Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

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AuctionBytes Blog
News and insight focusing on
ecommerce and the online auction industry
by Ina Steiner, Editor of AuctionBytes.com

December 01, 2007

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

By: Ina Steiner

Sat Dec 1 2007 12:48:38

Another high-volume seller has left the eBay marketplace. This time, it's liquidator Bargainland. AuctionBytes sat down with Paul St. James to find out why he decided to stop selling on eBay and what Bargainland is up to now. The article will appear in the December 2, 2007 issue of AuctionBytes-Update. (We'll provide a direct link to the story here on Sunday.)

Here's the link to the article (12/3/07).

What do you think this means for eBay? Is it a positive sign that eBay is cleaning up the site and getting rid of low-feedback sellers? Or is it a sign that high-volume sellers can't succeed on eBay? Share your thoughts here.

Comments (52) | Leave Comment | Permalink

Readers Comments

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: Cheryl

Sun Dec 2 16:23:32 2007

I have a mini bookstore on eBay and stocked it mostly with books I purchased from Bargainland auctions. I got some fantastic deals and miss the good old days when their shipping was less expensive. So far their new site doesn't offer anywhere near the books that they sold on eBay, and the shipping charges have increased. My experience was that they dealt well with their mishaps with refunds. Most people who gave them negative fb didn't take the time to learn to use Bargainland's contact system -- maybe it was too complex for novice users and the concept of ''as is'' ''buyer beware'' hard to accept in reality. Sometimes there were blatant mistakes by BL, but not as often as the negative fb would suggest. One time I studied whether the users who gave BL negatives continued using eBay and I found that by far the majority did continue buying, even from BL. There were thousands and thousands of very happy customers, too. I certainly understand why BL left eBay, with the high fees and fb system, and their other problems. But I, for one, sure miss the fun of shopping at BL, and the $60 books for $7. . . .

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: Ed

Sun Dec 2 16:55:58 2007

Good to see they can do just a well on their own site as ebay is run by morons who have ruined the site, ebay has driven away many buyers and created lower sales volume due to their constant changes that are meant to only make ebay money like removing payment options to force people to use Paypal (which ebay takes a percentage), Any business with intelligent employees knows that 30% of on-line buyers will only pay with cash as they don't feel safe using credit cards or revealing personal information yet ebay has removed this option in hopes of forcing people to use paypal and has lost these buyers as a result. This is just one of the many stupid decisions ebay has made and yet i could spend the entire day listing a lot more if i had the time, When ebay was just an auction site were they didn't get involved with the transactions ebay sales were great and everyone i knew sold on ebay, Now that ebay has set all these ridiculous rules sales are terrible and most of my friends have stopped selling on ebay and no one is going to return until ebay is taken over by someone who knows how to run a business properly.

I also find it funny how people are commenting on this persons 90.5 positive rate when i'd rate ebay's positive rate at 5.0 it's ashame that ebay doesn't feel the need to meet the same standards they set for everyone else.

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: tellyp

Sun Dec 2 19:17:33 2007

I really don’t get this, but why is the seller responsible for lost items?...if the item has been sent then there is a receipt of some kind as proof of mailing, so why are the post office or couriers not getting the blunt end of this, millions & millions of lost items yearly must be going somewhere?

Now I mail everything with insurance to cover all these problems…prior to this I would get at least 3-4 people a month saying items not delivered, now with compulsory insurance I have not had 1 non delivery in 7 months?

The big picture of Bargainland moving away from eBay is in reality the tip of the iceberg, a long line of volume sellers are also on the edge waiting to go.

eBay would do well to wake up & realize that in 2008 the internet is so far advanced on sales channels & outlets that their 1998’ish platform is well out of date & fashion, not to mention all this stupid “Fun“ branding by ebay

Almost every medium seller on ebay now has their own website, how very different to only a couple of years ago

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: Patricia

Sun Dec 2 23:36:12 2007

I continue to be totally amazed. At first I felt maybe eBay has thought up a system and it will become clear to me eventually....nope. Its a stupid system contrived by a bunch of ''mental giants'' who can't find their own rear end if they put both hands behind their backs! With all their money you would think - if they cannot lower themselves to actually asking sellers ''what do you need us to do to make it easier for you to make sales?'' - then at least hire experienced people who know what they're doing! Someone said ebay is just tossing ideas against the wall to see what sticks. Looks that way - and in the process they go lower and lower in sales, in traffic, in sellers, in reputation!!

