Divide and Conquer

One of the major effects of John Donohoe's disruptive innovation on eBay has been a polarization of eBay sellers. He used the divide and conquer tactic and for a while it worked. I wrote about it in early April as the first cycle of 'decreased and adjusted' billing completed.

In the days when eBay was a community, experienced sellers, many of them very high volume volunteered in the Answer Center and helped beginning sellers become good sellers. I know this because I was once one of those beginning sellers who was trained to do it right. I have always believed "What goes around comes around" that thought can also be found in the beautiful language of the King James Testament, Galatians 6:7 "..whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap". Years later when I actually knew what I was doing most of the time I too volunteered in the Answer Center.

That ended when eBay 'fixed a system that wasn't broke' with what, with 20/20 hindsight was a precursor of the Detailed Seller Rating system. The search function was 'weighted' to return threads that had been voted on as being helpful or not helpful. How do you think a slightly crooked seller would vote after being roundly told that his listing was in violation and business practices unacceptable?

Soon responders were registering 'posting IDs' to protect their eBay business from malicious buying just to give negative feedback. Both the good guys and the bad guys gamed the votes and eventually 'finding' was corrupted beyond redemption. If you are volunteering and the job is no longer rewarding the incentive is soon gone. Many of the good guys went away and eBay's customer service suffered.

Fast forward to October, six months after PowerSellers started eligibility for discounted Final Value Fees. Many smaller sellers left in May, they were the 'disgruntled noise'. Since then a trickle of sellers, business people who analyzed eBay and found it an increasingly unsustainable venue have quietly (for the most part) formulated an exit strategy, implemented it and gone.

The Brews News wrote twice this week on the subject, Thursday about the effects of lowered fees on their business and today about eBay's seller shrinkage and what the prognosis is for Q1-09. Insightful commentary and I recommend reading it.

What lessons can we learn from this experience? Please add your comments so we may all have food for thought.

Y'all come back!







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Dylan Sung the Song

You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy

^{Bob Dylan}

Today I made my 1000th and last post in eBay's Answer Center.
Gratitudes to the many responders who taught me the ropes, corrected me when I was wrong and generally helped me to be the best that I could be.

Customer Service

eBay puts a whole new spin on the concept of Customer Service. Most corporations understand that customers will have questions and providing assistance makes everything go more smoothly. Not eBay! At eBay the customers provide the service in more ways than one. For years Buyers and Sellers who had a problem found the best place to get an answer was from the Volunteer Responders in the Answer Center.


Seller "D" says:

Am I the only one who has found the whole ebay experience lacking in customer relations and support? I have had very unsatisfactory experiences with the whole system, particularly with the "Live Help" feature, HAH!

I recently spent 6 hours, with 3 different reps, trying to get a listing removed because their system would not let me provide the shipping services I wanted to offer. The reps would not accept the fact that their system was flawed despite being unable to edit the listing themselves.

I don't know which is worse, having to sit and stare at the screen for 2-3 minutes between responses from the rep, or the obviously scripted responses from them. In almost every case you are sent a link to "report" your concern to a "specialist", who then sends an automated email saying they are looking into your concerns, and you never hear from them again.

My first contact with LIVE, my initial request was to have the listing deleted so I could try to relist it. I did a Yahoo search and found a phone number bay had sent to "select" users, I took a chance and called it. The guy who answered asked for my ID, couldn't find it, but tried to help me anyway. What he evidently did was to create an identical listing, which was also charged to my account.

Now I had a second problem to resolve. The final LIVE rep managed to get me a credit for the dupe listing, but insisted that I had to email another dept to take care of the original problem. I eventually convinced him to delete the original listing by not agreeing to be transferred to another dept or clicking on a link to leave email.

I got the same scripted replies from all that I corresponded with. Line for line, word for word, in the same exact order the conversations progressed. The rep only broke script when I called him on it, he evidently did not have a script for dealing with that response. I kept a text copy of the "chats" for a while, but I eventually deleted it, since the problem was solved.

Besides, what would I do with the text transcripts, send it to ebay?!?!?!?