eBay is still figuring out this auction thing.
For a start, all eBay neutral feedbacks are now counted as negative, as from a couple of weeks back. If big sellers start getting a bad karma ratio, then the amount of stuff they can post to sell will be restricted. They’ve also been playing with the fees, with a few promotions.
A fascinating stat is that apparently 1% of sellers generate 35% of bad karma feedback. So think about it – as a business wouldn’t you want to just be rid of those sellers that are ruining it for everyone?
Trade Me is ruthless in getting rid of lousy sellers – and the community is doubly ruthless in identifying them. It seems to me that eBay has been putting short term greed ahead of good business, and choosing to do business with lousy sellers rather than turf them out of the site. This is growth at the expense of long term sustainability, and the sort of stuff lousy management consultants wuld recommend to make this quarter’s earnings look good.
But the site in the meantime is rubbish compared with Trade Me (yes I am biased).
I’ve been using eBay over here in Australia, as it seems that, like in New Zealand, eCommerce otherwise doesn’t exist. Well except for my great folly, the Apple Store.
It’s a completely different experience from Trade Me.
For a start eBay is an intimidating place – it just feels disorderly with too much stuff (not necessarily a bad thing), wildly different product pages and a majority of the items posted by enormous passionless sellers. It feels like the bazaars in Istanbul or Isfahan- you know you are going to get a bargain, but you are just that little bit worried, and you sure know you have to work at it.
I searched for a Nokia E90 on eBay AU, and found one from a seller based in Hong Kong. I decided to trust the seller as he had a huge number of transactions, and committed to the deal. But the experience differed wildly from Trade Me.
Firstly, the confirmation screen was of little use, and it took me about 30 minutes to pay by paypal (I have a US and NZ account and… oh never mind).
Secondly, although I received an auto-confirm email from the seller, I heard nothing more for several days. More than enough days for the phone to have arrived, so I dropped him an email. It seems the colour I chose wasn’t in stock, and wouldn’t be for at least a week. No big deal, so I changed the colour. Again I heard nothing until a few days later I receved a tracking email and finally the package.
The phone’s great (Vodafone is not – more on that some other time)
But through the whole transaction I felt unloved – there was no personal touch from the seller, and there was not follow up email at any time – not even an acknowledgement that the colour change was ok. The eBay site wasn’t a fun place to be.
In contrast Trade Me feels like a giant family. Even the huge sellers are careful to send out emails after I purchase, after any changes and after they ship. I’m always kept fully informed about what is going on. Morever there is no messing with Paypal in foreign countries, or with sending money overseas – It’s bank to bank or Trade Me’s new Pay Now service. The site itself is fun to use, and the experience enjoyable, and it is because the sellers are great and the site is great. There is a more equal dynamic between buyers and sellers, whereas on eBay the sellers dwarf the buyers.
This user experience difference is the primary reason why Trade Me is so much more successful in NZ than eBay is in Australia.
Right now eBay Au has 1.3m items on sale, but only 1.13m are located in Australia. Meanwhile Trade Me has 966k listings right now – getting perilously close to that magic 1m.
So eBay – please keep on copying Trade Me – after all I do own your shares, and believe that you will get it eventually. Start by getting rid of some of those MBA’s and ex consultants, and scale back on that off line advertising.
Lance Wiggs 
Are you referring to eBay Australia only? Wouldn’t they be trying to (or more likely ‘required to’ via corporate guidelines) emulate the rest of eBay? Not TradeMe in NZ?
I agree that Trademe is a different experience. Size does have a lot to do with it. But it’s like comparing a huge corporate restaurant chain with a local family kitchen.
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I think you’re being a little harsh on eBay. There are things that they do a lot better than TM:
1. Searching. You can search in all kinds of ways, although given the quantity you need to. “Distance from seller” would be great to have in NZ rather than the city limits.
2. Feedback is write once, which encourages thinking about consequences. TM has had to evolve their scheme substantially over time, the feedback wars of old were impressive. I’ve never seen a retaliatory feedback war on eBay (they must exist, surely, but I’ve not seen one). There are still many on TM, to the point that people are fearful about giving negative feedback, it is easier to give none rather than risk your own feedback. eBay also allow you to see the feedback given by people, which is almost of as much interest as that received.
3. Yes I agree there is no commonality of style across auctions, but:
3a. They have an open interface to allow auction manager software access
3b. They don’t constrict the information you do include. No text length limits or arbitrary image limits.
3c. They don’t have to try and regulate out the spamming of the search engine; listing costs provide free market control of this.
3d. Did I mention the search engine works?
4. Ebay checkout has existed for ages, before TM (ahem) came up with the idea. Some sellers don’t like it, but it works quite well, and I believe that NZ sellers would seem just as unfriendly if they were getting overloaded with emails as well; the scale of eBay is enormous.
I can’t explain why eBay hasn’t taken off in Australia. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but there is more to it than their website being a little odd. It may be that charging listing fees stopped them building momentum, whereas TM got heaps of momentum because listing was free (selling too originally, remember) and people could list things just to see what happened. The network effect kicked in and here we are :-)
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