Tonight’s eBay Live keynote was pretty long and featured Meg (on eBay Inc), Rajiv (PayPal) and Bill Cobb (eBay.com/marketplaces).
Here are my rough notes of highlights from the event:
Meg
- Talked about eBay winning the Webby award (interesting note, eBay chose ChannelAdvisor customer, Lanny Morton at sportscloseouts to receive the award – congrats Lanny). Meg mentioned their 5 word acceptance was: “Bidding starts at 99 cents”.
- Then she covered some stats, did the feedback game and the usual stuff.
- There was a good GivingWorks video (Note: we are big supporters and the top sellers in the program are CA customers). Meg then handed the event over to Rajiv
Rajiv
- Talked about the big outage last week, I wasn’t clear on the message here – something about the OS? I didn’t get warm-fuzzies from that one.
- PayPal is taking the keyfob (I’m a big keyfob fan so this is AWESOME) out of beta and making it available to all paypal+ebay sellers.
- Losses due to chargebacks are down 20% due to the resolution centre
- New payment review feature coming out that will flag potentially dodgey transactions and put them in limbo until payment clears, then you are covered.
- Seller protection – they are going to try and get all addrs confirmed
Cobb
- eBay Express Update:
- An item in cart every 4 seconds
- Every 60 secs apparel item sells
- 9/10 EE buyers met/exceeded expectations
- No fee increase in July! (Some sellers I talked to took note of the careful July mention, not leaving out Aug-Dec)
- Trust and Safety
- Recapped Feedback 2.0/DSRs, counterfeits, (didn’t mention SMI), etc.
- Played a video about the boring dullness of shopping and then introduced some new language (Some of this was tongue in cheek, but came off pretty cheesy):
- “We put the Shazam in Ca-ching”
- I could have sworn the video said: “take a risk, buy something on eBay” – hopefully that won’t make the cut into a commercial or anything. I wanted to check, but a different ad is playing on the keynote site.
- “Rockin Deals”
- Ever been to cloud ten?
- And this one seems to be something we’re going to hear a lot more of:
- Windorphins
- eBay has an entire microsite here. around Windorphins. they even have a little graphic where Windorphins are these little sometimes one-eyed, sometimes two-eyed, eBay-coloured tribble-esque thingies:
- They he talked about some of the fun things coming down the pike:
- eBay countdown – web2-ish countdown thing.
- Some changes to the homepage
- One click bid thing so you don’t have to refresh the listing
- Myworld2 (adds guestbook and counters)
- Markdown manager in stores
- A bunch of other things around the powerseller and store programs (support and discount on anchor, volume criteria for powersellers, etc.)
- They now have 90 TSAMs in SLC
- Pampering powerbuyers
- Finding changes (these could be good, waiting to see more)
- Checkout playground.ebay.com
- Advantaging powersellers in bestmatch search results (this could be good – some positive “carrot” feedback vs. the fee “stick”)
- UPI insurance for powersellers (this is good) where you get feature fees rebated (what about listing fees?)
Finally and most importantly, Bill announced a “summer relief” program, they are lowering the first tranche of FVF fees on core from 5.25% to 4.5%. Working through the math on that for your average $50 item, the typical FVF fee is: $1.31 (tranche1 – 5.25*$25) + .81 = $2.12. With the discount you’re at: 1.13+.81=$1.94 for a .18/item sold discount or for the $50 item it takes the FVF take rate from 4.24% to 3.88%. That’s about a 10% discount on the FVF which is better than a stick in the eye!
Will this accelerate listings? I don’t think so, but sellers still appreciate it. More on listings coming soon.
