A Vintage Collectables Seller RESPONDS to the ColderICE eBay POST

Written by John Comments
Last Updated March 17, 2009

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The following is a reprint by permission of a post from Cliff Alpert, author of The Collectors Site. Tell him how much you like his pros so he will consider guest blogging here once in a blue

The Collectors Site

The Collectors Site is you can find Cliff Aliperti bitching and brainstorming about selling online. Cliff has been selling vintage collectibles online since 2000. He mainly uses eBay, but has sold on many other venues in the past including his own web site. You can find out more about Cliff on his About page.

Active eBay Sellers React to eBay’s Analyst Day

Posted By Cliff Aliperti on March 16, 2009

Last week’s eBay Analyst Day certainly managed to keep the e-commerce bloggers busy, didn’t it? I followed the tweets of @scotwingo and @ebayinkblog for awhile before realizing I could log in myself to listen live, which I did in time to view a whole bunch of Weebles wobbling and listen to some guy from Boston drone on longer than I would have liked to finally draw quite obvious PayPal conclusions.

If you’re interested in where eBay’s going there’s plenty of good takes on it out there, but I want to point you to a couple of my favorite people, neither of whom are known for the now par for the course anti-eBay sentiment, and both of whom still regularly use the site.

John “ColderICE” Lawson has gone above and beyond as per usual with his post I AM MAD as HELL ~ A MUST Read Report: How To FIX eBay!!!. If you don’t know John, and frankly it’s much more likely you don’t know me as John is out there big time, he’s a eBay Platinum PowerSeller and eBay Certified Education Specialist–the ICE in his alter ego actually stands for Internet Commerce Education, which is what he’s been giving back through his ColderICE blog and various other activities very effectively since 2008.

John conducts several online interviews and he managed to grab ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo (yes, the one and the same @scotwingo from above) for a chat the day prior to Analyst Day. John’s Mad as Hell post includes the complete audio recording of that interview along with a very attractive pdf that transcribes the entire interview into a handy report. You can listen to it, read it, do both at once or either separately, the choice is yours. The report covers Scot Wingo’s ideas on what eBay should do, while John’s accompanying post covers his interpretation of what the eBay troops say is the actual plan.

Regarding that plan, we move next to Mitzi Swisher of Vintage Goodness. What I like about Mitzi’s breakdown, eBay Analyst Day-Any News for Vintage Sellers, is that it comes from the perspective of the vintage seller. Take a look around the rest of The Vintage List and Vintage Goodness and you’ll see that Mitzi sells vintage, writes about vintage, and celebrates vintage. Mitzi focuses on eBay’s new focus, the Secondary Market. She points out “I can see how the size of the “Collectible Vintage Pre-Owned” circle compares to the size of the “Outlet and Liquidation” circle,” and without benefit of the graphic I’ll just tell you, it’s tiny. Mitzi summarizes the point as follows:

There is a small bit of hope to be had though – first and foremost we are on the chart, even if we are just a small section down in the corner, and eBay does see the Vintage and Pre-Owned market as having the ability to increase from where it stands today. So they haven’t counted us out completely – and rightly so!

Mitzi goes on to question the decline in auctions as well as all of the advertising coming onto the site.

Finally, I found the complete Wall Street Journal article, eBay Retreats in Retailing by Geoffrey A. Fowler, pasted into the Movie Poster Forum, and found the following line very interesting:

EBay’s focus on its “secondary market” includes the used and vintage goods that the company is already known for selling, as well as clearance and out-of-season items.

As well as, hmmm. What do you think? If you take this line at face value and take Mitzi’s view that there’s hope because vintage made eBay’s chart then there might be every reason for traditional retailers to be mad as hell, but also for antiques and collectibles dealers to be optimistic.

Having listened to the portion of the original call featuring eBay CEO John Donahoe, my own opinion is that we may have hope, but that eBay is resting it’s future on the bigger chunk of that Secondary Market, the one which they define as including Out of Season, Outlet Inventory, Overstock/Returns, and Liquidation Inventory. In other words, and I apologize if this hits your niche, crap. More exactly, in my opinion, the crap which shouldn’t be the featured products but just a part of the draw. I have never and will never shop eBay for these items. Then again, perhaps I’m hopelessly out of touch because from the start I’ve viewed eBay as the place to buy the exact items highlighted in the smaller piece of eBay’s proposed pie: Collectible, Vintage, Pre-Owned.

But I wonder, maybe it’s not me who’s out of touch, as this line from the same Wall Street Journal article quoted above has me wondering what they could have possibly interpreted leading to this: