That Was Fun, But Now Ebay’s Selling Off StumbleUpon. eBay: The Doldrum Years. Can anything put the wind back in eBay’s sails? The once-iconic auction site is making cosmetic changes to its fee structure and moving away from the auction model to emphasize more fixed-price listings. But it’s hard to get excited these days about eBay. It seems that the Web has moved on and eBay is stuck in still waters. Don’t get me wrong. eBay is still a massive site and a cash machine. But once you reach 238 million visitors worldwide (comScore) and 26.4 billion pageviews a month, it’s hard to know where to go from there. This is not about fixed price versus auctions.
But now people are comfortable trawling the Net for the best bargains, and eBay is no longerteh first place they go. Can eBay do anything to regain its lost momentum? (Photo by Cindy Funk). The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Why the Borg's copycat busi. So I had brunch with Larry yesterday and he showed up carrying the Sunday Times and we were talking about the huge and incredibly embarrassing photo (above) of Ballmer that they ran on the front of their business cover.
It wasn’t quite as bad as the one of Ballmer with his tongue sticking out, but come on — you know from the photo that this isn’t a friendly story. So then we started wondering how the Borg has become such a joke — and Larry had an interesting theory. The online version also shows that photo, but for the real impact you have to get the print edition. Just imagine — it’s Sunday morning, you just woke up, you’re having your coffee and flipping through the sections, there’s some nice travel piece about bicycling in Vermont and then — bam!
Jesus fucking Christ! Suddenly there’s this huge photo of Ballmer looking like a doofus and you think, wait a minute, this guy runs a company? I mean, come on. How did all these billions of dollars slip through Ballmer’s fingers? As The Outlook For Holiday Sales Look Grim, Amazon and eBay Are. 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. 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). The reality is that any merchant selling online will list their items for sale in multiple locations—on Amazon, eBay, their own Websites, etc. Now, with this new API we might see some interesting mixing and matching. Don’t underestimate the importance of these APIs in the battle to dominate e-commerce.