eBay Fraud Scams exposed

Just a year ago the Wall Street sentiment projected deeply pessimistic outlook.

Today we hear so called ‘good news’ every where.

Last year:
Latest Retail sales figures are showing another decline. Retailers worried, deep discounting, consumers holding out…
This year:
Latest Retail sales figures areshowing another decline. But the declines are not as bad as projected…

You see the difference in attitude? Last year it was doom and gloom but this year, although the indicators are not encouraging, the media is spinning more positive outlook on economic situation at hand.

No doubt the pessimism in consumer outlook contributed to eBay sales declines past three quarters. But how do you explain this?

Net transaction revenues(1)

Dec 31 2008
EBAY Marketplaces Declined over same quarter year ago by ( -18% )
EBAY Overall Revenues Declined over same quarter year ago ( -7%)
AMZN overall Net sales INCREASED over the same quarter year ago by +18%

March 31 2009
EBAY Marketplaces Declined over same quarter year ago by ( -18% )
EBAY Overall Revenues Declined over same quarter year ago ( -8%)
AMZN Overall Net sales INCREASED over the same quarter year ago by +18%

June 30, 2009
EBAY Marketplaces Declined over same quarter year ago by ( -14% )
EBAY Overall Revenues Declined over same quarter year ago ( -4%)
AMZN Overall Net sales INCREASED over the same quarter year ago by +14%

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.

The latest numbers from ComScore confirm what most eBay sellers predicted in March of this year.

eBay changes enacted this and last year will result in both Sellers and Buyers abandoning eBay for more competitive marketplaces.

Last year eBay removed the transparency and hid the bidder ID’s so a few months later all the statistics on eBay Auctions showed a major decline. There were articles published by most financial and market magazines and newspapers speculating why eBay auctions lost their luster. The answer is simple. Auctions are alive and well, just not on eBay. eBay hid bidder’s IDs so eBay customers lost confidence in the eBay auction process because they could not determine if they are bidding against a real bidder or against a shiller bidder.

Then eBay enacted slew of changes starting with increased final value fees on Auctions and Fixed price items, raising the percentage charged to the seller from 5.25% to 8.75% and later followed by yet another fee increase to 12.75% on fixed price items. Next eBay attempts to extract additional revenues from eBay sellers by forbiding them to offer checks and money orders as an allowed payment method for eBay sales. (( PayPal charges eBay seller 3.2% fee, getting paid by check/MO does not cost the seller anything.)) eBay then removed another layer of transparency in the market place by allowing buyers to leave negative feedback removing this priviledge from sellers, which in turn left sellers vulnerable to scammers or competition potentially destroying seller reputation. This in turn drove many sellers away from eBay to alternative ways of selling online. Many buyers followed the sellers to these alternative venues. One beneficiary of this seller exodus is Amazon.

The good news keeps piling up for Amazon.com today.

Internet research firm comScore says the number of unique visitors to Amazon sites from Dec. 1 to Dec. 24 — the height of the holiday shopping season — surged 7 percent from the corresponding period in 2007, to 76.2 million.

Amazon’s strong traffic numbers come at a time when overall holiday ecommerce spending was down 3 percent, according to comScore.

eBay remained the most visited retail site with 85.4 million visitors but saw a decline of 4 percent in visitors.

On 2 year comparison, Amazon traffic increased past two years in the row, while eBay traffic declined 10% from 2006 to 2007 Holiday Season and this year saw another 4% decline.

This clearly points to eBay management killing the goose that laid the golden egg, slowly but surely. They may blame the economy, recession or Uncle Bob, but the statistics on millions of users do not lie, eBay has alienated sellers, buyers, employees and stock holders alike.

32 % of eBay users report being scammed according to the latest survey commissioned by Consumer Reports WebWatch as part of its “Look Before You Click” campaign, supported by a CyberAwareness Grant from the New York State Office of Attorney General and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. The survey represents one of the most comprehensive studies of New York state Internet users, their behavior and their problems with online fraud in a variety of environments: Online auctions, shopping, e-mail and spam, privacy and others. The whole survey is available today for the first time at :
http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/dynamic/fraud-reports-internetfraud.cfm

Online Auctions - Great Bargains, Possible Problems

For more than two years, online auction fraud has been the number one complaint of New York state residents to government organizations that keep track. The WebWatch survey shows that 27 percent of state residents who have ever used an online auction Web site, such as eBay or Amazon, have experienced a scam or deceptive practice - 32 percent of eBay users were scammed.

