Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Splat! Splat! Gossip

On September 14th the Fubarometer showed eBay listings dropping like a stone down a very deep well. On their graph numbers fell from 14.5m to approximately 13m.

This matched the stock price which closed close to a 5 year low.

I like to have more than one source of information so I waited for the Medved figures which have proved trustworthy in the past. This was a wise decision.

Medved shows (in their weekly chart for the week starting September 14th) that listings have dropped over the weekend from a high of about 16.04M to below 15.6M

In other eBay news Scott Pooler posted about Jet Blue, rumored to be eBay's latest Diamond PowerSeller in the making. Apparently Jet Blue was making some serious listing violations. Galvanized by this humiliating news eBay removed all Jet Blue's listing within minutes. Good job Scott!

Scott Wingo posted a speculative opinion piece on his blog eBayStrategies about eBay layoffs. The comments on Scott's blog are even more interesting. Will we see a rambling rebuttal clarification from Uncle Griff on eBayINKblog? Probably not because Scott is a Very Important Person; from his biography we learn

As President and CEO of ChannelAdvisor, Scot Wingo leads the company in its mission to provide retailers and manufacturers with the tools and services they need to successfully utilize consumer marketplaces as a sales channel.


ChannelAdvisor, founded in 1999 was recently in the news itself. At the beginning of the month the company announced it had received an additional $20 million in funding to accelerate its growth; and was cutting about 20% of the workforce in an effort to accelerate its push to profitability.

From the NewObserver
The funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from current ChannelAdvisor investors Advanced Technology Ventures, Kodiak Venture Partners, eBay and Southern Capitol Ventures. Wingo said the new funding will be used for general corporate operations, but no new acquisitions are planned. He expects the company to become profitable next year.


A clue!

To be successful one must have both the credibility and ability to borrow $100 million. After that you can take 10 years to show a profit.





Y'all come back






2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Henrietta,

Thanks for the props, I don't think I slowed the eBay / Jet Blue relationship even though I appreciate your supposing I could.
It was a violation of TOS to offer mystery auctions, but all of them had sold by the time I published my article.
We will see if Jet Blue steps over the line again...
Keep up the great work at Red Ink Diary!
Scott Pooler
Trading Assistant Jounral

Anonymous said...

Have you seen the medved listings for today, Henrietta? They're through the roof, up past 17 million and rising. I'm sure eBay will say it's because of the fixed price thing, but there are folks on the boards saying their listings are showing up twice!

Moonshadow