Comments on: eBay Cannot Live by Spreadsheets Alone

By: A

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 17:01:56 +0000

Super story. Ebay continues to keep it’s head in the sand while good sellers move to Amazon or their own marketplace. Whether it be Yahoo Merchants or Auctiva or where ever we decide to land. The new system of ebay allowing buyers to use the Dispute process as extortion without payment has to come to an end. Sellers have no recourse but to try and weave through ebays tangled web of HELP columns. Best of luck to all. I’m moving off ebay after 11 years of watching the ghost of ebay past come by.

By: nadine

nadine — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:51:38 +0000

brews,

It never crossed management’s minds? Well, doesn’t that just say it all? So when John Larouche speculated that eBay must be “culling the herd” since there was nothing to be gained from counting neutrals as negatives, unless they deliberately wanted to upset the sellers, he was giving eBay too much credit? They really are that stupid. Wow.

Ebay is going to become a textbook case of how extremely smart people can create an extremely stupid institution.

By: thebrewsnews

thebrewsnews — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:13:56 +0000

Ignatius, I heard that as well. It is interesting that nobody at eBay believes that any seller is knowledgeable about anything, not even that the seller knows their own stats and information. Surely a seller whose information does not jive with eBay’s aggregate numbers must be wrong. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I attribute eBay’s arrogance to their lack of experience and lack of understanding of how their own platform actually work.

Nadine, it didn’t even cross managements’ minds to look at the effects on individual sellers. eBay’s entire focus on recalculating neutrals to negatives was to do so in order to “give buyers more confidence in the feedback system” and that lowering feedback percentages was needed to make buyers feel more comfortable in leaving unfavorable feedback in the future. How a large company such as eBay can continue to make such ignorant decisions does amaze me, but not as much as it once did.

By: nadine

nadine — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 22:59:13 +0000

This is a particularly damning example of eBay’s myopia:

I spoke with a very nice TSAM who shared with me that eBay had been unprepared for what had happened. She told me that eBay had pre-calculated only a slight change in the overall percentage sitewide among all users. According to her, in the aggregate, the change to feedback percentage scores was predicted to be negligible even though it was recognized that there would be some sellers who would see a significant change in their percentage. However, it was not realized until after the recalculation had taken place just how much of a variation had occurred among individual seller accounts and just how many accounts were so dramatically affected.

No prediction was required in this case. eBay possessed beforehand the entire dataset needed to calculate the histogram of sellers who would be affected to a significant degree by this change, including calculated the counts of how many would be driven below 99.5%, 98%, etc. I certainly looked at the data and wondered how they were going to handle it when Buy.com no longer made the 99.5% cut. The data was all there. eBay was just too stupid to look at it.