Part II - Live blogging from ChannelAdvisor UK - Mark Lewis reveas UK eBay details...

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.  

They are opening to a Q+A - I'll post that separately in a second.

SeekingAlpha Disclosure - I am long Amazon and Google

  

Comments

[Matt]

Thanks for the report.

I see another Amazon is coming...