The time for action from Ebid is NOW!
Hi all.
Some of you will remember me as posting here once in a while... I have always been critical of how Ebid market themselves, and for that I offer no apology.
However, as many of you know by now, Ebay have basically kicked many sellers, both small and large, right where it hurts... their bank balance. Sure, if you are a volume seller, the changes are probably great you are thinking. However, as always they are hiding the full story.
Lets look at the facts.
20p listing for 1 or 100 items. Great for those volume resellers with high price items. Not so good for those smaller items such as postcards and craft gifts. EBAY need to be aware that their website was built by people selling like this. The volume sellers came after Ebay was well established. They also need to realise that, for many sellers who are searching for collectables will no longer find them when they leave Ebay in droves and come here... seems absolutely stupid to me but the 80 / 20 rule I suppose applies.
9.99% FVF. They were quick to say "auctions from 1p" but not so quick to say that if you sold something for £10, they would be taking £1 of it at the end.
And the one I love most of all - ABSOLUTE VISABILITY. Great you probably think? Well, if you are in a category where there are a lot of sellers with shop items, guess what, there are going to be SO MANY PAGES to trawl through, imagine going from 10 pages of items to 100, or even 1000????
Coupled with this are their heavy handed suspensions, absolutely crazy feedback changes and quite possibly the worst customer service in the world, you have got a company pandering to those companies that are using Ebay as a high class search engine and not the community site it was set up by its founder to be.
So, why the tirade? Well, the way I see it is that all the other auction sites now have an absolutely unique opportunity - to pull in discontented sellers, and their buyers, plus the buyers looking for items which are no longer going to be on that site. Now is the biggest opportunity to grow and grow quickly.
Hopefully, this is evident, but what I am concerned about is Ebid missing a trick here. If management are reading this, I have a suggestion - keyword bidding on Adwords and other marketing venues for the wave of products which are being listed on Ebid. This would generate traffic to Ebid from buyers, because the first thing that people will do if they can't find anything on the dark side is go to a search engine and look for it there.
It would be interesting to know if people had any other plans to help grow Ebid. I know may of you have done little things such as car stickers, badges etc etc and whilst I respect your ideas, this is piecemeal compared to a focused and strategic marketing strategy.
Looking forward to some answers, and if Ebid management do read this, I do have ideas which may help if you would like to contact me.
ATB
OJ
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Originally Posted by ojleap
