Greed has caused the detruction many of history’s greatest entities. ebay/Paypal are following that same path, with their pockets full, blinders on and an insatiable appetite for more. There will be no pot of gold at the end of their journey.

I am a small retailer. I do not believe eBay=Amazon will ever happen. eBay-trying-to-be=Amazon yes.

Amazon is run by retailers. eBay is managed by MBAs. My choice of words is deliberate.

Amazon rules it’s sellers, there is no room for misunderstanding. The policies are fair and leave room for a seller to make a profit. The site is well designed and relatively trouble free. Customer service is superb. There are no Non Paying Buyers.

eBay puts out deceptive corporate waffle, makes arbitrary policy changes frequently and is prone to vast errors in judgment. The platform is a glitchy mess. Customer service is NOT. Many sellers are running about 10% NPB and it is getting worse. A NPB can leave negative for sellers, and does. Getting your FVF back is time consuming and not always successful. Ditto for the negative.

eBay is actively hostile to sellers, constantly denigrating and always looking for the worst. Only on eBay could you have the Director of Global Feedback Policy making the utterly inane statement “we think that recent performance and activity is a much better indicator of what a buyer can expect to experience than a performance rating from 7-8 years ago” and believe it. Someone who has kept an exemplary record, multiple repeat buyers, no negatives given or received, month after month for years and years is not trustworthy or deserving of seller protections. A powerseller using a like for like automated feedback program scattering retaliatory feedback like confetti is trustworthy and has a track-record.

eBay is all about eBay and there are many more suckers down the road to replace sellers who give up, until they run out.

One thing I have to wonder regarding the link policy — yes, it sucks, but does it make much of a difference?

I never bothered checking my own stats on it (too busy!), but how many people were actually taking the trouble of clicking on a seller’s me page and then clicking yet again to their personal site? 2 clicks, from what I’ve been told, casual shoppers don’t like that.

I’ve seen some Me pages constructed pretty well, where I wasn’t even sure if I wound up on eBay or the seller’s own site (probably a confusion that eBay wants to see disappear), and I’ll check myself most of the times, but I’m a curious sort.

I wonder what percentage of sellers even had outgoing links on their ME pages, and on top of that what percentage knew that you could do this prior to this new change.

I’d love to see some stats on outgoing clicks from eBay.

Again though, the biggest surprise to me is that this took so long — beyond the recent My World that I mentioned, I thought they would phase this out years ago back when they banned .com’s in the ID’s. So basically, I’ve been expecting this for like, 6-7 years, it bugs me, it effects me, but it doesn’t surprise me, so I’m not totally up in arms over it.

eBay wants to put on its “big boy” retailer pants and it just isn’t going to work.

I will say this flatly these changes will not achieve the desired results. They won’t kill eBay but they will marginalize it.

Just my 12%

Perhaps that’s responsible for a good deal of the emotion — nobody else is really like them.

I completely agree with you about the silly MyWorld and hope my original comments didn’t imply they ever would (I don’t think I’ve even logged into my page).

Personally I wish they would innovate instead of building their own version of popular applications. (How long before eBay tweets?)

My original comment was meant more to defend eBay’s perspective than their actions.

I think they want to “grow up” and act like the other sites, including some of those I mentioned.

Sadly, what you say in your last line about AOL could be the end result.

My hope is that they turn out to be right about the majority of their changes, So far, I like most of what I see. I don’t want to lose this marketplace.

eBay is not like any of the other merchants you mentioned. eBay is a venue, a social experience, a marketplace and even an addiction for some. It is the essence of social marketing, or was…

For eBay to act like Kohls or Circuit City is to say Google should act like Comcast… They are apples and oranges.

eBay relies on the power of the network to generate their fee “take”. That take has been dwindling and the growth of eBay has been slowing dramatically. Responding with draconian back to the dark ages non-social policies is a serious mistake in my book. It amazes me they just released the facebook app considering how backwards they are with the rest of the social marking thing these days.

eBay “My World” will never replace or even compete with MySpace or facebook. They simply do not have the capability, especially when you consider the amount of links and back links they miss out on with this new policy.

It’s really a shame – eBay is not Sears or Circuit City or Amazon, eBay is eBay and to mold it into a standard retailer will be like watching AOL shrivel up and atrophy into what we see now…

Save eBay – Open the links!

I can see both sides here. I’m really irritated that I lose my ME page and will probably have to edit a couple of thousand auctions too, but I’ve honestly expected this for a long time and was surprised they waited so long to do it after the launch of their MySpace imitation pages (MyWorld).

But at the same time, none of the other major sites that I shop online have outside links either. Not that I can think of: Amazon, Circuit City, BestBuy, Kohls, Newegg, etc., etc. I’m very possibly wrong about some of those, but the trend seems to be to allow user forums and then create the content themselves.

Perhaps my misunderstanding is because I see eBay as a retail market more in line with those I mention above, than as any kind of social network or…and here’s their terminology causing the problem …community.

I think this is a similar case to the removal of negative feedback for buyers “fiasco” — eBay was one of the few allowing something like this in the first place, and now they’ve corrected what they must have viewed as a mistake or an inconsistency.

Again, personally don’t like it all, totally understand it though.