Posted on 01/24/2010 8:43:24 AM PST by khnyny
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- As one of his first moves upon becoming CEO, eBay chief John Donahoe unveiled a slew of changes to the online marketplace, kicking off an uproar among sellers and sparking boycotts. Two years later, eBay is finally starting to see signs of success on its turnaround plan.
The San Jose, Calif., e-commerce giant on Wednesday reported 2009 sales of $8.7 billion, up from $8.5 billion in 2008. That's a 14% increase from the $7.7 billion in revenue eBay had in 2007, the year before Donahoe's overhaul.
EBay's profits, though, haven't kept pace with its sales growth. Net income dropped 8% from last year, to $2 billion -- putting eBay's earnings below where they stood two years ago. Gross merchandise volume, a closely watched metric tracking the value of items sold on eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500), was essentially flat from last year and down slightly from 2007.
"These turnaround efforts are paying off," Donahoe said Wednesday on a conference call with analysts.
That's a sharp change from the tone he adopted last year, as the company struggled through its changes.
"This business has continued to fall short of our expectations and customers' expectations," Donahoe told analysts at a meeting in March. "That's not acceptable. EBay has a storied past. But it's a past that we held onto for too long."
The firestorm: In February 2008, then brand-new CEO Donahoe announced a major revamp of eBay's fee structure and feedback policy. The goal was to make the site more buyer-friendly.
The move inflamed eBay's core community of active sellers, which numbers in the millions. They raised virtual pitchforks and organized protests, including a week-long boycott. Amid a flurry of scathing blog posts and online messages, many jumped ship entirely and migrated their online storefront to other sites.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
bump
I hate selling anything on ebay now. I was not a store, of course, just would sell stuff from time to time. Small antiques, things like that. Now, it’s not worth it. You sell something for around $20-$50 and they take nearly half of your profit. Then, the seller is at the mercy of the buyer when it comes to feedback. It’s more geared towards the large ebay stores now. Small individual sellers, what I think made ebay great, well, its just not worth the hassle. It was a perfect system the way it used to be, and someone got the idea it needed to change. I can never understand that kind of thinking. A company rises to dominate a world market, then once there, they think it somehow needs a major restructuring to turn it into something it wasn’t.
gunpal.net.....
I buy and sell on both of them....
eBAY is the 800 lb. gorilla...and I still buy and sell there..but hope to totally leave someday.
onlineauction.com is a nice place to buy stuff...but not a good selling place for me.
CZ-52’s or 75’s?
And we can't have that happen, now can we?
/s
Well I’ll be ...I need 1,000 of those! (just kidding)
I’ve had decent success with selling on Craigslust, you just have to suffer weeding through lots of nuts,no-shows, and scammers.not really worth it for $10 items ,but can be a good deal when it comes to items not very shipping-friendly(heavy car parts,wheels,etc)
I’ve found good deals there on local sellers on parts for my old motorcycle.
ping
Things like that come from my dad and uncle, heavy equipment people. They packrat spare parts and equipment but they hit their limits on storage on dead inventory sometimes.
In the market for a slightly used but VGC 5 ton military truck? I might be able to make a deal....
I agree with you on the problem children out there. What I am looking for is later model Willys body parts. The new kits are just too expensive. Finding a parts donor that isn’t rusted to death is tough in my part of the world. All the ones I find are all out west.
I would love a 5 ton(drove one once in a while in the Army), but can neither afford one nor store one.
I can barely afford to keep my 15 year old VW rust bucket running and my vintage Yamaha.
Not true. Talk to just about anyone who has sold on eBay for any length of time, and you will hear horror stories about buyer misconduct.
A favorite trick is to keep the good item that the seller sent you, complain, and then return an identical but damaged item and demand a refund. Sometimes, they will claim damage or misrepresentation and demand a partial refund.
The way they have the system set up now, the seller is SOL when this happens.
I have a 73 Jeep with a few problems and a couple I acutally need an equipped pro to fix because I don’t have the resources, time, or memory/experience to deal with it. I keep it since it is an intermediate model, has a 304, headers, and it annoys the watermelons next door. When I have it running again, it really will drive them nuts. I have a project with my dad which is idle for the immediate future which is a 68 Willys CJ. It ran once but the body has had it. The search continues for a donor. I have photos at a Flickr album.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tysonneil/sets/
Screw Ebay. Used to be a great place before they took over Paypal. It’s been over since then. Just a bunch of e-tailers now.
Craigslist is killing them.
bookmark - post 46
True...but?
There should be one kind of seller feedback...was the item paid for promptly? That is the only thing that really matters.
I've had around 150 transactions on Ebay. Each one notes, "Paid promptly." I do have one negative feedback, from a monitor screen I bought. The seller represented it as one item, the item listed on the container. The item inside did not match the box. I disputed, went through the rigamarole of getting third party documentation, won.
He then left bad feedback on me...?
Ebay should allow sellers to rate timeliness of payment. Nothing else.
But the buyers feedback has never mattered! How silly. I sold on ebay for years, and ended up not leaving feedback until 2 weeks after I mailed it. I figured, if there were any problems by then, I would have heard about it from the buyer.
I only got screwed once or twice out of thousands of transactions, but once they changed the seller pricing tiers, I decided to switch to 2x/month FB.
I rarely sell, but still buy a lot. I have yet to care whether I get FB as a buyer. It means absolutely nothing.
I had a 100% with over 10K feedbacks over the course of several years. However, the items I sold were geared to pet owners and they tend to be a wonderful bunch of people. Plus, we’d go over and above to keep people happy (so we could have repeat buyers).
IIRC, ebay owns a part of Craigslist, or at least it did a couple of years back...
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