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eBay Is Conducting a 'Mass Layoff' In the Bay Area (mercurynews.com) 102

Posted by BeauHD from the slice-and-dice dept.
eBay is planning to slash nearly 300 jobs from Bay Area locations by July 20, calling the cuts a "mass layoff." Those being laid off were informed at the end of June, reports The Mercury News. The San Jose-based company estimated that it would eliminate 224 jobs in San Jose, 41 in San Francisco, and five in Brisbane. From the report: "This action is expected to be permanent," eBay stated in the Employment Development Department filing. "No affected employee has any bumping rights." Over the one-year period that ended in March, eBay lost $1.64 billion on revenues of $9.84 billion, according to information posted on the Yahoo Finance site. During the first quarter that ended March 31, eBay earned $407 million on revenues of $2.58 billion. Compared to the year-ago first quarter, profits were down 60.7 percent and revenue rose 12 percent.
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eBay Is Conducting a 'Mass Layoff' In the Bay Area More

eBay Is Conducting a 'Mass Layoff' In the Bay Area

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  • How do you lose money if you're eBay? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2018 @07:36PM (#56971510)
    It's a scaled up beanie baby store - how do you actually lose money with that market share? If I was CEO I think I would just find 100 of the best and brightest to run it, fire all the deadwood and make bank - hope more layoffs are coming!

    • Forget market share (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2018 @07:40PM (#56971528)
      they're practically a bookie. They don't operate much of anything, they're a middle man. And they take 8-15% of gross. Are they losing that much to fraud? They don't have any crazy tech initiatives, and they sold off Paypal. They had almost $10 billion in revenue and spent $11 billion. What the devil did they do with all that money?

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by vtcodger ( 957785 )

        "What the devil did they do with all that money?"

        Hey, hookers and drugs aren't cheap. And neither is a penchant for trying to fill inside straights.

      • Re:Forget market share (Score:4, Interesting)

        by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Thursday July 19, 2018 @03:51AM (#56972770)
        I should think that fraud is a major part of their income. Seller sells a bunch of counterfeit goods, only a % of buyers open a dispute, eBay seizes the sellers funds and after resolving disputes keeps the rest as well as all the transaction / listing fees. Rinse and repeat.

        I've never thought that any middle man service, be it AliExpress, eBay, Amazon, Kickstarter et al really takes fraud that seriously. They'll pay lip service to combatting it, but at the end of the day they still profit from both ends from it happening.

    • Re:How do you lose money if you're eBay? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2018 @07:57PM (#56971596)
      They are losing revenue to Amazon and craigslist. Amazon from "professional" sellers moving where the sales are, and craigslist for the guy wanting to sell his one or two whatevers and not deal with ebay, their fees, shipping, and the increasing possibility of getting ripped off by unscrupulous buyers and ebay's overly customer friendly dispute policies.
      • They are? Revenue rose 12% to $9.84 billion. How can you not make a profit running a website at close to $10 billion revenue?

        • Re:How do you lose money if you're eBay? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by gravewax ( 4772409 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2018 @10:09PM (#56971986)
          probably from all their desperate sales to bring shoppers back. There doesn't seem to be a week that goes buy without ebay subsidising a sale for one large vendor or another with 20% discounts. I am guessing a lot of people are sick of the scammers, the overpriced items and are simply more aware of the alternatives out their. hell 90% of the shit on ebay (and amazon for that matter) is just Aliexpress stuff with 500% markup in price.

          • Re:How do you lose money if you're eBay? (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Bing Tsher E ( 943915 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2018 @11:00PM (#56972146) Journal

            eBay spends too much time trying to be Amazon. It's the place I go for obscure electronic parts* and old test equipment. But every time I go there the browser has to load a bunch of sleek counterfeit merchandise and bullshit for consumers. eBay has gone way too vanilla in the last decade.

            • If I want something cheap, a lot of times eBay will have it with free shipping, so that I don't have to try to find other items at Amazon to qualify for the $25 free shipping.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            That.
            Aliexpress is kicking the shit out of a lot of chinacrap retailers. Get your china crap direct from china for a tiny fraction of what you pay in the usa.
            Thanks to the killer deal china and the post office have. It's even cheaper to have stuff shipped from china than it is from the usa.

