I’ve thought and thought about some simple, practical, and effective changes that eBay could make to turn around the current decline in the performance of its core marketplace.  Here’s what I came up with, that is different to what other commentators have said in their lists.

1.  Listing scheduling - The fee for scheduling a listing is pure usury.  It is completely unnecessary and heavily degrades the buyer and seller experience.  Here’s why – As a buyer I do not want to browse categories and suddenly find dozens, or hundreds, of near identical consecutive listings from the same seller that are of no interest to me.  This swamping occurs directly because of the scheduling fee.

Compare any eBay site that charges for scheduling against any eBay site that does not, or that gives it free with a shop or SMP subscription.  When scheduling is free, sellers space out their listings attempting to get a broader spread of end times, capturing different viewer/buyer eyeballs at different peak times and on different peak days/evenings.  They can also leverage time zone differences to internationalise their sales opportunities.  Using Turbo Lister, they can set the automatic spacing between listings at anywhere from one to sixty minutes for simple batch uploading, or set listing start times individually per listing/group of listings.  This avoids single seller clusters of listings in browse and search results.

Charging a scheduling fee that is often close to the minimum insertion fee in price, simply deters sellers from making use of this feature, and has destroyed some of the buzz that used to surround core eBay due to constant variety in the browse and search results.  Ergo, ditch the scheduling fee across all eBay sites – let sellers spread out their listings for free, and return choice of seller (as well as choice of item) to the results.

It will also help to spread the load on servers and infrastructure, as sellers can then upload at times to suit themselves, scheduled to start/finish at times to suit the buyers, and upload sufficiently in advance that the listing does not lose up to 24 hours of its initial display time whilst it is bot-checked for listing compliance.

Making such a move would be an all-round winner for everyone – sellers could schedule realistic working times, buyers get to see product lists that are not dominated by one seller tweaking title keywords to have a 20-page list of otherwise identical items, and eBay would see a bigger number of viable listings arriving onto the site at differing times.

2.  Make all eBay Shops/Stores fully internationally visible - For a venue that touts itself as a “global marketplace”, eBay devotes a lot of effort into fragmenting itself into village green sized markets.  Since the start of the Millennium, I have watched the powers-that-be chip away at the cross border viability of eBay, and at the visibility that is supposed to be delivered for the ever-increasing fees.

So here’s a simple fix that will avoid swamping core, but will provide sellers with what they seek, and buyers with the choice that is being garotted by Best Match.  Make all Shop/Store listings automatically full global visibility and provide buyers with just two basic filters at a first level – filter by listing language (English, German, Timbuktooese or whatever), and by the option to show results from “only my country / only my continent / worldwide”, but make the defaults as “any language” and “worldwide”.  Then once those (first filter) results are returned, add additional filters for buyers to use.

In tech terms, such a move would give eBay real experience of moving all listings to the same global visibility in the future, but initially from within the less visible and less used global stores environment, and therefore more manageable from an infrastructure point of view.  Let’s face it, with their Q4 results released last week, something has to be opened up, back towards what eBay used to be.

3.  Return to the flea-market - The UK has just announced it is in recession.  The USA is too, and Germany has been for quite some time.  Those are eBay’s three largest marketplaces, and together they account for the majority of sales GMV, and fee revenue, on the platform.

In recessionary times people want bargains, but the current fee structure for under a selling price under 10 currency units (dollars, pounds, euros, whatever) have become prohibitive.  Listing for 1 currency unit is as much as a 20% insertion fee.  Selling at that price, the FVF is as high as 15% (site & format dependent), and then PayPal takes a further 20-35% flat charge, plus up to 3.9% in commission, and maybe another 2.5% for currency conversion.

Total all those up under worst case accounting, and selling a 99p/99c item gives eBay Inc a 76.4% slice of the selling price (it’s actually more because PayPal is also taking a slice of the P&P charged).  Yet it was exactly these low-price sales that built the buyer base on eBay in the first place.  Fees for low price items MUST be lowered on both eBay globally, and on PayPal, otherwise eBay can never perform as it should during a global economic recession.

4.  Re-ignite Core (again) - Add a special insertion fee tier, of say 5p/5c, for all listings starting under £1/$1/Eu1 – better yet, do as Germany have done and make it free for sellers with accounts in good standing.

Reintroduce a very genuine incentive for sub-99c/99p auction starts, and reverse the £1/$1/Eu1 minimum BIN price policy that has decimated categories such as craft supplies and jewellery findings/beads etc.

Return the power of offering bargains to the sellers, and reward them for doing so.  It is the most needed feature on eBay during financial hard times, and it is what built eBay to where it was two years ago.

Why item number 4?

As the following MedVed graph illustrates, the reality of sell-through rate (STR), by auction or BIN, appears to be very different to what the ex-Bains, who are now sellers’ banes, appear to have expected from all of last year’s changes.

And this close-up of only-2008 shows where those sell-through rates truly went awry, and completely destroyed the trend of the previous 5 years.

Now let me see … what was the change that eBay made last September, that would cause such a massive shift on the graph?  Ah yes, FP30 (USA) / new-BIN/SIF (UK), and nothing under £1/$1/Eu1 in any format.  What a disaster that must be proving – hmmm?

As Randy Smythe might say, “Just my ‘lost’ 12% worth”. 

Ed