eBay appear to have rolled out the 18-inch naval guns to shoot their own feet again.
This month sees the switch from being reliant on Commission Junction (CJ) for management of their Affiliate Marketing scheme, to taking it in-house with the eBay Partner Network. Last month’s announcement was full of hype and spin about improved benefits and flexibility for affiliates, but already long-standing CJ members are complaining of being refused admission to the new Partner Network.
Universally, those refused membership appear to be marketers who are also eBay sellers that at some point have crossed swords with eBay, and been labelled “bad boys & girls”. This includes sellers and PowerSellers who have disagreed with eBay staff in the eBay forums, then been “sanctioned” (banned from posting in forum) by eBay’s 3rd-party forum moderators “LiveWorld”, through to marketers whom eBay regards as having either competing or “eBay-unfriendly” websites.
Additionally, “good” marketers whose status of registration falls under “3rd-location” residency are being denied entry to the Partner Network. These are affiliates who have business and banking registration in one country, but reside and operate in another. One would think eBay would be thoroughly comfortable with this concept, especially with all their European subsidiaries owned and financially managed from a holding company in Luxembourg, but nope, what’s good for the goose is not good enough for the ganders. Swathes of ongoing CJ affiliate marketers are being locked out of the eBay Partner Network.
All of which creates a chasm of opportunity for eBay’s competitors, but which, based on historical evidence, few are likely to grab …
The thing I’ve noticed about online sales venues is that mostly they break the mould of traditional income:expense financial modelling. It’s a peculiarity of the Internet. Apart from eBay, most of the long standing competition are those with “effectively free to list” fee models. It’s the ones who jumped straight in with across-the-board fees in place, that have disappeared, and it’s the ones who embraced affiliate marketing that have most benefitted in recent years.
The most successful and long-standing eBay competitors are those that eschewed listing fees in favour of success fees, however, with one exception, they mostly have suffered from site names that are not memorable, and in the case of the exception, their name is too close to eBay’s, and I’m sure that’s damaged them in marketing with message-receivers diverting to the larger site due to household-name syndrome.
Another area that has caused slower growth in the smaller sites individually, seems to be that most of them are founded by technicians, not marketeers. By this I mean they seem to spend too much of the growth phase focussing on the site features and structure, and not enough on getting the message out to would-be users. TazBar seemed to break that mould, but I think they mistimed.
If TazBar had not launched in mid-2006 (on the back of the “shops in core” debacle on eBay) they could have aimed for a more propitious launch-point, which may have gained them more sustainable initial momentum. As it was, there is an underlying thinking that TazBar was yet another angst-competitor similar to the many we’ve seen launch since late January this year. The very fact they seem to be “doing an eBay” causes support for that line of thinking. There is little to differentiate them from eBay, and a lot of that must lie with the founders’ origins in ecommerce (being all ex-eBay powersellers).
eBay competitors need Unique Selling Points to differentiate themselves - here’s some examples -
Niche sites
delCampe - Philately and postal memorabilia only. By far eBay’s largest competitor in this field, and actually far bigger than eBay in it. Unlike eBay, they leave it to sellers to choose if they want to be seen across all sites, or only on their home site, and this without an International Listing Visibility Fee.
Etsy - Crafts and handmade items - rapidly overtaking eBay in this product area, but becoming a little image-conscious in the buyer complaints arena. They seem to be becoming a little too influenced by eBay policies in failing to allow buyers to take responsibility for the buyers’ own decisions, and have been reported lately as punishing sellers for buyers unwillingness to exercise due diligence when purchasing, and for buyer-impatience regarding shipping conditions clearly laid out by sellers, that the buyers refuse to read or comprehend.
WargamesMarket - has “stolen” 90%+ of eBay’s sellers (and listings) and is growing rapidly with buyers - they founded within the last year and have already destroyed eBay’s marketplace for these products. (average UK list count in (one example) 15mm tabletop down from 7000+ daily average, to 600-700 daily average). Also, they are doing what eBay was never able to do - they are pulling the home-industry wargames manufacturers into trading online (other than on their own websites), and are receiving approval, and listings, from the larger, international, wargames companies too.
Non-Niche
eBid - Lifetime memberships and free multiple shop identities per seller account, with automatic cross promotion between the shops. Something eBay have been asked for, for years and have failed to provide. Also, each listing is available on all sites by default if the seller selects this - something eBay used to offer, but is rapidly removing in order to gouge yet more fees. Additionally, sellers have a much more detailed choice of which countries they will and will not ship to - they can exclude the notoriously bad Italian market while keeping other European countries for example.
eBid has always been held back by lack of a good, offline listing tool, now it’s under development, eBay should be very concerned and look again at their business model. Tazbar (and others) could be finished off when that eBid tool goes live, leaving eBay UK with a single, focussed, general auctions competitor, and a far bigger threat because of it.
Amazon - no chargeback risks to sellers, multiple account types to fit most sellers business models, universal presentation style for the company’s own products and 3rd party sellers’ products provides a unified image, with most buyers not differentiating between Amazon stock and 3rd party stock. One monthly subscription option with no further up-front fees (ideal for volume listers). It’s no wonder that Amazon have been capturing eBay market share (and buyers & sellers) hand over fist recently.
