Obviously this is not advice in any sense at all:
Cohen said the 1,600 remaining sites would offer eBay a “national network for authentication, intake, fulfilment, and live commerce”.
Those stores could serve as “drop-off and shipping nodes”, and double as broadcasting studios, with eBay providing the goods and customer base for events like livestreamed auctions, it said. “GameStop staff already inspect and grade hardware and trading cards every day. Sellers walk in, items are verified on the spot, and listings carry a trust badge,” GameStop’s slide deck added.
That’s not an obviously insane plan. Which already makes it better than some stock market moves – HP buying Autonomy for example.
GameStop, which has quietly accumulated a 5% stake in eBay,
Of course, could be that really driving the idea.
But what it is is deffo fun.
“Those stores could serve as “drop-off and shipping nodes”, and double as broadcasting studios, ”
There are so many takeovers where “could” is in someone’s thinking rather than “will”.
It’s not the worst of ideas having a broker for authentication of some things, but if you’re doing that, what’s the benefit over someone just selling to a shop? The stores are going to charge for this service.
Also, the stuff like really expensive Pokemon cards is rare. If you’re buying something under £50, are you going to do this, or just look at someone’s store and feedback and take a small risk?
Broadcasting studios? Who wants this? A Van Gogh going on sale is an event. Most people don’t care that much.
Broadcasting thing is about the sudden appearance of TikTok live selling which has rapidly become a serious rival to Ebay in certain niches, esp the trading card stuff that Gamestop is into. Also other live selling platforms like Whatnot but TikTok is the biggie. Ebay has invested a lot into Ebay Live in an effort to take them on. But that’s only just starting in the UK, it launched in the USA first so you might not be aware of it. They’re being very selective who they let sell on it (need to have good customer feedback and do a training course first – Ebay thinks its USP in live selling is higher standards and better customer service/protection) while the need for a decent studio setup is a barrier to entry for many of their top-rated sellers. What I don’t understand is why Ganestop shops are seen as a good studio option, retail properties are expensive (surely out of town warehouse space would be a more cost effective?) and you’d think might be noisier than ideal too. Maybe the idea is to put on a show and get a studio audience bidding along on their phones.
“Broadcasting thing is about the sudden appearance of TikTok live selling which has rapidly become a serious rival to Ebay in certain niches, esp the trading card stuff that Gamestop is into”
in certain niches is doing a lot of work here. I can imagine some extremely rare $2000 auction gets attention, but the more normal $50 card?
“surely out of town warehouse space would be a more cost effective?”
Yes, but Gamestop have shops, so this is just using a hammer to get screws in.
If you really wanted eBay authentication, you’d have the equivalent of trade counters, as you say, edge of cities. And you don’t really need many.
But at the point of authentication and eBay stuff, why bother? Every Comic-con has trading. You can check the goods.
Might depend on who is doing the selling. If they don’t drive (even a lot of over-17 youngsters don’t these days), a High Street location might get you a lot more footfall from your target group.
Gosh, I hadn’t. Another trend that had passed me by. Sounds horrible.
“in certain niches is doing a lot of work here. I can imagine some extremely rare $2000 auction gets attention, but the more normal $50 card?”
No, this phenomenon isn’t generally about people selling big ticket items and getting tens of thousands of people watching. It’s much more bread and butter stuff, being sold in front of audiences of dozens to hundreds. You’ve got it entirely the wrong way round – which is understandable because the way it works is pretty counterintuitive. Think of how many professional YouTubers or Twitch streamers exist in the “long tail” of content and that’s where the Ebay Live sellers are, it isn’t so much for the mega-sellers like Music Magpie and World of Books. But bargain-hunters have an interesting incentive to switch to smaller streams where the bidding competition is less fierce.
Those niches I’m talking about aren’t small ones. Trading cards is an especially popular category on Ebay Live but it’s a big part of Ebay sales in general. Plus related collectables like toys – Lego, Matchbox/Corgi, Funko, MayMei, Thrilljoy, Jellycat & similar plushies – and coins. Clothing and footwear are huge on Live and there’s also tech (refurbished phones, laptops, TVs, sound systems), computer games, handbags, beauty & fragrance, watches & jewellery, a few you might not expect like power tools and sporting goods (balls, weights, golf clubs etc). But there are other categories of Ebay sellers which hardly feature on Live at all, in some cases because the category isn’t allowed there. Second-hand cars is huge business for Ebay but not on Live, for instance. You might also be surprised how much food and drink is for sale on Ebay – mostly packaged stuff bought at clearance prices or people buying food brands from abroad that they miss. Also absent on Live. Homeware, vintage and antiques have lots of small business sellers on Ebay – a few sell on Live but most don’t because the pricing model isn’t sustainable for them.
