ChannelAdvisor

PREDICTION: Store Fee Increase is coming...

Ok, I'm going to put a prediction out there based on what I'm seeing, hearing and know about how eBay thinks.  eBay Stores listing fees are $.05 for < $25.  and $.10 for > $24.99.  They used to be $.02 before the 'great rebalance of 2006'.

I see eBay store listing fees going to:

.10 for < $25
.20 for  $25-$100 and
.50 for > $100

I don't know about the specific amounts, but feel we're going to get a new tier and  the old tiers will be %-wise increased dramatically.

Ok why am I saying this? (and no I don't want it to happen, but I think it's unavoidable).

Evidence 1: Stores growing too fast (still)

I've been watching the listing data from the Wall st. guys closely and stores continue to grow much faster than core. eBay hit the brakes, they slowed down and now they are climbing again. 

Evidence 2: Core not growing fast (still)

eBay desperately needs core listings to grow and views that stores cannibalize core listings.  This is where they get it wrong because they don't understand seller behavior, but they still view that seller's are choosing stores over core.  (the opposite is the case, sellers go to store if core doesn't work).

Evidence 3: Wall St.
In a number of presentations to Wall St., eBay has hinted this is coming this by saying things like the controversial "unproductive listings".

So the only question I have is when is it coming?  They announced the last hike July 20th.  I'm going to say they announce this with the Q1 results in April.  The trick is we have eBay Live in June so they can't do it in June or May (30 day window for fees to start).  If they want to act fast they need to do it a good bit before then for the wind to blow over (so May/June is out).  That leaves either April with the Q1 results or post eBay live like they did last year - July timeframe.

I'm going to vote April because I don't think they can afford to wait till July, they need to slow those stores and grow the core. 

Reader's what do you think?

Mozilla, eBay and Barney

A weird press release just hit the wires talking about how Mozilla (the folks that produce the excellent firefox browser) and eBay are going to "work together to make the auction experience easier."  The release then goes on to say: "more details on their collaboration will be available in the       second calendar quarter of 2007".  Ok, so where's the beef?

Back in 1998-2001 we used to call these Barney press releases because there's just a "I love you, you love me" kind of a thing and no substance.  Usually this kind of press release is generated to try and pre-empt something or create FUD.  I wonder what's gong on here.  It's not like eBay to pre-release something like this.

Craigslist founder interview...

If you're in the eBay world, I think you'll find this podcast interview of Craig Newmark (craigslist founder) pretty interesting.  I really enjoyed it.  Craig has a unique view of the world and what he's done at craiglist is certainly disruptive to old and new media companies.

eBay Town Hall - March 29th

March 29th eBay is hosting one of its regular Town Halls.  I'm not hearing about any big news, but it's always good to keep the radar up on the days of Town Halls because 20-40% of the time they are setup to discuss with the community some news that comes out that day.  The other times they are geared towards answering open questions in the community.

eBay UK Print Ad - Don't Sit on it, Sell It!

When we opened our office in the UK and started to see more of what was going on there, we noticed that eBay craftily uses that and other markets to test a variety of concepts and then add the best to their international "play book".  So as a US eBay seller it's somewhat important to monitor what's going on there.

Chris over at tamebay has an interesting scan of a full page ad featuring the rainbow people that are in the UK TV ads as well.

The ad shows the pictures of some items and what they fetch on eBay and encourages readers to sell on eBay.  From what I've seen of the UK, they have quite a bit of demand so I suspect the eBay team is focused on bringing on more supply.  But as Chris points out, a selling buyer is a better buyer.

I wonder if we'll see a campaign like this over in the US at some point?

Catalyst wrap-up.

We had a great time this week hosting over 400 customers, partners and merchants at our Catalyst conference.  On the eBay side, we had lots of content:

1. Bill Cobb came and gave everyone an update on eBay.   This was covered in AuctionBytes here.

2. We announced a partnership with Overstock to enable sellers to sell there for the first time. (note this is not overstock auctions).  Announcement is here and auctionbytes coverage is here.

3. In my talk I covered some of the opportunities in challenges in the rapidly expanding world of online ecommerce channels.  Auctionbytes coverage is here and you can download the slides here (Download Catalyst_SW_ecomm_trends.pdf)

Additional ebay content was covered in the Fraud panel (Rob Chestnut came but was very sick - Rob we hope you are feeling better!), the Wall Street Panel and if you count shopping.com, the Comparison Shopping Engine Panel.

It was great seeing all of our customers, partners and friends at the conference and everyone at ChannelAdvisor came back fired up about our new offerings.

Next, we're bringing Catalyst to the UK and DE and I hope to see you there!

Best week of the year!

Our annual conference for retailers large and small, ChannelAdvisor Catalyst, kicks off today and the excitement at ChannelAdvisor is palpable.  For us Catalyst represents two very important things.  First, a definition of a catalyst is: "A substance that speeds up a chemical or biochemical reaction that would have occurred anyway (without help), but at a much slower rate."   At ChannelAdvisor we see the world of ecommerce changing rapidly towards multiple ecommerce channels (Search/CSE/Marketplaces) and view ChannelAdvisor's role as accelerating this change for our customers so they can successfully navigate those changes.

