When did eBay become pay for play? Are they killing the company?
My company has sold our returns on eBay for 8 years. In the past we would do around $20k in sales a year. We didn't pay much attention to eBay and just let it run in the background. I had noticed a downturn in sales over the last few years, so we transitioned to selling many of those items on our own website's clearance page, which works out well because we don't pay any of eBay's fees and fully control the customer experience. That said, we now sometimes see zero sales on eBay month to month, which is absolutely wild. Just 3 or 4 years ago we were seeing 5 sales a day. Our own website hasn't replaced that volume, so we've definitely lost out on sales overall. My guess is that because eBay is heavily pushing sponsored ads we have zero visibility despite thousands of 5 star transactions. Long story short, we pulled our listings yesterday to streamline fulfillment and I don't think we're missing out on a thing. The whole platform has become meaningless for us. Personally, I've been selling on eBay for over 20 years. It's sad to see what it's become. Maybe it's just the nostalgia of the early 2000's when it was peak eBay. Curious to here what other long time sellers think.