EEF: Bill Cobb keynote, post 3 (T+S)
Highlighted how important T+S is at eBay. Bad guys are getting smarter, Pierre's vision is still solid, but the BASICALLY part is getting tougher.
Over 2000 employees in T+S fighting the battle vs. the bad guys. Due to this they are going to more actively protect buyers from fraud/bad experiences.
Safeguarding seller IDs for example (this stops fraudulent SCOs). So far fake SCOs are down 80-90%, may need to take additional steps to protect bidder IDs
Another way reducing bad buyer experience is adjusting the seller standards. Repeated information on excessive shipping, late item, INR, bad customer service - causes majority of bad user experiences on eBay.
Historically have allowed practically anyone to sell on eBay with few restrictions, going forward going to significantly raise the bar on who they allow to sell on eBay.
Not fair to the large % of good sellers that small % of bad sellers are driving away buyers.
Example: cross border trade restrictions they started in Q4.
Beginning this week, any new seller who wants to list in US/CA, must offer a safe payment method - paypal/CC.
In October, eliminated private feedback - used to suspend 60%+ of sellers with private feedback. Now they are transparent again.
In 07 there will be more details on how great sellers are advantaged and bad sellers are further restricted.
Counterfeiters - Bill highlighted the changes that have already been instituted here. They are closely monitoring the results, may do more here.
Last week announced doubling of coverage from Paypal protection program. ($1k-$2k on SNAD and INR, other transactions $200 for unqualified items - no processing fee). Buyers love this and sellers should too - makes a statement in confidence of the marketplace.
Shipping and Handling
Covered why it's bad.
Made some progress in 06 with active enforcement - started in June. Cited cell phone category - S+H is down 25% in that category.
Need to be more proactive - developing some product based solutions - sort by total cost, (editorial note: ebay express does this and best match does too) going forward the approach is going to be to put the right incentives into the product and reduce reliance on manual enforcement. No silver bullet, short of regulating, but they are going to keep at it until contained.
Just was informed today that the Post Office is going to raise the postage again in May but this time they are going to learn from UPS and FedEX. They are going to change the postage amount based upon the size of the package.
Looks like now we need to prebox all itmes to get the shipping size to add this to the shipping cost calculator or be forced to charge and use the flat rate boxes.
Posted by: RadioComputerSupply | January 22, 2007 at 11:19 AM
If eForcity charged actual shipping, they won't get the traffic nor volume sales you'd expect from such a strategy. When buyers from search engines (Google, Froogle, etc) or eBay itself see a low price, they will click through to view the product. But if the price is built into the item price = less visibility, less click. It also means the seller pays more fees making their business more expensive to run. The buyer has to cough up the extra costs. No one benefits from actual shipping except eBay.
Posted by: sun | January 18, 2007 at 02:35 PM
RE:Excessive Shipping & Handling charges.
This will be interesting to see if this policy actually gets REALLY enforced-right now, I believe ebay has a unofficial "Dont ask, don't tell" policy. Right now, the Top 4 ebay sellers are all the same company, eforcity. AND, eforcity clearly gouges their customers for shipping charges! They sell DVDs for quite a bit below below their actual wholesale DVD cost (even theirs, not just the general DVD marketplace)-and make up for it by charging $6.99 to ship a single DVD by USPS Media Mail rate! This is ebays number one seller!
I'm not just picking on eforcity. If you go down the list of the Top 200 sellers, you'll find most all of the other big media catagory sellers (Movie Marz, Inflatible Madness, etc/all)-and virtually all of them are selling their goods at such a deep discount, that they have no choice but to profit from shipping and handling. ANd yes, of course, they all get hundreds of negative feedback comments literally every month, all for bad customer service and not filling their orders in any reasonable timeframe. Ebay didn't start out this way, it makes me very sad, feedback used to matter, but now it doesn't seem to...
Its a really bad marketplace, but I'm wondering: most all these guys are in the room this week, eating lunch on ebays dime at this conference. Is ebay REALLY going to weed out the countless sellers providing them with so much revenue? And how do sellers like eforcity take this news? Probably with indifference, business will likely go on as usual for them.
Scott, keep up the good work, you have THE best ebay blog out there!
Randy T
Posted by: Randy T | January 17, 2007 at 12:17 PM