eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

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

July 02, 2007

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

By: David Steiner

Mon July 2 2007 15:37:49

A check of Nielsen/NetRatings shows that eBay users are spending less time on the site than in previous years. In 2006, eBay trumpeted in a Seller Central Report on how buyers use eBay that visitors spend more time on eBay than on other sites, and that time spent on the site is increasing year-over-year. It used data from December 2003 to March 2005 to prove its point. A look at more recent data, however, shows the time spent has gone down.

I was looking at the Nielsen/NetRatings report along with other data to see if anecdotal reports had any merit - you can see my musings in today's AuctionBytes Newsflash article here.
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m07/i02/s00

There's tons of data, I'm interested in hearing what readers have to say, please leave a comment below.

Comments (227) | Leave Comment | Permalink

Readers Comments

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: Marg

Wed Jul 4 23:31:04 2007

I just want to say that it appears obvious from all the comments above that the vast majority of eBayers DO NOT want a ''fun-filled community experience''. All we want is a site which offers a safe, convenient and economical way to purchase or sell items - just like eBay used to be!!

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: BGNW

Thu Jul 5 01:49:44 2007

EBay’s manipulative and shady maneuvers have let sellers know we are dealing with a ruthless and cutthroat business partner. Their entire image worldwide is terrible to say the least. Mention eBay to many folks on the street and you see an immediate frown. Many, if questioned, either have a sad story to tell or knows of someone that does. I stopped selling there in 2005 (after 8 years), and plan to never return. I believe eBay is so deep in trouble that they will not be able to turn it around as they have in the past. No, not this time....They are slowly sinking into the mud, where they certainly belong….

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: Candy

Thu Jul 5 02:45:21 2007

Marg, I agree completely. What was fun about eBay was selling stuff for more than you had realized it was worth and buying things for less than you thought possible ... and anything in-between was pretty good, too. The friendships on the chat boards and discussion forums was nice also. ''Meeting'' people from all over the world in the process of buying, selling, and chatting was fascinating. I consider all this to have existed up until about 2003. Since then it has increasingly become an absolute disaster. When people asked me what I did for a living, I used to proudly say that I sold things on eBay full-time. I was one of the site's great cheerleaders. Now when I am asked that question, I say, ''I sell online.'' I don't even mention eBay anymore because the reaction is ALWAYS negative. It's so sad.

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: Candy

Thu Jul 5 02:56:26 2007

Actually, this is how bad it gets ... because I was getting so much negative reaction to eBay itself, I purchased a domain name in order to set up my own website. Realizing that it would be a good while before I was ready to completely move off eBay, I have put a re-direct on my domain in the interim so that it takes people to my eBay store ~ and what I advertise is NOT my eBay store URL, but the domain URL, to both avoid the typical immediate negative reaction to eBay's very name as well as to help build up attention now for the dedicated website that will exist later.

Even at that, I have had 2 customers that I can recall in the past two years email me to say, paraphrasing, ''I saw your posting on XYZ and went to your website to browse, but then I realized it was actually an eBay store so I left. Sorry but I just don't patronize eBay people anymore, I've been burned too often.'' That's only 2 people, but if 2 people bother to email me about it, heaven knows how many just left and went elsewhere without mentioning it.

It makes one want to cry.

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: James

Thu Jul 5 03:13:50 2007

Ebay has become more of a sad place to sell then a ''fun'' place and as long as ebay continues to treat sellers unfairly, ebay will continue to spiral downward. I'm not against changes in general, as that is normal for all businesses, but I have never seen so many wacky & manipulative changes as ebay has tried to implement the past two years. I've also never seen a company give so little back to it's core base of sellers (the backbone of ebay) and yet rip-off that same core of sellers by demanding higher fees and even implementing a 5-star rating the only buyers can use?? How much more one-sided and unfair can ebay get?? And then many wonder why auction listings, sales and the reputation of ebay is going downward??

