eBay sees surge in UK small businesses joining the marketplace
More than 36,000 new businesses joined eBay in 2018, the largest rise since 2015, reports the online marketplace.
Rob Hattrell, Vice President of eBay in the UK, said: “Britain’s small business scene is booming, fuelled by a desire for greater flexibility, independence and empowerment. It’s this attitude, coupled with an agile approach to decision-making, that means our sellers have what it takes to keep British business ahead of the pack.”
eBay’s Small Business Barometer reveals that the power to choose working hours (33%) and make their own decisions (30%) are the top motivations for UK entrepreneurs.
According to eBay : 43% of UK small businesses feel positive about their growth prospects in 2019, compared to just 22% who are pessimistic – a margin of two to one.
In fact, against a context of uncertainty, nearly two thirds of UK small business owners (62%) plan to increase their investments in 2019, according to eBay’s Barometer.
eBay’s Small Business Barometer suggests that digital retail will play a key role in small business success in 2019. Small business owners surveyed expected most of their growth to come from online sales (22%) and increased product lines (14%) in the coming year.
Finding ebay more and more difficult to sell on, due to their policies and the only growth I see on there this year is exports. The rest of my sales are way down compared to previous years even thou I have more stock than ever before on there. With some of the recent policies like service metrics and the amount of fraudulent returns I have to deal with on ebay I sent up on Amazon and more recently my own website.
My opinion is ebay try to get to involved in everything, why do they need to make decisions on cases when they never see the item yet can agree with the buyer it is not as described yet the buyers reason matches reasons mentioned in the listing. Let buyers and sellers work things out and if not the appropriate feedback will be left and if it is a pattern of poor customer service then their business will struggle.
Another big problem on ebay is the amount of small businesses that use the site to sell but don’t declare as a business, yet ebay have very little interest in doing anything about it other than giving them 1000 free listings each month to help them