June eCommerce Retail Numbers Are In…eBay We Have a Problem…

Key Points From comScore’s June U.S. Traffic Release

June and Q2 U.S. Online Retail Traffic Trends Largely Neutral —

• Overall U.S. Y/Y Traffic to Online Retail sites was modestly positive
• Q2 traffic (up 13.0%) very modestly better than Q1 trends (up 12.7%)
• comScore tracked 21% Y/Y growth to Amazon’s U.S. Website
• comScore tracked a 5% Y/Y decline to eBay’s U.S. Website

And the icing on the cake for me was this quote "…these trends as Neutral to both a Bullish AMZN and a Bearish EBAY…" Wow, does that say alot? These stock analyst are looking at Amazon increasing and eBay decreasing as a NEUTRAL trend.

Dayam! This like like eBay is on the "short bus" and they just expect it to stay that way. I mean, wow they don’t expect too much from eBay these days I guess. Dude that has got to suck for eBay.

Some key points to recognize are that Amazon and eBay are looking somewhat neutral. However, Amazon is very bullish while eBay seems to be very bearish and of course that means that Amazon is up, eBay is down. if you look at the chart, the chart data is showing that Amazon continues to see double digit increases in online traffic, while eBay is seeing single digits decreases in the negative, April saw down -7%, May down -3%, June down -4%.

If you couple that same data and take a look at same store’s sales data that was just released for June from ChannelAdvisor and their block of customers, it looks like the changes from eBay continue to take its toll on eBay sellers because the eBay same store sales declined 5.2%, after being up a little bit, around 4% in May.

eBay - The changes from 3/30 continued to take their toll on eBay sellers.  eBay declined to -5.2% vs. -4% in May.  Customers continue to be frustrated by the BestMatch algorithm, constant eBay tweaks to that algorithm and the very high eTRS bar.  If there is a silver lining to this problem, it has lead to more expansion in other channels (Amazon, Buy and webstore are the primary beneficiaries)
                                                                                        — Scot Wingo

So, now, we’re seeing that becoming a little negative, I’m not seeing a whole lot of rainbows in here for the eBay squad and I’m one of them. We need to see some change, some optics in the eBay numbers because they cannot continue bleeding this heavily while the rest of the country and the rest of the eCommerce economy seem to be turning the corner and moving forward; even though to double digits, eBay is still seeing the negatives. Not good.

This is a constant trend, if you want to see a silver lining in the cloud well at least eBay is not down 15% or 23% down, like a year ago; they’re bleeding less…Yeah?

Next lets turn our minds to the user interaction on the web.  Interesting point is that Google Sites are still seeing an increase and an income, but Facebook is also catching up pretty quick.

If you look at the total number of views and the total time spent, Facebook is starting to catch up and make a big profit. Facebook had a share of 8.6% where it used to be 7.8% and they are expecting Facebook to capture the number one spot in time spent before the year ends, which means that Facebook will be number one by year’s end. Who would’ve thought that crown would switch hands? If you rewind the clock back to just 3 years ago, no one would have predicted Facebook would out do the King Google?