There was an interesting post in an Amazon forum about whether eBay or Amazon is better for sellers and their opinion was eBay is the Gold Standard and Amazon is the Black Standard.
eBay is far from perfect and I can point to a few things where it is a piss terrible company: charging sellers fees for sales tax paid by buyers and the upcoming ad “cookie” stuffing of charging sellers ad fees for sales if anyone in the world sees an ad even if the person making the purchase did not. It’s just plain fraud in my view.
And it will lead to more fraud as every seller will have an incentive to click on competitors’ ads every 30 days to force their competitors to pay the ad referral fee to eBay for every sale they make.
Something tells me eBay will be looking down the barrel of lawsuits and government action in the future.
But beyond that … eBay stock is up 35% Year to Date. Amazon up 10% and that’s only because it just got a 10% bump from the AWS AI deal.
Step back farther – 5 years or about Andy Jassy’s tenure as Amazon CEO: eBay up 75% Amazon up 50% – and Amazon is largely due to AWS and a massive income jump in seller ads.
eBay also thanks its investors with some dividends. So does Google, Microsoft, etc. Amazon has never paid a penny in dividends to the investors who were necessary to build the company.
If you sell on both platforms there is a definite “vibe” growing significantly more disparate the last few years.
Amazon? Many sellers wonder why Amazon hates them so much and why it is even in the marketplace business and doesn’t just split the company.
Maybe some sellers feel like eBay is the “gold standard” for sellers because it understands it needs sellers; while it can feel like sellers on Amazon are are just fodder while Amazon focuses on AWS and pivots Prime to being a Disneylike media company.
Personally, I think Amazon needs to be split into at least 3 companies: AWS, Media, and Marketplace.
That might force Amazon to be better for sellers.
Right now too many parts of the Amazon marketplace are atrocious. Products are shadow banned until the seller pays for ads. Consumers just see ad after ad after ad. Many of the products are just Chinese companies buying cheap stuff on Alibaba and then selling the same product under different – unintelligible trash “brands”. It can be a horrible experience. So bad I believe eBay is reaping the benefits.
Amazon has exited the used toys business. A huge percentage of booksellers are gone. Numerous other product categories are under strain to even be sold as bots run amok and Amazon limits sales of non-Chinese bombarded categories to billion dollar brands. Amazon merch is squeezing out sellers of additional product categories. For many sellers and their products they are going to eBay and I expect that trend will accelerate.
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