Sooooooo I am sure all eBay sellers know this by now but Devin Wenig is OUT — AND IT COULD NOT BE SOON ENOUGH!!!
ebay sellers have complained about him for years and Wall Street was blinded by him but he really did some damage to ebay and now it is showing. His “squeeze more blood from the turnip” strategies did not result in ANYTHING BUT NEGATIVE GROWTH. ebay actually LOST MARKET SHARE AND LOST SELLERS AND LOST REVENUE AND LOST LISTINGS AND LOST BUYERS under his regime because it was all SHORT TERM TURNIP SQUEEZING.
My First example is the reduction in the Top Rated Seller Program. This used to be a 20% discount on sellers fees so really for most sellers, it wasn’t a huge amount when he reduced it to 10% but it did give some sellers pause on whether they be doing the things that are required to be a TRS like ship every business day. Personally I stayed with it until the next little retarded gem he cooked up which was…..
FREE RETURNS – I take returns and I have no issues in paying the return shipping because I have a very loyal and wonderful base of buyers on eBay so if one of them has an issues, send it back. happy to pay the return shipping. BUT FREE RETURNS invites a group of buyers I frankly do not want and that is the wishy washy not sure crowd. Most small sellers like me cannot afford for people to try before they buy and then eat the return shipping and the penalty from ebay when they decide they don’t want it so when ebay came up with this as a requirement for TRS, I ditched TRS. At the same time, I adjusted my handling to a longer period of time and went to 2 day handling which means I only need to ship M-W-F. So don’t tell me I was the only one who walked away from TRS due to free returns because you know tons of people did. So did ebay save $$ — of course they did, but they also increased the wait time for their buyers in some cases.
Now those were not the only BS ideas during the Wenig regime and I am sure I can think of dumb ideas from any CEO anywhere if I do a bit of research but destroying long term growth for short term stock gains or just to stabilize stock is not going to be a winning strategy so see ya Devin. Hopefully the board and their new bunch of more interested investors will find someone who understands long term growth better and while they are at it — —
CAN THE NEW CEO when you find him/her please teach everyone that downtime costs $$$. Every time a buyer has to try multiple times to complete a sale or pay for an item is an opportunity for them to just say fuck it and go somewhere else!! So all of the downtime events and payment issues needs to be addressed because they are both counter to the buyer experience as well as revenue – God only knows how many abandoned carts could have NOT been that had the buyer been able to complete the sale and not been glitched to the point of frustration!
BYE BYE DEVIN — Go sit by the pool somewhere !! Hopefully the wave after wave of technical issues will leave with you!