eBay Strategies: Part II - Live blogging from ChannelAdvisor UK

This is Part II of my eBay UK, Mark Lewis keynote live blog. Part I was here.

What kinds of products are doing well?
- Just out of season - off-price, secondary market
- Buyers are thinking about every pound and trading down
- There are warehouses of this stock throughout the country waiting for sellers like you to find them. Go get them, put them on eBay and price them competitively.
- Are you the lowest price in that category?
- Experiment with free shipping.
- Consider BestOffer
Summary:
- It's tough out there
- Top sellers are doing well
- There is a success for doing well on eBay
Looking forward
- We heard you on predictability/reliability. We're not changing our strategy.
- But we want to make ourselves easier to work with.
- In 2009 we are going to bundle together our releases into two major releases
  - Shows a calendar with June and Sept circled
  - 60 days of notice at a minimum
Five things coming in June:
- Better Listings to drive more sales
  - Multiple Variation Listings (size/color/etc.)
  - Free Picture hosting
- Make it easier to sell on eBay
  - Smart FAQ - allows you to build FAQs or eBay will do it for you. You can also entirely suppress buyer questions (!?)
  - Easy Returns - A new way for buyers to do automatic returns on eBay UK. Buyers can print an RMA slip right off eBay with full information on what's going on.
- More incentives to offer Free Shipping
  - This will be in addition to visibility incentives
Then they went through some mock-ups for how this will look in TurboLister as well as the site.
- Consumer will select their variations and click buy (like Amazon)
Conclusion:
- We realize it's tough out there
- That being said - top sellers on eBay are doing very well - 30% growth
- 2/3 are confident about ability to keep growing
- 2008 was a year of a lot of change
- We're excited about the year.