Why can’t eBay be more like Amazon?

This week saw both eBay and Amazon release their Q1 figures, with whats becoming a sad norm: eBay underperforming, Amazon bucking ecommerces downward trend. Mark T. posted the obvious question in our comments: why? Let me get what I want So to answer Mark, heres what I think: shopping on eBay is too damn difficult. eBay is the only site on the internet where you can be told off for changing your mind. If I’m buying from Amazon, I can put an item in my shopping basket and take it out again get halfway through checkout and decide I don’t want it go to pay, and decide I’m not going to pay, and then decide I prefer something else, and cancel in the click of a button so long as my item hasnt been dispatched yet. I can’t do *any* of that on eBay. eBay should join the 21st century, and get a shopping cart and a buyer-initiated cancellation before dispatch process, before all buyers quit in frustration and go somewhere else where its easier to shop. Every time I suggest eBay needs a shopping cart (and yes, I say it a lot ), a seller tells me that it wouldnt work because buyers would leave things in their carts, and those items would be stuck in limbo. Funnily, Amazon Marketplace has made this work just fine: the item isnt yours until youve paid for it and someone else can still buy it from under your nose. So in fact, youve got *more* incentive to buy now, *more* incentive to get on and check out – rather than doing the eBay thing of popping that BIN item on your watch list and forgetting about it. If we made it easier for people to shop, they would shop *more*. Of course, a shopping cart would require one other change to the eBay system: the much-needed addition of instant payment required for multiple items. Its utterly ridiculous that this hasnt be implemented, meaning that those of us who commonly sell multiples have to sit on unpaid eBay orders for sometimes weeks at a time. If eBay needs an incentive to make these essential changes, think about the extra PayPal-funded sales that multi-item IPR would bring in. But you will change your mind The easier shopping = more shopping rule also applies to order cancellation. Buyers – whether we like it or not – have a legal right to change their minds. The current system of UIDs undermines that right. Its too complicated, its too easy for either party to get wrong, it relies on clear and accurate communication when tempers may be getting frayed. And it should be gotten rid of. Lets replace it with: a buyer-initiated cancellation before dispatch process: until the seller has marked the item dispatched, the buyer can cancel their purchase. The PayPal payment will be refunded, the eBay fees (all of them, including featured) will be refunded, and the item will be automatically put back into stock – either added back into a live multi-item listing, or if on a single listing, made available for relisting to the seller. a seller-initiated cancellation before payment process: if the buyer hasnt paid after a stated amount of time (3, 5, 7 days&? could be seller-selectable) the seller can just cancel the sale and get their fees back. Without arguments, without negative feedbacks, without disputes. And for both of these, I would envisage saying that as no transaction has taken place, no feedback can be left by either party. eBay will doubtless worry that some sellers would abuse such a system to avoid fees. IMHO eBay are so obsessed with the idea of fee-avoidance that theyre ruining the site because of it. They can see which sellers are potentially abusing the system easily enough, and they can take action against them. And the rest of us can quit feeling like were in some Kafkaesque nursery school where childish bureaucracy rules, and get on with buying and selling. Youve got everything, now. In last weeks earnings call, John Donahoe said that eBay is outperforming ecommerce in general in every selling format it has, apart from auctions. Fixed price revenue is up 12%. Classifieds revenue is up a massive 23%. Auctions, on the other hand, are down 20%. So what is eBay doing? Encouraging sellers to list auctions. On .com, auctions insertion fees are 15c; BINs are 35c. On eBay UK, private sellers auctions starting at 99p or less have no insertion fees; BINs are 40p each if you dont have a shop. On eBay.fr, auctions are 15c and the headline price for BINs is 50c. eBay Germanys vastly complicated fee structure largely favours auctions. Sellers across all eBay sites are being pushed to list auctions. But (except perhaps in a very few specialist areas) the novelty of online auctions has worn off: buyers dont want to sit around for a week to see if theyve won – they just want to get on with their shopping: eBays own figures show that. What eBay does best is a phrase thats used often to back up arguments, and Im going to use it again here. Meg Whitman said that auctions were what eBay does best. John Donahoe seems to think that secondary market retailer clearance is what eBay does best. I disagree. What eBay does best and always has done is to provide a marketplace, for everyone, for everything. Amazon, Ebid, Bonanzle, dozens of start-up wannabees: nothing comes even close to eBays breadth of inventory, nothing comes close to the huge variety of sellers from the mother selling her kids unwanted toys to the biggest high-street names, nothing, in fact, comes close to eBay. eBay should stop being an auction site, and reposition itself as a shopping site. Sellers should be encouraged (financially) to list in the formats that work: the fixed price ones. eBay should teach buyers to think of eBay as the site where you can buy everything, right now (not a site where you can win that thing you want next week, if you havent bought it on Amazon in the meantime). Ive already waited too long Given the figures that JD announced last week, I dont think it would take much to turn eBay around. Not much except, perhaps, some rather radical thinking: to get out of the auction mindset into the shopping mindset. eBay seems to be moving in the right direction – easier returns and multi-variant listings being two such recent moves – but theyre doing it too slowly. Were due another announcement of site changes in September; rather than the fiddling for the sake of something to do while Rome burns we had this month, lets next time see some really radical change that will make eBay a great place to shop again.