Eleven percent of online auction site users reported they never received the goods they bid on, the most common complaint. In addition, seven percent of survey respondents who received their goods said they were not in the condition they expected. Other common complaints included not being told a key detail about the item before it arrived (7 percent) and being sent an item of lesser value than the one they actually bid on and won (7 percent). Read details of our in-depth investigation of auction sites, including lessons learned by New York State residents:

http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/pdfs/casestudies.pdf

Beware : eBay PR wants you to belive you are safe shopping on eBay but independent research proves otherwise. You are better off shopping at other venues. eBay derives too much profit from scams and eBay management is notorious for closing both eyes over the customers being scammed if curbing scams cuts into eBay’s bottom line.

eBay continues to spend all of it’s revenues on stock repurchases to prop it’s own shares. It’s all about make belief to shareholders. Meantime the rumors that eBay is cutting 10% of it’s work force have been confirmed by Wall Stree Journal this morning.

The employees may be better off elsewhere : according to the latest ratings where employees rate their own employer, eBay CEO rating dropped to 26% from over 30% in less than a month and there is a major discontent brewing inside company ranks.

Average ratings from all usersOverall Rating
2.9 CEO Approval

John J. Donahoe
President and CEO

26% “Approve”
1 - 10 of 143 Reviews for eBay

Sep 9, 2008

10 found helpful
“Why is management trying to kill the golden goose?…”
Software QA Engineer in San Jose, CA (United States)
Sep 8, 2008

10 found helpful
“One eBay insider’s point of view…”
Program Manager in San Jose, CA (United States)
Sep 21, 2008

8 found helpful
“Ebay needs to get back to what made it great, being a unique force in the online marketplace.…”
Independent in San Jose, CA (United States)
Sep 12, 2008

9 found helpful | 1 comment
“Nearly 5 years there - what was I thinking…”
Senior Staff Software Engineer in San Jose, CA (United States)
Sep 11, 2008

8 found helpful
“Horrible for engineers.…”
Senior Software Engineer in Campbell, CA (United States)
Aug 22, 2008

10 found helpful
“eBay attracts a lot of great people, then the company culture beats them down and they leave within a couple of years.…”
Senior Product Manager in San Jose, CA (United States)
Sep 19, 2008

7 found helpful
“Great company, great purpose, no leadership, no willingness to admit mistakes…”
Senior Manager in San Jose, CA (United States)
Sep 10, 2008

8 found helpful
“Used to be a good place to work….…”
Program Manager in San Jose, CA (United States)
Sep 27, 2008

5 found helpful
“Was a great place to work when it was eBay instead of Amazon Jr. or Walmart.com Lite…”
Project Manager in San Jose, CA (United States)
Sep 8, 2008

6 found helpful | 1 comment
“John J. Donahoe does NOT know how to run a company!…”
Software Engineer in San Jose, CA

Can this get any worse?

Yes it can and yes it will. There are many reasons why. One of the best summaries of lately was published today at Forbes Magazine : The Real Reason eBay Is Stuck

eBay shares keep plunging as more on more bad ebay news paired with financial markets turmoil - we now have a 5 year low and finance forums for eBay shares at Yahoo and Google message boards are buzzing with discontent.

How are all these recent changes a new CEO John Donahoe made since early 2008 working for everyone? We know that eBay Sellers are screaming bloody murder and abandoning the site for fairer pastures. We know that media hates eBay this year. Cramer keeps telling shareholders that eBay is in trouble. eBay employees give eBay very low ratings. But the eBay CEO continues on his path of self destruction maintaining “We may have some sellers that make some noise,” [eBay CEO John] Donahoe said, “but we’re absolutely confident of the direction we’re going.”

What do the buyers think?

The above graph clearly illustrates that over the past 13 months eBay has lost 9% of it’s visitors, while craigslist gained 61.9% new visitors and Amazon gained 17.1% new visitors over the past 13 month period.

This is not a new trend. New York Times blogger reported in January 2008:

• Now the latest audience figures from Nielsen Online confirm that the e-commerce traffic crown has changed heads. For the month of December, for the first time, more Americans clicked over to Amazon.com (59,624,000) than eBay (59,374,000).
• According to the Nielsen data, the number of visitors to eBay.com dropped 10 percent from December 2006 to December 2007.

