ebay and changing customer demands?

Online auction leader eBay warned in an annual report on Friday that it faces difficulty getting former customers to return, adding to the normal challenge of attracting new users to its sites.

In its annual shareholder filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, eBay cited a variety of new threats to its business that reflect "changing customers demands."

Changing customer demands - really? Well of course it is - but I suggest its more than that as my friend a CTO commented

This looks like another example that, to me at least, shows that the industry is waking up to the need for a richer, more engaging relationship with their users.

And that's right. Its called Engagement. The truth is, that markets form around three key principles. These are

1). Knowledge and information exchange
2). Commerce
3). Entertainment

These are the vital and necessary glue in social interactions that bind us together. Successful markets are then social constructs that play a vital and important role in peoples lives. In a world where we form into communities around passions values and desires, those that seek to build businesses of the future should not overlook this important principle

This is why the Facebook's of this world will suffer, because they know how to scale a social network, but they don't know why their social networks work, or scale, or indeed, how to take all of those massive flows of social interaction and turn that into revenue. For example a friend of mine a Finn, a male and a business and family man is served Facebooks ads for Breast enlargement. Another friend of mine, female, a mother and professional marketer gets served Facebook ads for hoe to get a "Six Pack." I told her she was quite fit enough :-)

But there is a market for mass niche communities of interest, the scale of revenue to be earned from these can dwarf regional markets.

Wall Street analysts, on average, expect eBay this year to earn revenue of $8.7 billion, a rise of 14 percent on 2007.

Thats not too bad a sum, the problem is that eBay revenue has suffered a dramatic slowing of growth in recent years – down from rates of 30 percent to 40 percent.

Via Cnet news

Also I wonder if ebay really has a true understanding of its members as what I would describe as a 3D profile. How can it meet the needs of the community if it does not truly understand the complex nature of people's relationships with each other?

More on ebay

Comments

[Chris Leben]

Ebay needs to be neutral in their actions for both the buyer and the seller or there going to keep losing business.

http://www.typobuy.com - Get cheap ebay auctions by finding auction misspellings

[Cheap Beats By Dre]

and the seller or there going to keep losing business.

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