Mimi Kriele was a longtime seller on eBay who endured many challenges, including eBay's inability to keep fakes off the site and its inconsistent enforcement of policies. Mimi began exploring other channels to add to her eBay presence, and last year, discovered "life after eBay." She says her business now grosses 20 times more in sales than it ever had on eBay.

When eBay began to open up its central marketplace to foreign sellers in the early 2000s, Mimi Kriele started to get worried.

Since 2000, Kriele had been running the eBay store Touch of Europe, specializing in vintage European items and soon settling on a core component of vintage linens. As the business matured, Kriele, who with her husband had spent decades living in Europe, expanded into collectibles and unusual items from the continent and Great Britain, ranging from clothing and home décor items to food and skin care products.

But the international expansion of the eBay.com marketplace invited the vendors from whom Kriele had been importing her vintage items to set up their own shops and cater to the same collectors that had become loyal customers at Touch of Europe.

"My suppliers in Europe were starting to bypass me and sell directly," Kriele said.

Fair competition is one thing, but when Kriele studied the listings that were beginning to crop up from, for example, German sellers who had previously been restricted to the eBay.de domain, she noticed something unusual. Many of the items bore an uncanny resemblance to the listings on Kriele's store. Likely owing to a language barrier, not to mention a general unfamiliarity with the nuances of selling on eBay that seemed to make taking shortcuts irresistibly appealing, product listings on the new shops would advertise items with mismatched descriptions. In one instance, a seller pictured a tablecloth but advertised it as a sheet, with the text lifted verbatim from one of Touch of Europe's listings.

"A few of them went as far as to copy my listings directly," Kriele said. "The listings were legitimate but they were describing something else because they just copied my text."

"I thought it was funny," she added.

As it happened, that was only the beginning of Kriele's troubles with eBay, the beginning of what she described as a long, sad goodbye as she weaned her business off of the marketplace that had provided her a platform to launch a fledgling store that now rakes in several million dollars a year.

The Beginnings
Kriele opened her eBay shop toward the end of 2000. At the time it was her only platform, and throughout the next year she bulked up her inventory and honed her focus on vintage European linens.

Kriele was in business school at the time, and some of her colleagues who were taking an MIS class suggested that she launch her own website. She agreed, and the Touch of Europe site launched in 2002, though eBay remained the focus of her business.

"It was very much on the back burner for the first couple of years," Kriele said.

Then, "by a sheer fluke," she explained, Kriele decided that she would try to ratchet up the business on her own website. She settled on a promotion: Touch of Europe began offering free shipping for orders of $50 or more. Kriele watched in amazement as sales began to skyrocket.

"All of a sudden we realized, "Hey, there's a viable business here,"" she said.

Her frustrations with eBay had been mounting, in part from the dubious listings that were crowding her niche category on the marketplace, but also from a growing litany of complaints that included policies being enforced unevenly, hassles with non-paying customers and difficulties with the visibility of the store thanks to an ever-shifting search algorithm.

"2003 is when I realized that eBay was not where I wanted to be," she said. "We just realized that long-term eBay was not going to be right."

Expansion to Amazon.com
The next year, as Amazon was in the midst of a heavy recruiting push for third-party sellers to join its expanding marketplace, Kriele opened the third front of her online business and set up her Amazon store just as the holiday season was approaching.

Her impression with the new marketplace was immediate.

"Amazon in November and December from the seller's perspective is an eye opener of the first magnitude. Now we spend months every year preparing for it. I mean, we're preparing for it now," Kriele said in a telephone interview in July.

Still, Touch of Europe continued to enjoy its platinum seller status on eBay, and even if Kriele had decided that the marketplace was not the permanent home for her business, it remained an integral part. Aside from her own website, it was the only online channel at the time to move her vintage items, as Amazon only permitted the sale of new merchandise.

In Part Two, Mimi Kriele explains that just as she was stepping her toes into Amazon.com's third-party marketplace, eBay opened up its site to Chinese sellers, which had a devastating impact on her category. Despite having a vehicle to provide direct feedback to eBay through the Voices program, the challenges continued to multiply. Today, none of the $3 million in sales from Touch of Europe is generated on the eBay marketplace.

See Part 2 of this series on this page, and comment on the EcommerceBytes Blog.

About the Author
Kenneth Corbin is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. He has written on politics, technology and other subjects for more than four years, most recently as the Washington correspondent for InternetNews.com, covering Congress, the White House, the FCC and other regulatory affairs. He can be found on LinkedIn here .