The fact that eBay is losing buyers was again confirmed by the Internet Retailer report in February 2008 :
Unique traffic to eBay.com slipped 5% in February from February a year ago, to 56.6 million
The top 10 online shopping destinations in February, with unique visitors in millions this year and last and growth from prior year, according to Nielsen Online, were:

* eBay, 56.60, 59.42, -5%
* Amazon, 47.67, 40.76, 17%
* Target, 22.57, 20.14, 12%
* Wal-Mart Stores, 21.35, 20.11, 6%
* Shopzilla.com Network, 21.16, 16.86, 25%
* Shopping.com Network, 16.36, 17,82, -8%
* Yahoo! Shopping, 16.08, 11,46, 40%
* Dell, 16.06, 13,96, 15%
* Circuit City, 14.30, 9.39, 52%
* Best Buy, 13.45, 12.66, 6%

Did you notice that the only other online retailer experiencing slowdown in unique visitors is Shopping.com = also eBay owned company! eBay has a special knack for ruining any company they purchase. It all boils down to incompetent management running down everything they touch.

The credit for bringing this to our attention should go to this post on eBay Stock forum poster on Yahoo Finance Board: Wanto to see a scary eBay graph

A year ago, Amazon Shares soared while eBay shares struggled in an effort to retain value. Those of us watching eBay closely knew that Wall Street has become aware of eBay’s inept management who was unable to react to current internet trends and threats, lack of customer service and safety across eBay properties and other issues which prompted eBay customer and seller base to migrating away from eBay and the likely beneficiary of the dwindling eBay business would be AMAZON. Next we have seen eBay desperate efforts to AMAZONITE itself, which so far has proven a complete “feeasco” as eBay management does not appear to “GET IT”, IT being the essence of makes Amazon so much more attractive to shoppers: Customer Service, Integrity, Safety and Security, Stable Selling and Buying environment at a reasonable price. Ebay needed to grow margins, so they increased seller fees and tried to ram PayPal down the sellers throats. Ebay needed perception of higher safety on their site, so they reduced transparency on its site by hiding who bids on what and removing 2 way feedback so you can no longer identify shill bidding and fraudulent buyers. This resulted in even more pronounced seller exodus from eBay so eBay begins losing it’s “edge” of having many unique one of a kind items, one cannot find anywhere else.

Now one year later, we have the benefit of viewing Quarterly Reports of both ecommerce rivals to see who is successfully adapting to constantly changing economic and market conditions. Those who successfully adapt turn out to be winners leaving the ‘has beens’ to dwindle. As I write this, AOL comes to mind.

When a single company reports earnings for a quarter, it is healthy to relate those earnings to the one of it’s closest competitor as well as the market segment as a whole so we can get a true feel if the Company is doing well in the current economical conditions. I have waited for Amazon’s Q2 Report so we can compare eBay’s performance with Amazon numbers.

ACTIVE USER GROWTH

AMAZON = INCREASED TO 18%

The number of total active customer accounts also jumped, rising 18 percent to more than 81 million

EBAY = CONTINUES FLATLINING AT 1%

The number of total active user accounts rose only 1 % to 84.5 million compared to second quarter 2007

MERCHANDISE SALES GROWTH

AMAZON = 35% growth

North America segment sales, representing the company’s U.S. and Canadian sites, were up 35% from a year ago to $2.17 billion.

International sales, representing the company’s U.K., German, Japanese, French and Chinese sites, were up 47% to $1.89 billion.

Excluding the impact of foreign-exchange rates, international sales grew 34%. (Any company still growing US centric sales at pace with foreign sales - you have to tip your hat at least a little)

EBAY = only 13% growth

The Marketplaces business unit, which consists of eBay, Shopping.com, StubHub, Kijiji and other ecommerce sites, had a strong second quarter, generating $1.46 billion in revenue, equating to 13% year-over-year growth

Gross merchandise volume was $15.68 billion for the quarter, an increase of 8% over the second quarter of 2007.

IMPACT OF SLUMPING US ECONOMY

AMAZON : SAYS IT’S POSITIVE

Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said Amazon suspects increased fuel prices may give it a “relative advantage” over other retailers.

“Even just driving 10 miles these days is a few dollars worth of gasoline,” he said during a conference call with analysts. “And consumers, we suspect, are beginning to take that into account and try to do trip consolidation. So our free shipping offers and Amazon Prime are clearly of even more value to customers under that set of circumstances.”