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: gb-in-uk

Thu Jul 5 05:32:33 2007

to the ebay ''insider'', are you a robot or what? It smacks of the typical ''non answers'' from ebay staff. As this blog actually has a link from the UK ebay powersellers message board so its probbaly a ''pink'' (Ebay staff), trying to smooth things over in a very half hearted attempt. Believe me, no one believes you. Us UK powersellers are sick to death of treated as idiots. When people complain loudly enough that they are being treated like dirt, you kick them off the boards! Ebay also removes posts that it doesnt like (Nothing to do with policy either), it would rather PIN a threat about big brother tv show on its boards that PIN a discussion about how ebay is totally wiping out the mnarketplace. When i pay the damn high sellers fees, i expect the whole world to see my listings, not just the UK, and i dont want the USA sellers to be able to flood ebay uk which is what they are now doing. Fees are also cheaper on ebay usa, plus they have special offers which the uk doesnt. R.I.P GLOBAL MARKETPLACE

Ebay IS BROKEN. there is no point at all in constantly pandering to the whims of the buyer, as this is at the expense of the seller. More and more sellers are jumping ship, and pretty soon all that will be left on ebay is a pile of c*** from china in every category. More and more people are starting up their own sites, plus ive discovered quite a good site called delcampe.com which is FREE to list, and one good thing, you can get the BUYER to pay the fees on each sale if you want! Brilliant, although the sites is a bit slow, the search engine isnt brilliant and it is crying out fore more investment and development, but the site ''feels good'' and that soemthing that ebay have lost. With increasing scammers, increasing rubbish items from china (who probably get to list for free), the lack of any customer service, is it a foregon conclusion taht ebay is on the way out? They havent invested in the site, they have raised fees, they dont listen,aaaaaaaaaaaaargh!!

I could go on but i wont, reaidng this board is depressing me! I suggest all ebay sellers jump ship now and list on delcampe instead, its a damn site cheaper too.

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: Erilyn

Thu Jul 5 06:47:51 2007

I moved my eBay business off eBay due to their never ending glitches, the lack of exposure that I was PAYING for, lack of customer service, even for stores its a joke. Not having my items show up in the UK or Canada, even though I checked WORLDWIDE. Having the .com flooded with listing from the UK, Canada, India, the free listings that the CHina sellers received.

To make matters worse on top of that, they pushed stores on sellers then hit them with a HUGE increase in fees. They messed with SIS which actually worked for me as well as a lot of other sellers, then dropped us like an infectious disease. We get even less exposure for 5x the amount of work.

As a buyer, so far this year I have had to file 4 claims with Paypal because of dishonest sellers. As a seller, I dont take Paypal because of all the scams people like to pull.

Ebay is not what it used to be and its a shame. It used to be fun to get bitten by the eBay bug. Not so anymore. Never ending glitches, billing problems, searches are messed up, non exposure, the list goes on and on and not a word from the eBay team about it.

In all my years I have never met a business that operated like this and were able to get away with it!

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: Anonymous

Thu Jul 5 09:09:39 2007

The changes on the site can drive me crazy. Not only because they are ALWAYS in favour of ebay's pocket in against the seller. Mainly because it feels for too long now like an uncertain not safe atmosphere for business making. If the s---theads up the so called management could just let us be for a while, to get used to the new formats and ''offerings'', we could be able to adjust and keep our businesses stable. Now we have to change our selling policies and strategies once a month or even more frequent, so our buyers feel We are the ones who are not to be trusted. Alternatively we can (and this is what I do) sit quietly and see how all our profits go to ebay and all our client base is evaporating to other sites or even worse, to ebay's local sites.
I agree all heartedly with the previous comment about being ashamed of selling on ebay. I am very cinycal now and I know when time comes and I will treat ebay the same way they treat me. Either they will deliver or I am not there. On other free auction sites as stampoffers.com I behave the other way and ocasionally donate money to the site develope.

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: Al Cole

Thu Jul 5 10:41:14 2007

My problem, I guess, is that there isn't any competition to eBay for the items I sell. I deal in new and used computers and parts and every once in a while, as a test, I type in ''Commodore 64'' into other auction sites. I might get back one or two hits, whereas with eBay I get back 300+. So, even with eBay's problems, I am almost forced to patronize them.

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: duane

Thu Jul 5 11:08:43 2007

Yep. I currently HAVE to use them, but I cringe when I do. It is sad. In the beginning you tried to list more so that you could make more. Then you tried to list more so that you could stay even. Now you try to list more and you think you are about to turn the corner and WHAM it is fee time and there goes all of your progress. They have made us squirrels in a cage and it seems that anything that they do only makes us have to run faster.

