eBay ecommerce forum - Live Blog update

Last night eBay treated about 250 of it's top sellers to cocktails+dinner and opening remarks by John Donahoe, President eBay Marketplaces.  He started with some data on the group.  The group represents over 7m items sold last year and $500m in annual GMV.  The average feedback was around 42k.

Then John hit on some positives about eBay's brand and the last ten years have been great and sellers have been a great partner, etc.  They are stepping up communication with sellers and appreciate all the feedback.

John previewed some of the content of the conference by talking about buyers.  It's in both eBay and seller's best interest to improve the buyer experience.  The topics he talked about were:

• Who is the eBay buyer and what do they want? (a talk will start at 9am about this)
• How can they improve the buyer experience?
  • Finding
  • Ease of use, flows through site
  • Fun - how can they keep eBay fun and quirky
• Feedback - how can they make this better
• Shipping and Handling - this is still a big problem when they talk to buyers

The content today is largely focused on these same areas.  We have:

• eBay buyer experience - understanding the eBay buyer
• Bill Cobb keynote
• T+S - making the user experience better (the buzz is we will finally see feedback 2.0 and some more on S+H
• Leveraging SEO+shopping.com
• Top seller panels
• Understanding profitability and your eBay biz (I heard they are going to case study glacierbay as an interesting 'what did they do wrong' kind of thing)

Seller reaction has been 'wait and see' so far.  We know S+H items can be painful and some sellers that have seen Feedback 2.0 (the granularization of feedback) are concerned that it will increase workload and buyer blackmailing, others see it as a net positive.  One seller said that eBay has been in denial about the buyer problem so it was good to see them recognize it and admit it's a problem, but she worries that it's too late.

More to come...

Comments

[Steven Mazur]

While Ebay may believe shipping fees are too high, the issue is that there really is not shipping fee other than Free that is acceptable to the consumers. For some reason Ebay cannot express to the general consumer base that a shoe costing $49.99 with $10.95 in shipping is a net cost lower than the same item on other sites at $79.99 with "free" shipping. A "net cost" approach is the only way to tackle this issue. For shoe/apparel sellers, the key issues is 2 fold, one is Choice, which while Ebay now allows, they did not provide any changes to their API to code for the changes, 2nd is the increase in listing fees above $49.99 which effectively doubles the cost of listing. The sweet spot for shoes and clothing is approx $68.00 net, which means if Ebay wants free shipping, they have to reduce the tax penalty on items above $49.99. It's a 2 way deal and Ebay does not understand that the consumer has no idea what it costs to ship. An easy resolution would be to include shipping calculator and require all sellers to charge actual shipping costs. That way they can get rid of the DSR for shipping that 90% of sellers will never have acceptable levels of.