Sales were strong in several sections of Amazon’s massive marketplace. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos also said Amazon’s Kindle digital book reader was gaining readers, while the number of independent sellers offering goods on Amazon’s site continued to grow.

EBAY: STATES IT’S NEGATIVE
Despite a gain in the number of items sold, the average selling price of goods on eBay declined 6%. That means items are selling, but at lower prices. Lower prices hurt sellers and are particularly painful to eBay under its new fee structure, which grabs the most revenue from percentage-based fees on the sale price of items.

Chief Financial Officer Bob Swan also attributed some of the declining growth in eBay’s core shopping business to a slowing U.S. economy. Growth was flat in eBay’s autos business, which brings in about 20% of the revenue for its shopping sites. Swan also said the softening economy was leading shoppers to buy cheaper items.

True, the economy is taking some toll on eBay’s business. But a bargain site like eBay could also have benefited from a weakening economy as increased volume from deal-oriented shoppers makes up for the decline in selling prices.

Moreover, eBay’s growth has long trailed growth in the overall e-commerce market. The U.S. e-commerce market is expected to grow 17% this year, according to Forrester Research (FORR). But revenue in eBay’s U.S. marketplace grew just 12% from a year earlier.

If you are an eBay seller, you may want to checkout AMAZON, it appears that AMZN is attracting buyers and sales on Amazon are increasing while eBay sales continue to shrink. Amazon is lot more stable, management wise so your business is SAFER on a professionally managed marketplace. On eBay, one day you are a star, next day a BOT will block you from selling and PayPal will freeze your assets, effectively ruining your business. If you are an eBay seller, it’s definitely worth testing the AMAZON waters, many many eBay sellers already are and YOU do not want to get left in the dust with the group of eBay sellers being slowly bled to hang “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS” sign on their eBay store. Check out this newsbyte Amazon says active seller accounts up 18 percent

If you are a shareholder, it’s nice to have a comparison of the two e-commerce rivals handy to assist you in recognizing how eBay management fares in adjusting to current economic trends and conditions.

Check out the eBay stock forum on Yahoo Finance.

Lots of eBay sellers are asking what are other places to sell online aside from eBay.

There are the usual good suggestions like
amazon.com
base.google.com
craigslist.com
ioffer.com
ecrater.com
rubylane.com
ubid.com
ola.com
ebid.net

Each seller presents a unique set in the type of items as well as sales preference format. I cannot say enough of good things about Google when it comes to eCommerce.

• Search Google for your product.
  A good example is a search for
  RCA Victor Phonograph
  then pay special attention what comes up

  I see:
  craigslist
  GoAntiques
  and independent websites on page 1 results of Google/Google Base results

  This will help you identifying sites you can list your products THAT COME UP ON GOOGLE search well

• If you have unique product that is not common you can build your own store under your own domain name and come up almost immediately on page 1 Google search

  Do a Google search for Mosaic Mailbox and you will see our site with custom mosaic mailboxes as #1 on Google search results. It’s only a spiffed up WordPress blog and it took about 60 days to get to#1 spot on Google natural search results.

• Did you know you can IMPORT your eBay store listings to homestead store hosted pages? You can create a homestead store and import your eBay listings with few clicks of a mouse into a homestead store front Your import options include:

  The ‘Build Catalog Using eBay Listings’ feature, which allows you to create products from your eBay listings and then select the products you would like to copy into your Homestead Storefront catalog. eBay listings include eBay Store and individual listings based on your eBay seller account. You’ll find the ‘Build Catalog Using eBay Listings’ option in the ‘eBay Tools’ area of Store Administration.

  The only drawback I see with Homestead hosting is their unstandard web addresses they assign to home page and product pages.
  If you check out the featured sites here you will notice that the catalog item pages have this “bok?” in the web address which makes it rather difficult to move your store to another web hosting provider. So you may want to consider using a standard web hosting company who offers osCommerce store web hosting and enter your items manually so if in the future you want to move your store, you would not be stuck with a proprietory platform.

• Remember to register your domain name so your ecomerce livelyhood will not depend on whims of a 3rd party. You can move your store to another web hosting company any time as long as you have your own domain name, remeber if your store is http://www.ebay.com/antiquetreasures or http://antiquetreasures.ecrater.com the moment you leave those websites, your store and your customers will go poof! So placing your store under your own domain name, such as www.antiquetreasures.com is critical to your long terms success.
  

