ChannelAdvisor

eBay town hall tomorrow.

eBay is having one of it's town halls tomorrow 9/29 at 10am PST, 1pm EST.  Bill Cobb is hosting and rumor is that Gary Briggs  will be there focusing on how they plan on bringing more buyers to the sight.

Sometimes there are big announcements that happen before these town halls and they use them to roll out the news to the community.  I don't think that is the case here because it's not after market hours.

eBay launches doorone - what the heck is it?

eBay went live with something called DoorOne, which is re-skin of shopping.com for UK/FR/DE/AU.

Not sure what the strategy is here.  Seems to me "shopping" maybe a better brand?  I spent a fair amount of time comparing dooreone.co.uk and shopping.co.uk and uk.shopping.com and they look identical except for the branding.

For example, here's the shopping books category

And here's the DooreOne books category.

Same SKUs, same order, etc.

My guess: Someone took all the shopping.com international URLs and now eBay is having to rebrand in Europe/AU.  Don't they check this stuff before buying these companies?

shopping.co.uk - resolves to shopping.net
shopping.de  - some other comparison shopping engine (they sell a lot of bikinis evidently!)
shopping.fr - looks like a vacation shopping system.
shopping.co.au

Remember though that shopping.com used to be Dealtime, so maybe dealtime didn't anticipate this.

What's your guess?

eBay My World is live!

And it looks pretty good.  Here's my MyWorld.

The only downside is it's kind of vintage 2003/4 technology. If you've played around with any of Yahoo!'s offerings, Google's customizable homepage, etc. those all have much more flexible and interactive (AJAX) content editors, drag-n-droppers, etc.

Still, it's a step forward.  The tagging is pretty weird though, everything you do is a searchable tag.  I suspect this has all been highly geared towards increasing eBay's SEO.

GlacierBay's Randy Smythe breaks his silence!

One of the top sellers on eBay glacierbaydvd, went NARU suddenly about a year ago and nobody knew what the heck was going on.  Now evidently Randy is going to be telling his story here. Should prove to be interesting.

What's Chinese for "speed bump"? How about "OH (censored)!!"

"Whoever wins China, will win the world" - Meg Whitman (quoted in a 2005 Morgan Stanley report)

Ina over at Auctionbytes is breaking the news today that Martin Wu, eBay's leader in China resigned and will stay on as "consultant" to the company.  This was covered earlier in chinatechnews.com.  Liao Guangyu, GM of PyaPal China will take over.  No reason was given, but Wu has only been at eBay china since early 05, so this wasn't a 5-8yr veteran taking time off to hang with his kids (before going to google post-non-compete).

Something is beginning to smell funny in China to me.  If you're remember in 05 eBay surprised Wall St. by wanting to spend $200m there (and paypal) and then Yahoo! invested in Alibaba and it's been Mortal Kombat since.

Also in China/Asia related new, Mark Mahaney was recently abroad and put out a general Asia Internet vibe report.  His takeaways from the visit as they relate to ebay are:

1. eBay needs a partner/JV in China vs. going it alone.
2. eBay continues to face some serious competition in Korea from gmarket - especially with the female demo

I suspect Asia will be a big focus of the eBay conference call this Q as investors are going to want some more warm fuzzies than they are getting around this region for eBay right now.

Fruity vs. Meg

The resemblence is eerie.  I think I'm getting to the bottom of the fruit cat mystery. At the time of this writing fruity has 330 votes, meg has 30.

From the matchup, a very long note, that but you get the gist of it:

Vote for Fruit Helmet cat as the next CEO to replace Meg Whitman of Ebay. Kitty is here make the marketplace fun and safe! Remember the thrill, the excitement! Fruity will change the Greedbay empire and make it green for all of us, no more fees! My fleshy helmet is very versatile, I can turn it over and sip fresh cool water. One day, Live Help tried to slip me kool-aid but I know what happens when you drink that!

I am a powerseller on ebay and I have sold and bought regularly on this site for 4 years. Now I can't afford anything, my sales have tanked and so are all the other store sellers. I made 75 bucks last month after $130 in
selling fees and $400 worth of damage from a non-paying bidder. And don't tell me oh I should just sell different merchandise or research prices, I made enough to live on for years running my business very well, thank you. Then it takes a nosedive and flatlines. I did everything you asked me to do, used your tools and services, promoted where you wanted me to. Followed all your rules and policies, I even would email customer service to have them review my listings BEFORE i listed it. I really wish Bill Cobb would respond to those emails I've sent him. He said to the community that he would read his emails just like Meg does and this time he would listen. He doesn't listen, he has assistants who respond and they don't even respond to the question. That is a very sad thing to do to someone small like me who pays money to you..

eBay - Innovation engine, keeps chugging

The company that brought you blogs, then wikis and MyWorld, now has really outdone themselves with eBayMatchUps!  You can pit any two things against each other, and have the community vote it out.

