eBay: Ship of Fools? Yeah, but the boat is still solid.
I think Meg and Pierre need to retain Donald Trump for a few board meetings, because some Apprentice rejects are apparently running the show now. Let's see...implement internal messaging only policy .... announce blatant rate hikes to support recent options packages via (external) email ... spend the next few weeks dealing with a latter-day Reform Party convention ... decide that half an options package is better than nothing, so announce (another external email) rethinking, including a slight reduction in rate, and 'real, live, customer service' .... what's next? Probably lots of people leaving, actually.

But, is that really a bad thing? Personally, I think the "permanent" store items are today's version of the "free" auction listing. Where the early days featured spam-like auctions for the most inane, semi-legitimate (if that) items available, today's "auction-store" features spam-like listings for commodity items of tangible price (if not value).

In theory, items that would normally not sell at auction can be sold in a permanent 'store' listing, at a fixed price. In practice, commodity items that would normally sell at auction are offered around the maximum (or higher) bid price, to remain untouched until supply drops enough to shift prices above the items' asking mark. So, while eBay collects lots of revenues from these static listings, their offerings suffer as a whole, due to lower signal-to-noise, and increased stagnation.

So, a reduced number of junk listings, in the form of eBay's stores, should be a silver lining to management's dark cloud. Next up: creative (if not effective) solutions to the stores problem.

posted at: 02:05 | path: | permanent link to this entry