At the end of the day, Amazon’s model is a little different to all the others - Amazon itself trades product on its site, in competition with its 3rd party sellers, and that doesn’t harm them. eBay, TazBar, et al, could be doing the same - they could leverage marketing muscle and market position by taking up with (for example) software companies on a drop-shipping basis. The profits from such trading could be used to stall fees growth, or even to partly offset fees and cause a reduction in them. I suspect that currently, both etsy and wargames market are doing similar - they’re both enthusiast marketplaces and for the owners to get into them, they must have an interest in the sector’s products and be trading them, though whether on the owners’ accounts, or on the sites’ accounts is another story.
It’s impossible for any non-global (and by global I mean the likes of Yahoo, Virgin, Microsoft et al) to create a start-up to take on eBay head-to-head. What they’ll all do is nibble at the edges, fragmenting and diluting the marketplace, and causing even more panic reactions (fee increases and seller punishments) from eBay. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, new entrants MUST go niche. They cannot succeed with a general marketplace against eBay. It’s too late to attempt that, and they’d be better off supporting the existing players if they want to go down that route.
The likes of TazBar, CQout, QXL etc fall into what I refer to as 3rd tier markets. Right now, there are very few 2nd tier players - eBid is just edging into it this year, OLA in the USA have just entered it, and there are a couple of others, mainly in the USA. Up in the first tier it’s eBay vs Amazon and that’s it.
However, the more that eBay continues to segregate its national marketplaces, the greater the risk of each dropping from 1st tier to 2nd tier or lower (most of its Asian markets are actually 3rd tier on their own, and only get 1st or 2nd tier ranking due to the global identity of the parent). When looking at individual eBay countries, only the UK, US, and Germany are tier 1. Many of the others, including Canada and Australia are tier 3. Tiny little Belgium, is actually a bigger market than France right now, and both of those are still tier 3, about on a par with TazBar - way smaller than eBid.
eBay New Zealand was effectively killed off and shut down, several years ago, by independant all-categories auction site TradeMe.co.nz - however, TradeMe pulled a lot of revenue from online dating and property location services integrated to the site (there’s that niche angle again). eBay never did get more than a little finger into the NZ market and ended up pulling their site, keeping only a portal there that redirects into the US site. Australia is in serious danger of going the same way due to the avalanche of competitor sites opening up down under, especially the reverse-auction sites (where buyers pay to place a bid, but it’s the lowest bid that wins - the site then shares the buyer fees with the seller), but Oz is too valuable a test bed for eBay - look at all the policies announced there, that I predicted would go global, then did so.
I still feel TazBar is still trying to be too much “same same” as eBay, and that they’re going the same way with fees too. They don’t have the membership mass, or momentum, to be “doing an eBay” - and if they don’t take care, they never will. This is the opposite of eBid’s free-to-list strategy, and it shows when comparing growth between the two sites.
In my book, TazBar should try a brave move such as cutting back fees now (to gain growth and momentum) but announce (for example) a five-year plan for fee introductions/increases, and stick to it. That way, they can attract memberships, build volume and trade, gather fees at future points that sellers can plan for, and avoid the “greedbay” tagging that the big site generates.
For several years, eBid have offered an affiliate program via ClixGalore, which has been very much an on-off-on again one. Very recently they bit the bullet and began offering affiliates a higher share of the revenue from CPA adverts via the Google Adsense Referrals program. It seems to be paying off for them. The power of marketing replication via an easily accessible affiliate program really does work. eBay seem to have forgotten that fundamental.
The new eBay Partner Network is not only being extremely picky about who they accept (reducing their marketing network) they also are earning the reputation of requiring affiliates to have active eBay accounts. Whether this reputation is founded correctly or incorrectly, early online discussions off-eBay are reinforcing this and it will cause a great many CJ affiliate to simply delete eBay from their program list and not bother attempting to join the Partner Network. This will create large holes in many websites that will be crying out for replacement ads and advertisers.
Now is the time for all af the tier 2 auction sites to make the marketing push to have programs with CJ and fill the voids eBay have created this month. It is also the time for the larger tier 3 sites to do the same. Leveraging the marketing multiplication effect of affiliate programs is critical for the smaller sites too.
In-house marketing and SEO efforts can only go so far. As some of the newest sites are discovering, personal member blogs in site (similar to eBay myWorld blogs) are essential marketing tools for social networking. Many continue to rely on member-support forums alone, which is better than nothing, but for those without blogs, an affiliate advertising program is now more essential than ever, to take advantage of eBay’s alienating many of its longest-supporting ad publishers.
Ed
The BuildaSkill Affiliate Agencies List
The BuildaSkill Affiliate Marketing Forums -
ClixGalore, Commission Junction, Shopping Ads (3rd party route to eBay affiliateship)
The BuildaSkill Online Selling Forums -
Amazon, CQout, delCampe, eBay, eBid, Etsy, QXL, TazBar, WargamesMarket
Apologies to William Shakespeare, but after the winter and spring of discontent comes the summer of reflection. It appears many eBay sellers are seriously questioning whether they should continue using the company’s sites, and those questions are not related solely to fees, but a growing awareness of the dirty tricks being played on them.
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