Big day in ebay-land - Kiss the two-cent buy-bye...

Well folks, it's officially September 21st the last day that $.02 (affectionately known as 'two-cent') eBay Store listings will live on eBay.  On August 21st sellers had their last blast of listing at .02 and now we are the expiration date of those listings.  Seller feedback has been across the board.  As you can imagine the sellers that invested years of hard work into their store and have > 100k listings there are most severely impacted.   Traditional auction-style/core listing sellers didn't miss a beat.

One interesting page to track is the eBay stores "see all stores by size".  Before the fee increase the top store was Mega Media Depot with 628k listings.

Now the top three are:

1. NorthKeyMovies with 205k items,
2. carpartswholesale with 180k
3. moviemarz with 147k items

So the 'new regime' top three don't even add up to the previous numero uno.  The end result is LOTS of store listings are gone.  As a big fan of the long tail, my concern here is eBay cuts out too much selection from the site and thus those long-tail buyers that come in, no longer believe/experience "whatever IT is find it on eBay" and thus shop elsewhere. 

Stores are like fight club: The nice thing about two-cent stores is you have an abundance of inventory.  The bad thing about two-cent stores is you have an abundance of inventory.

 

Most of the stock analysts track all of these listings (at eBay's direction here) at a daily/weekly level and I thought I'd highlight a good summary that Imran@JPM put out this week:

If you'll follow the US stores weekly trend from 7/30/06 to 9/17 you'll see the listings go from 6.6m to a peak of 8.3 (driven by the 8/21 last hoo-ra) and then a low of 4.5m the week of 9/10. I'm predicting we'll see another dip in the next two weeks as the fee increase REALLY hits home and those new listing and FVFs hit.

Finally, if you look at the US core line (under big three heading), there's some signs of life there, but the jury is still out.

eBay Strategies readers - how are you doing over there?!  Let us know via comments.

Comments

[Christopher Matthew Spencer]

Scot, I have not seen you since Live! when we did the panel, but I have been reading your blog entries and find it informative. In our industry of Trading Assistants, we don't feel the burn so much by fee increases incrementally because our business is primarily auction-style listing format with a fixed margin based upon our commission schedule. I am interested in seeing a random sampling of data presented in three months to see how the landscape changes.

Clearly there is a tremendous shifting as eBay is no longer the darling prodigy and other channels compete for attention. In our world we are all about eBay but it would be foolish to believe that others feel as we do so we keep our ears open to see how the markets morph.

In the vein, we are consulting the with new Online Market World conference which we know will be big in '07 and will bring glue to the various segmented players who will need to play together more as things evolve here.

As much as we stay abreast of it, we remain an eBay-centric business as that is the model we use and it actually has been improving for us as prices are rising for us in some areas. For example, an Anaconda Brewing Company beer tray which we sold for $995.00 on 09/11/2006 (yikes!) is 2x+ the selling price we got for the same tray which was $466.81 on 10/15/2003. For us the prices are going up on many items and we have lots of similar examples to prices which are rising overall in the areas we sell most.

I attended the PeSA event and there was a general tone "against" eBay in many of the voices there and I think much of this is simply residual anger over price changes. I really believe it will calm down once people understand that eBay is a great tool for some sellers and other sellers need more than one channel to do what they do.

I have been trying to determine if multi-channel selling works for my industry and frankly have not been convinced it will be helpful to us and so we remain an eBay-only business.

[Bill]

A few charts have been done and it shows they are making more money with the increase. In the Midwest we call it getting the last drop out of the cow before it is sold for slaughter.

Bill

[RadioComputerSupply]

It would be nice to see a chart on the revenue lost (or gained) by this move but that would tell the story to Wall Street.

[Greg Spurgin]

In my little niche on eBay Australia (where the fee rises have been even higher) I have seen two of my competitors disappear, and one other competitor who never did "core" listings has dropped of to about a third of previous sales. I have put up lots of "core" listings, but I would have to say I am struggling to match store traffic that I had before search changed. It would be nice to think with all these competitors gone I would be selling much more, but no. I think in my little category alone eBay has lost lots of sales and lots of revenue.