Did the eBay boycott work?
Posted
Feb 25 2008, 03:24 PM
by
Kim Peterson
The weeklong boycott of the eBay auction site ends today. But did it accomplish anything?
Fed up with recent fee hikes and other policy changes, some eBay sellers decided to boycott the site from Feb. 18 through today. Third-party tracking sites say auction listings have dropped about 13% since the strike started to 13 million items listed.
Ebay shares dipped slightly over the past week, but have returned to where they started -- at just under $28. The share price closed up 30 cents to $28.01 today on news that Shopping.com CEO Josh Silverman will now run eBay's Skype online telephony unit.
Ebay says it wasn't affected by the boycott, which I find hard to believe. Unfortunately, any analysis of the boycott's impact is nearly impossible because eBay ran a one-day promotion on Feb. 13 that cut listing fees to 20 cents. That alone was estimated to boost listings to 16 million from 12 million. Those listings could remain live for up to 10 days, which overlapped with the boycott week.
Also hurting the boycott was the sweet story Friday about the legally blind record store owner in Pennsylvania who sold his music collection on eBay for the asking price of $3 million. Yesterday, it came out that the bid was a fraud, but the seller says other buyers are lined up.
The boycott did nothing to change eBay's policies, and the new rate structure remains in place. But if nothing else, it highlights the growing discontent among eBay's user base and, more importantly, the increasing willingness to act on that discontent. Today a seller boycotts. Tomorrow, that seller might move to Amazon, or perhaps consider setting up an independent online store and advertising through Google.
The Web site Power Sellers Unite has been discussing whether to extend the eBay boycott. Commenters seemed to be split on whether that would work.
"You have to hit companies like eBay in their pocket book," wrote one seller. "It's not an
easy thing to do when they have so many millions of auctions."
"A boycott won't really do anything to change eBay," wrote another. "Never has, never will. What will change eBay is if everyone leaves. Ebay will crumble and other sites with more compassionate managers will benefit. And the sooner the better."
