eBay Live 09 Cancelled - Focus to be smaller events

On the US announcements board this week, director of eBay Marketplace Operations, Lorrie Norrington has announced there will be no eBay Live in 2009.  Instead she says eBay will run more, smaller, events, giving more people the chance to interface with eBay and PayPal staff.

Hoorah says I, with a big BUT.

If this means the senior management will get out on the road more, and visit their developing markets such as South East Asia - with recognition that, for example in my case, the "small" countries in the developing world also require multiple events (it takes 14 hours on the train from here to Thailand's capital, Bangkok) then this will be a long awaited good move.

However, if as expected, the forays from the San Jose's Ivory Towers never leave mainland USA, then it's a yah-boo-hiss from me.

I very much want the opportunity to front the likes of Ms Norrington and her bosses with questions (and documentary evidence) regarding how the new policies have been destroying my business.  Visitor traffic to my listings are down on every site except Australia (and that's due to the mass seller exodus over the PayPal-only policy).  Page views per visitor are up, but spend per visitor is down - this means the average number of page views per Pound of revenue is through the roof.  The reduced number of browsers are looking, but not spending.

I know exactly why as well.  Not only are those who do buy, hammering our shipping DSRs because of our location (they're reading despatch time as meaning total delivery time, which is wrong even by eBay's help page texts, and they're hitting us on P&P costs purely due to location without comparing the stated price or the delivery-surety services included in the price).  But also, we're suffering badly on the international visibility cuts eBay enforced last year, and introduced fees for, this year.  Those are causing escalating fee overheads which have to be recouped, and that means higher start prices, which now penalise everyone under the Best Match search criteria.

Of course, not all of it is eBay's fault, detrimental exchange rates have affected prices, and gloom about economies on both sides of the Atlantic are slowing bids.  But mostly, as proved by the data analysis, it's eBay policies that are causing our sales drop.  Our product range and target markets are not so affected by general economics as some other product groups.

Looking at our traffic analysis on Omniture, total monthly visitors from the US have dropped steadily by around 5% per month for each of the last nine months.  On the UK site, they have monthly yoyo'd by up to 40% every month in the last nine months, with the overall trend being downwards, such that last month was 50% down on August last year (both being peaks on the yoyo graph). 

The yoyo-ing itself speaks volumes about eBay playing on-off games with visibility of our listings.  December is normally a peak month for us, last year it was a trough - 65% down on November instead of the usual 10-20% up.  With total monthly visitor count jumping from 22,000 down to 15,000, then back up to 19,000, and down to 13,500 (for example) there's definately unseasonal factors at play.

Add in that our sales in the last week of April were 10% of the previous 3 weeks, and a switch was flipped off somewhere.  This week is, so far, no better.  That's 90% down, not 10% down.  Additionally we've had more days with no sales in the last fortnight, than we had in the whole of 2003 (our first year on eBay).

I remain unconvinced that Ms Norrington's announcement is aimed at improving communication between eBay and its small and medium sized sellers.  Looking at our experiences of the last 2 years, and all the policy changes in the same period, I think the new, smaller, roadshows are fishing expeditions, intended to showcase eBay to the local corporates in each location they visit, and that the little guys like us, will continue to be squeezed out by unannounced policies that hammer our visibility and sales.  One thing's for sure - corporate customers will not tolerate the on-off-on-again visibility so many current sellers are suffering, and reporting in the eBay forums.

Gaz