To the incoming CEO and Board of ebay

To the incoming CEO and Board of ebay,

Regarding the new Feedback Policy and Fees that you propose to introduce.
Please allow us, your CUSTOMERS, the ebay SELLERS, to point out some defects
in your theory:

1) Your new policy would make sense if ebay transactions were multi-directional (ie: you took fees from BOTH Buyers and Sellers) transactions on ebay are uni-directional (ie: you receive fees only from sellers). Yet your new policy favors those from whom you derive no direct profit and penalizes those who make up your Revenue Base. This is contrary to good business practice and common sense. In fact, it borders on Commercial insanity.

2) Under the New Policy it will be nearly impossible for any normal Seller to avoid Delayed Payment. This may favor PayPal, enabling it to take profit from money in temporary limbo in the same way as a normal Banking House, but it will drive thousands of smaller Sellers to the wall or out of ebay. At the moment other Online Auction Venues are virtually non-existent but if smaller sellers are driven elsewhere in large numbers, and they will be, and if those other venues employ googlebombing and viral marketing, etc and they will, they will expand rapidly and ebay will contract, equally rapidly. You cannot afford that contraction of your customer base, consult Yahoo!

If a large corporation, such as Google or Amazon, decides that this is the time to go into direct, functional, competition with you, something that until now has always proven unprofitable in the extreme, you will be damaged past the point of recovery. The same would apply if they decide to covertly back a smaller competitior, a choice they may very well choose to make, since otherwise they would fall foul of European Monopolies and Merger Laws. Bear in mind also that even Microsoft is losing against the European Regulators and your proposed changes may cause ebay to fall foul of them, too. Can ebay afford a 5 or 6 billion euro Fine? Especially with falling revenue due to a contracting customer base?

3) You express a desire to "Get away from the culture of the flea market", but it is precisely upon this culture that ebay has thrived. Take out the Small Speciality Sellers or simply the Small Sellers and ebay will find itself in direct competition with Amazon. Amazon will win, because your large Powersellers already happen to be Amazon customers, too, and Amazon offers a better deal, better service, better support and lower overhead. The Powersellers use ebay to get greater exposure. You need them much more than they need you. What ebay is to the Small Seller Amazon is to the Big Seller. And many Small Sellers in the DVD and Book fields, etc have already moved to Amazon, more will follow and the Speciality Sellers will go to another Online Venue. When that happens ebay will go into meltdown. You live on being the biggest fish in the pond. Any contraction of your status or a move to another pond will prove deadly. PayPal will survive, though probably as a division of Google or Yahoo, but ebay will die.

4) Face a fact, ebay is the world's biggest Flea Market! Nothing more, nothing less. Our customers, the Buyers, come to us because they haven't heard of any of the other Flea Markets, but if we go to another Flea Market so do they. Many Buyers and Sellers have already gone to Amazon or other places, more will follow if you make your changes. A nickel off a listing fee is nice but a 3.5\% rise in the Final Value Fees is a killer. Delayed Payment is a killer. Inability to weed out Bad Buyers is a killer. The biggest killer of all is non-payment and you are giving the fraudsters and the thieves among the Buyers a charter to rip off the Sellers and the Sellers are your customers. Yes, some Sellers are crooks, thieves, frauds and con-artists and
you are really inefficient at weeding them out, but does that give you a right to rob those who aren't or to help others to rob them? NO!!

Accordingly, we recommend that you reverse these catastrophically stupid
Feedback and Fee changes. WE, YOUR CUSTOMERS, THE EBAY SELLERS, don't want to see ebay go to the wall, it would be inconvenient to us but we will survive.
Why do you want to put yourselves out of work? Amazon and Google won't employ
you and any new venue supports the "culture of the flea market" by definition and so won't.

Wake up! Dump these changes.