eBay Strategies

Upcoming conversations with Wall St.

For the Wall St. readers out there, we have three events on deck around the topic of Holiday sales trends:

• Merrill/BofA - 12/1/09 - 10am ET hosted by Justin Post
• Goldman Sachs - 12/4/09 - 11am ET hosted by James Mitchell and the GS Internet team.  We'll have eBags and some other retailers on this one.
• Citigroup - 12/9/09 - 11am ET, hosted by Mark Mahaney.

At each event we'll have some new data to present and I'm sure the holiday season is going to take some interesting twists and turns which we'll be sure to report on.

If you are a retailer and want to listen in to any of the calls, feel free to contact Delisa Reavis @ ChannelAdvisor - delisa.reavis@channeladvisor.com and we'll get you the information.

eBay's change in Holiday promotional strategy between 2008/2009 - will it work?

I was reviewing last year's Black Friday and CyberMonday results and trends and noticed some interesting differences in eBay's strategy between 2008 and 2009.

2008 - A Cornucopia of Online Promotions...

Last year, eBay's Holiday promotional mix was best described as heavy online promotion. They partnered with Microsoft to offer up to 30% off on Bing (Live back then) cashback.  On top of that eBay flooded the marketplace with a ton of coupons (10% off $100, free ship, etc.)

2009 - Back to TV (Come to think of it....)

This year Bing bumped up from 8 to 10% cash back for CyberMonday which may seem decent, but compared to last year is paltry.  Last year, eBay was one of the only merchants in Bing Cashback, this year the program is very robust with hundreds of merchants and many of them offering 15% or more, so eBay actually feels under funded in that environment.

 

eBay doesn't seem to be running any major coupons that I've seen either.

However, while eBay has pulled back from cashback and coupons, they are running TV spots and interactive media like nobody's business.

One idea of why they would change strategies is maybe they evaluated the Q408 strategy and found it to be more cannibalistic (giving discounts to folks already going to buy on eBay) vs. incremental (new buyers).

eBay is a no-show for CyberMonday :(

I did a comprehensive survey this morning (CyberMonday morning) and pretty much every online retailer ran some great CyberMonday promos: Walmart.com, Amazon,com, target.com, toysrus.com, buy.com  - you name it, they were running strong CyberMonday promotions, highlighting great gifts, etc. Here's what eBay was running this morning: (click to enlarge)

 

You can look at this page with a microscope and you won't find the words Cyber or Monday and certainly not CyberMonday anywhere.  eBay is really missing the boat IMO by not joining with the rest of the online retail world and doing something special on this day.

Conclusion

We're watching the data closely from BF and CM to see what early holiday shopping trends we are seeing - eBay Strategies readers, what are you seeing?  Do you think eBay's focus on TV vs. Online promos is the right strategy this year?

SeekingAlpha disclosure - I am long Google and Amazon, eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.

eBay pop-up shop and some videos

eBay took over some real estate in the heart of Manhattan on 57th for a pop-up store.  When I first heard about it, it sounded kind of weird (eBay in a store?)  I haven't had an opportunity to visit the store yet, but I've talked to some that have and they said it's actually pretty cool.

Fox business has two videos that highlight the store. Unfortunately they don't seem to have an embed function so I've linked to them.

In this first video, there's an eBay apparel seller, Linda's Stuff (Linda Lightman) talks about the store and her eBay business.  You can see the apparel part of the store pretty well in this one.

In this video, Lorrie Norrington does an interview on Holiday top sellers from the pop-up shop.

Enjoy the videos and if you happen to go to NY or have been, let us know what you think about the shop in comments.

SeekingAlpha disclosure - I am long Google and Amazon.  eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.

 

More details on eBay's search outage - buyer and seller compensation announced.

Sellers had three concerns coming out of this weekend's outage:

• Is eBay going to be stable for Q4?
• What about the buyers that were impacted?
• What about the seller impact?

Is eBay going to be stable for Q4

According to AB posts and comments in the press, it looks like the outage was due to a software problem that eBay has found and fixed. Evidently a 30% surge in listings caused the problem to rear its ugly head.

