Is eBay in Trouble?

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111 commentsThursday, July 16, 2009

Data Shows That Traffic isMoving Downstream

By Chris Crum

eBay's traffic appears to be on the way down. This doesn't come as a huge surprise if you pay attention to the commentary on message boards and comment sections on eBay articles.

The griping usually comes from disgruntled sellers, and there is a lot of it. We've covered that before. Users have been frustrated for a variety of reasons.

If you look at the traffic patterns, you can see these gripes reflected. AuctionBytes looks at Nielsen data for page views, unique audience, and time per person spent on site. Here are a couple of those graphs:

Unique visitor data from Compete paints a similar picture. This is from the last three months:

The question is how far is this going to go? Will eBay's numbers continue to plummet or will the company win back the respect it used to get. Competition certainly isn't getting any slimmer. What do you think eBay's future holds?

News Tags: Research, traffic, eBay, ecommerce, Compete, Nielsen

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Twitter: @CCrum237

By Steve (WPN reader) - Fri, 07/10/2009 - 16:38

RIP Ebay!

I think basically people are shopping around for the best price on something if they are shopping at all. So Ebay for me has become a tool to compare prices that are usually a lot cheaper elsewhere.

On the seller side, there are more cost effective ways to sell products.

By Dragan Mestrovic (WPN reader) - Fri, 07/10/2009 - 18:27

Yes, I think ebay is in BIG trouble

They lost many of the seller trust. Also it is in the most cases not a good deal anymore to sell on eBay.
They change the rating system, not for the better.

Competition in niche market is emerging strong. For example in the luxury watches niche where eBay is charging fees which are to high and not competitive. This drives these sellers way to specialized auction services which charge lesser fees!

I think that this market share they lost will not come back to them. And they will lose more in the future.

It goes faster to lose a market than to conquer it.

This is a good example how the things are moving in the internet.

That you are big player today and that you may have been the first one in this market does not matter anymore, if you do not listen to your customers you can become history very quick.

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