Source: eBay Celebrates its Sneakerhead Community by Releasing a Collection of the Greatest Kicks Never Sold
I ran across a smart paid promotion with Jazerai Allen-Lord for eBay’s Inside Drop Campaign:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CT5N3tuF64k/?utm_medium=copy_link
The reason this is smart, is because instead of simply using influencers to sell eBay as “cool”, influencers who don’t really sell sneakers, but build community, these influencers are saying create an account, sell on eBay, to win. eBay’s issue isn’t that it needs influencers what eBay has needed for a long time is an overhaul.
If you’ve been anywhere online, and you’re in the sneaker community, you’ve seen eBay Sneakers everywhere lately. The company is attempting to recapture the moment in time where eBay was basically the only place to discover a pair of kicks you couldn’t get locally, or a pair that was released years prior. eBay was the classified section in real time, allowing for people hunting for kicks to earn a little bit of dough for sneakers sitting in their closets. In the 2000s I was a power seller because I found two sources no one else in my region considered as an opportunity to make money. Those sources were the Nike Clearance Store and FootLocker Outlet. In the early 2000s, no one saw these places as an opportunity to generate revenue. From 2005 to 2009 there were only three of us using these stores to build storage rooms filled with sneakers and apparel.
I needed to raise capital to work on my sneaker brand Sho-Shot and then my sneaker brand ARCH. I was running ads in Dime and Bounce Magazine. I was operating basketball camps and creating video to get players recruited, and all of this cost serious money. I’ve written about this story often. What I haven’t done is explain what happened with eBay that shaped not only my sales on the platform and opened the door for tech savvy business people to enter the marketplace. My sneaker selling began as support of my love for sneakers and basketball. Many of the old heads in the sneaker game began that way. We found a way to buy and sell using a platform that reached more people. eBay functioned like an abusive boyfriend though:
In the post above I explain a scenario that was all too common.
- eBay kicked people off of its platform,
- sided with the buyer
- closed accounts without any true explanation
- It alienated sellers.
In this article I talk about my next step being a move to Amazon (an entirely different story). This was in 2011. Around 2013-2014 eBay partnered with Campless and allowed the site to scrape its data, this was the moment that opened the door to tech in sneakers. What has happened since is a degradation of the values that always existed in sneaker culture. This division has manifest itself in a constant confrontation of old heads vs new sneaker fans, and capitalists and opportunists vs purists in sneaker culture. It’s much more complex than this, but I don’t want to be longwinded. This fact reared it’s head on another Twitter thread where a very prominent, important OG made this statement:
funny seeing all this eBay sneakers stuff right now—I got hit up about it and couldn’t in good faith even consider it since I haven’t bought or sold sneakers on eBay in like a good decade (and have no interest in doing either).
Like I’m just not fucking with any of this shit anymore and I damn sure won’t endorse any of it.
It’s not even that as much as WHY I’m over it, which has a lot to do with the entire resale economy. I still love sneakers and will always love sneakers but all the added infrastructure from people who just want to get rich off it, nah b.
In the matter of five minutes one OG, Jazerai, is doing a paid promo that works, and another OG is saying they would never do anything to promote it. Neither person was speaking to the other, but the fact that in my timeline I saw both opinions, speaks to how divisive the push by eBay Sneakers is in sneaker culture. In my most recent Retail and Resale Analysis I explained that eBay’s problem isn’t advertising:
Resale Report and Analysis August 2021: Part 2 – an eBay vs StockX Analysis
eBay gets over 840 Million visits a month. Paying influencers to funnel traffic isn’t the issue. At the start of this post I said eBay is trying to regain its Sneaker Soul. The fact of the matter is, when eBay treated its sellers like crap in the past, it showed they didn’t have a soul. eBay is attempting to regain something it never had. It doesn’t matter that you were the first. It matters that you’ve treated people well and delivered a product that is simple and fair. eBay is still the same exact platform it was in the 2000s when it was the only platform available outside of meetups, sneaker conventions and Nike Talk. StockX, Poshmark, Grailed, Tradeblock, Kixify, GOAT, and countless other platforms have monetized sneakers. While OGs hate that this has happened, there isn’t any going back.
eBay doesn’t need to try to recapture, it needs to revamp. In the next few months I’m going to take it on myself to run an experiment using the three biggest platforms in sneaker resale. It’s going to be a test for me and I’ll be as transparent as possible. I will use Amazon, eBay and StockX. I’ll document my method and do videos. I don’t consider myself an OG because at the start of the growth of the sneaker market, unlike most popular influencers, I owned sneaker brands. I wasn’t trying to work for or with Nike and adidas, I wanted to be Nike and adidas. I am not considered an OG, but those who know, know. I do a resale report monthly discussing my sales which ring up at 350 to 1000 pair sold per month.
eBay is doing all it can to recapture a history that doesn’t exist. StockX has collapsed resale. Amazon is a machine and doesn’t care. Somewhere in those three companies lies an answer to a medium between culture and capitalism. Let’s find it.