if they get back to their roots... they *could* once again regain
some footing in all areas, including movie posters...
whether that will even happen, remains to be seen.--THAT will be the
key--unless it is already too late.
jeff
On Mar 12, 2009, at 3:44 AM, Richard Halegua Comic Art wrote:
It's hilarious.. they just keep making mistakes and they're going
to make one more because they just don't realize the core problem
that ebay as a major force is finished.
They entered the American lexicon to become a household name
now they're like last year's fashions
I'll be having a good laugh at this.. I'm sure Bruce will too. And
Unca Phil..
LOLOLOLOLOLOL
At 02:33 AM 3/12/2009, David Kusumoto wrote:
On the front page this morning in NY. -d.
-----------------------------------------------------
EBay Retreats in Web Retailing
Company Will Return to Its Roots as Internet Flea Market, Put More
Focus on PayPal
By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER, WALL STREET JOURNAL - PAGE ONE - THU., MAR.
12, 2009
EBay Inc., a onetime Internet star that thrived with its
pioneering auction model, is retreating from its strategy of
competing across the board in online retailing as it contends with
its own missteps and changing consumer behavior.
EBay Chief Executive John Donahoe told analysts Wednesday
that the San Jose, Calif., company plans to focus its online-
marketplace business on used and overstocked goods, rather than on
the retail market for new goods that is dominated by competitors
such as Amazon.com Inc.
EBay's visitor traffic fell over the recent holiday season
and the company reported a 16% drop in fourth-quarter revenue for
its marketplace business.
The online-marketplace business constitutes about half of
eBay's $8.5 billion in annual revenue.
EBay's focus on its "secondary market" includes the used and
vintage goods that the company is already known for selling, as
well as clearance and out-of-season items.
The move is a shift from just a few years ago when eBay
developed sites such as eBay Express to sell new goods, and when
many in the retail industry expected eBay to dominate all forms of
online commerce.
"We aren't a retailer," said Mr. Donahoe, who took over as
CEO from Meg Whitman early last year. "We're going to focus where
we can win."
Mr. Donahoe valued the global market for secondary-market
goods, online and otherwise, at $500 billion a year.
EBay spent Wednesday trying to persuade analysts that it is
no longer just an online auction company and that its greatest
hopes for growth rest in PayPal, an online payment company it
acquired in 2002 that is able to benefit from overall growth in e-
commerce, not just sales on eBay's sites.
It announced a deal with Research in Motion Ltd. for PayPal
to become the exclusive payment method for the application store
on BlackBerry smart phones.
Still, the move amounts to an acknowledgment by eBay that it
can't compete with Amazon and other e-commerce companies that
represent the online equivalent of a shopping mall.
Instead, eBay is returning to its roots as the Web's flea
market by focusing on used and overstocked items, albeit with an
effort to rethink the classic eBay shopping interface that has
grown stale in recent years.
EBay had taken off as an early leader in e-commerce in the
late 1990s with an auction model that guaranteed consumers could
find the best price on many used and leftover items.
But in the last few years, eBay has been felled by a shift in
consumer behavior as shoppers revert to the buying habits that
were familiar in the pre-Internet era.
Before the Web, typical consumers preferred going straight to
brand-name stores selling new goods, with the best customer
service, to purchase the latest goods.
The growth of malls across the nation reflected this
preference; flea markets and thrift shops were a small sliver of
commerce.
For a while, eBay appeared to cause a blip in that behavior,
as new online consumers went to its site to snag deals by
outbidding other people.
But as the novelty of online auctions wore off -- and as the
demographic of online shoppers broadened beyond the adventurous
"early adopters" -- consumers began defaulting to huge online
retailers like Amazon.com, Buy.com and Wal-Mart.com to buy their
items.
EBay, too, began shifting its focus to fixed-price sales but
wasn't able to keep up with the competition on mainstream retail
items.
EBay also is dealing with its own fumbles, many under the
leadership of Ms. Whitman, the former CEO.
The company rested too long on the laurels of its auction
business, even as rivals like Amazon built their online retail
offerings.
EBay later tried to diversify into other areas for growth,
purchasing Internet telephone service Skype Technologies SA for
about $2.6 billion in cash and stock in 2005. But the deal didn't
result in major revenue or customer growth. EBay later took a
write-off on the acquisition, and there has been speculation the
company wants to sell Skype. EBay has declined to comment on the
speculation.
In addition, eBay is being hurt by the recession.
As consumers searched for online deals during the recent
holiday shopping season, many gravitated to Amazon.com, which
experienced a big jump in visitor traffic and posted a record
holiday quarter.
But eBay -- which had benefited in the dot-com bust and
economic slowdown earlier this decade when many consumers dumped
used goods for sale on the site -- saw a drop in traffic,
according to figures from comScore Inc.
EBay has been scrambling to reverse its slowing growth.
After Ms. Whitman retired last year, her handpicked
successor, Mr. Donahoe, made a series of changes. These included
emphasizing fixed-price sales and giving preference to merchants
who get positive customer ratings.
But the changes have yet to pay off.
EBay reported its first-ever quarterly revenue decline, 7%,
in the fourth quarter as profit fell 31%.
Increasingly, eBay has relied for growth on its
nonmarketplace businesses, such as its PayPal unit, which has
doubled in revenue over the past 18 months.
EBay's emphasis on the secondary market is an "attempt to
differentiate themselves from Amazon," said Scot Wingo, the chief
executive of ChannelAdvisor Corp., a company that helps merchants
sell across a variety of e-commerce sites, including eBay and
Amazon. (EBay has a minority share in the company.)
"It was an admission that they have a competitor out there
that they previously wouldn't address," Mr. Wingo said.
An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.
As part of its sharpened focus, eBay Wednesday sketched out
changes to its marketplace to help bring back shoppers who have
migrated to other sites.
The company said it is refining its search engine and
developing a catalog of its products, which will let shoppers find
what they're looking for more easily and choose from different
colors or sizes of an item from a single page.
EBay also is experimenting with new interfaces that enable
shoppers to explore products via photos, based on similarities in
color or style.
Such moves, along with growth at PayPal, should boost revenue
to between $10 billion and $12 billion in 2011 from $8.5 billion
last year, the company said.
EBay executives said they expect operating earnings to grow
by mid-single digits through 2011.
Still, the company predicted this year will be difficult.
Its 2011 revenue goal and prediction that operating earnings
would grow in the single digits "assumes that the global economy
returns to some sense of normalcy," said eBay Chief Financial
Officer Bob Swan.
Mr. Donahoe predicted PayPal will produce revenue of $4
billion to $5 billion by 2011, compared with $2.4 billion last
year, and could become the largest portion of eBay's business.
EBay also warned that, as it makes changes to its
marketplace, sales in that business will underperform that of
other e-commerce companies this year.
The company forecast its online-marketplace unit will
generate $5 billion to $7 billion in revenue by 2011, suggesting
sales could remain flat from $5.6 billion last year.
Mr. Donahoe didn't name companies that he had wooed into
using eBay for secondary-market sales, but signaled that they
might include some middle-market players that buy overstocked
items in bulk.
He said his company's "sweet spot is as much with
intermediaries as with retailers."
Analysts were receptive to eBay's emphasis on the secondary
market. "But it comes down to executing on them," said John
Aiken, an analyst with Majestic Research. "If they can make the
buyer experience incrementally better, there will be more buyers,
and therefore more sellers."
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