hope someone can help me on this...something about ebay
 

not sure if this is the right place to post this topic, but i actually need some help one this project im focusing on.

me and a few buddies are doing a marketing project on topic ebay. The problem why Ebay sales have gone down tremendously for the last quarter of year. We are planning to do a P.E.S.T analysis on it.

Im kinda stuck on the political factor and the social factor analysis on Ebay.. :(

can someone tell me what I can write on that?

Im pretty sure alot of revsceners use ebay in the past, so i thought users can give me some good insights.hah

help is greatly appreciated

Stop getting other people to your homework. You're in university for christ's sake, this is against academic honesty.

social and political factor on eBay? what the heck, why not the financial factor?

PS. it is spelled eBay.

What the hell are ebay sales?

clearly the dude has already figured that part out

way to be a twat about spelling :haha:

I don't know about social and political factors for eBay's problems but some of the obvious reasons are eBay has increased their fees to ridiculous amounts over the last couple years and have made policies changes that have pissed off some sellers like sellers not been able to leave negative feedback. Because of the fees and policies changes most eBay sellers have moved onto other auction style sites like ioffer.com and of course the other major factor is people are spending less money because of the rough economic times.

Just getting some opinions.

ill make sure revscene.net is on my reference list :)

I heard about the sellers did together came up with a site to start the rivalry. I think eBay aftewards cut down the listing fees, etc.

Thanks for the input

are u serious?
How is this academic DIShonesty ???

if you go to a tutor to help you with your homework is that dishonest?
He's not plagiarizing, he's merely seeking opinions.


Anyways,

Political factors, maybe they are influenced by certain governments? ie. in china since everything is filtered, only certain items on ebay.hk are allowed to be sold?

Social - there is no real network where users can discuss in like a forum.
it's really hard to contact certain sellers because some of them never respond. also it is hard to respond to people who sell who don't speak english. they jsut use a free translation program and you can't understand what they're saying?

Powerseller = get taxed.. but we already paid taxes on the item ... which is pretty gay!

Fine, it might not be. Regardless, it's still pretty retarded. All the information for eBay PEST can be easily found on the internet. eBay is such a large, new generating company. If you can't figure out simple PEST for eBay, you fail at life.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the fakes eBay "sells". That's my help for you.

i've noticed that sellers are overcharging a shitload for shipping costs now. Thats turned alot of people inckuding myself off.

I worked for eBay for over 4 years and saw watched as they were giants to well now.

There are so many reasons for the decline. One of the main reasons imo is because they don't carry their own inventory and and sellers charge their own shipping prices. Yes eBay has rules in place for shipping now but it isn't enough. Plus the fact their fees have raised and bad policies have been implemented.

Competition wise almost every company out there now has a website where you can buy online whether it be BestBuy or Joe Blow.

Lets face it prices on eBay for the item + shipping just isn't a deal anymore for a lot of things. Often you can just go to any retailer and get it for cheaper now. I found in the past eBay would be the first place I searched but now it's the last.

ebay sales went down last year also because of the rating system, they changed how seller rates a buyer, the seller cannot leave a negative feedback for buyer.

buyer has more protection now on ebay. they can lie and get away with everything. seller even has to refund shipping charges.

ebay & paypal take alot of cut when u sell something on ebay. they were making too much money. SPecialy paypal.

Yup those changes were some of the "policies" I was thinking about but won't get into the details lol.

Political - tariff / tax / duties: often increases purchase prices of items by 15-30%, making intentional eBay sales less competitive

Social - our culture are moving toward the "I want it and I want it now" mentality, many people would pay a price premium to get the product now than to wait 2 weeks. Again, this makes eBay less attractive to many buyers.

University doesn't mean jackshit now. You'd be amazed at how much dishonesty goes on just for people to get that piece of paper that they so outrightly did not deserve... then again, it won't do them any good in the future anyways.

I've been using ebay since... 99 I think, maybe a bit earlier. The one major thing I can say is that when I first started using ebay, it was ordinary people selling stuff out of their basement. Over the years, it's moved into a marketplace for companies to sell product. When I go on ebay, I'm trying to find the "I don't want this item anymore so I'm selling it auction", but those are virtually non existent now. With all the companies on ebay now, they're working with real world purchasing costs, so the items really aren't of any savings to the buyer.

So why the change over the years? My guess is a lot of it has to do with ebay wanting to promote the big sellers, and also webpages like craigslist and used*addnameofcityhere*. The audience of these websites are huge now, so if I list something on usedvictoria, chances are it will be sold in a couple of days, and it was free.

Anyways, good luck with the paper.

obviously i can't say why this happened and what not as I have never done a project on ebay but I a marketing grad so I think some areas you can look at in terms of PEST is the whole economic downturn. Companies and the government are tightening up on a lot of their cash flows. Maybe this could be an area of research for example companies that deal large amount of transactions on eBay is clearing out inventory faster by lowering prices to keep cash in hand as most companies would do in a recession.

Socially, has something changed? Possibly, maybe try researching people's general purchasing behaviour. When eBay started it was a great place to purchase with great pricing. I'm not sure if growing rebates on amazon and instant face to face purchase from classified websites like Craigslist (which is partially owned by eBay btw) has any affect on this.

Just to add to whole thing is that the internet is still a growing market place, even in this economy. I have research for this but most likely won't share lol.

Something to look at is the general spending by the audience between real life and internet. Decline in retail sales and internet transactions and what not.

If you have also done a SWOT on eBay it should also explain a bit about their concern. If not, there's a website that has SWOTs completed on different organizations for free.

Don't quote me on anything as I know nothing about eBay honestly, you should brainstorm with your group then research to see how much is worth looking into.


Edit: BTW if this is a marketing project I wouldn't fully consider craigslist as a direct competitor as craigslist's major focus is real estate and job posting in four major cities.

yup totally with this, used to be able to find stuff at killer deals, now almost everything is on par with retail market prices. Add that to the shitty canadian dollar, hiked up shipping costs and duty costs then its pretty much a wash up

Totally with you, it just hasn't been what it used to be...
The Fees are ridiculous I sold a hat and another item in one month and surprisingly they billed me with a pretty big invoice.

You can still find deals, just gotta search harder. :haha:

eBay was good for canadian buyers to get stuff not easy to get in canada for a decent price when our dollar was up. I mean... who goes to ebay.ca as their first choice? With our dollar down it makes it very hard to deal with buying something at US price and THEN having to pay crazy shipping fee's. In the end if you go to one of your large chains here and barter a bit you can get a decent enough deal that it makes the hassle not worth the effort.

Berz out.

RS is part of the internet lol

its like paying GST and PST

then paying income tax.

i think the gov't came down hard on ebay to get "their cut" of unfiled income tax.

however, there are plenty of legit businesses that advertise on ebay.

that doesn't have much to do with his "university" project as Canadian transactions aren't weighted heavily for eBay. It has affects but not to that degree.