What about buyers that were impacted?

eBay is giving all buyers (winners) of auction-style items a 10% off coupon - this is the first time I've ever seen eBay do anything like this and I imagine it will turn this negative to a positive as now we'll have all of these buyers with unexpected 10% off coupons during a key purchase time.

eBay seller impact/compensation

eBay sent a letter to sellers Monday that detailed the compensation they are providing for the search outage. In addition to the normal listing/fvf fee reversals, it was great to see eBay not only give sellers the ability to cancel sales (auction-style listings) and be inoculated from any negative feedback reactions caused by that.  As you will see eBay even gave sellers some sample language should they want to cancel the sales.

Kudos to eBay for expediency and for acknowledging the severity of the outage.  Fingers crossed that we won't have any issues in the next 30 days!

BEGIN eBay's letter to sellers

Dear XXXX:

By now you might be aware that between 9:45am and midnight PST on Saturday, November 21, eBay search was down with searches returning limited or no results.

We know this is a very serious disruption, especially as you are ramping up your sales for the holiday season. Because you had listings ending during or within an hour after the outage, I wanted to let you know, personally, what we will be doing to support your business and protect your eBay reputation.

First of all, this outage will not negatively impact your feedback or detailed seller ratings (DSRs) in any way. All auction-style listings completed during this time will be protected from negative and neutral feedback as well as DSRs below a five star rating.

In addition, we will not expect you to fulfill Auction-style orders completed during this time if you feel the search outage prevented you from realizing the full expected price from your auction-style listings that closed during the outage or within an hour after the outage. It's up to you whether you want to fulfill the item in the interest of good relations with your buyer or cancel the transaction.

If you do plan to cancel a transaction, we ask that you contact your buyer within the next 48 hours (by end of day Tuesday, Nov 24). For your convenience, we've drafted some language below that you can use in your emails to inform the buyer of your intention and let them know this cancellation was due entirely to an eBay issue and not you as a seller.

If you had Fixed Price listings completed during this time period, you would of course be expected to fulfill sold items as usual.

Second, in keeping with eBay's outage policy and doing what's right for sellers and buyers, we are taking the following actions for listings that ended during or within an hour after the outage (9:45am Saturday - 1:00am Sunday PST):

• We will refund all associated fees for Auction-style listings and refund pro-rated fees for all active Fixed Price listings during the outage. This refund should be reflected in your next eBay invoice.
• We will remove negative/neutral Feedback and detailed seller ratings (DSRs) lower than 5 stars given by buyers for affected Auction-style listings.
• We will alert the eBay and PayPal resolutions team in the event that a claim of item not received is filed for an affected listing.
• We will be sending a 10% coupon up to $100 off to buyers who won Auction-style listings during the outage for any inconvenience.

We fully understand the impact of an outage of this scope on you, our valued partners. We sincerely apologize for the disruption to your business. I want you to know that we are continuing to focus our teams and resources to ensure a smooth and rewarding holiday selling season for you.

Sincerely,

Lorrie Norrington
President, eBay
___________________________________

Suggested email for notifying your buyer of cancelled Auction-style transactions:
Dear Buyer:

As you may know, for a period of time from Saturday, November 21 to Sunday, November 22, eBay search was returning limited or no results. See the official eBay report. Unfortunately, the item you purchased from me on [date] was offered through an auction-style listing affected by this technical disruption.

I wanted you to know that as a result of this issue, I am cancelling this transaction and any payment you made will be fully refunded. In addition, eBay will be sending you a 10% coupon up to $100 off for the inconvenience. Now that eBay search is fully restored, I will be relisting this auction [today]. I sincerely hope you will bid again-and win!

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact eBay via the "Contact us" link at the top of the eBay homepage. Thank you for your understanding. I look forward to your future business.

Sincerely,

END eBay's letter to sellers

Seekingalpha disclosure - I am long Google and Amazon.  eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.

eBay global outage - search system down globally most of 11/21/09

Around noon ET we started to get some inbound requests from sellers asking about the status of our systems because of unusually slow order flow.  Everything was fine on our end.  We realized that eBay's search system was having instability and ultimately a hard outage.  You can follow the official eBay Announcement board here for details.  At the time of writing, it looks like we're going on a 6hr+ outage here.

The problems manifest themselves in zero search results like you see here.  It's interesting that eBay chooses this behavior instead of a page saying the site is down.  You'll notice that the sponsored listings and other advertisements are all doing just fine.

 

This is a bad buyer experience IMO because it makes it seem like eBay has zero (ipods, xbox, etc.)

