Is EBay still used by people to buy and sell?

[lookwhatisforsale]

I'm asking if people are still buying and selling on EBay?

The sales I make these days is practically non-existent.

Gone are the days when sales were consistent.

Looking at my seller hub just depresses me.

It just seems EBay is dead,or is just me?

[tressygirl]

Well,  short answer is yes peeps are still using eBay to buy and sell.  Many you will read on here say they are closing their acounts, but are still here.

eBay spend milllions on advertising a new tv ad is on now ( controversial in some eyes!),  bring in thousands of new members.

eBay have recently introduced no selling fees for clothes,  followed quickly by no selling fees for all items,   (not for vehicles) for Private sellers,  so the competition now is far greater for sellers.

Is it worth it ?  Yes,  if you are happy to wait a little longer now for sales,  and do not need  all your items to selll immediately.

@lookwhatisforsale 

[lookwhatisforsale]

Let's just hope that sales will eventually pick up.It's so frustrating when nothing sells.

[kath3735_wxmjn]

a lot depends on what you are selling and the prices you are asking.  I always start with a price slightly higher than i really expect and then depending on interest (or lack of ) I lower it.  Sometimes i give up and it goes on the car boot other times i just leave it (costs me nothing) and i suddenly make the sale.  I am not in it to make money per se, just to get rid of family stuff and I give them the money just before christmas when all those £3 items add up to a fairly decent figure.  For me it works, if you need the money badly then it will not.   At least with e bays reach there is eventually someone out there just looking for your items.

[nigel_paul_wright7557]

I think the problem is there are just too many sellers.

For me ebay is very up and down, selling nothing for a week then selling 2 items within an hour.

[lookwhatisforsale]

Back in the day I used to make a lot of sales.Now I'll be lucky to get £20 a month.It's gone from a lot to zero. It's really depressing.

[lookwhatisforsale]

Yes,there are definitely a lot of sellers.

It's really hard to compete.

I keep trying to sell things but it just seems futile.

[plpmr]

Well Global Shipping is a turn off.

[carl-uk]

I’m still selling some stuff, I’m still buying some stuff.
I think it’s hard for private sellers to measure sales performance, as many, like me, just sell when we have something we own that we now want to get rid of.

Plus there is a divide in buying and selling.

Buyers want more sellers – as competition lowers prices.

Sellers want less sellers (and more buyers) – as they don’t have to try and match low competitors prices.

I tend to do more buying than selling. So having a lot of sellers flogging the same items has benefited me.

The new no-fees for private sellers may make that better for a while as well. But come next year, especially if eBay do introduce a fee for buyers (like Vinted do – and it has been announced something is coming next year), then I can see buyers being put off. That will mean you lose sellers. That will mean there is less competition, and so prices go up. And that will put more buyers off. And so on.

[m25jet]

Personally I feel that eBay's best days are long gone.  I stopped selling on eBay when they got rid of PayPal and brought in Managed Payments, and there were enough hoops for sellers to jump through then.  From what I've read on the forums it only seems as though matters have got even worse.

As a buyer my use of eBay has declined sharply compared to previous years.  eBay used to be my number one choice of website if I was looking for something online, as you could get just about anything on eBay, but nowadays I tend to use Amazon as my first choice website and only buy off of eBay if the item that I want to buy is only being listed on eBay.

From a buyer's perspective there are a number of things about eBay that really put me off of using the site, in large part due to many recent changes, which appear to be badly thought out and have also proven to be vastly unpopular.  For me these include the following:

1.  Looking at a listing and seeing multiple other ads plastered right across the page.  Not only do I find this distracting but I also feel that it makes the site look disorganised and unprofessional.  There have been many instances recently where I've seen so many ads plastered across the main listing that I clicked on that I've often just logged off of eBay and have bought the same item off of Amazon as a result.

2.  Being bombarded with offers for items that I've viewed and have decided not to put on my Watch List or purchase outright.  If there was a way to manually override this function and disable it entirely then I would; however, I often receive many unwanted offers for items I decided that I wasn't interested in after looking at the ad.  The end result of this is that I would be significantly less likely to buy anything from that seller,as I do not like being bombarded with unwanted offers for items that I'm not interested in.

3.  Search results being flooded with duplicate listings.  This is one thing that I hate.  When searching for items I like to see a mixture of results from different sellers, but not when it's clearly obvious that the items being displayed are all being advertised by the same company under several different User IDs.  In many cases these items are often overpriced and it makes it harder to find the items being advertised by other sellers not connected to that company who are selling the same item for a better price, but whose listings have been practically buried by those sellers who virtually swamp the site with numerous listings under several different User IDs.

4.  Business sellers who are clearly trading as private sellers.  A common gripe with several members on the site, eBay really ought to be making a determined effort to force these type of sellers to register correctly or kick them off of the site forever, rather than relying on registered business sellers to start snitching on those who don't comply with their legal obligations to declare themselves as a business seller.  To me this is not a professional way of dealing with the problem, as it only sparks bad feeling amongst business sellers who have complied with the rules and are doing everything by the book whilst the business sellers who are selling under the guise of a private seller continue to get away with selling on eBay without registering as a business, often undercutting the registered business sellers in the process.

As you can see from these four examples, eBay has deteriorated into one hell of a mess and I honestly can't see how they're going to get back to where they used to be before the rot started to set in.

[lookwhatisforsale]

Ok.I thought it would have been useful.

[lookwhatisforsale]

I buy and sell.There is definitely more competition with sellers now.

[lookwhatisforsale]

You made many good points that I consider as a buyer also.

[atozstopandshop]

 @tressygirl   helpful as always. Nice to see that you re helping almost everyone in this community 🙂

[tressygirl]

Aaah  that's lovely praise, thank you!  🙏

[doumind_7]

EBay is certainly doing its best to get rid of private sellers. If you mainly sell small items its not worth doing with all the new buyer protection fees.

[preternatural]

I sold 1 vehicle on their over the past week and I wish I hadn't even bothered. If I could go back in time I wouldn't have listed it on eBay and instead just put it on market place or auto trader. A fake scammer account was the winning bid and hasn't paid or contacted me. I'm now 11 days in and sick of eBay already. Never again will I lost any item on eBay. If I get charged the selling fee of £15 for listing it. I'm off to Amazon permanently.