eBay Fraud Scams exposed

John, we can understand that many eBay sellers are opposed to the changes invoked by you on eBay venue. There will be a certain amount of negative reactions in any business. The question is - are you listening and learning? It appears that most buyer, seller feedback has been shunned, censored and silenced in the interest of eBay PR but on the account of transparency. Latest Auctionbytes is buzziing with the “eBay silencing Founding Voices Members” and you should see the unusually high number of responses to that post.

We thought it may be interesting to revisit John Donahoe’s glassdoor.com ratings that are provided by his own staff, by the people whose paycheck JD signs and see if his popularity changed since we took the pulse of John Donahoe’s CEO approval ratings. This CEO rated by his employees was at 30% approval ratings in Sept 2008 which dropped to 26% by October 2008

Today John Donahoe - the eBay CEO is holding the top rank of worst CEO list where CEOs are ranked by their own employees.

According to this article from 12/29/2008
Steve Odland of Office Depot had the highest disapproval rating at 80% (approval: 4%). He has been accused of not understanding his own business and poorly treating employees. The list continued with nine other worst rated bosses - they were Anthony LaFetra of Rain Bird, Randy Falco of AOL, Greg Brown of Motorola, Ron Rittenmeyer of EDS, James Pouliot of CSAA Inter-Insurance Bureau, Kevin Sharer of Amgen, Lynn R. Blodgett of Affiliated Computer Services, Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems, and John Donahoe of eBay. Donahoe had a disapproval rating of 49% (approval: 20%).

Glassdoor.com is a website where employees rate their own employer and CEO and eBay and JD’s ratings provide a valuable insider look stripped of the censorhip and paid PR smokescreens.

eBay Product Management Director in San Jose, CA: (Past Employee - 2007) Advice to Senior Management
“listen to your people below the mangement ranks to really understand what’s going on. more actively seek and remove leaders with bad behavior.”

eBay CSR Level 3 in Burnaby, BC (Canada): (Past Employee - 2009) Advice to Senior Management “Pay more attention to the issues that are affecting members on the site by asking employees on the front lines. Do more to educate members on changes to the site and use less fine print.”

eBay Staff Software Engineer in San Jose, CA: (Current Employee) Advice to Senior Management “Evaulate each team’s effectiveness, cut the useless organizations.”

eBay Anonymous in San Jose, CA: (Current Employee) Advice to Senior Management “Find your direction. Create a home in the space you choose to play by letting your talented team (your employees) build a solid foundation. Find the roots of a commonly shared goal from the ground up.”

eBay Anonymous in Salt Lake City, UT: (Past Employee - 2007) Advice to Senior Management “Fire John J Donahoe. We need to go back to our roots and stop pretending we are Amazon. It’s not working.”

Looks like John Donahoe is as unpopular among his employees as he is unpopular among the eBay sellers. One thing is being unpopular among the sellers (read customers who pay your fees) because you aim to change company focus on what you perceive a more profitable direction but if you cannot sell that direction to your own staff and employees, that is where a good CEO would stop and think.

Based on recent report from Nielsen, eBay page views showing a steady decline over a period of two years. This is a clear indication eBay visitors a losing interest in eBay site or leaving the site because they cannot find what they are looking for. In contrast, Amazon page views hold steady. This indicates a consistent level of interest in Amazon site while interest in eBay continues to decline.

According to another metric by Nielsen, unique visitors to eBay continue to decline while Amazon continues to gain share of unique internet audience. We now have a relatively long period of time to measure true impact of changes initiated in late 2007 by eBay management to benchmark the two rivals based on those merits alone.

We have forcasted the signs of trouble in eBayLand as the recession approached in October 2008. Let’s take a look year later on how these forcasts turned out.

• Following eBay’s management blunders we have seen visitors and page views decline on eBay while Amazon’s increase. That still holds true per Nielsen’s graphs above.
• eBay lets go fraud, hijacked seller accounts, fakes and counterfeits go unchecked on it’s site. We have pointed a million times that eBay, who holds it’s profits above the safety of it’s customers, will see sales declines, as more and more customers get burned by the shady scammers whom eBay lets thrive on it’s site. eBay profits from all scams on the site. But consumers are not stupid. Once burned a person tells 10 others who then tell others and so forth and thus slowly but surely word has spread that eBay is not going to protect you as a buyer or seller if such protections stands in way of eBay’s profits. Furthermore eBay is famous for making a significant effort in covering up the fraud on it’s site in an effort to mislead it’s customers into thinking they are safe. There are vast amounts of testimonies to such eBay Hack Cover up and eBay Security Breach cover up all over the internet. Actually eBay spends 7 figure amounts on hiring and firing Public Relation firms to clean up this security mess.
• eBay should be doing better sales-wise than Amazon in depression economy, eBay is branded as heavy discounter, close out e-commerce venue. Back in the recession years of 2001 eBay made headline news bragging it is recession proof. In 2009 recession, ebay blames recession for it’s continuos sales decline.

How did eBay and Amazon compare on latest QUARTERLY REPORTS?

NET REVENUE

Amazon reported better numbers — Amazon’s revenue in the latest three-month period rose 14 percent over the second quarter of 2008, to $4.65 billion. eBay’s revenue fell 5 percent to $2.1 billion

NET INCOME

Amazon reported better numbers again. Amazon posted net income of $142 million in the second quarter, a 10% drop from the same period in 2008 and the first such decline since December 2006. Chief Financial Officer Thomas Szkutak of Amazon said the profit decline was due to a $52 million settlement the company paid in June to resolve a dispute with Toys R Us. Without the payment, Amazon’s profits would have increased. eBay reported a 29% decline from the same period in 2008, a second consecutive decline in 2009. Net income fell to $327 million, compared with $460 million, in the year-ago quarter for eBay.

No doubt, both companies are affected by the recession equally. At the end of 2008, for the first time in its history, eBay stomached a year-over-year decline in quarterly revenue. And now it has happened three quarters in a row. The cause of eBay’s loss in revenues, loss of income and growth shrinkage rests entirely on eBay’s management. But during a conference call with industry analysts and reporters, CEO John Donahue called the company’s latest quarter “solid,” saying “we’re moving in the right direction, a strong company getting stronger.” eBay management has a long and proven history of placing profits over and above everything else.
EBAY RECAP
Net Revenues down 4%
Net Income down 29%
Marketplace Revenues down 14%
Vehicle sales down 32%

And as for those registered user numbers…

Active users edged up from 88.3 to 88.4 million for its lowest gain (100k) in the 4 quarters presented in the release

In the meantime they had to add 37 MILLION new accounts to eak out that 100,000 active user gain. Now according to the data… This is showing incredible user churn.

A full 82% of Ebay’s registered users have not “who bid on, bought, listed or sold an item within the previous 12-month period.”

This should trouble stock holders as well.. “GAAP operating margin decreased to 19.6% for the quarter, compared to 24.8% for the same period last year” That is a 20% decline in margins

As eBay alienates it’s customer base, it will fade into the mediocre land of has been along with AOL internet service, Alta Vista search engine, Xerox copiers and IBM computers.