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: duane

Thu Jul 5 11:16:32 2007

There may be some hope. While I would rather see a little guy come from nowhere as a competitor, Google is making some noise. Here is a link to an article I read the other day. http://tinyurl.com/269j33
What is your take on this.

Also, are any of you making a living off of your own web site or having success on sites other than ebay?

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: beachgal707

Thu Jul 5 15:15:55 2007

the top 5 reasons why people spend less time on ebay: 1) too many ads; 2) ebay changes the way it searches for IT as often as we change our undewear; 3) bad programming - nothing works right; 4) the marketing team is clueless; 5) the findings team is a joke!

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: HD

Thu Jul 5 19:57:26 2007

I can voice a survey of one me, I sold on eBay for about 4-5 years then my niche market went dry. I also bought stuff. I still buy stuff online but not from eBay, too many bad apples. The listing fee's killed my eBay business. My profit was small and by the time I paid this & that there was nothing left. I needed to sell 30% of my listed items just to cover costs.
I used to enjoy browsing the web looking for info about a varity of things. Now the web is all about selling stuff. Good old American greed ruined it. eBay used to be a cute little old country 2nd store now its just another boring mall.

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: Keith

Thu Jul 5 22:57:28 2007

As a seller, I'm wore out with the fee increases. What’s wrong with increasing sellers rather than increasing fees.

I'm for making buyers feel comfortable to buy with buyer protections, but not at the PayPal charge back expense of honest sellers. There has to be a balance.

While eBay has made the process easy for power sellers to list identical item(s), the listing process for sellers such as myself who sell individually unique vintage items remains time consuming. The eBay practice of catering to power sellers selling cookie cutter stuff from China realized larger fee dollars in the short term, but eBay cast off the sellers of individual and unique items that gave eBay charm and long term traffic.

As a buyer, I’m tired of eBay allowing Jesse James sellers robbing buyers with outlandish shipping & handling fees. The sellers argue that the buyer doesn’t have to buy, but that’s not the point. A buyer wants to buy and have fun doing it on eBay, but soon becomes burnt-out being robbed.

And finally, I’m sure at the root of every biased rule and fee increase leak on eBay’s ship are numerous highly self-important, know-it-all, return demanding investors with hand drills.

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: Katie

Fri Jul 6 10:02:32 2007

Sellers of counterfeit items are taking over too many parts of Ebay and driving legitimate sellers out. Just in Womens Clothing and Accessories, ninety oercent of the Coach wallets listed are fakes, and as much as ninety-five percent of Coach keychains. One recent check of 300 listings for "Coach keychain" found three legitimate sellers and 26 peddlers of counterfeit junk. These listings have been reported by myself and many others until our fingers bleed but are never removed, and the sellers continue to fleece buyers. Ebay dooesn't care as long as they collect their fees.

Sellers who buy genuine keychains even on sale for $15 or $20 are competing with crooks who buy fakes in bulk for three dollars each from SE Asia. A Coach wallet that even on sale still costs the buyer one hundred dollars isn't going to attract the attention of the typical Ebay bargain shopper when there are lookalike fakes purchased from Chinese websites for fifty or sixty dollars. Sellers of genuine items are fed up with the proliferation of fakes sellers, and potential buyers who have been fooled once by a cheap fake are much less likely to come back.

Ebay's disregard for obvious frauds is even more blatant, as anyone who remembers last summer's flood of one-day BIN auctions will tell you. Ebay did NOTHING to block those obviously fraudulent and easily tracable listings until it finally got to the point where fully one-third of the weekend listings for things like designer handbags and brand-name golf clubs were frauds.

Buying AND selling on Ebay has become about as enjoyable as walking blindfolded through a minefield.

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: Mindy

Fri Jul 6 10:22:01 2007

Everyone's comments are so head on, excellent, and so important for ebay to hear, can someone send them this link? Or would it fall on deaf ears?

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: Anonymous

Fri Jul 6 12:27:54 2007

Mindy: I can only assume that if ebay people will read these comments they will do exactly what they did so far with sellers comments: ignore them and raise the fees once again.....

