What Exactly is the Problem Over at EBAY?

Fixing eBay

Salon Dot Com

The answer to fixing eBay is easy: fire John Donahoe and get somebody in there who understands what eBay founder Pierre Omidyar understand in the 1990s – EBAY IS A COMMUNITY AND 90% OF ITS USERS ARE HONEST.

EBay has made it impossible for members to be part of a community by its rigging of the contact system. Meg Whitman and John Donahoe’s Ebay had this fear of losing money if it let sellers and buyers actually communicate with each other easily. And don’t tell me Big Brother eBay doesn’t monitor what emails it allows.

The company has raised selling fees to the point of insanity. It has zero telephone support. It’s support emails are worthless and are written by robots. Nobody can get an honest answer and, sorry Mr. Donahoe, but SKYPE was one of the stupidest endeavors ever. 100% of eBay users already had phone service of some kind or another. Who the heck wants to switch to an Internet provider when there’s always a good chance your Internet connection is going to conk out? Does anybody really want Skype to replace their cell phone? Why does anybody need two phone service providers?

The new rule wherein Sellers can’t leave negatives for Buyers is as dumb as dumb gets, which makes Mr. Donahoe a very stupid man. He’s a total failure as a chief executive. He’s wimpy and wishy washy and clueless. He’s also idealess, unless it’s a bad idea.

The other new rule wherein PayPal is the only thing that can be mentioned as payment is another dumb idea. The raise in fees, the no-negatives-to-Buyers dictate, and the PayPal only declaration has done what nothing else could. IT SENT SELLERS AWAY FROM EBAY IN DROVES.

The company knows it. It knows sales are down. It knows why. No one at eBay has the guts or the backbone to admit the truth.

Donahoe has failed the company. It has made eBay a nasty, suspicious, demeaning place on which to do business – at least for Sellers – and, what? It wants to blame the economy for its problems? Baloney.

EBay dug its own hole by the way it treated Sellers and now it’s paying the price. Almost everyone who posted on eBay’s chat rooms and boards the past two years predicted that eBay would eventually kill its Golden Goose. Well, it has.

To succeed, eBay needs to go back to basics. GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING. It needs to poll EVERY SINGLE SELLER and ask what’s wrong. EBay has the email capacity for that. But, I think they’re terrified of the negative response it will receive.

Once again, the technocrats destroyed a good websites. Techies who think they know better. Techies who think that because they can think it up, it’s going to work and help. Once again, these techies learned the hard truth. You can’t cock up a site with tech features and expect people to be happy or to keep caring. Everything became too complex. SIMPLICITY SHOUTS.

And when you’re nasty to the people that made you rich, the people that made you rich will tell you to kiss-off.

I used to sell thousands upon thousands of dollars of product each year on eBay. I don’t sell there anymore, and I hardly bother to buy. EBay doesn’t even advertise anymore. It’s a wounded company, limping towards irrelevance because of what it did to its Sellers.

I now pay $40 a month to a local antique mall for a showcase in which I put my items to sell. I do very well. I no longer need, want, or care about eBay. You know why? Because eBay hurt my feelings. It made my feel unwanted. That’s why.