看ebay--之季度GMV降低

Given the economic backdrop and what's going on at the ecommerce giants eBay and Amazon as well as the rest of the industry, I believe that for years we will look back at Q408 as a significant 'ah-ha' moment when the entire World finally woke up to what those of us entrenched in the industry have been seeing indications of for the last two years - Amazon is significantly, methodically, and relentlessly eating away at eBay's market share. I believe Amazon is the largest beneficiary of eBay's decline, but certainly not alone. Online retailers from Zappos to Newegg to Wal-mart and others are all doing their part in taking share from eBay.  In fact, many of eBay's changes are actually self-inflicting further declines as I'll attempt to illustrate later in the series.

Before we go into details on how material this is, I wanted to pull together some highlights from eBay and Amazon's results.  These results are culled from many areas including:

• Company announcements and conference calls (transcripts here: eBay , amazon)
• Analyst notes - I've read and dissected information from every analysts and you will see specific references to datapoints from Jeetil Patel @ DB, Scott Devitt @Stifel, Imran Kahn@JPM, Justin Post @ML/BOA, Derek Brown, and others.
• Industry analysts - I was just at shop.org and talked with some of the top analysts about these trends. 
• Where possible, we enhance this data with data from ChannelAdvisor and our own internal analysis/tracking.

By all but three measures eBay had a terrible quarter.  The focus of this blog is eBay's marketplace business so I'll only cover that area and not spend any time on Paypal or Skype (which are both doing well, but still too small to turn the tide of the core decline).  Thus all data and analysis in this section specifically refer to the marketplace business and omit any and all PayPal/Skype information.

The three bright spots for eBay's quarter were:

• Items sold were up 3% y/y
• Active users increased 4% y/y (a small acceleration, well big percentage-wise, but small in absolute terms) from the Q3 3% y/y gain.
• Fixed price items are now 49% of GMV 

Here are some graphs from Jeetil Patel that show the trends in the item sold and active user metrics: (click to see full-size version):

The transaction growth chart shows that while eBay held onto a y/y growth on this metric, the trend is definitely decelerating.  It will be interesting to see if this goes negative in Q1 or if eBay can hold the line here.

In active users, you see a little bit of a bounce y/y growth-rate-wise vs. the lows of Q208.  Jeetil points out that this could largely have been driven by the expensive (contra revenue) coupon and mslive cashback activities in Q408.

These were the bright spots and the negative datapoints were:

• Overall GMV was down 16% y/y
  • Autos GMV was down 30% y/y 
  • International GMV was down 15% y/y 
  • Domestic GMV was down 9% y/y
  • Fixed-price GMV was down 2% y/y  
  • Auction GMV was down a whopping 26% y/y
  • Total non-vehicle GMV was down 12% 
• ASPs were down 7%
• GMV/user was down 8%  

I believe the GMV datapoints are the most significant measures of the health of any marketplace and every eBay GMV trend is defnitely very concerning.  Before Amazon announced, it was easy to look at these through the lense of the economic backdrop, but after Amazon, a different picture emerged (more on that later)

Here are some interesting graphs that show these datapoints and the trends that led to them.  First, here's a breakdown of GMV over the last 5 Q's with the fixed-price and auction portions called out from JP Morgan.  The second graph shows the growth rates  of fixed-price and auction over the course of the last year:

I think the second chart is very important because it shows both the well known fact that eBay's auction business is ailing, but it also shows that fixed-price isn't too far behind.  It also begs the question if eBay's movement from auction to fixed-price will really help at all.  In other words, are they going from the frying pan (down 26% y/y) into the fire (down 2% and dropping) here?