So, let’s be perfectly clear. At times, I love eBay to death. But lately, they are like that alcoholic junkie family member that you love but you have to get rid of because they just fuck with your life too much. eBay are seriously fucking around with sellers with all their downtime, glitches and other nonsense and then their CEO Devin Wenig who at times sounds kinda smart but usually sound completely out of touch like he doesn’t even know what eBay even is or what people like about it. So Devin Wenig says in the July call that he is not going to worry about growing the business and bringing in more buyer and encouraging buyers to buy more and you know — what they should be doing, which is to earn more fees from more actual sales — what I would call REAL growth.
Nooooo, eBay are not concerned with real growth – they simply feel they can milk the sellers they already have for more fees.
So if you are considering this for a stock buy, you might want to REALLY RESEARCH because this is downright scary. Here is a simple comparison, so simple even some of the people (like their CSRs that answer the phone who are all idiots can follow)
If you own a slaughterhouse, you make your money by KILLING and selling what you kill, RIGHT? Yes, I know graphic but it is a good comp, I promise.
You decide that you want to make more money so you can kill more and make more or you can try to get efficient and get more meat from the cows you already have. That “getting more with what we have” might work for a while but at some point, you will need to bring in new cows — OR YOU WON’T HAVE ANYTHING. You cannot kill (and eat) something that isn’t there. So this whole, “we will just milk our current sellers” and not worry about new buyers and new users and new sellers is FLAWED HORRIBLY. Hopefully someone will figure this out because NEW USERS is a very important metric. New users ARE NEW BUYERS and they are also NEW SELLERS. So not only do they give you “fresh meat” but a lot of them will become new sellers who will bring “more fresh meat” The eBay new seller metric is GARBAGE and if they don’t fix it, it will only get worse. And this has nothing to do with Amazon and nothing to do with Alibaba or China or imports or tariffs. This has to do with eBay not having a clue what their business is and with treating their sellers poorly so they leave.
If you would like to read more about the new plan to just milk sellers for more fees, you can check it out on ecommercebytes by clicking here