When craigslist filed a lawsuit against eBay, illustrating eBay’s deceptive advertising on Yahoo, I guess Yahoo thought it would be a good idea to use the same (btw. completely against Google Adwords advertiser’s policy) tactic so now Yahoo Shopping ads show up on eBay related searches as ebay com.

If you see this ad on our website, please do not click on it - no need to support deceptive advertising, be it originated by eBay or it’s competitors, such as in this case.

This is an interesting development. I was under the impression that Yahoo and eBay were “buddy-buddy” relationship. In 2006 Yahoo and eBay entered into several partnerships and I thought that those “partnerships” were a partial reason for Yahoo’s discontinuing Yahoo Auctions in US in June 2007. With a Yahoo campaign of this sort, one has to ponder if eBay managed to alienate yet another ally.

No doubt both Yahoo shares and eBay shares are in turmoil so one would expect both companies taking extreme measures to reverse the trend and defend their margins.

Remember Bruce Hershenson of eMoviePoster.Com? Bruce was one of eBay Super Power Sellers who announced after eBay’s infamous site improvements that after he sold 300,000 items on eBay he is quitting eBay completely. Unfortunately he announced it on eBay Seller forums and eBay “accidentally” deleted that very busy thread, so it was preserved on our site as one of the original eBay censorship stories. Whal could be eBay’s motivation deleting Bruce’s post on eBay’s Seller Central, other than censorship?

Business Week just did a good interview with Bruce, titled Auctions on eBay: A Dying Breed As consumers opt for fixed-price purchases, what happens to the company that perfected the art of online bidding—and the scores of e-auctioneers?

Another article worth reading is Was eBay a fad? by RoughType:
June 03, 2008
We already know that the famously cute story of eBay’s origin - founder Pierre Omidyar launched the site to help his fiancee trade the PEZ dispensers she collected - was a lie cooked up by a PR operative. We also know that the company’s vaunted “reputation system” - the foundation of what has long been perceived as a radically new kind of self-organizing and self-policing commercial community - has been crumbling….

There are many advantages of having your own domain name, hosting your own online store. Selling on eBay cripples your potential in many ways. While eBay is OK ( or should I say used to be OK? ) for novice sellers it pays to do things right from the get-go and setup your own hosted eshop so YOU can control your own eCommerce destiny. If you sell on eBay and put all you eggs in that basket, one day you will find yourself out of business with no warning, like all the digital goods eBay sellers did just this March.

These series of articles will give you some insight into advantages of having your own hosted store website vs. relying on eBay to do your marketing and ultimately falling a victim to eBay’s management poor decisions which have caused many eBay sellers to lose their livelyhood overnight.

The first article will cover TRACKING YOUR VISITORS. eBay does NOT provide this functionality so while you pay eBay to bring visitors to your site, do you know if they are Nigerian Scammers or real buyers looking at your items? Which keywords did they use to arrive to your eBay listing? Correct, you are in the dark, eBay does not provide you with this information although every web hosting provider has such tracking program installed (this technology is 10 years old!) and owners of hosted websites have this info at their fingertips.

For example, on our site, we see exactly how many visitors arrived to our pages and what keyword phrases they used. While there are thousands of keywords that bring visitors to our site, here are the keyword phrases for this month that people typed into search engines and clicked on search results to arrive to our website. We have selected only those keyword phrases that begin with the word eBay:

You can cross check these search terms and see how they lead to our site, for example a search term “ebay stock article” on Google search will bring up our site on page one of Google’s natural search results - sometimes it is found on page two as Google’s results are fluid.

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So you can see that owning your own site / store gives you a good marketing tool to get to know your visitors. It is an important one and it will enable you to do future planning for your site’s expansion, additional product sales. eBay does not give you such statistics on your auctions.

As time progresses, this site will have additional articles on setting up your store and successfully moving away from the eBay platform. Stay tuned.

Recently eBay opted to artificially increase listing counts by inviting Mega retailer Buy.Com to list on it’s venue and listings jumped by approximately 500,000 plus

I suppose the Wall Street was not happy about eBay’s shrinking listing count so they had to do something about those dwindling listing numbers.