Generally sellers don’t put the rare or valuable stuff on Live, except perhaps the odd tempter to get the crowd in, because the audiences are too small to reach anywhere near top dollar. If they know what price something ought to fetch they’d rather sell it as Buy It Now (fixed price but they’ll usually accept a reasonable offer) rather than auction it. The way they use Live is to get through volume, with slim margins. For clothing, toys, handbags etc you’re looking at selling at charity shop kind of prices. That’s why audiences tune in, not to see the $2000 auction of a rare trading card but just for something to casually zone out to with the chance of picking up something extremely cheap. The small audiences on a typical livestream are part of what keeps viewers interested – prices don’t go super high and there’s a huge amount of audience interaction in the stream chat and if it’s a good host then a lot of repartee. It has the community feel of a small YouTube, Twitch or TikTok live stream.
For sellers this high volume, low price model works if they source at wholesale prices – then most gems that turn up in a clothing bale or job lot instead go on their main Ebay store to get a better price, while Live is a good way to dump their low-value finds they do not want clogging up their main store and lowering the quality there. Or it works if you literally are a charity shop and get stock for free. All the major chains have an Ebay presence and a lot of those have already pivoted into live-selling. Charity shop chains do now advertise specifically for online selling staff who have a good grip on Ebay (and other selling platform) policies, how to display and describe items for online sale, and can research and set prices appropriately. Livestream presenting skills are going to get added to the “desirable” list too, since the quality of the host makes a big difference.
Seeing a senior executive explain how she was casually watching a selling livestream on her phone while having breakfast with her kids before school, and to her great surprise ended up buying a second-hand handbag she was very pleased with, is one of the most surefire signs I’ve seen that Western civilisation is doomed. But there is business to be done here, and in fairness it’s mostly substituting for people zoning out in front of the TV a few decades ago.
But aside from trading cards or coins/stamps I’m still not sold on this studio idea. Selling cheap tat doesn’t seem a good way to draw an in-store crowd which is the only other good reason I could see to justify it – I take the transport point but bear in mind Ebay’s minimum age requirement is 18, and the stock will be a pain to transport without a car or van unless it’s small stuff like cards – even 30 pairs of trainers/sneakers is beyond easy bus transport and that would be a pretty small-time stream. The low margin surely can’t justify the retail floor space costs. There’s a reason very few Ebay sellers rent their own shop or anything bigger than an emporium stall, even the ones who are big enough to have built a dedicated home studio or (for the ones with a bit more scale) a studio space in their industrial unit. And similarly why a typical auction house – which this concept is essentially a reimagining of – isn’t on the high street these days, preferring to be outside the town centre with dedicated parking.
I read elsewhere that they also see themselves in competition to Amazon, which is excellent news and if true proves yet again that monopolies cannot exist in a free market, only in a government regulated market.
Not that I necessarily agree Amazon is a monopoly but that is often the claim.
Amazon isn’t a monopoly.. There’s the chinese tat giants for starters…
There’s also smaller sites operating in more specialised fields the big ‘uns won’t touch.
It just depends on where in the world you are, what you want/need, what quality you desire, and what risk you want to take actually getting the stuff you paid for.
It’s really just like oldfashioned brick-wall retail: You got the big supermarket chains, the smaller chains filling more local needs, and specialist stores dealing in stuff the supermarkets don’t find commercially interesting.
As each day passes I find it more and more difficult to distinguish Amazon from the Chinese tat merchants.
I buy quite a lot of stuff from eBay, it’s often cheaper and easier than Amazon (no need to navigate around the ‘we are offering you prime’, ‘sure you wouldn’t like prime?’, ‘how about prime?’ traps.) But its a long time (15-20 years?) since I brought anything secondhand from a private seller on eBay, it’s just another marketplace for small traders.
Monopolies can exist in a free market – it’s covered in introductory microeconomics textbooks – but it needs certain conditions to apply, like extreme economies of scale or network effects. But yes Ebay sees itself as a rival to Amazon. Just a different model since Ebay generally doesn’t have much involvement with fulfilment – some exceptions like it runs an international selling program that helps small sellers reach new markets abroad – and it’s purely a marketplace model, while Amazon is more of a hybrid.
Is the strategy “…and then r/wallstreetbets will come to our rescue”?
Nice idea.
Couldn’t be a bigger bunch of thieves than CEX.
Who seem to have been closing stores. The two nearest me have gone in the last year or so.
People probably now flog the stuff on eBay instead with only marginally more hassle and far greater gain.
Agglomeration effect of town centres. If you were going to town, nip into CEX and see what DVDs are cheap. Once the M&S goes, you don’t pop into town.
Thats very true WB. I used to wander around my local to see if there was anything that might be useful. Now, thanks to parking costs and lack of shops, I don’t go into town anymore.
I find flogging stuff on eBay a bit of a hassle: the process is clunky. For ‘vintage’ stuff, Vintage Cash Cow is better.
The Mouse That Roared.
Superb movie.