Dec
14
AuctionBytes recently ran a story that highlights the fact that unless you own your own traffic, and can direct buyers to whatever venue you choose to sell your products, you don’t own your business – eBay does.
High volume eBay seller, Bargainland, recently left eBay do to the cumulative effects of eBay’s policy changes over the years. Paul St. James accumulative over a million positive feedback points and a fair amount of detractors selling as-is products from returns, damaged shipments and other product liquidation markets. He cites changes in feedback policy and new restrictions limiting his ability to list more than 5 trademarked designer items per month as key factors constraining his business on eBay.
He claims that his competitors would buy their inventory from him at auction, leave a negative feedback in order to tarnish his eBay reputation and buy from him again later. His resulting ratio of positive to overall feedback rating fell below eBay’s threshold of 98% positive which resulted in volume restrictions. Bargainland needed another venue to sell his inventory and he needed one quickly.
He took a two-fold approach to his dilemma, integrate his inventory and sales into Overstock.com and develop his own auction site. He had 24 days to get his inventory moved off of eBay and moving through another venue. He thought Overstock would be his ultimate solution, but after two-days of launching his own site, the off-the-shelf auction software crashed due to the volume of traffic and corresponding sales. He abandoned Overstock.com and set about developing http://www.bargainland.net into a robust, viable marketplace for his own inventory.
St. James said that by the second month, Bargainland.net had achieved the same Average Selling Prices as on eBay. “We were dumbfounded by the results.”
Now ask yourself, who owns your auction business? You or eBay? Most of us aren’t in a position to start our own auction site and be as successful as Bargainland.
-
But what happens when eBay implements a policy change or new fee schedule that makes it untenable for you to continue to sell through them?
-
If you leave, will your customers follow?
-
Do you have your own website with substantial traffic you can use to redirect customers when you move off of eBay?
-
Do you have your own mailing list of potential customers?
-
Are you capitalizing on that traffic and earning diversified income that doesn’t involve selling?
If the answer is no, you really need to consider a change. My change started with this article from Ken Evoy. If you want to diversify your business, build equity and position yourself to be free of eBay if the need ever arises, the time to act is now. It was the best decision, I ever made. Click http://auctions.sitesell.com/insights2.html
Related Posts:
Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post. | TrackBack URI
One Response to “Who Owns Your Business, You or eBay? A Case Study”
Leave a Reply
I commend Mr. St. James and agree whole heartedly with the assertion that it the seller (and not the venue) that owns their feedback/reputation data.
I am beside myself that this has yet to crescendo with users…