With economic recession in the air and layoffs everywhere, the outlook for online retail sales looks grim this holiday season. So far in November, online sales are 4 percent less than last year. Online retailers Amazon and eBay will be fighting for every last Christmas dollar.
The two look more and more alike these days, as eBay seeks growth beyond the mom-and-pop auction sellers that everyone associates with the site. The company has been emphasizing fixed-price listings for a while now. But earlier this week it took another step towards wooing the types of merchants that you are still more likely to find on Amazon. On Monday, eBay quietly announced a new program in beta that will allow large merchants to list thousands of fixed-price items at once on the site.
This will no doubt give eBay’s core mom-and-pop auction sellers one more thing to complain about (like they need more competition from larger outfits). But what else can eBay do? Its main source of growth comes from its non-retail businesses like Skype. Its $945 million Bill Me Later acquisition is now looking suspect. And its overall ability to attract consumers has stagnated. According to comScore, eBay had 70.7 million unique U.S. visitors in October, down 11 percent from the year before. In contrast, Amazon had 60.1 million unique U.S. visitors in October, up 6 percent (see chart above).
The reality is that any merchant selling online will list their items for sale in multiple locations—on Amazon, eBay, their own Websites, etc. (Multi-channel e-commerce management service Mercent, for example, is already supporting eBay’s API for its online retail customers).
Now, with this new API we might see some interesting mixing and matching. An online retailer, for instance, can now list her items on eBay and use Amazon’s fulfillment API to ship the orders from an Amazon warehouse.
Don’t underestimate the importance of these APIs in the battle to dominate e-commerce. Whoever controls the flow of transaction information, will control the flow of goods online.
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It doesn’t help that eBay is running Amazon banners on its site http://blog.auctionbytes.com
I was just going to say the same thing. What in the world are they doing? They pay tons of money to buy traffic, only to send it to their competitor?
eBay has a corporate culture that systematically drives out talent and intelligence. Since 2001 they haven’t done anything smart, and mediocre decision-making and organizational confusion tend to dominate.
THERE’S SO MUCH TENSION YOU COULD CUT IT WITH A KNIFE!!!!!!! IT’S AN ALL OUR WAR AHHHHH.
Do you people at TechCrunch have any journalistic standards?
This new ‘power seller’ mentality it seriously what got them in trouble. I suggest reading 10 Reasons Why eBay Is Dead: http://tinyurl.com/6964gz
we are diggin in on amazon to get our hoodies out to that audience and seeing some good results so far. ebay is second on the list but a bulk list api sounds pretty sweet.
You know the problem is Amazon is the new ebay, so all the big and small shady sellers are selling refurbished or used goods as “new”, this will catch up with amazon in a few years when there brand becomes known for shady sellers and fraud just like ebay is now known.
This may be the year that small affiliate marketing gains the most ground as they can move faster into marketing in new areas of the Internet.
How does Craigslist.org or Corkin.com treat bigger retailers? Are bigger retailers seeing success on those sites?
Brillian Paul! Advertise Corkin.com in a Techcrunch comment, and the users will flock to your site! Can I invest in Corkin? I believe in you!
The true meaning of Christmas has been lost in the abyss of consumerism, I’m not talking about anything religious, I’m talking about spending time with family and friends and shutting off you Blackberry for a few days and reconnecting with everyone on a deep personal level.
We don’t always need new crap every year, try spending money on experiences rather then items, you will live a WAY more fulfilling life!
All the best this holiday season!
Adrian Eden
Great comment Adrian. That is all too true. We spend so much TIME looking for crap for our families during this time of year the real meaning is totally lost. Actually wne you think of it, it actually sucks that we only look to this and a handful of other days a year to spend time with our families. It’s simply not enough. And that it takes a consumer based “HOLIDAY” for it to even occur is another shameful thought as well.
We are a morally and ethically corrupt society. I know people will say,, speak for yourself, and I am. But “Glass Houses” ya know?
Thanks so much for that very wisdom filled insightful comment.
> We don’t always need new crap every year, try spending money on experiences rather then items, you will live a WAY more fulfilling life!
Get off eBay and Amazon, and get on Facebook and MySpace!
Thank you for your kind support, now if we can only get other people on board with our mindset, the world would be a great place full of smiles and mutual respect…
Selling solutions are becoming much more sopihisticated too, decreasing the barriers to leaving eBay. My company, Vendio, provides a hosted solution for over 40,000 eBay sellers who combined account for over $1billion in eBay sales. We are using these exact API’s to make it easy for sellers to seemlessly move goods between eBay, Amazon, and their own store. Don’t rule out Google as a formidable player driving traffic to private label stores for these merchants too.
I hope both Amazon and eBay do well this holiday season. You are right though, eBay’s purchase of bill me later was very suspect. In my opinion, they did it to prevent Amazon from moving further into the payments and transactions market like PayPal. In any case, these two companies are becoming very similar.
Ebay is a joke.
Also, I hate to encourage spam, but Jason@tinycomb’s post on why eBay is dead is excellent:
http://tinyurl.com/6964gz
Yes, I think we are doing to see the rise of mom-and-pop niche sites that use the best of breed APIs and solutions to build targeted ecommerce offerings for their users and that will be a huge competitive force against large amazonian sites that carry everything in the world. Amazon is in an unique position though as its customers are pretty locked in with 1click and Prime etc. that its just not worth it for them to shop elsewhere - this factor will keep the niche stores continue selling on Amazon. Not sure of what ebay’s fate may be though. They just haven’t innovated in a long long time.
amazon > ebay. i cant say the last time i brought anything off ebay. amazon to me is cheaper too.
probably the sign of a good solid duopoly. it’s all coalescing nicely, no?
2 totally different retail styles hit by the same problem. It’s still not gonna change though. People will not spend that much. They just have to weather the storm i guess.
Oh btw
Check out the new look JobsTAXI at http://www.jobstaxi.com
New Jobs. SK+G. Frog Design. Blue Fang Games. HCA. Dror.
i dont think ebay and amazon are serving the same markets.
i think the people who ebay is not catering to are leaving for amazon but all in all ebay is doing good business in their original market.
In a quick analysis of the listings on eBay.com today, I found the following:
Buy it Now listings: 15.8 million
Auction style listings: 11.5 million
The path eBay is following is pretty clear. Despite most people thinking of eBay as an auction site, it is in fact moving inexorably towards the Amazon model - an ecommerce shop.
In New Zealand, a site called trademe may be a glimpse into the future. http://www.trademe.co.nz is unashamedly an auction site, and looks remarkably similar to how eBay used to be in the early days. trademe now has more listings than eBay Australia!
Perhaps someone should set up a simplyauctions site in the USA?
Won’t be long before Amazon sales are more. Not to mention the amount of digital books they are selling too for the Kindle
Shill Bidding on eBay: A Case Study
For anyone who buys on eBay, a detailed case study of another classic instance of blatant shill bidding and the abuse of eBay’s proxy bidding system—all exacerbated by eBay’s introduction of “hidden bidders”—and a detailed comment on eBay’s disingenuous attitude thereto, at http://www.auctionbytes.com/fo.....hp?t=24033