Until today, our organizing and consulting company really felt like eBay was dying. Dead. Gone.
We've stopped shopping on the site. We've stopped pricing potential items on the site. And we've been forced to stop sending clients to a local Los Angeles eBay shop.
Last March, our company spent considerable time and money developing a relationship with a solid, reputable eBay resale business here in LA. We set the whole thing up, wrote a press release announcing a "partnership" of sorts and then offered our clients the ability to get rid of their clutter through the resale service.
It was designed to be a win-win for clients, professional organizers (us) and the local auction sales company. We saw it as a value-added service and took NOTHING for the transfer of the items. Nada. We were experimenting as as small company should.
The system worked well, well, for about 3 months. And then this value-added service crashed.
We had to work too hard for this business. We picked up items, kept them and dropped them off for sale on Tuesdays only to have to pick a lot of the stuff back up. It just didn't sell, or didn't sell for the price clients claimed it would sell at.
Worse, our clients, Hollywood fashionistas, would need high-end bags, clothes, shoes and decor listed that a small auction company couldn't really highly detail in a way another fashionista would search for something.
John had to teach the writers how to write fashionable copy, like a gay man or a stylist from Entertainment Tonight, very flowery, littered with key words like Gucci, gorgeous, shiny snaps and buckles, imagine taking this LV-signature hobo bag to your next Hollywood premiere.... that sort of thing. He even started writing the copy FOR the small auction company.
Remember, we weren't getting a dime for this, just encouraging clients to lose their unwanted "pounds."
Some items were rejected on site by the auction company.
Because of guilt, our office listed several outright rejected items. We even held certain items in our office until this past Christmas so we could take advantage of holiday shopping. Once listed, the items didn't fetch much money after all, or even less.
We think the resale on-line market is changing for the worse. Supply and demand are not matching up. Plus, Americans are just getting too smart for eBay. You know how to bid, and when. You have electronic bidders that jump in and bid two-cents more than the last person. The whole process has become a buyer's market. So we reluctantly pulled out and stopped offering this service to our clients.
So, like we said, we feel eBay is dead.
Until today.
Today, we received a reader tip with an article from Motley Fool.
The scenario is simple: 1 out of 30 people on Earth is registered on eBay to sell or to buy. That still represents massive opportunity. eBay has found that too many sellers make for cluttered listings, too much junk and unhappy buyers because of the quality.
So eBay has raised seller fees, which has literally pushed small shops to close up and move on. This represents something of a renaissance for eBay opening up new doors for better business. There's more to the story, and you can read it on Motley Fool, if you sign up for the free subscription.
And now we ask ourselves, maybe eBay isn't dead. Or maybe it's dead in the way we think it is and some other site is going to pick up the business that we can't give to eBay?
Maybe there's hope after all.
Comments? We'd love to hear all of them.
Hat tip to Scott Roewer, of Solutions by Scott in Washington, DC for suggesting this story.
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