            Aliexpress has far better customer service too and there's no screwing around if you have a problem.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by nwf ( 25607 )

            Sounds right. I stopped going there years ago. Most stuff was either:

            1. Shipped direct from China and generally garbage with long ship times.
            2. Priced over MSRP and/or current prices on Amazon.
            3. Have such poor descriptions and photos, I can't even tell what's being sold.

            Although in fairness, #3 is a problem for amazon as well. I can't count how many movies or shows I've looked up to purchase on Blu Ray and they have basically no information as to what's included.

            The rare situation where I find something th

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        They are losing revenue to Amazon

        Always baffles me that Amazon is so popular. Everything about their site and service turned to shit in the last few years.

        Ebay is pretty much always cheaper, doesn't obfuscate who sells something, has more items and a search engine that actually finds what you're looking for, not what Amazon thinks I should buy instead.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I'm a new eBay seller and I'm going to have to disagree with you. Nearly all new items on eBay are drop shipped with a lot of them coming from Amazon. In fairness there are 5% off Amazon credit cards, affiliate links, Prime provides free shipping, and you can buy discounted gift cards, so in reality those resellers are getting 5-15% discount on everything they buy but they're also paying at most 13% in eBay/Paypal fees. So those using all the tricks can sell things cheaper on eBay, but those who aren't a

        • Ebay is pretty much always cheaper

          I find just the opposite for 99% of the stuff I look at- it's almost always a few bucks more on ebay than on Amazon.

          Part of this is due to the man-in-the-middle scheme, where someone lists something on ebay for a few bucks more than on Amazon, and when they get an order they just buy it from Amazon and have it sent directly to the seller. They make a couple of bucks for doing nothing except transferring the order from ebay to Amazon.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        And AliExpress. People are buying all their tat direct from Chinese sellers. Who needs eBay and its expensive listing fees?

      • More victims among buyers than among sellers Reported by 2.7 percent of the population, fraud connected with an online purchase â" non-delivery of goods or services which have been paid for â" is significantly more common than fraudulent sales transactions, where goods or services are delivered but not paid for (0.2 percent).

        https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2013/43/three-percent-of-online-buyers-and-sellers-victims-of-fraud

        it is from nl, but I heard similar statistic in germany. Basically company

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Different US states have tax rates that are not great.
    • Huh. My first question was "How did you have as many as 300 employees in the first place?" Perhaps our two questions, when combined, start to paint a coherent picture.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Well...lots of ways. CEO Dummy Wenig got a private plane for all travel last year or the year before due to "safety concerns" and flies to the Hamptons every weekend. Then there's the generous awards to all of these clowns that come in, fuck something up, and move on (or, worse, don't). eBay's also bought and dismantled numerous smaller companies. Then there's having sales so poor that you subsidize flash sales to the tune of 20% to boost quarterly numbers...while collecting 10% fees from sellers. US s

  • If beginning to rip off their customers with flat 10% fees had anything to do with it? There are cheaper and better alternatives and they refused to keep up with the times. eBay is gonna go away like Blockbuster, Toys R Us, and anyone else who refused to change with the times.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AvitarX ( 172628 )

      What's a better alternative (as a buyer)?

      I'd love to shop for second hand and obscure things somewhere the sellers are happy.

      • What's a better alternative (as a buyer)?

        What's a better alternative (as a seller)?

        No other site (that I am aware of) comes close to their market share. If you want to get your old junk in front of as many eyes as possible, then you're stuck with eBay's fees.

  • How can they possibly not be making bank? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AbRASiON ( 589899 ) * on Wednesday July 18, 2018 @07:45PM (#56971554) Journal

    Have you all seen the goddamn fees to use ebay? It's a disgrace.

    Maybe people are using it less? I try to avoid selling on there absolutely as much as possible.
    (Note: Australian here, being scammed on ebay seems far less likely than in the US)

  • Serves you right, laid off eBay scum (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I used to do a lot of shopping through eBay. One day PayPal froze my account. No idea why. I lost several hundred dollars in it. They made it so difficult to activate I just gave up and stopped using eBay altogether. I haven't shopped there for years.

