this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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Sites at that scale that cannot afford errors, downtime, or system breaches operate massive IT teams just to keep the systems running. That's before even touching Logistics,Advertising, customer service, seller outreach, brand management, human resources, etc, etc. Ebay in 2023 had 132 Million customers. That's 12,000 customers per employee per year, or 32 customers per employee per day assuming they worked the full 365 solid. A rather lean storefront actually, probably propped up significantly by the labor of their third-party sellers.
I’ve designed, built, and maintained some pretty complex marketplace sites that get that much traffic and have a bunch of independent people dependent on its uptime for income. I can empathize with the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fit it” philosophy.
That said, eBay smells like it has grown into one of those large companies that require 85 meetings to get anything done. I look at that site and wonder what the hell is going on in that org. Their ratio of people to tech debt just feels off to me.
That company has felt like it was poorly run for a long time now. They’ve been coasting on inertia.
I don't personally disagree, but I don't know what sort of business challenges they face. Also I should add that 132 Million number isn't traffic or transactions, that's verified customers that have made at least 1 purchase. That all being said there is definitely a redesign/restructure/rebase needed, but the ship takes crew to keep it sailing even if it needs remodeled/repaired/etc.
Yeah, I was following. Active users ≠ order or conversion rate.
Just saying that as someone who builds some pretty busy e-comm marketplace platforms, I have some questions when I see how many people they have and what they’re maintaining.
Maybe their subsidiaries are inflating those employee numbers.
I wonder how much of that is overhead from maintaining legacy systems. It's one thing to use modern tools to build out big distributed applications. It's another to take something built in the 90s by someone who left the company a decade ago and scale that up to a hundred million users.
I bet they've got rooms full of old machines that used to run critical systems, and that they keep around because they're the only documentation on how it works.
(At least it was that way when I worked at MapQuest back in the day.)
Map Quest, a real OG.