eBay traffic analysis from compete.com
Jan-2007
I found an interesting post the other day on the compete.com blog giving some interesting stat about eBay site visits.
Compete runs a service similar to Alexa where they track the behaviour of their online community. This way they can analyse the behaviour of their members regarding eBay’s website. The data is interesting but it is not clear what they regard as a registerd and non registered user. Also, is their information on registed users carried from one month to the next, or indeed from one session to the next?
eBay registered vs. Unregistered browsers
According to this first graph, less than 50% of visitors to the website are registered users. This would suggest that whilst eBay’s traffic is high, they have a long way to go in order to fully utilise it.
Registered in this content means that they have not visited a page which requites an eBay account e.g. My eBay. However, it is not entirely clear to me whether they this distingushes browers who are registered and not logged in or visitors who simply do not have accounts. If someone logs in on one visit and then the next visit does not log in, are they counted as a registered or unregistered user?
Bidding vs Listing
The second chart compare the proportion of visitors who bid vs those that list. It would seem to suggest that the listing is performed by a small fraction of site visitors (6%) which is about 15% of eBay registered users. Bidding is performed by approximately 65% of registered users.
These figures suggest that eBay still has a long way to go in order to make it easy to list on the marketplace. It also shows the opportunity for seller on eBay still exists – it is a marketplace with few sellers and a great many buyers, even if some of these buyers are selling in high volumes.
Bidder vs non bidder page views
The last chart shows that eBay listers visit approximately three time as many pages than those who bid only. The author thinks that this is because most listing are done by powersellers who list a large number of items and therefore visit more pages. Whilst this is probably true, it take a lot of page views to list an item and manage the sale which probably accounts for the extra page views
Re the bidders vs listers page views, it’s hardly surprising that only 6% of visitors to the site actually start listing items. This is because of the plethora of listing tools such as eBay’s own TurboLister and File Exchange and third party tools such as Spoonfeeder, Marketworks, ChannelAdvisor etc.
Most serious sellers hardly visit the eBay site proper at all and definately not for listing.