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We’ve been selling on ebay for about 6 years now. We have seen a significant decrease in revenue for the past 2 years from our 2 ebay stores and ran a bit of an experiment for 6 months.
During the 6 months, we used all the tools that ebay provided, ie: promotions, markdown manager, promoted listings, 30 day returns, 1 day handling etc AND correcting the still present glitch in SE Keywords with titles and meta tags in our ebay store pages. We then used our own tweaks, offering free upgraded shipping, bundling items in lots, running auctions, listing every day, and sharing to social media. We ended nearly 400 stale listings, and put up new items in all price ranges. We changed what we sold and grew our knowledge base in different niche areas. We saw no significant increase in sales. In fact, our main store saw a 54% decrease for the last 3 months.
At this point, we began to search for solid data. How many active users does ebay really have? How many sellers? How many listings are shown at any one time on their servers? Here is what we found out.
Q1 2017 ebay had:
169 million active users
25 million sellers ( 11-12 million in the US alone )
1 Billion live listings at any one time
2.2 billion in revenue
What is interesting is the site has 1 billion LIVE listings at any one time. Which means that’s only 40 listings per seller being shown at any one time. You could also argue that the number may be higher or lower per seller, and it may not apply to each and every single one. So perhaps we could (just for fun) say that 12.2 million sellers get 80 of their items shown at any one time. etc. And what is unknown is how often the Live items refresh and recycle.
Now if our math is correct, take the # of active users and divide by number of sellers. You get 6.76 buyers for every 1 seller. If 6 buyers are only seeing 40 items, perhaps it is more than ‘just a conspiracy” theory as to why sales have slowed, and why items aren’t getting views.
Our 6 mo experiment has shown us that there is a need for change in our business model, what we are selling, and possibly the need to expand onto other platforms. We thought this would be a fun little post and would love some feedback! -
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I’d also love to see where you found those numbers of eBay buyers and sellers. I’ve always wondered if there’s numbers about how many Anchor stores, etc there are.
I totally agree that more people are listing on eBay. More competition. No conspiracy there.
What kind of changes do you think you’ll make?
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So we found several sites simply by just doing a search for terms like how many sellers on ebay 2017, and there were lots of blog type sites, but the ones we found that were most neutral were:
Statista.Com
Bloomberg Business
https://www.quora.com/How-many-sellers-are-on-eBay
The Quora article was based on an AC Nielsen study from 2006, but the writer calculates the compound annual growth rate for Global B2C e commerce, and its a very good read.
Statista.com also has Amazon, Walmart, Etsy stats.
Jay, as far as what we are going to change, I think our main store which is our vintage and collectible store will be our secondary focus. We have already downgraded our store subscription, and have been ending listings and taking them to local auction, where they are actually selling! We may keep around 3-500 listings there.
We have a second store that is..you guessed it..clothing and shoes. Just cant get away from those commodity items, but they are paying the bills! Our main focus at least for the rest of the year will be to bring that store up to par with 3-5000 items. We may try facebook marketplace, we already have the “shop now” link on our facebook for biz page linking to our ebay store. We also are looking into developing our own product or line of products with the help of a SCORE counselor through the small biz administration. We are looking for a US based manufacturer and its tough! As to where to sell those products, it most likely will be our own website, with a few on Amazon and ebay.-
Cool. It sounds like you have a plan. People definitely buy clothing and shoes.
Just curious about creating your own line of items because I see other sellers talk about White Label or Private Label items. Are you creating items that no one else sells? Or are you just buying common commodity items and putting on your own brand?
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Forgot 2 other links were from ebay themselves!
Here you go -
The eternal conundrum, how to reliably source a good selling product to ensure a consistent return. I don’t know that I necessarily need to know how many buyers there are on eBay at any given time simply because there are so many different types of products sold on the platform. It ranges widely from automobiles all the way down to nuts and bolts and everything in between. I only need to concern myself with who will buy my junk, er ahh, quality goods (lol). I have two stores too. One is what I consider mine and my friends; the other is my husband’s.
Here’s the difference between the 2. In mine, we have about 600 items, and it’s a store. When we are regularly listing, we sell about $1000/month (not counting cogs). We have stuff in there from our houses, from the Goodwill bins, and maybe a little garage sale and estate sale sprinkled in. We sell bags, luggage, stuffed animals, china, shoes, clothing, books, magazines, etc. We sell around 60 items a month from this store, so roughly 10% monthly.
My husband’s store has ver selective stuff in it. He put up 10 listings, with no store, not a lot of feedback, no top seller status, no frills. he sold 3 listings within 10 days.
High demand items will sell, even if you’re just a tiny peon in the food chain.
Happy Hunting
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Jay,
I think for us it will be developing our own product. I know all about the PL and WL sellers- that is something we will not do. It is commonplace with every major retailer, their store brands are processed in many of the same facilities that process Green Giant vegetables, for example. Same product, add a little salt, maybe a few end pieces and and re-label it as a store brand. We want to create a product that fills a need in the marketplace, not just re-package something that is already there. It will take some time, but in the end we will have something that is truly ours.-
Agreed. I’m always curious about the White Label and private label sellers who are just branding a common object because the barrier to entry is so low. If their product is successful, I always wonder how long they can sell before other sellers just brand the same item and compete.
Creating your own item sounds exciting. I’m recording a conversation with an eBay seller next week who makes and sells his own fishing lures that his company makes by hand. He sells online and directly to tackle stores.
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Jay, that sounds awesome. We look forward to hearing that interview.
Whiskey, we believe its 40 items per seller at one time. What we don’t know is how often that algorithm recycles and resets. But we have experienced the “lights on, lights off” effect with sales, as many, many other people report. Its an interesting read for sure, on any of the sites above.
This weeks Scavenger Life podcast talks about removing old listings-I think its safe to say that the 1 Billion items number is correct, perhaps their servers cant handle any more than that, especially when a listing is taking up space with no results. -
How does ebay define “seller”?
As I recall, years ago ebay defined a “seller” (for purposes of their SEC filings) as someone who had listed at least one listing within the past 12 months. Has that changed?
That said, I don’t think your calculations really make sense. First, the one billion items are active listed items. That means, on average, all ebay sellers together have a billion listings up. Once a listing is up, its up (apart from glitches). If I have 1000 listings up, they are up…ebay doesn’t choose 40 of them to be live and hide the rest.
And the comment about ebay taking down old listings because their servers can’t handle more than a billion listings. ebay is not afraid to spend money on more servers if they need them. They would happily pay for more servers in order to hit 2 billion listings.
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My Cottage,
You could be right on my math calculations they could absolutely be wrong. I simply took the number of active listings being shown at any moment in time divided by the number of sellers. Thats where the 40 came in. Forums are great places to hear and participate with all kinds of perspectives, ideas and even random thoughts! This was just one of ours. I am not the authority on how ebay works, none of us are.
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