One of the (many) things I do for a living is sell various collectibles on eBay. I have been a part of the global Marketplace since 1998, so I'm not exactly new to that gig.
Things certainly have changed a lot since the early days. Among other things it seems to constantly get more and more and more expensive as a seller and I'm not exactly sure what we're getting for our money anymore.
In the early days, it was a lot more fun than it is today! For one thing it was a true peer-to-peer marketplace where people from all over the world — be they collectors or just people with excess stuff they wanted to sell — were able to connect with each other and exchange stuff, or make a few dollars on the treasures in their attics.
That certainly is not the case anymore. These days it seems more like eBay is just another place for Walmart and Alibaba to get rid of all their excess stock. Almost all individual sellers have been replaced by giant corporate organizations. Which is a shame, I think.
But I digress.
Trying to figure out why my sales on eBay kept falling and falling and falling I started visiting more "seller support" forums around the web where sellers talk about their experiences and share tips on how to succeed.
It seems that one of the primary culprits in this equation is the advent so-called "promoted listings." Phrased a little differently, it basically means that you're encouraged to spend another 11% to 17% of your sales price on getting yourself placed in a more visible position in on-site (and search engine) search results.
In other words: "if you don't pay us an additional 11-17% your merchandise is buried on page 445 of search results."
In situations like these it would be easy to just jump in and start complaining about corporate greed. But is it really corporate greed that is responsible here?
I would submit that perhaps it is actually investor expectations that we have to deal with here. Consider the fact that a lot of the current issues smaller sellers are having with being able to get their product seen has to do with the fact that eBay became a public company.
When companies become public, their are obligations change.
Instead of trying their best to be in the business of creating happy customers and serving their customers, they are now accountable to Wall Street and their focus instead turns on how to keep happy investors.
I remember this from the years I spent in corporate America working for a Fortune 100 company where — when it came time to report quarterly results — nobody cared about what we did all we had to focus on was to ship more stuff out the door — whether it was ready to be shipped or not — the most important thing was making the numbers, not making the product.
We used to joke around that if it would add a couple of cents to the quarterly earnings-per-share if we made tacos, we'd be making tacos.
Does greed play into the picture? Absolutely! However, it bears remembering that fickle investors who insist that their rate of return becomes a little bit higher every year end up driving corporate culture to ever increase earnings, pretty much at the expense of all other factors. And if the company fails to do so, those investors might well head for the nearest exit.
So what does this have to do with small sellers suffering on eBay?
Well, we end up being a sort of "collateral damage" in a game where the power players know that making a few cents each on millions of items will increase their earning, while those small sellers can't actually feed themselves amd their families on razor thin profits on individually handmade things.
Moreover, those "individually handmade things" and collectibles end up buried in a mountain of competing "cheap stuff," never to be heard from again.
Unless, of course, we are willing to just capitulate and "play the game," and accept that making a net $1-2 on each $20 sale is a "good result." Which becomes an impossible equation, because in order to make even a somewhat simple living requires a turnover volume that niche collectibles markets simply don't support.
Time to look for alternatives...
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 2024.10.23 10:42:20 PDT
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