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ebay is having a 50% off sale Nov 29-30. If you have some higher ASP items, I think this makes a ton of sense or if you have an item that has >50% conversions and you are deep on it, put some in a fixed-price listing (10+ units) and then do a feature plus on that puppy.
Details are here.
Black Friday - Monday have been CRUSHING it!
Based on internal trends we are seeing at ChannelAdvisor and based on some external sources like this Business 2 recap - it appears that eBay is having a great holiday season. The hitwise survey referenced gives eBay a 16% share. If you're not on eBay you missed 16% of shoppers.
We have some ebay focused customers seeing a 2-3-4X spike in sales right now and conversions are through the roof which allows sellers to post much more product knowing it will find a home and cover listing fees.
Google and Yahoo! search are also hitting record conversion metrics and doing very well for those leveraging smart strategies.
If you're really hard core about this stuff - comscore has a good meaty report. I'd say the take away if you are selling on eBay or using search or both is that during this time of year you can't ignore or you should specifically target the "online lunch shopper". If you loook at the table on page 2 you will see that from 10-2 is the peak shopping (work+home+university) during this season so plan your closing times/adword bidding appropriately.
eBay has dropped the HAMMER on preferred service provider Andale. Ina @ AuctionBytes has the details. Given that Andale was down for 9+ days during the holidays and continues to have issues evidently.
It will be interesting to see who blinks first in this one.
In related news, former Andale CEO, Munjal Shah's new startup - Riya - appears to be doing well. In fact the rumor is they are being acquired for $60m by Google - congrats Munjal - talk about turning it around.
As predicted, it looks like Google Base's launch is going to be followed rapidly by at least one more system designed to help people sell online in new and exciting ways.
Microsoft is evidently in beta with something codenamed Fremont that from what I can gather is a classified system that internally has been called a craigslist-killer.
Oddly enough someone in China was able to snag some marketing copy which seems to confirm the other sources->
So it looks like my thesis of the Clash of the Titans continues to flesh out with Microsoft coming to the game with their marketplace/classified/local hybrid at some point soon.
What's this mean to eBay sellers? More options.
Given all of this new competition for ebay it will be interesting to see what they do with fees in Q1. Ok so who is next - Yahoo!, IAC, Amazon or eBay?
NOTE: CHECKOUT OUR NEW PAYPAL COUPON CENTER FOR THE LATEST AND GREATEST WAYS TO SAVE MONEY WITH EBAY AND PAYPAL.
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The C1-holiday and other coupon codes are coming to the end of their run. However a new code has been released:
C11-GIFTGUIDE - this is a 10% off coupon, no min, $25 off max.
Enjoy!
NOTE: CHECKOUT OUR NEW PAYPAL COUPON CENTER FOR THE LATEST AND GREATEST WAYS TO SAVE MONEY WITH EBAY AND PAYPAL.
Link: Google Click-to-Call is now live evidently.
This is what the eBay/skype integration will/should/could/may look like if eBay can get it going on.
Looks like Google is also testing Flash ads
All of these innovations can easily be rolled out to Google Base listngs...
Link: eBay: 50 Percent Off Fixed Price sale at eBay. Probably not worth changing any strategies. You may want to consider moving some store inventory (top sellers) out to the main site if they are in the <$50 range. Otherwise the economics probably don't work for you.
Remember relists are at full price on these kinds of promos.
Link: MarketWatch has an interesting video interview with David Kesmodel from WSJ.
He talks about how niche auction sites are using google/yahoo to promote themselves and steal some business from eBay.
I found a copy of his article that was the catalyst for this interview here (no sub required).
I totally buy into his assertion that small merchants are setting up thier own sites, etc. But I'm not so sure about the bidville piece of this. That seems like a stretch to me.
What do you think?
Link: TechCrunch reports that Skype with Video could be out within 30 days. Can't wait!
One of the jewels in eBay's crowns is eBay Motors. One of the top categories of products that GB launched with was Vehicles.
On any given day eBay's passenger vehicle category has about 30-40k vehicles listed. The average listing lasts 7 days so in a month there are typically 120-160k vehicles listed on eBay.
GB has been up for about two days now and if you drill into the Google Base Vehicles type you find they have about 420k vehicles listed (GB listings last 31 days).
The key here is eBay is where you go to sell a vehicle, the auction format can almost guarantee you a buyer (especially if you do low bid no reserve). GB is more of a classified system (like autotrader) where instead of bringing buyers you are bringging interested parties.
So until we start to hear some stories about the transaction rate GB has on those > 400k vehicles, it's too early to call this one.
Sidebar - one super cool thing about the Vehicle category is the Google Map integration. Check out this search for Porsche's in the NJ area. Click on the map tacks on the left and over in the map you'll see a zoom in on that vehicle and it's location.
COOL!
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