/21/08 there was a big content strike of people not doing blogging and such.

The livejournal content strike was a complete failure.

There were ebay strikes before dating back many years ago and they also failed.

[The_Cynic]

One thing I missed when I wrote this. Ebay has added over 1/2 million new listings from Buy.com. The thing is, that the sell thru on these buy.com listings is awful, around 4%. So The bump in ebay listings can partially be explained that.

That will not translate to higher profits for ebay because their buy.com deal allows for free listings and a reduced fvf on buy.com listings.

[jim_ch]

Interesting analysis.

Etsy has been lucky to do well, but I wanted to note - they've exaggerated their stats a bit, actually kind of just conveniently left some details out - yes, they have 1,000,000 accounts signed up.

However, hundreds of thousands are inactive or have never been used for buying or selling. Duplicate accounts are allowed for various purposes, too.

There are 150,000 shops, but an analysis of their seller page shows over 80,000 have no items listed for sale. A good amount of the rest have not been active in a month or more. The real number of active sellers is 20-40 thousand, in my estimation.

Also, Etsy does not only sell 'handmade' goods! In addition to 'handmade' (which they define as an item made by the seller), 'commercial supplies' and 'vintage' are allowed on Etsy. They make up 10-15% of the listings and 20-25% of the sales, at last analysis.

Also, the listings do show in google well, but they are not currently submitted to Google Base - the shop has to edit their RSS feed into Google's format, by hand, and submit it themselves.

Just thought I'd throw this info out there!
-Jim

[Sammi007]

The new CEO of eBay want's to drive up eBay's profit's...he is totally out of touch with the values of eBay....

He is doing a good job at driving up eBay's profit's and want's the eBay site to be something like that of AMAZON.

eBay basically wants to squeeze out all the little sellers and any seller that poses a risk to the site...

eBay won't be Number 1 forever and they know that...That is why they are expanding in many different area's.....their basically covering their investments...

[ambercolour]

hey The_Cynic are you from BHW??

[hooray]

I heard something about Google made an agreement with eBay not to make a auction site... so they can run ads on eBay...

I could be wrong.