Auction Power Guide

I am doing a school report in oppose and in favor of ebay fees.

I would like to know specifics of what may happen if eBay didn’t ask their sellers for fees or for as much as they currently ask for.

Examples:
Employees can’t be paid
Maintenance can’t be paid
Full service can’t be provided…

Ebay didn’t charge fees originally. They were completely free. The more they increase their fees, the more they lose power sellers. In 2008, with the new CEO "genius" in charge, they made some changes, one of the major changes was they lied to their sellers and made it seem like they were charging less fees (by making the listing price cheaper), but they increased the final value fee, so people were paying an arm and a leg in fees once the item sold. There was also some feedback changes (sellers could no longer leave negative feedback for buyers who dont pay, and feedback hurts a sellers rankings in search), and other changes (they put digital download sellers out of business overnight, gave them a few days warning and suddenly came out and said digital download items weren’t allowed anymore). All of these changes, especially the fees, caused the powersellers to leave and go to other sites, especially craigslist. The surge in sellers going to craigslist caused ebay to decline in visitors. Less sellers means less items (the power sellers and digital download sellers accounted for thousands and thousands of listings), and this means less visitors because those items get listed in Google, and many visitors find ebay by googling items first instead of going directly to ebay. This was ebay’s downfall. In winter 2008, for the first time ever, Craigslist matched ebay in monthly visitors (I checked on Alexa.com). Ebay continued to tell their investors that they were losing visitors because of the recession, which wasn’t true because Craigslist continued to increase around the same time. Ebay keeps increasing their fees to make up for the loss in visitors and actual sales, so its only a matter of time when this catches up to them, they cant keep it up forever.

I live in San Jose, where ebay is located, and they layed off more than 2,000 people in the past 2 years. They have more fees now than they ever did, but have much less employees than they did when they were free. Fees have nothing to do with service, employees, or maintenance….fee’s are only related to profits. The site could still run without fees, and they could generate income from selling advertising space on the site like Myspace does. They do sell advertising space, but its not enough and they will continue to try to squeeze more fees out of their sellers until their sellers are finally gone. Do a "completed listings only" search in advanced search. 80% of the items on there don’t sell. It was the opposite 5 years ago, and it’s not the economy, it’s less visitors. My websites still get sales and my sites are worldwide just like ebay is.

Amazon has lower fees, and doesn’t charge a listing fee, and continues to outdo ebay in generated income.