I might add - as though its not laughable enough...that in the midst of the holiday season - when they should be gliding along and not skipping a beat - they choose - as usual to change things and ''look into'' other things. Yes, when a truly competitive site does open - and eventually it will...the stiff breeze you'll all feel is the stampede by sellers getting the *ell out of ebay!

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: mat

Mon Dec 3 01:41:08 2007

every body seems to hate ebay ... but where else do we go ... what other venues come close to eBay??

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: Ron

Mon Dec 3 05:29:32 2007

I only wish BL all the luck in the world on their new site. I'm hopeing the programers he has hire are top notch and gets them to the point that he can come along and cherry pick the larger sellers on ebay to also list on their new site. I'll bring my 30,000 items a little over a 1/4 mil. in rolling inventory to his site I'm ready to move to another sandbox..

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: 4wder

Mon Dec 3 06:53:38 2007

Some sellers have moved to a smaller start-up called oztion. It's gonna take a while to build up but at least they are probably the one that can come close to ebay. Otherwise sellers have only 2 options. Setup their web site (cost, maintain web site, marketing, advertising, you name it) or stop selling.

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: Dennis

Mon Dec 3 09:27:48 2007

>>I'm surprised they lasted this long. If eBay want to improve the buyer experience, they need to actively kick these people off rather than wait until they go out of business. <<

But they apparently also had the highest repeat customer rate on eBay. So there's more to their ongoing success than a simple minded subjective sound-bite FB system.

They didn't go out of business, they took their biz elsewhere and claim to have sales back at their eBay levels.

They sell junk. That's what they say they do. They're definitely a low end supplier. Their customer service was on the par with eBay's so called customer service.

They also had a lot of trouble with eBay's half witted VeRO system

Interestingly, they investigated some of the anti-BL hate sites. The biggest one was run by their biggest customer! I'd expect to see a fat lawsuit, there.

Now we have big sellers and small sellers saying eBay doesn't work. If I owned eBay stock, that would make me nervous.

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: Empires

Mon Dec 3 09:49:29 2007

Can ebay really survive? Sure they can, just watch their stock go up every day. Amazing. Sellers complain (me too), and still end up there. I'm closing my store in Dec., That's $1,400 that ebay will lose monthly. Their find an answer thingy sucks, their restrictions are ridiculous and the prices they bring back to buyers are weak. Need I say more...

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: gcarr

Mon Dec 3 09:57:20 2007

Ya think anyone with some power at ebay cares enough to read and take heed of all of the ebay hate blogs?

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: Gold PowerSeller

Mon Dec 3 11:54:02 2007

I checked Bargainlands feedback and can't understand why he was given a platform on auctionbytes to offer his opinion. His feedback was not only bad, but many of the bad feedbacks were Item not Received. As a seller this is really easy to prove, so I will give the buyer a little more credit. I can see why this seller was warned. High volume does not mean your above all. Ebay's decision was fair.

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: Another Wronged Seller

Mon Dec 3 14:50:49 2007

Ebay fails to understand the most basic things about its own business. Every day I see sellers who have a better grasp of the business than ebays people do.

Different types of sellers generate different levels of satisfaction (feedback). Liquidation sellers like bargainland ineveitably will receive worse percentages than sellers selling new merchandise.

