Interesting Meg/JD interview...

I'm a big fan of Erick Schonfeld's writing.  You may remember him as Futureboy from B2, but now he's blogging in various places.  Today Erick has a great interview with Meg+JD I recommend you check out.

The 'new' news for me was this tidbit:

Whitman: We wonder if there is a way to embed reputation into Paypal. Is there a way to travel across the Web with your Paypal wallet and some other aspect of reputation?

I've always thought it was extremely clever (and a benefit of coming after ebay/paypal) of Google Checkout to put the feedback in the payment system, because it makes it portable. As a merchant, I can now bring that feedback to all my sales and have it accumulated.  If I'm an eBay seller, I have my ebay feedback and there's no way to link it to shopping.com or even my ecommerce site.  By moving that into PayPal you'd have a genius move that would REALLY lock merchants into paypal, because if you left you'd be losing your reputation.  That would only make sense if you had a bad rep, and that's aligned with Paypal/ebay's goal too so it really 'works'.

Comments

[Paul]

If merchants ratings travel through the web, Amazon has some catching up to do. We noticed that it is a lot more difficult to get ratings on Amazon than on eBay. Maybe because AMZN ratings are not reciprocal?

[David Yaskulka]

Scot, I agree that this would be a brilliant move by eBay.

Why sell on eBay if margins and growth are slipping relative to other channels? It seems eBay is taking seriously its hsitoric leadership role incubating new business. Very much unlike Amazon, eBay helps you with:

-customer acquisition (e.g., 3rd party checkout opt-in)

-branding (even in eBay's sandbox)

-cause marketing in-a-box (eBay Giving Works)

And now, possibly:

-building your online reputation!

Thanks for the great post, Scot.