Last week’s eBay Analyst Day certainly managed to keep the e-commerce bloggers busy, didn’t it? I followed the tweets of @scotwingo and @ebayinkblog for awhile before realizing I could log in myself to listen live, which I did in time to view a whole bunch of Weebles wobbling and listen to some guy from Boston drone on longer than I would have liked to finally draw quite obvious PayPal conclusions.
If you’re interested in where eBay’s going there’s plenty of good takes on it out there, but I want to point you to a couple of my favorite people, neither of whom are known for the now par for the course anti-eBay sentiment, and both of whom still regularly use the site.
John “ColderICE” Lawson has gone above and beyond as per usual with his post I AM MAD as HELL ~ A MUST Read Report: How To FIX eBay!!!. If you don’t know John, and frankly it’s much more likely you don’t know me as John is out there big time, he’s a eBay Platinum PowerSeller and eBay Certified Education Specialist–the ICE in his alter ego actually stands for Internet Commerce Education, which is what he’s been giving back through his ColderICE blog and various other activities very effectively since 2008.
John conducts several online interviews and he managed to grab ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo (yes, the one and the same @scotwingo from above) for a chat the day prior to Analyst Day. John’s Mad as Hell post includes the complete audio recording of that interview along with a very attractive pdf that transcribes the entire interview into a handy report. You can listen to it, read it, do both at once or either separately, the choice is yours. The report covers Scot Wingo’s ideas on what eBay should do, while John’s accompanying post covers his interpretation of what the eBay troops say is the actual plan.
Regarding that plan, we move next to Mitzi Swisher of Vintage Goodness. What I like about Mitzi’s breakdown, eBay Analyst Day-Any News for Vintage Sellers, is that it comes from the perspective of the vintage seller. Take a look around the rest of The Vintage List and Vintage Goodness and you’ll see that Mitzi sells vintage, writes about vintage, and celebrates vintage. Mitzi focuses on eBay’s new focus, the Secondary Market. She points out “I can see how the size of the “Collectible Vintage Pre-Owned” circle compares to the size of the “Outlet and Liquidation” circle,” and without benefit of the graphic I’ll just tell you, it’s tiny. Mitzi summarizes the point as follows:
There is a small bit of hope to be had though – first and foremost we are on the chart, even if we are just a small section down in the corner, and eBay does see the Vintage and Pre-Owned market as having the ability to increase from where it stands today. So they haven’t counted us out completely – and rightly so!
Mitzi goes on to question the decline in auctions as well as all of the advertising coming onto the site.
Finally, I found the complete Wall Street Journal article, eBay Retreats in Retailing by Geoffrey A. Fowler, pasted into the Movie Poster Forum, and found the following line very interesting:
EBay’s focus on its “secondary market” includes the used and vintage goods that the company is already known for selling, as well as clearance and out-of-season items.
As well as, hmmm. What do you think? If you take this line at face value and take Mitzi’s view that there’s hope because vintage made eBay’s chart then there might be every reason for traditional retailers to be mad as hell, but also for antiques and collectibles dealers to be optimistic.
Having listened to the portion of the original call featuring eBay CEO John Donahoe, my own opinion is that we may have hope, but that eBay is resting it’s future on the bigger chunk of that Secondary Market, the one which they define as including Out of Season, Outlet Inventory, Overstock/Returns, and Liquidation Inventory. In other words, and I apologize if this hits your niche, crap. More exactly, in my opinion, the crap which shouldn’t be the featured products but just a part of the draw. I have never and will never shop eBay for these items. Then again, perhaps I’m hopelessly out of touch because from the start I’ve viewed eBay as the place to buy the exact items highlighted in the smaller piece of eBay’s proposed pie: Collectible, Vintage, Pre-Owned.
But I wonder, maybe it’s not me who’s out of touch, as this line from the same Wall Street Journal article quoted above has me wondering what they could have possibly interpreted leading to this:
As part of its sharpened focus, eBay Wednesday sketched out changes to its marketplace to help bring back shoppers who have migrated to other sites.
