How To Start A Small Restaurant Business - Can eBay Save Itself?

This was the first time Amazon went ahead in the race for traffic. Last October Amazon had over 54 million unique visitors compared with eBay's 50 million. A couple of years ago very few people would have expected Amazon to outperform the giant of online selling eBay but that is just what is happening now.

In the same survey Amazons positive response went up from 36% to 65%. In a recent survey only 13% surveyed gave eBay as their answer to the question "which site gives the best shopping experience" which is 14% down from a similar survey last March. They are getting very low customer satisfaction ratings. But it is not only in the amount of traffic that eBay is falling behind.

It would appear that eBay is starting to leak customers to Amazon at an alarming rate. The fact that 69% also viewed Amazon positively should also be a cause for concern. 54% had a negative opinion of the company, probably more worrying for eBay should be the fact that amongst the PowerSellers in a JP Morgan survey.

EBay do not sell their own products so they would have to find a way to encourage their retailers to make the discount offers which will be no easy task. Quite simply in the past eBay has been conceived as the site for bargains but they cannot compete against Amazon on discounts. Firstly the company's apparent move away from the auction format towards fixed price Buy It Now option, there are several reasons for this.

In the long term that is not sustainable and now they are paying the price. Failed to answer questions and concentrated purely on expansion and new markets, they ignored complaints. In the good expanding years eBay paid no more than lip service to the concept of customer care.

These disenchanted sellers felt it was no longer a level playing field and moved to Amazon in their droves. One of the big causes of dissent is the way that eBay seem to have abandoned the home based and small retailers as they wooed the large companies. Articles and blog posts complaining about eBay and their methods of operation, you do not have to search very hard on the Internet to find web sites.

In seemingly wanted to abandon their original business model and it could be argued that they have thrown out "the baby with the bath water". These days the main concern of the company is towards its shareholders and their profits. Albeit a huge community, in the beginning eBay was very much a community site.

If it is not too late, it does not look well placed to take on Amazon in the online discount market and perhaps rather than try to re-invent itself it should consider going back to its roots.