Is the problem with ebay or with the perception of buyers? Buyer can go anywhere and buy item for $20.00 new OR go to ebay and buy item from BL for $10.00 and it is stated that it is a store return and shows signs of use. Buyer receives item and is SURPRISED that the item is not new ( or at least in better shape than they thought) DESPITE WHAt IT SAYS IN THE AUCTION LISTING!

Other buyers buy from sellers that list an item as new and pay the $20.00

The problem is with the buyer who expects to get a $20.00 value for $10.00 and somehow feels ''cheated'' if the don't. Here comes the negative feedback!

Buyers need to be realistic. If you buy from a seller with ''as-is'' merchandise (at a lower price) you can't expect the same levels of new, quality merchandise.

As a long time buyer at BL, I understood that the items weren't new and didn't expect them to be.

Don't buy a chevy and get mad that you didn't get a Mercedes!

I have listed items as used and buyers have negged me for sending them used merchandise even though it said used in the listing. I have gotten negs for the same and been forced to take merchandise back by paypal for selling used items. Make sense????

If ebay can't or won't understand that there will be different feedback levels for sellers of new vs used merchandise and adjust the feedback criteria to reflect it, there will always be a disparity in how liquidation sellers are treated.

Good luck to bargainland! I will miss them on ebay but I will continue to shop on their new site. More lost revenue for ebay.

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: Michelle

Mon Dec 3 16:04:09 2007

The striking thing about Bargainland is that they sold $300K per month through eBay yet only paid $20K in eBay fees. It's quite an achievement to only pay 6.66% of sales.

http://esellerstreet.wordpress.com/2007/12/03/bargainlan
d-leaves-ebay-junk-seller-or-matchmaker/

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: Jerry

Mon Dec 3 16:57:14 2007

Michelle, I’m not sure where you are getting your sales data, but I know for a fact that Bargainlands historical sales ran between 1 – 2 million dollars a month, with fees in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. You may have been just looking at the last few months of transactions on eBay where they were winding down their operations.

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: Ming the Merciless

Tue Dec 4 04:05:29 2007

When individuals engage in the kinds of behaviors that ebay does, they are often diagnosed as suffering from one or more forms of mental illness.

For example, ebay's frenetic (and frantic) but usually short term, hyperactive, and inconsistent shotgun focus on issues such as VERO, knockoffs, postage, the content of ads, etc. suggests their management suffers from chronic attention deficit disorder and impulse disorder. In other words, they're institutionally incapable of rational analysis and creating reasonable solutions to ongoing problems. They simply make wquic, superficial, arbitrary, simplistic, and utterly thoughtless judgments and move on to their next 30 day assault campaign against sellers.

When an individual chronically engages in anti social if not criminal behaviors that harm others without feeling any remorse whatsoever, these people are called sociopaths. When they're convicted of crimes, they go to jail or prison. When a corporation engages in unethical, immoral, or criminal behavior that damages others, however, Wall Street calls them darlings -- just like they did with Enron until the extent of Enron's criminality could no longer be concealed.

Ebay also seems incapable of learning from their mistakes and taking what they've learned from them (if they spent any time at all trying to learn anything useful which is questionable) and then avoiding these mistakes in their present and future strategic planning such as their pathetic, myopic strategic planning is.

How many sellers left ebay over Bill Cobb's genius store listing turnaround last year that was patently unfair to those paying for auction style and Buy It Now listings?

How many European buyers left American sellers when ebay's incompetent techs developed a platform that ''accidentally'' changed sellers' listings from Ships Worldwide to essentially Ship to US only?

How many English buyers quit buying from American sellers in retaliation when ebay removed British listings from the ebay US site?

How many sales are ebay sellers losing when ebay sells links on search pages to YOUR competitors selling on the Yahoo platform? Or, for that, matter, to the refinancing opportunities or weight loss or whatever? And how many of you remember the infamous Hallmark Cards pop-ups in seller listings at Christmas time several years ago?

So what we have here is a corporation whose dominant strategy is to take as much as they possibly can from sellers, create crises through its own ineptitude and greed, and then 'manage' these crises in the most irrational and heavy handed way they can think of.

Ironically, ebay fails to recognize the genuine crises it does face and has adopted an ostrich like and inflexible attitude that's already ignited the fuse towards its own self-destruction.

One of the pop definitions of mental illness is to the same thing over and over again expecting a different result which, I think, applies not only to ebay but to many sellers as well who erroneously believe that tweaking their ebay selling strategies will overcome the exorbitantly high fees that that the unregulated monopoly called ebay charges.

Ebay, you're going up in smoke from your own gross incompetence and mismanagement, and unfortunately you're going to take a lot of good people with you.

Buyer are NOT ebay's customers; they're OUR customers, and both sellers and buyers will migrate to where they're treated fairly, equitably, and HONESTLY -- concepts that ebay left in the dust when Meg Whitman took over.

And I suspect the ebay apologists and plants among us will be the only ones left when ebay as we've known it implodes from its own stupidity and greed.

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: debnroo

Tue Dec 4 05:00:20 2007

Let's see, if I had 1 million past buyers, of which 90% were thrilled to do business with me (and came back again and again), and I could save myself 10-15% of my margin by taking those 900,000 or so buyers OFF eBay after eBay creates arbitrary standards, what would I do?

Leave, obviously.

Look folks, I get your point. But, look on Amazon. LOTS of "featured" sellers with 88% feedback selling tens of thousands of items.

Back in the real world, 98% positive feedback is not realistic. It only occurs because of feedback retaliation on eBay.

On Amazon, people leave negatives without ever attempting to resolve an issue. Sometimes just to vent frustrations that have nothing to do with the transaction or product. And, as a result, it is not the big deal it is on eBay. You are not identified by your feedback - it is just a metric.

In May of 2005, 99% of our business was on eBay. We had presence elsewhere, but the volume was on ebay. In May 2007, 90% of our business was on eBay.

By September, it was down to 60%.

We just reviewed the past two weeks, now 75% of our volume is on Amazon. Same products, HIGHER prices, and they are flying off the shelves on Amazon. eBay business is down 30% YOY, and everyone wants a discount. A gazillion emails to deal with, the site is constantly broken, and nothing but lip service from the staff.

We are not making this happen, buyers are. People are sick of eBay lip service, and the tipping point has been reached.

Those of you still defending eBay are doing so on an academic level. Whatever your feelings are, the fact remains that eBay is losing buyers and sellers in droves.

eBay gave away the dream business model of a lifetime. It is sad.

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: brian

Tue Dec 4 12:34:54 2007

I'm a small scale ebay buyer/seller for 8yrs. I agree with the knowledgeable posts like debnroo. Here is a personal example how 'wrong' their 'system' is. I order and pay immediately via paypal for expensive item from a seller with mostly all good feedback. Half the item never arrives. Go through their 'ebay/paypal resolution'. They close it out without even contacting me when seller posts a tracking number for half the shipment?!! Then seller proceeds to call me lots of names, and leave me neg retaliatory feedback. With ebay 'system' I have no recourse. Turns me away from them, and looking for a better site! Or how about "no reserve" folks who 'end the sale early' when the bids aren't meeting their reserve they wanted?! again no recourse. I've written them to suggest things, yes, only lip service and automated emails. They suck. I order from amazon.com now, and in fact yesterday I put my IRA savings into their stock amzn exclusively. Tells you where I think the future is, and others above see it even clearer than me.

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: Ming the Merciless

Wed Dec 5 05:12:31 2007

I think an excellent case could be made that a substantial part of ebay's growing unattractiveness as a sales platform is a growing group of very troublesome buyers. And while these irrational types are still a minority of ebay buyers, their numbers have grown to the point where they've become a problem that ebay refuses to address so as not to break the magic spell of the mystical "buyer experience."

These are people who must ask ten questions in ten separate emails before buying IF they buy which more often as not they don't. Emailing is a form of recreation for many lonely, unhappy window shoppers.

