eBay lost a key executive to a rival platform with the departure of Nicole Colombo, head of eBay Collectibles, who is joining Alt where she will oversee strategy, marketing, customer experience, and business development.
“After six incredible years at eBay, I couldn’t be more excited to be joining Alt as their first President,” Colombo wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “When Leore Avidar and I connected earlier this year, I knew they were building something special in the alternative asset space. I can’t wait to help them scale further as they increase the transparency and liquidity of alternative assets, starting with trading cards.”
Alt describes itself as an alternative asset platform that lets people invest in sports cards the same way they invest in company stocks. “Our mission is to increase the transparency and liquidity of alternative assets.”
The departure comes two years after Scott Cutler left eBay to run StockX and succeeded in taking market share from eBay in the Sneaker category. Cutler’s departure served as a wakeup call to eBay, and it began launching an “innovation playbook” in vertical categories such as Sneakers, Trading Cards, Luxury Watches, and Handbags.
eBay poured resources into the Trading Card category with the help of Colombo. Three months ago, eBay CEO Jamie Iannone boldly claimed, “As a leader in trading cards with 25 years of transactional data, no one is better positioned to estimate the value of every card ever sold.”
eBay instituted new policies and launched features in the Trading Card category designed to turn “buyers” into “lifelong enthusiasts.” Initiatives included adding a scan-and-list feature in March to make listing trading cards easier and “Price Guide & Collection” tools in July to enable collectors to discover and track the value of a card over time.
In an unusual move the following month, eBay ejected PWCC, a partner and one of its largest sellers in trading cards, accusing it of shill bidding, a charge PWCC called defamatory.
Alt credited Colombo with growing eBay Collectibles 144% with the launch of “new experiences for collectibles enthusiasts during her tenure as General Manager of eBay Collectibles and Trading Cards. It quoted Colombo, “I’m excited to be joining the team and to help investors, flippers and collectors realize the potential of alternative assets.”
Colombo also said in her LinkedIn post, “I’m so grateful to eBay for allowing me to learn and lead so many key verticals, from Fashion to Collectibles and Trading Cards. I’ll be rooting for my friends and collogues at eBay and I’ll always be a proud eBay buyer/seller!”
The rats continue to jump ship at Ebay as they see all the problems from the inside and don’t want to cripple their careers going forward by staying with the sinking ship. Losing the head of their collectibles market to a competitor is once again going to wind up having a negative impact as Alt starts going after Sellers in the Trading Card industry who are already fed up with Ebay and have been trying to find a platform to sell on that still gets a lot of traffic.
I took my sports cards off of Ebay awhile ago and although I have not yet found a single platform that can match Ebay for traffic as well as sales, by using multiple sites to sell I have been able to come very close to what I was selling on Ebay without having to spend most of my time watching to see if Ebay has somehow overcharged me for something I sold on their site or worse yet continuing to try and charge me for a store a month after I had closed it and their site even showed that it was closed. But they still charged me for a premium store the next month and then it took me almost 60 days to get my money back from them as they kept lying that the credit had been issued. They issued the credit all right, at the end of the month to my Ebay account for future FVF, on an account that was no longer being used. When I asked for a refund they wanted to delay it another 30 days as that is their policy for credits on an account.
They are absolutely desperate for money and to earn the investment income on anything they can get their hands on to try and show revenue growth.