Question
http://www.medved.net/cgi-bin/cal.exe?EIND
I'll admit that I worked hard to hand pick a couple of data points but the weeks of Sept 7 2003 and Sept 5, 2004 are very interesting.
Medved numbers show that on September 12, 2003 eBay had 11.25 million listings.
And on September 8, 2004 they had 11.2 listings.
Hmmmm.
Bill
Answer
All stats aside I think it is still growing. There are thousands of people finding the internet for the first time every week. Many of them are going to find ebay since it's one of the top sites on the net.
Answer
Wall Street still believes eBay is growing and will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. They usually have good numbers.
It has just reached the highest stock value ever and has a P/E ratio that is only justified by assuming rapid growth.
While the numbers you used justify the question it is the listings not included that tell the rest of the story.
I don't believe any Store listings are included and none of the listings from foreign sites not offered on the US site are in that number.
In more simple numbers, I'm running about 30% less listings each week than a year ago, have about 10 times my average number of Auctions as Store listings and experience about half my sales from the Store.
So my counted listings are down, my sales are up and eBay fees are up. I hope to double my Auctions and add about four times the current listings in my Store.
Unless they figure out some way to count Store listings and sales there will not be a good measure of what is happening.
Answer
RR
You make a very good point. Perhaps this is a signal to sellers that auctions themselves are falling out of favour. And so BIN and stores should be given more effort.
Thanks
Answer
How do you define growing?
Answer
I didn't really give the definition enough thought. I could care less what their stock does. I was thinking more in terms of the opportunities for sellers to make a buck.
A crude measure, I know, but if people slow down their listing activity it may imply that they aren't making enough money.
Answer
that measuring stick is excluding things like Store Inventory items and international sites, I believe. I have about 85% of my items in store inventory format - so they'd be missing from those counts - and there are something like 400,000 stores now?
Unless you can see the whole picture, its hard to measure growth. Looking at eBay's quarterly report summary, there certainly is measurable growth in almost every sector comparing current yr to prior yr
Answer
Originally Posted by Bill
I didn't really give the definition enough thought. I could care less what their stock does. I was thinking more in terms of the opportunities for sellers to make a buck.
A crude measure, I know, but if people slow down their listing activity it may imply that they aren't making enough money.
If it is about opportunities for sellers to make a buck, then eBay is clearly not growing. In fact, a lot of categories have really not increase in auction count. It is hard to tell if this is due to stores or just decrease in sellers or decrease in listings per seller.