How about the chronic whiners who constantly complain about everything. When it becomes a problem, the constant complainers go to my blocked bidders file.

Many ebay members have a very strong sense of entitlement -- if they ask for discounts, sellers are supposed to give them to them. And it's nearly always people you've never done been business with who want discounts. And, of course, there's always some newbie seller who'll be out of business in six months willing to give these jerks discounts.

They make demands they would NEVER make in brick and mortar stores and who make extremely rude, hostile, and sometimes threatening comments they wouldn't have the courage to make to you face.

And how about the alcoholics, other substance abusers, and the mentally ill who make completely irrational demands, are verbally abusive, engage in a wide variety of ebay dirty tricks, and who make false and often bizarre accusations? These people take a lot seller time -- time that could be spent making money. And still ebay does nothing even when these types of communications go through their own email system.

After all, ebay doesn't want to lose the paranoid schizophrenic, bipolar, or alcoholic demographic. Now I am NOT anti mentally ill; I just don't think that ebay should look the other way at certain behaviors, and I don't think if a member has a history of leaving inaccurate and unfair feedback that ebay should continue to allow them to even leave feedback.

Efforts in the past to have 'no listing days' have largely failed because ebay would simply schedule a promotion. But if every seller on Ina's distribution list switched to Amazon for a month and ignored any ebay promotion, it would get ebay's attention.

Listings -- or lack thereof -- is the only thing ebay understands because ebay is joined at the hip with the corrupt Wall Street folks who thought so highly of Enron.

These are the greedy sharks who hate customer service because true service detracts from profitability, who lick their collective lips when ebay expropriates someone else's software so they don't have to expend re$ource$ developing their own (Buy It Now lawsuit comes to mind that ebay has lost), who love unjustified fee increases, hidden fee increases, and platform 'malfunction' fee increases because they increase profitability, and who love the fact that ebay is an unregulated monopoly that, among other violations of the Sherman Anti Trust Act, seldom follows its own policies when those policies involve refunds owed to sellers. They behave in this manner because they can get away with it because they know the largely compliant, almost anesthetized sellers will put up with it or leave ebay.

Ebay operated under the delusion that when one seller left, more would take their place. Not so anymore. Partly because of the slowing economy but mostly because most ebay users are fed up with ebay's corporate arrogance and their erratic heavy handed tactics against sellers.

As long as ebay is a cash cow for stock holders at the expense of sellers, nothing will change unless YOU start complaining to state regulatory agencies such as the your state's Attorney General because what goes on on ebay far, far transcends a simple consumer complaint.

Boys and girls, can you spell R-I-C-O?

Read a little about the Robber Barons and Teddy Roosevelt and the Trustbusters! Ebay is a modern day robber baron and YOU the seller -- sorry to mix historical metaphors here -- are little more than an unpaid indentured serf.

If ebay needs better class of sellers, then ebay needs a better group of buyers even more. But most of all, ebay needs a better class of executive!

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: indyattic

Sat Dec 8 12:10:07 2007

Terry is wrong. THe beauty of eBay used to be in starting auctions at .99, and seeing how high the final price would go. I sold lots of things for more than I thought they were worth early on.

Then eBay "helped" by adding the "watch" feature and killed early bidding. (I know, everybody loves "watch" but it killed the true auction. Period.)

It's only when everybody started demanding that eBay "protect" them that things started to truly fall apart. PayPal brought in the fraudsters, not feedback.

The mentality of buying something from a place that specifically indicates "as is! No Refunds/No Returns" then calling yourself a victim just shows that the inmates are running the asylum that is eBay.

Bargainland Bids Adieu to eBay

by: david

Thu Dec 13 15:24:59 2007

I recently became a victim of eBay's SPNC warning. The issue was that I got too many Neutral feedbacks. I previously would never attempt to have a withdrawal of a Neutral, however, i would attempt to address the issue identified. Ebay let me know that they count Neutrals as Negatives. How utterly ridiculous!

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