I would like to know how many active eBay sellers there are. I have
read through eBay's SEC filings, and while they report the number of
'registered users' and 'active users,' I have not been able to find
the number of Sellers (vs. users who only buy). Ideally, I would like
to have a sense of the number of sellers, their relative activity (#
of listings), and maybe even which categories have the most active
sellers, but I will take what I can get. THANKS!

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 23 Nov 2005 20:34 PST

Love to be able to provide you a rich pile of statistics, but I have a
feeling you won't find much more than this, from a fairly recent
Washington Post article:

"...EBay won't say how many sellers have hit the platinum or titanium
levels. Nor is much data available on how many of the site's 60
million active users are sellers. In 2003, the most recent year eBay
conducted a major survey of its users, the company estimated there
were nearly 4 million sellers on eBay in the United States. Nearly
120,000 were using the site as their primary or only source of income;
another 310,000 used it as a secondary sales channel, the survey
concluded..."

Does that help at all?


pafalafa-ga

---

Clarification of Question by drewmc-ga on 24 Nov 2005 10:13 PST

That helps a little. At least I have SOME data now! I was hoping for
something a little more detailed. I have now discovered a couple of
services that allow you to mine eBay Marketplace Data, but still can't
cut the numbers at this macro level.

Can you reference the article?

Thank you!

drewmc-ga,

Glad to hear that article at least gets you off on the right foot.

Here's a link to the full article:


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/29/AR2005062902935_pf.html
EBay Sellers Fell Into Careers That Fill Their Lives
Washington Post   June 30, 2005



I wish there was more detail available to you, but frankly, if a
business section reporter from a major national newspaper couldn't
shake loose the information, I doubt there's much more out there to
dig up.

I did find one additional set of stats, though it's not 100% clear to
me where the author dug them up.  Have a look:



http://www.wholesalemarketer.com/affiliate/whois_wm.html
Wholesale Marketer

--Over 430,000 eBay sellers consider online selling their primary
source of income (eBay, 2004)

--Nearly 12 million registered sellers (eBay, 2004) 

--Approximately $32 billion in eBay product sales (eBay, 2004) 

--Over 250,000 Yahoo! Stores, and over 150,000 eBay stores (eBay, Yahoo, 




Hope that helps.  Best of luck with this, and let me know if there's
anything else I can do to help out.

Enjoy the holidays...


pafalafa-ga


search strategy -- Google search for [ebay "1..100 million sellers" OR
"1..100 million * sellers" ]

Thanks for the help!