The community quickly hijacked this idea and turned it into a vehicle for voicing discontent with eBay.  The most popular matchups are:

1. Core vs. Store (I love the core image here)
2. eBay store sellers vs. Rodney Dangerfield (which gets more respect)
3. Meg/Bill vs. the Tweedles (Tweedles are winning by a 16:1 margin)
4. Bill Cobb ("I love fees!") and some random parrot ("I love oatmeal!!")
5. Which is most likely to be found:  Atlantis or eBay Stores inventory?

My prediction is this was some marketing/community idea to maybe get some buzz going for the holidays or maybe some free organic search traffic.  Once the eBay PR/IR machine realizes it's being used by members as an editorial platform, it will either be shut down or they will unleash the TnS tazmanian devils on this site.

After spending a wasted 10 minutes of my life on this site I find myself wondering:
1. How does this increase GMV
2. Why do so many people have a picture of this cat with a watermelon its head
3. How could 'westhaven7'  have voted 3,867 times and why?

eBay Strategy readers what am I missing?

(Ok, one last one this one is just BRUTAL)

ipod accessories go too far.

Ok, I think this is a sign we're peaking out on iPod madness.

Rebtel - Skype killer!?

This company Rebtel, has a really cool model.  The way it works is you sign up and select the areas you want to call.  Rebtel creates a local number there for you and then you call to your friend there and they call you at that local number.  Now you are charged local rates which are typically included in phone service for FREE.

Personally I like this better than skype because it uses the existing phone infrastructure.  I hate doing phone calls on my computer.  The sound quality is tin-ey, the headsets are cheesy and the quality is always hit or miss.

Feedback from PESA Fall Summit

Wow, lots to post today.  A bunch of our folks got back from attending the PESA fall summit in SFO. PESA = Professional eBay Sellers Alliance, a non-profit group of over 1000 eBay sellers.  The ChannelAdvisor team enjoyed meeting our customers that were there and all of the other sellers that attended.  Full disclosure - we were a Platinum Sponsor of the event and have been BIG believers+supporters in PESA since inception.

The headlines:

• Google announced that Google Base listings will show as a refined product search, kind of like how Google has integrated base house listings, job listings, etc.  Steady readers will remember I've been BIG on Google base for a long time and think its going to be disruptive to the organic search results to have this hear.  Instead of worrying about SEO, focus on google base for Q4.
• Amazon had a huge crowd of Amazonians there to get eBay sellers over to their various platforms for SMBs.
• Google was represented by the AdWords team, checkout team and analytics team.  Google clearly sees the mid-tier online retailer as a priority and is investing there with products as well as PR/marketing.
• eBay - While eBay had a couple of attendees, the vibe was that eBay and even eBay topics were absent from the agenda.  This is a stark contrast to the last summit which was headlined by Bill Cobb, and had largely an eBay selling focus with some side topics on other channels.
• ECMTA - There's some confusion/drama around a new group evidently coming out of PESA (purportedly a splinter group) called the ECMTA.  That stands for Ecommerce Merchants Trade Assocation.  No word on:
  • To what extent is Tom Cruise involved? (the image on the homepage is clearly from Mission Impossible)
  • Why do this when you have shop.org out there?
  • Is this a way to nicely focus the group on the broader world of ecommerce vs. the eBay focus of PESA (the e in pesa is ebay).
  • Who is "in" and who is "out" (that's the drama part)
• My buddy Bob Peck gave a killer keynote.

Speaking of Mr. Peck, he pushed a note this am, that came out net positive for eBay on the event.  However most of his comments make it seem like eBay has sellers captive and they don't have choices.  That maybe true for the holiday season, but every year come Q1, we see more and more sellers drinking the multi-channel online selling Kool-aid.

Peck's note summary follows:

   On Wednesday night we gave a keynote presentation on some of our thoughts on eCommerce to a group of 200-300 eBay power sellers at the PESA conference in San Francisco. Throughout the myriad of conversations that we had, we drew several thematic conclusions that we think will set the tone for the coming months on eBay's key metrics: listings, activity, GMV, ASPs, and revenues.

· The Five Major Themes we took away were: 1) FEE INCREASES WON'T DISSUADE SELLERS, SHORT TERM; 2) BUYER ACTIVITY / DEMAND REMAINS TOP CONCERN; 3) STORE LISTINGS WILL DECLINE - BUT REDUCE CLUTTER; 4) OTHER 'FRICTIONS' NEED ADDRESSING; 5) EBAY EXPRESS NON-IMPACT IN 4Q, BUT HAS POTENTIAL

· Further, we think eBay is listening more. We think eBay has opened up more to the community and is taking their suggestion more to heart. Lastly, Google and Amazon were present to explain some of their new undertakings to work with sellers, including a new front end coming for Google Base / Froogle.

· Our net takeaway from our meetings is positive. We caution that we do see longer term issues for eBay should it not address the concerns of the community shortly. However, we believe that management is embracing the community's ideas more than ever. The rest will be up to execution.