Second, when Aris and I founded CA, we wanted to create a company that deeply PARTNERED with our customers, not the typical "please buy our software and don't call us" kind of relationship.  We believe ChannelAdvisor's inherent customercentricitity has made ChannelAdvisor a unique company to work with and a unique company to work FOR (shameless plug, we're hiring for lots of positions right now).

With customers at the heart of our DNA you can imagine that the opportunity to sit down, meet with, break bread and drink (everyone watch out for Todd Rath on this one and some of our friends from the UK!) with over 400 of our customers, partners and friends makes us pretty dang excited.

Today is the annual golf tournament (I don't golf but hear that things are off to a great start thanks to the awesome weather here this am and the Pinehurst courses are beautiful and in great shape.).  Then tonight we kick things off with a keynote from Davis Ridley.  Davis ran customer service for Southwest airlines.  In ecommerce, customer service is one of the best ways to distinguish yourself from competitors.  In the airline industry, SouthWest consistently beats every other airline in all aspects of customer service so we thought someone that could achieve what Davis has in one of THE toughest customer service industries would be a great way to start the conference.

Tomorrow's agenda is here. I won't be able to blog at the conference, but Max Leisten over at the CA corporate blog is going to be keeping up with what's going on.  We have Bill Cobb from eBay, some folks from Paypal, shopping.com, Google and Overstock so if you aren't at the conference, keep checking in as I have a feeling some interesting industry announcements are going to be coming over the next 48hrs ;-)

Reminder of two events coming up...

Two big events coming up.  Wednesday March 14th at 2pm EST, we are hosting a webinar on "eBay Strategies for 2007".  You can register here. 

Next week starting March 19th we're having our annual Catalyst event.  If you are serious about selling via ecommerce channels like eBay, Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, and comparison shopping engines, this is a must-attend event.

I look forward to talking to everyone a the Webinar, Catalyst or both!

eBay Strategies - revisited Webinar

As most of you know, this blog is the continuation of a book I wrote in late 2005, eBay Strategies.  A lot has changed on eBay in the last two years and I frequently get asked about updating the book.   That's not in the cards unfortunately, but what IS in the cards is a webinar.

On March 14th, I'll be hosting a Webinar at 2pm EST called "eBay Strategies for 2007".  I'll be updating many of the strategies, introducing new ones and also revisiting all of the case studies that were in the original book to give you a 'where are they now' view of what's been happening since the book came out.

The webinar is completely free and you can register here.  If you have any specific topics you want covered or ideas for strategies please feel free to post a comment here or email me via "scot at channeladvisor.com".

Feedback 2.0 check-up

In the UK (and other countries), eBay launched Feedback 2.0 in late Feb.  We've been watching closely and talking to customers.  While there's been quite a bit of anxiety, so far things seem to actually be better than many of the doomsday scenarios that sellers were worried about between the announcement and launch.  For example, many sellers thought buyers would rate them all zeros for the five "Detailed Seller Ratings" (DSR).

The DSRs don't show up for the seller until you have 10+ DSR feedbacks from buyers so given we're at March 7th and many buyers are choosing not to leave DSR, there haven't been any "live" examples of Feedback 2.0.

One of our large media sellers, gowingstore, has hit the threshold and it's interesting to take a look at their DSR which you can see live here.  For your convenience a screen shot is below:

Here's my take.  Gowingstore already has stellar feedback with a 99.4% positive rating.  Doing the volume they do, this is a very very very high level of feedback to attain.  For example in the last month they had 12,607 positives, 90 neutrals and 101 negatives.  Shipping 12k products a month means you are shipping 400+ items a day and listing 800-1000+ items a day.  That's a lot of activity that can generate errors.

So far, gowingstore has 117 buyers that have left DSR and its interesting to see that contrary to the doomsday scenarios the DSR feedbacks are largely positive and in-line with gowingstore's overall feedback.  For the first DSR, "item as described" they are a solid 5.0/5.0.  For the other three they are also very positive at a 4.5 out of 5.0.

From a buyer's perspective, I find this very helpful.  If you read some of the comments around negatives some of them talk about shipping time.  But if you look at the DSRs, the bulk of the buyers aren't finding this is an issue with this seller.  So I think of the DSRs as a net positive for me as a buyer because they give me more information to consider.

From a seller's perspective, let's say that over the next 200-1000 DSR feedback, the dispatch time slips to 4.0/5.0.  That gives me a wake-up call that I need to:

1. Communication shipping timeframes better and set expectations correctly in my listing template as well as all email templates.
2. Potentially work on improving shipping times (if possible).

Bottom-line, from what I'm seeing here, I think Feedback 2.0 could be a win-win enhancement to the creaky eBay feedback system.  What do readers think?