eBay is not very good with figures

eBay say it has 233m members but if you read the small print then this 233m soon becomes 14m for the UK and you could add 20% more for the USA but this still leaves you a very long way from eBays 233m figure.

http://pages.ebay.co.uk/aboutebay/thecompany/companyoverview.html

eBuster put the total for active members at about 33m members.

http://www.ebuster.co.uk/SellerStats.aspx

and that includes all the shill bid accounts and accounts set up for nothing more than selling feedback and if you think these are small numbers then take a look here were 1000's of feedback adverts are listed.

http://www.ebuster.co.uk/SellingFeedBack/AllSellingFeedback.aspx

or here where we have a bidder with just 6 points retracting 275 bids

http://www.ebuster.co.uk/BadBids/275BidRetractions.html

or this one where a bidder has 72 bids with the same seller.

http://www.ebuster.co.uk/BadBids/t-shirtzShilBidder.html

eBays responce is to cook the book when they have been caught out.

http://www.ebuster.co.uk/BadFeedback/euroachat2009/GoogleHadIT.html

but Google cached pages saves the day.

Take a look at 'Books Fiction' on eBay UK and it says it has about 2.5m items listed so if you take 2.5m and divide by 15 days and 200 items per page then you should see about 833 pages of these books each day but the highest page you will get to is about 251 and it will show items are ending in about 23 hours time if ordered by 'Ending soonest' so where are the other 500 pages.

eBay says crime only accounts for something like 0.01% of items and it is doing all it can to help members so how come i can write software with limited access to data that spots gang activity a mile away.

http://www.ebuster.co.uk/Matrix/Matrix.aspx?SellerName=xoberhausen

eBay is doing all it can to hide data and will not answer why bidder in the UK are all called bidder 1-20 and the USA has two digit alias and not a ten digit unique alias but i think we can all work that one out for ourselves and now if you take the time to look at the bid history for cars you find a page full of new members and yellow stars.

Sorry but eBay can not claim to have masses of loyal members if none of them are bidding and any figures from eBay must be taken with a large pinch of salt.

Free Postage Scam?

So the increase in revenue is nothing to do with the fact that ebay have introduced mandatory "Free Postage" on the most popular seller categories?

Previously, sellers would be able to mitigate for the money they lose on the transaction due to ebay and paypal fees by building a small contingency into their postage costs (OK not so small with some sellers!)

Now all sellers have to include the cost of the free postage in their start price - so whereas previously you could offer something at an attractive 99p start price and if it only had one bid you weren't out of pocket because you had the postage covered separately...now you have to start your auction at say 3.99 so that if it only attracts one bid then you make enough money to cover the postage AND fees

Of course the ebay final value fee has never included the sellers postage costs (hence the scam where an occasional seller who would offer something for a few pence but then charge the actual value as the postage)so now ebay have forced sellers to increase the start prices and therefore increased ebay's slice of the pie substantially.

It's not a sign of a recovering economy, or an indicator of consumer behaviour - it's just a case of ebay changing their pricing model to squeeze the maximum cash out of sellers and buyers