OnlyEBAY submits: As is common every year around the time of the holiday break, eBay's (NASDAQ: EBAY - News) week 12 listings suffered a major decline W/W, with core listings down over 33% from last week. Y/Y growth rates remained constant at around 15% for total listings. Analysts now expect a marked rebound in the final week of the year due to the practice of listing unwanted gifts.
Listings data for this week, according to Merrill Lynch, came in with total listings QTD (to 22 Dec) of 544.4 million (versus 472.4 million QTD in 2005) representing 15.2% Y/Y growth. Corresponding core listings stood at 457.0 million QTD (versus 409.9 million QTD in 2005) representing 11.5% Y/Y growth.
What do listings mean, anyway?
All eBay research analysts report listings as the metric with which to follow the health of eBay’s marketplaces business week to week. They do this simply because listings are the only public piece of information that can be continuously monitored simply by looking up figures on the eBay website. However, are listings really the key metric? The answer is obviously no.
The key metric of eBay’s health is GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) which captures the value of all goods and services that trade hands on eBayV drives the bulk of eBay Marketplace and PayPal fees. GMV is a function of consummated listings and their average selling price. Consummated listings are complicated to calculate. They depend of the absolute number of listings (how many items are on the shelf), the trade velocity (how long items are on the shelf), and the average conversion rate (how likely an item is to sell).
Therefore, the absolute listings data we get every week is only part of the story. There could be a scenario where consummated listings are actually growing while the absolute number of items on the shelf remains constant. This would occur is either the conversion rate or the trade velocity were to increase.
source : SeekingAlpha
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment