Yesterday a client came into our offline business to get a quote on some potential new business. We started talking and the conversation switched to eBay. His eyes lit up when he talked about his collection of yearbooks. He scours eBay looking for yearbooks from local schools and came across one recently from 1909 that had been part of an estate sale. There were less than 20 students that year 99 years ago and he checked around and only the Puyallup library had a copy of the yearbook.  It was fascinating watching his passion as he described the yearbook and what it meant to him.

He was excited to be the owner of likely one of only two yearbooks from that school in existence from 1909. Now some (many?) might think collecting yearbooks of strangers simply because they went to local schools is a waste of time and money, but not our client. It’s doubtful anybody who went to the Puyallup school in 1909 is still alive and anybody who worked at the school is gone.

Collectors and collections are what has made the auction site eBay strong. The cliche one person’s junk is another person’s treasure holds true. I had hoped when they bought Skype that eBay would find some way to use Skype to better connect collectors with collections. At least to my knowledge, this hasn’t panned out.

Bernard at ReadWriteWeb further opines on eBay’s strengths:

Selling off inventory from big companies (eBay’s diversification) may be a great business, but it was not what made eBay magical. Garage sales, antique shops, auctions….these all have a bit of magic and romance. It is about finding something unique and special.

Magic is a perfect description of how a collector like our client feels when they discover something they want to bid on at eBay. Bernard’s post goes on to compare eBay to the site Etsy.com where people buy and sell handmade goods and ponders if Etsy is the next eBay?

Etsy, you say?
Having only been to Etsy in passing a couple times, I decided to take a closer look this morning and register. Since my name wasn’t taken I used that which becomes a subdomain on etsy (tdavid.etsy.com). Nothing there yet so no sense in linking. The registration process was smooth with email confirmation before being able to login.

After logging in I started searching around and the first thing I noticed when clicking the category "Time Machine 2" was the Flash interface. I’m not a big fan of using Flash in archive results. I know Flash is supported in all the common browsers but what is wrong with HTML and graphics? I get it, you can’t hover over the "Auto Scroll" and see the listings smoothly scroll from right to left across the screen with HTML. That can be done with JavaScript. Fortunately the regular listings and search results are in HTML.

I’m not a very craft-oriented guy so my time at Etsy will be short-lived. Never say never though, maybe I’ll get more crafty as I get older. Not that I don’t appreciate people who can make things with their hands because I do, but I’d rather spend the time making things (writing fiction, non-fiction, coding, etc) with my mind. If you do enjoy making crafts then Etsy could be in your wheelhouse. Etsy has a cleaner design than eBay which seems cluttered these days (compare the screenshots above). Another plus? I didn’t see any advertising.

What eBay needs to do
To answer Bernard’s question, Etsy is too niche focused to be the next eBay. Craigslist, if it got a little more structure to prevent fraudulent transactions is a stronger competitor to eBay.

Ironically, focusing on their strongest niches is what eBay should be doing moving forward. They shouldn’t try to do things that appeal to the masses, they should drill down on their most active auction categories and provide even deeper support and interaction between buyers and sellers. And they need to stop tweaking the listing fees, that just pisses off the buyers and sellers.

Finally, they need to reinstate the system that kept buyers honest: allowing sellers to leave negative feedback on buyers. eBay might think they were helping to make the system a more friction-free buying experience, but if you aren’t the kind of customer a business wants to have, they will refuse to do business with you. On the internet how do we know good from bad with just a screen name and buying history? eBay made it harder to identify potentially dishonest customers by eliminating the ability for sellers to leave negative feedback.

We haven’t been huge eBayers in our household, either buyers or sellers, but I don’t think their auction feedback system was broken. Big companies which tweak things that work often make things worse. If I was the new eBay CEO, I’d put that feature back post haste. In a recent boycott, listings were down an estimated 12%. eBay’s official response was that the boycott "had no effect" which was stupid. They should have apologized to the sellers and reinstated the policy that had been there for many years and helped define the eBay auction system.

In short, eBay needs to be less corporate, go back to the basics that made them stronger and focus on collectors and collections. What do you think eBay should do? And do you use eBay any less now than you did a couple years ago?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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