It was proven before, that when you clog up the venue with lots of duplicate listing and eliminate the ‘uniqness’ factor by purging the smaller sellers who carry the special one of the kind inventory, the overall sales will drop. Since all the new changes took hold, we have been watching the Medved chart which tracks eBay sell-throughs. The sell-throughs on eBay appear to have reached all time low.

Here is a link to the MedVed Chart:

http://www.medved.net/cgi-bin/cal.exe?SSHAAllALLCAT

Will low sell-throughs have impact on seller and share holder retention? You Bet!

Yahoo has a busy forum for eBay stock holders, not many happy campers there:
http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/mb/EBAY

Last month we have noted decline in eBay search traffic based on ComScore reports and independently confirmed by AuctionBytes report using Nielsen data.

Here is an updated table on Unique Visitors and Site Searches for month to month change from March to April 2008.

Property  Unique Visitors
                    Apr-08 vs. Mar-08    M/M
Total Internet     190,728     188,010   +1%

Google             141,080     137,480   +1%
Yahoo              140,613     139,518   +1%
eBay                81,874      80,903   -1%
Amazon              58,683      58,057   -1%

comScore Expanded Search Query Report
April  2008 vs. March 2008

Expanded Search Entity  Search Queries (MM)

                                  Percent Change 

                       Apr-08 vs. Mar-08
Total Expanded Search  15,088  14,988  -1%

Google                  6,531   6,639   2%
Ebay                      474     450  -5%
Craigslist                277     273  -2%
Amazon                    149     137  -8%

eBay continues to show decline on both metrics on month to month basis, while Google continues growing.

Similarly eBay stock share price flatlined / declined in April 2008

                    April 1 -08     April 30 -08
NASDAQ               2362.75     2412.80
Google                465.71      574.29
eBay                   31.41       31.29
Amazon                76.70        78.63

Recession is supposed to be good for eBay, at least it used to be during the past tough economic times. It is important to note that Amazon and Craigslist show slowdown as well.

We own several ecommerce websites and primarily market through Google. Many of our websites appear on page one or two of Google natural search results…. so I was interested how these stats benchmark against our own sites, testing if Google natural search results bring increased traffic on year to year and on month to month basis.

Here are our stats, site A and site B

SITE A
Month Unique visitors
      2007  vs. 2008
Jan  14409     16106
Feb   7994      9307
Mar   9572      9326
Apr   8679     10241

SITE B
Month Unique visitors
      2007  vs. 2008
Jan   1276      1741
Feb   1054      1618
Mar   1099      1503
Apr    992      1220

It is important to note that :

• most traffic to the site is brought by Google natural search results
• no paid adversing traffic to the site, e.g. we do not advertise on Google or any other site to bring additional visitors to these sites
• our marketing or site content has not changed significantly from last year to this year
• both sites are ecommerce sites

This quick reality check with our own website confirms that while eBay visitors and search traffic declines, Google generated visitor traffic continues to grow and gain marketshare.

If you are developing your own store under your own domain name, be sure to learn all you can to market your ecommerce products via Google.

Is eBay hurting for shoppers? It would certainly seem so. First we saw eBay rewarding those shoppers who gave negative feedback with a coupon, now eBay started to send eBay Bucks incentive to some shoppers or more accurately, non-shoppers. Here is a screenshot of the eBay Bucks incentive.

As reported last month, user growth, page views and searches on eBay site reached zero to minus territories. eBay Sellers are in revolt over fee increases desquised as fee reductions, unattainable dangling carrot discounts, feedback policy changes, PayPal 21 day money freeze. Buyers lost confidence in eBay marketplace while back, when eBay made it impossible to identify shill bids due to eBay hiding bidder’s IDs, citing site fraud, while insisting fraud is almost non existent. eBay shares flatlined three years ago. Everyone and their mother is suing eBay on grounds of deceitfull business practices.

As of today, eBay sellers can only leave positive feedback for buyers… this is just another step in process eBay is trying to take to Amazonite itself.

Not being able to leave feedback makes a lot of eBay sellers unhappy, since eBay is much more prone to fraud and scams, compared to Amazon.

This new pop up window presented to an eBay buyer who is about to leave feedback for a seller appears to be encouraging buyers to leave negative feedback.

I am not sure if eBay platform full of 89% positive feedback sellers would not backfire on eBay sell throughs. I personally check the seller rating on eBay and I am used to seeing good numbers. Seeing low feedback scores across the board may just send the buyers to competing websites, such as Amazon.