With a revolt brewing, why is eBay still laughing?

Since eBay increased its fees and banned payments other than PayPal, most eBay sellers are furious about the decision. If you go to the eBay power seller’s forum, http://www.powersellersunite.com, you can feel the heat and clearly see there is a revolt brewing against eBay. Some sellers are even asking sellers to boycott eBay on May 1st to deliver a strong message. You rarely ever see a revolt of this scale, against a business by it’s own members!

On Wednesday, 16th of April, on the morning 2GB’s special eBay topic talk-back show, almost 100% of the callers condemned the changes. An eBay spokesperson was also on hand to defend their policy. When faced with a sea of furious callers, this extremely well spoken guy (probably good looking as well) cited improved security as one of the main reasons for its decision. Compared to the stressed out and angry callers, he was so calm, confident and delighted, behind his well organised words, you could feel his true attitude: “just shut up or piss off if you are not happy!” You could sense he just thought all of those stressed out angry sellers’ were a joke.

As an eBay Powerseller, I truly understand the feeling of sellers, it’s just an extra cost for us to bear and extra income for eBay to enjoy. A friend of mine recently spent a lot of money not too long ago implementing an online payment system for his eBay buyers. Now with the change to the PayPal only system, all his money’s been wasted and for the sake of his business, he needs to employ an extra 4 people to handle the payments section before any alternative system can be set up. With extra labor costs and extra payment settlement costs, eBay sellers are getting squeezed too hard. Although sellers are extremely reluctant to increase their prices when they realise it’s an inevitable cost for everyone, they will be forced to by either increasing the Buy It Now price or raise delivery charges to offset PayPal fees. Although buyers are making less noise at the moment, in the end it will be ALL eBay users who with suffer.

I now have to ask this question, how can eBay think they can simply defy the odds by pressing even harder, even with this kind of resistance and not worry about losing customers? How can they possess this kind of super power other business don’t have? Honestly, I have to say they deserve it. After years of superb work and marketing, they built the best auction site on earth. In terms of online auctions, they are the Mt. Everest. Almost nobody can compare.Those who have tried to overtake them have often fallen to the wayside. Other sites are happy to sit by, and watch eBay users be squeezed, get angry and suffer, because they know that some eBay users are glutton for punishment and will come back to trade on eBay despite how they are treated. EBay knows they hold all the cards! Without eBay, where can sellers go? Some eBayers have tried to organise boycotts to deliver the angry message and stop eBay from pressing too hard.eBay knows they are big enough to weather any storm and sellers that boycott will only be hurting themselves! After using the Australian market as a Guinea pig, they will push PayPal to all global sites! Their profits will soar indefinitely. It doesn’t matter how eBay users are.

eBay users and competitors must be wondering, are they truly invincible? Like human beings trying to reach higher altitudes, after reaching the top of Mt. Everest, they just can’t go any higher unless someone thinks of something revolutionary. But by inventing the aeroplane, man can go higher than any mountain! Look at Kodak film. No other film makers can come close to Kodak, but they were replaced by a new format almost overnight. Kodak, the most well known film company nearly drowned in its own developer due to the invention of the digital camera.When we look at this scenario in comparison to eBay, you can see that it won’t be replaced by a more user/seller friendly auction website, it will be replaced by an all new concept of online trading.What once worked for everyone now is starting to not work. It’s time for a new idea.

Beside extremely low fees, OfferMe has all the other advantages eBay doesn’t and a concept that makes eBay look out-of-date in this new, next generation way of selling. I just wonder if OfferMe will stop eBay laughing?

Author: Albert Yang