I’m kind of snowed under with stuff today and not much time to add to the blog, but I promised updates on the effects of the eBay strike, so I’ll need to add something about that.

First though I wanted to post something about a snippet I read somewhere else.

It seems that Google Checkout is to introduce multi-user functionality, so that business users and other organisations can have more than one person logging in at a time.  The announcement at Google’s Checkout blog states that the extra users will not be able to view invoice or payment details, which makes it pretty pointless really.  I can understand restricting their ability to add or change bank accounts and so on, but surely the idea of multiple users is to allow them to verify payment and delivery details, order contents, and then to begin processing of the orders towards despatch?  Maybe I’m missing something, or maybe the Google poster miscopied something?  Time will tell.

What’s happening on day 4 of the eBay Seller’s strike?  Not a lot it would seem.

Total listings took another plunge yesterday, as expected considering it was the last of the mainstream 7-day listing life from the Cheap Listing Day on the 13th.  As a side note, looking at the graph above, there two vitally important pieces of sales-strategy information revealed – have you spotted them?  If you think you have, add a comment to this post, I’ve got a freebie prize for the person who spots the same sales tips that I’ve spotted.

However total active listings are still around half a million higher than on the 12th February, suggesting there’s a lot of 10-day listings still active from the CLD, or that the non-striking sellers have put Turbo Lister into overdrive to capitalise on lower competition.

Looking at the crucial sell-through rate (listings that achieve sales) there’s been a tiny drop so far this week, but nothing out of the extraordinary – it’s a shame that Medved lost the data for Sunday though, as it would have been useful to know the bidding peak for the crucial Sunday the strike started.  The flat graph from the 19th to the 20th hints at a lack of listings, or bids, as I would have expected to see an upsurge in success rates on the 7th day of a CLD’s life-cycle, immediately before the bulk of listings dropped off the screen.  The jury is still out on what happened there.

 Looking at the same week a year ago, at the time of all the shenanigans regarding did Google drop eBay from their search results or not, you can see a much less clear picture of what was happening to listing volume, although the Sunday to Thursday curve sort of matches this year’s, it’s at around 750,000 higher (than 2008) for both the peak and the trough.  Fuzzy logic says then, that appears to be the rough number of listings eBay lost this week due to the strike.  It’ll become clearer tomorrow and Saturday.

This last graph shows the totals for the month so far in terms of active auctions – I’m not sure if MedVed is counting only auctions in this graph, or if they’re including fixed price listings as well.  The steepness of the drop from the peak on the 13th would imply that it’s for both formats, with sales from fixed price  items closing listings progressively during the period of the CLD’s 7 days, rather than only in clear steps after 1, 3, 5, and 7 days.  The closure of the 7-day listings, yesterday, can be clearly seen on this graph.

If the fuzzy logic is correct, then total listings should drop below the 12 million mark sometime Saturday night, maybe further, though somehow i doubt they’ll go as low as 11 million.  Net effect – the strike was an irritating itch, not a body blow, about on a par with a mosquito biting an elephant’s butt. 

I’ll post again on Sunday with the “end of strike” graphs.

Ed

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