    At the time they scum at eBay and PayPal no doubt couldn't give a shit. And they got to keep my money.

    I'm no the only one. There are many stories on the net and man web sites dedicated to people screwed over by eBay and PayPal. Corporate knew about this but the

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bobby ( 109046 )

      I used to do a lot of shopping through eBay. One day PayPal froze my account. No idea why. I lost several hundred dollars in it. They made it so difficult to activate I just gave up and stopped using eBay altogether. I haven't shopped there for years.

      I had a somewhat similar experience, but in the end it was a good thing. I'm a pretty tenacious person at times. I called ebay, paypal, my bank, Visa, each many times and nobody would tell me squat. I got a VP of IT at the bank to dig into their server records (I told you I'm tenacious) and he figured out that ebay (maybe FBI too?) had flagged the seller as criminal and automatically blocked the transaction, but did not want to tip off anyone who might work for the criminal and try to test the system. T

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Privacy offender. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If you buy anything off their site as a guest they create a dummy profile and start spamming you to sign into their site. You can't unsubscribe from these emails unless you create a full account. When you contact them to delete the account their staff are quite aggressive in tone and don't want to delete your account. You have to be quite firm. They start asking all these questions about your identity, pretending to be verifying it is you, but they don't have this information in the first place from the dum

  • Before they bought PayPal, Ebay was such an awesome place to conduct business. I used to sell a lot of stuff (as a private seller) through Ebay. I had a great reputation and made some nice side money. Then they tried their hardest to ram PayPal down everyone's throat. That is when I was left, it was such a hassle. I moved my stuff to CL and continued to sell, prices went down, but for the most part I was selling local and didn't have to deal with shipping or fees, so in the end CL was a much better cho

  • They're Seller-Hostile (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mnslinky ( 1105103 ) * on Thursday July 19, 2018 @07:51AM (#56973286) Homepage

    In the past several years, eBay has become hostile to sellers. I don't have a lot of volume on that site, but I cringe every time someone buys something from my business. Only buyers can leave negative feedback for a seller, and the "eBay Buyer Protection" is a mislabeled "eBay Fraud Enabler" feature.

    Case in point, I recently sold a security panel main circuit board replacement. I realized I had one more for sale than I had in inventory, so this particular one ended up being drop-shipped from one of my distributors. This wasn't a used part, or one that was sitting on my shelf for a long time, this was brand-new, recent stock.

    The buyer received the item and immediately requested a return claiming the board was defective. Their comment was that, "upon power-up the board makes several loud clicking noises." The is a DSC circuit board, and those loud clicks are an indicator that the panel has been "dealer locked". Not even the manufacturer can unlock a panel in this condition. It's not possible the panel would have been dealer locked from the manufacturer.

    I asked the buyer to provide me the serial number of the board he was going to return so I could compare it to the one my distributor had shipped. The buyer responded with, "I'm not putting up with your hassle, I'll appeal to eBay."

    Now, I had listed the item as "No returns", but apparently eBay Fraud Enabler simply overrides this setting and they lock your funds and force you to accept the return or simply refund the buyer's money. This is crap.

    This case is still open with eBay, but the buyer was supposed to return the faulty circuit board to me by July 16. It never arrived, so I suspect this will resolve in my favor. It hasn't stopped the buyer from leaving me my first ever negative feedback since I joined the site in 1999 (really!): "Worst seller broken part tried to scam and refund." That sentence doesn't even make sense.

    I've never really "needed" eBay. Paypal's recent issues, as well, I'm thinking I'll just close both accounts and walk the other way.

    • That sounds like a very bad experience and like their system is set up for enabling many more experiences like that. Thank you for sharing. Your story and the one posted in reply were fascinating to read.

  • "eBay earned $407 million on revenues of $2.58 billion. Compared to the year-ago first quarter, profits were down 60.7 percent and revenue rose 12 percent"

    Revenues up, profits down....first thing I would want to know is HOW MUCH did Executive Compensation increase during that time.

    - Jason

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