February 19 2008
eBay sellers go on strike
eBay’s change in its feedback system is angering sellers in the US and they’ve decided to act, by striking
According to Fortune Small Business activists opposed to eBay's upcoming policy changes are readying for a weeklong site boycott starting this week
The boycott, planned to run Feb. 18 - 25, is scheduled to overlap eBay's Feb. 20 rollout of significant changes announced last month.
While the changes in fees are part of the argument and some sellers may lose revenue what's really irking the sellers is the changes to the feedback system, where sellers have been banned from leaving negative feedback about buyers which sellers say will leave sellers vulnerable to negligent bidders and scammers.
EBay spokesman Usher Lieberman said the company is taking a wait-and-see approach to the boycott talk
"At this point it's still premature for us to speculate," Lieberman said. "We're empathetic with our sellers and understand that they're concerned, and that some of them object to some of the changes we're implementing. On the other hand, we think we have very good reasons for what we're doing."
Meanwhile eBay’s free classifieds site Kijiji seems to be taking off in the U.S. eBay launched Kijiji in launched in March, 2005, outside of the US and launched a U.S. version of the site last summer.
Since then, the U.S. site alone has grown from 362,000 visitors in July, 2007 to 1.8 million in January, according to comScore. In comparison, Microsoft’s classified site, Windows Live Expo, attracted only 176,000 visitors in January, Yahoo Classifieds attracted 97,000, and neither Google’s classifieds site nor Google Base even registers on comScore.
