This is - as far as I know - unprecedented.  A two day sale (a good
one with big savings of $39 per listing on eBay motors) and eBay shows
less listing volume over those two days.  It's going to be a very slow
summer.

http://www.firemeg.com/2007/06/did-anyone-see-ebay-had-sale-last.html

It's no mystery why eBay is dying: Just look at its traffic ranking.

I see it is back down a couple of places in the past few days.
Granted, the sites that are passing it are not competing ecommerce
sites, but everyone using those 20 sites that rank higher than eBay is
not using eBay while they use the other sites.

Firemeg -

May I ask what site you go to to review their traffic rankings.
Thanks

Maybe alexa.com?

No, Alexa is for traffic rank as a percentage of all internet traffic.

I use the first three links in the "eBay Statistics" box (upper left
corner) on my website, medved, Dealscart & PSU.  They always differ
slightly, and I'm sure none of them are 100% accurate, but they are
all good for a general assessment of listing volume on eBay.

Oh, my site is http://www.firemeg.com  if you weren't aware of that.
thanks

Awesome - thanks.  I'll check out your site

Awesome - thanks.  I'll check out your site

EBAY goes up against GOOGLE and then the person that is calling the
shoots does the following:

NEW YORK (AP) - The chief executive officer of online auction site
eBay Inc. exercised options on 640,000 shares under a prearranged
trading plan, according to a document filed with the Securities and
Exchange Commission on Monday.

In a Form 4 filed with the SEC, Margaret "Meg" Whitman reported she
exercised options to buy 640,000 shares of common stock on Thursday
and Friday for $10.02 apiece. She sold the shares the same day for
$31.74 and $31.97 each.

REMEMBER ENRON

Does this look like the heads of EBAY are going to stay the LONG
HAUL???????????

The big problem with ebay is you can no longer add search e-mails or
change your existing searches. The problem started earlier this year
when they (cough) "modernized" the site.  Ebay was great when it
started and they keep adding special effects garbage and ads to the
point that it doesn't come close to being as good as it once was.  The
latest I've seen is that they're going to get rid of the current on-
line listing format and replace it with some other on-line listing
crud that I have already beta tested.  I'm a member of the ebay
blogging community, and I know what other sellers (and potential
buyers) are going through right now.  Everyone is having problems, and
the gods at ebay wont come down from their cloud to see what's really
going on with what's left of their company.  With the standard listing
format gone, it's a dead horse and I've dropped my 10-year-old ebay
business and moved back to stock trading.

Buy the way, I contacted ebay more than a dozen times over the problem
where you can't be notified about searches any more.  Others have too
- many, many, MANY times and we always get the same cut-and-pasted
response, which I know by heart "Thank you for contacting eBay
technical support.  Our engineers are aware of the problem and are
working to correct it." (LOL!)

People continue to complain and still hold on the stock.  Sell it and
stop complaining!!!
Those who held the stock yesterday, are not complaining...

Those who held EBAY stock in Jan 2005, at $61.66, have stopped
complaining and watched a good company go down the toilet. So don't be
surprised when YOU look back on this date and the stock is $32 and
change and you find your stock is worth, well lets say, PENNY STOCKS,
REMEMBER THEM?????????

REMEMBER ENRON

This is an excellent example of why I don't really pay much attention
to firemeg. Let's look at the same chart today:

http://www.medved.net/ebay/M062007.gif?66045

Doesn't look so bad now does it? The reason for the dip in volume was
likely because of eBay Live. With over 10,000 people showing up (2nd
largest turnout for eBay Live ever), a lot of big sellers missed the
sale days. Let's give a round of applause for unbiased reporting from
the original poster.

Gotta love the Enron comparisons as well. You can argue that eBay
isn't doing as well as it was a few years back, but how one could
compare it to Enron is beyond me. Incredible.

Lol, people who are talking about eBay from yesterday obviously didn't
get their fact straight. Almost all the rise came from before market
activity, which was camouflaged in the eBay China agreement. Since
eBay China is launching again, the stock naturally would rise, right?

WRONG

Soon after the large before market order, the stock started sinking,
and sunk $0.67 per share, or 2.06% right back down to the $31 zone.
Google also opened high yesterday, but it just kept going up.

See the difference?

Now, let's suppose that the unusual before market activity is related
to insider trading forwarding eBay's own agenda, isn't this what Enron
executives did before the stock crashed? Kept the stock prices up just
long enough for all the money to go into their pocket, then escape,
letting the stock plummet, and fly off with millions of dollars.

eBay stock was - 2.06%, fell two points if you don't count the large
order of stock someone placed before market.

No, you're right, the numbers did go back up.  They are still lower
than in previous years.  After a sharp drop, the scale of that chart
makes it look like the listing skyrocketed, and yet the listing volume
increased by less than one million.

Now go take a look at the "all data" link and see where eBay is now
compared to last year, the year before and the year before that.

It's decreasing on an annual basis.

You can't expect listing amounts to always go up if fees are going up
as well. You can't grade the health of eBay based upon how many
listings are being posted. If they made their site completely free to
use, you'd probably see a billion listings on the site. Would that be
good for the site? Would that be a good indicator of how they're
doing? Absolutely not. This chart is a little bit more representative
of how well it's doing:

http://seekingalpha.com/wp-content/seekingalpha/images/eBaymarketplac...

What was the point of that graph?  To show that eBay has nearly
plateaued in revenue and that the GMV is decreasing?

Look at the same chart with an overlay of listing volume during that
time period.

http://www.firemeg.com/dontouch/images/listvolchart.gif