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: BB

Fri Jul 6 17:07:02 2007

I stopped selling on eBay in 2006. Here are just a few reasons:

EBay’s never ending fee increases: I will never again use a web site that charges a listing fee or take money off the top before I make a sale. However, I am willing to pay for a final value fee, but it must be very low…under 3 percent. This obviously excludes eBay.

Countless site glitches: One glitch that still has me fuming even today is that from 1999-2006 I was always contacting eBay about erroneous month end billing charges. After 7 years I don’t consider it a glitch but felt it was intentionally designed to function as a part of their regular running program, whose purpose was to squeeze every drop of revenue from sellers.

Capricious policy changes from both EBay and PayPal; so many changes that I could not keep up with them. Many of these changes I suspect were even bordering on illegal.

Deceitful, secretive, and unprofessional behavior from eBay’s management that eventually trickled down to their staff. Staff will yell at you and even hang the phone up in your face! Some of these employees should have been terminated. PayPal staff was just as bad. I have been lied to numerous times.

Search engine problems: I was a small mom/pop seller who primarily listed my items in auction, but eBay was manipulating the search engine in core auctions too. Many times my listing would disappear and re-appear a day or so later. In other words, I never received the full 7 days listing exposure I paid for. And because my items were receiving less exposure I had to re-list it 3-4 times which in the long run eroded my profit, but fattened EBay’s. Because of this, I decided at the beginning of 2006 to open a store (strongly encouraged by eBay), but now they are hitting stores with high fee increases and the same search engine problems exist with both stores and core.

Pacific Rim countries (China, Taiwan etc.) were not even charged listing fees!! This was eBay’s attempt to enter the Asian market, but now it has really backfired because these countries have now flooded the site with many cheap and fraudulent goods; so many in fact that I think it has overwhelmed even eBay.

Devious buyers that disrupted my auctions, because they did not like the prices I charged and when I reported them to EBay, little or nothing was done. Chargeback’s from corrupt buyers who keep both the item and money is growing phenomenally.

Pornography: Sometimes I would go to list an item, and somehow, someway some web savvy idiot managed to insert pornographic material on the web page. But to eBay’s credit, when I reported it, eBay took immediate action (within 15-30 minutes).

I have closely watched over the years, the numerous crazy changes eBay forced sellers to comply with and it just seemed they were treating us like rats in a maze; do this, do that, jump here, no there… What?? I thought you were just a “venue.” For my sanity, I had to stop selling on eBay, and I have decreased “buying” by at least 95 percent. Most days I do not even visit the site and my blood pressure has now returned to normal.

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: sherrygilson

Fri Jul 6 17:12:55 2007

Why not just KEEP DUMPING more doubt and garbage into everyones mind, so that they get discouraged and QUIT!!!!!

Ok with me leaves me more room without competition!!

eBay Users Spending Less Time on Site

by: Violette

Fri Jul 6 17:16:44 2007

I'm an eBay buyer, seller, and shareholder, so I have 3 different POVs. As a buyer, I want fair treatment from seller: Reasonable S&H, decent packing of items, decent shipping times, quality product, and polite communication. As a seller, I want reasonable speed of payment (I allow 10 days), reasonable listing fees, and good visibility for my items. As a shareholder, I want eBay to make money. These things are not mutually exclusive. I think eBay could make as much, if not more money by cutting listing fees. I'd happily pay a little more in FVF (not a lot more, 1% max) if they'd eliminate most listing fees. I'd like to see gallery be free for those of us who host photos off-eBay and perhaps a larger number of free relists. I sell relatively low-cost, low margin vintage items and the listing fees are wiping out all of my profit. My sell through is horrible and I have to relist several times to get a sale. It's hard enough to convince buyers to pay the shipping costs without having to increase my minimum prices just to break even. I think eBay could really increase listing volume by lowering listing fees. They seem to have decided that we smaller sellers aren't worth their time and effort anymore, which doesn't make sense according to their "back to core" philosophy. I agree with most of the other posters about the flood of cheap knockoffs and just general crap that's flooding eBay. I've been buying there for years, but I won't buy electronics, jewelry, or designer stuff there, since you can't trust that it's legit. I'm going to be investigating other venues and setting my own web site for selling, since I'm not able to make much profit on eBay anymore due to the listing fees. I'll still sell on eBay, but I sincerely hope they do something, so I won't lose money as a seller, can trust them as a buyer, and make money as a shareholder :-)

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