Thoughts.com Blogs - EBAY DOESN'T WANT ANY "RIFF-RAFF"

By "riff-raff" I mean the basic home seller selling their second-hand goods online to earn a bit of extra cash for themselves, not the high volume business sellers which it now favours. This attitude has been underlined in a recent interview John Donahoe (head of ebay) made to the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/technology/17ebay.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin

It seems he wants ebay to be more like a "strip mall" than a "flea market" and is intent on stamping on the private home seller as much as he can in the next few months.

It's really sad that they're being victimized in this way considering it was these sellers that actually made ebay in the first place. It was this "flea market" characteristic which made it such a thrilling place to buy and sell on, where you could find anything - no matter what it was. But this year will see the end to that. Those stories you've all heard in the past of strange items being sold on ebay will be just that - a thing of the past. In other words, John Donohoe is intent on ripping the heart and soul right out of ebay and turning it into just another Amazon. When that happens it will become a very dull place indeed!

These business sellers (powersellers and ebay shop owners) are just as bad. They haven't raised a single voice in defence of the small seller, choosing to turn their backs on them as they snuggle up to mother ebay, quickly forgetting that they were once just like them. This rift between sellers never used to exist, there used to be a pleasant solidarity between powersellers and small sellers, but over the past few years ebay has sadistically hammered a solid wedge between them and split them apart. The private seller is now viewed as the poor relation, the leper in the community that ebay, along with it's loyal army of business sellers, want to get rid of for good.

Like I've said before, this is a big mistake. After all, their business sellers aren't going to stay with them forever. Even the most loyal amongst them will one day decide to go it alone, without the need for ebay as a resource. The problem ebay will then have is who will replace them when their seedbed of private sellers is gone? It's like a deep-sea diver cutting his oxygen line, thinking he can hold his breath forever. Even a company as vampiric as ebay needs a continual supply of new blood, and no private seller will consider becoming a business seller if there aren't any of them there to begin with.

I started out in 1999 as a small seller. A couple of years later I became a high volume seller, but in the past few years, with the first signs of ebay's changing attitude, I decided to return as a small private seller. This I prefer, because I was able to give my buyers a much more personal selling service that business sellers do not, and my buyers do appreciate it, and I'm glad I'm no longer "one of them" (a business seller). In the next blog I do, I'll tell you how you should buy from business and private sellers, as it is important that buyers treat each one very differently now.