That ain’t what I’m hearing.
Cliff this is a spot on summary of what is going on. But in my opinion, here is a big problem for eBay:
Good, bad or indifferent, many people are not even talking about the company any more. There are many thousands of sellers who’ve moved on, and no longer highlight eBay in the conversation. In short, they’ve given up trying to change eBay and are building their brand elsewhere.
Anyone in PR will tell you, the only thing worse than bad press, is no press. I just don’t see eBay as that relevant in the conversation anymore.
Thanks for a great article.
Walt
Thanks for chiming in, Walt, you’re actually somebody I was curious to hear from in the aftermath of this.
There are hints of improvements for vintage sellers, do you see this as a possibility in direct relationship to what came out of Analyst Day, or do you think this information is being misconstrued, or possibly just taken at face value, by some heavy hitter sources (such as Wall Street Journal) out of ignorance of the antiques & collectibles industry?
Basically, that’s the question I’ve been dying to ask you!
Thanks again, Cliff
Cliff I think the Wall St. Journal got it wrong if their take was that eBay will be mending bridges with vintage sellers.
The message I got from eBay is that they are not interested in catering to those who sell unique items. Lorrie Norrington said, “if the old eBay was about selling things out of your attic, the new eBay is about selling warehouse liquidations” (uggh)
They stated several times that the auctions were a small part of what they are about.
It sounds like eBay is interested in the being the avenue for the cheap imports that are no longer salable in stores. Now, if we as a country, are not interested in buying this junk in the stores anymore, what makes them think we’ll want it on eBay?
I don’t think the WSJ gets it, and don’t think eBay does either. But I did look around that day to see what others were saying, and from the New York Times to blogspot blogs, the eBay Analyst Day did not seem to impress.
Thanks, Walt, that’s exactly how I took it.
Here’s from the WSJ:
“EBay’s focus on its “secondary market” includes the used and vintage goods that the company is already known for selling, as well as clearance and out-of-season items.”
And today from Seeking Alpha:
“eBay last week cried uncle when it announced it was returning to its roots as an auction clearinghouse for used goods and collectibles (in addition to overstocked items).”
But I heard what you heard and agree, we seem to be the smaller piece of the pie as illustrated on the chart Mitzi posted.
The cynic in me is saying – sure they want to keep the vintage sellers, they are, for the most part, honest sellers we can make money off of without much energy or attention, while we focus on giving sweetheart deals to the large companies and their warehouses full of crap that no one wants to beef up our listing total so we can show Wall Street everything is A-OK.
The optimist in me is saying – Maybe eBay does realize the positive (and profitable) user base they have in the vintage categories, and are going to include them in their efforts going forward. They gave us free photos not long ago, and just this week I saw a big ad spread in Country Living magazine from eBay focused on “shopping green” and highlighting vintage (I’ll be posting that on the Vintage List blog tomorrow!).
I wish we had a crystal ball to know how it’s all going to shake out – but, we don’t, all we can do is what is best for our businesses.
I don’t agree with Walt that eBay isn’t even part of the conversation anymore – that may be true for those sellers who have left, but for those of us that are still on the site it is certainly isn’t!
Hey Mitzi,
Thanks for replying, and thanks for your original blog post.
Yes, I’d like a view of that crystal ball too, because thinking about this all out loud like we’re doing has me wondering if eBay might have taken a step back towards the course I want them on. That was kind of the point of how I spun this, all I’m hearing is more of the same bad eBay scolding, but then I those couple of articles spinning it differently–and while that spin remains bad for investors, it shows hope for vintage sellers.
No secret where my interest lies between those two camps.
Very interesting what you say about Country Living, I look forward to hearing more about it. I used to get very upset when the eBay Catalogs would come and vintage would be under-represented or only show off items in the luxury price range. I’ve said before, actually to both you and Walt, that I think the “Shopping Green” idea is a very interesting way to appeal to potential new collectors.
Let’s see how they do.
Thanks, Cliff