Ebay Promotion Works Too Well

Ebay have said that they are experiencing so many people buying and selling this Christmas season that their site is having problems with the volume of traffic. Make no mistake, Ebay have asked for it and if you are having problems accessing the site, please blame Ebay.

The 2009 Christmas season was always going to be the biggest yet for internet sales. We’ve all been watching our pennies this year, so online shopping helps there. More of us than ever have tried the flexibility and convenience of internet shopping because we have been using the internet longer and someone, somewhere has said – ‘try this website, it is great for buying whatever’. Finally, there is more competition in the online shopfront market than ever, with online stores competing and managing the selling experience better than ever before.

So, online is big, but why is Ebay having issues serving pages to the millions of perusers looking for ‘stuff’?

Look deeper and you’ll find a well-timed promotion run to encourage sellers to post items has been too successful. Ebay is a brilliant online business, more successful than anyone else at providing a place where buyers and sellers meet to trade goods. Ebay has no stock, but simply take a commission on the sale price. They have other costs that the seller pays for meeting in the Ebay market, primarily the listing fee. This is the cost of listing your item on the site and Ebay provide a smorgasboard of options and value added elements all positioned to help you sell your item and help Ebay make more money.

This summer Ebay have run a promotion. ‘Free Listing For Auctions That List at .99 cents’. Free is a rare word with Ebay and the result is that we are now rushing to sell to take advantage of the $1.50 or so we will save at the time of listing our items. The influx of sellers taking advantage of the reduced listing fee’s has been met head on by the influx of buyers looking for a bargain from the growing pool of items for sale because internet shopping is bigger than ever, and there you have it, a choking, groaning server farm trying in vane to serve up the pages that we all are trying to view through our web browers.