What drew buyers and sellers to ebay, besides Pierre’s initial spamming of USENET, was purely word-of-mouth accolades. Ebay was exploding before they ran their first media ads, including the infamous “IT” campaign.

What do you think that on-the-street word-of-mouth advertising is saying about ebay now? What is ebay doing to counter that? Besides punishing small sellers, that is, which hastens the bad advertising. What do you say to your friends when you sell something here for the first time and get a 21 day hold, or your listing taken down by a VeRO member?

One official comment I’d like to see is a comparison of Amazon’s 4Q results with ebay’s, which proves it isn’t “the economy.” Resale and discount houses are doing really well in this environment. I would’ve thought that ebay would be booming. They’re not? How about disruptively innovating back to what they were in the early 2000′s?

Yep, Jose, you did. To your detriment.

I even saw the transcript of the earnings call where an analyst asked about this very thing and received, quite frankly, a very entertaining tap-dance and standard non-answer.

Currently, eBay is doing absolutely nothing to lure people to the site. NEW ebayers that is. Nor are they really attracting people who have signed up as members then either forgot or decided to give up.

Television ads remind people about the site. Coupons and loyalty programs only work for people who already shop here. And I’ll bet that instead of increasing the amount of money spent, they simply substituted those coupons for what they would have spent anyway.

Television ads bring in buyers who may not normally think about Ebay as an alternative to the mall…people who DON’T spend a lot of time online. People who aren’t going to be using Live Search (way too complicated for many older shoppers), who aren’t going to be reached by the keyword purchases and banner internet ads. People who aren’t going to be listening to the radio ads–because in rural America (where I happen to live) radio has little to no presence.

Ironically, the people in my area spend a LOT of money on catalog and internet shopping per capita. A LOT. Why? Because we don’t have a Walmart. We don’t have a mall. And our demographic isn’t unique.

Ebay made NO attempt to reach any of the rural Americans like me.

Skipping TV ads didn’t look like you were being smarter with your marketing budget. It made you look cheap and desperate.

And, just to sum it up for you, traffic means nothing if those visitors aren’t translating into buyers. So being #1 in unique visitors is worthless unless those visitors buy HERE. They didn’t.

As others have pointed out, sellers also buy, I know I did when I sold their previously. I buy the odd thing or two now on ebay but I’m nowhere near as involved as I once was and I have absolutely no intention of spending my time and effort trying to make a few quid on the side with a company who keep making it clear by their policy decisions that they don’t want small sellers.

Actions speak far louder than words, I can assure you and the actions of ebay’s management have certainly spoken to me.

However, if you look at comScore figures published just 2 days ago eBay was number one in unique visitors globally for December. See this link http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2696

No doubt it was a tough quarter and the economy continue to erode consumer confidence, the business model as a whole showed relative stability and strength — driving more than $500 million in cash flows for Q4.

Going back to the point you asked about with unique visitors and the holiday, this is made more interesting as we made a strategic shift away from mass marketing to drive customer acquisition to focus more on buyer and customer loyalty programs.

We think these metrics are important to show our reach across the still growing e-commerce market, but as we also stated our long-term focus for eBay is sold items across these and all of our markets.

Sincerely,

Jose Mallabo
Director, Financial/Corporate Communications
eBay Inc.

Keep up the good work, Richard. Don’t let the complainers keep you from doing what you have to do.

Cheers,
Dan