There was a similar, but shorter outage last in in October.  There are four general buckets of problems that will impact a search engine like this:

• New software has bugs - Hopefully they haven't rolled new software this time of year, but if they did it would be a likely culprit.
• New hardware causing problems - Perhaps they slipped in some last minute new hardware that is having problems
• Existing hardware problem - Search engines require lots and lots of storage and lots of machines to hold the indexes and serve them quickly.  There's a lot that can go wrong in there. eBay invests heavily to make sure they don't have any Single Points of Failure (SPOFs in our world), so I doubt this is it - it would have to be pretty massive to see the impact we are seeing here.
• Existing software/system  bug/corruption - As the holiday sales period ramps up, software systems are put under pressures they don't see in other time frames. This can cause hidden bugs and problems to pop up. 

Judging by the hint given in the AB post - "errors in our  backend systems", I'm going to go with the 'existing system bug' theory, but it's all speculation at this point until we learn more.

One thing is clear, this doesn't give anyone in the eBay ecosystem confidence that the site will be up and robust for the critical next 30 day prime time holiday selling period.

Impact on sellers

Sellers are asking us if there will be some form of compensation from eBay.  I believe eBay has to declare it an outage first and then they automatically extend listings 24 hours as compensation.  You could theoretically argue that this isn't an outage as the front end of the site is up.  That's an empty argument as it's like saying your car is starts fine even though it has four flat tires.

The 'extend listings 24hrs' thing is a kick back to the auction orientation of the site and doesn't really apply to today's fixed price world where a days worth of sales have been effectively lost and extending listings won't bring 'em back.

Speaking of SPOFs, we've been guiding sellers that putting all of your eggs in one basket isn't prudent.  Today is one of those days that amplifies that message for eBay-only sellers.

What's the impact on you?

eBay Strategies readers, did you experience the outage?  What was the impact on your business?

SeekingAlpha Disclosure - I am long Google and Amazon.  eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.

Interesting article on the risks eBay faces leaving its roots...

I've often argued that if eBay leaves its roots and becomes essentially a fixed-price mall that competed squarely with Amazon, that they may lose that battle. The key is if they can do both - keep the unique and quirky stuff while adding in the fixed-price stuff.

Anthony Mussucci has an article over at Daily Finance that you can find here, that nails that view better than I have been able to.  Here's a snippet that I found very succinctly summarizes what I think most of us in eBay-land feel and worry about:

The more eBay morphs into an online retailer and gets away from its roots as an online auction site, the more likely it's fighting a battle it's going to lose. While it's important to establish trust among sellers and buyers on eBay, trying tocompete with Amazon or Walmart and their online guarantees is a waste of time. Even if eBay can match the services offered by other retailers, why would a buyer chose to shop there? 

EBay's strengths are in the variety of old, hard-to-find collectible and discounts on new items. That's why people shop at eBay, and if the company moves too far away from that core identity, it may never rediscover its mojo.

SeekingAlpha disclosure - I am long Google and Amazon.  eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.

October Same Store Sales

The ChannelAdvisor Same Store Sales October results are in and there were a couple of interesting trends that could indicate how the Q4 holiday season is going to shake out.

This figure shows the results for 2009 so far graphically: (click to enlarge)

• Amazon led the pack (as usual) with 61% y/y growth - up from Septembers 55%
• Overall at ChannelAdvisor we saw things pick up overall very nicely from the high single digits to 17% y/y.
• eBay had a slight tick down to 4.73% from Septembers 5.1% - that's small enough that I don't think it's cause for any concern.
• Comscore hasn't put out their October numbers, but I suspect they will be flat to down slightly.

17 days to Black Friday!

SSS data disclaimer:

The ChannelAdvisor SSS data represents the combined results of over 3000 retailers.  ChannelAdvisor's mix may be materially different from that of eBay, Amazon or other channels.

SeekingAlpha disclosure: I am long Amazon and Google. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.

Free Webinar tomorrow, 11/10/09 - e-commerce gut check

I'm hosting a webinar tomorrow where we'll go over the Q3 results for various companies (eBay, Amazon, Google, etc.) as well as look at the various Q4 forecasts and reveal ChannelAdvisor's October data.

We'll wrap with 10 last-minute strategies that you can implement BEFORE BLACK FRIDAY / CYBERMONDAY and get that last little bit of juice out of your holiday sales.

For you eBay Strategies readers, there will be lots of eBay coverage as well as other channels you maybe on/interested in. (Amazon, Buy, CSE, Search).

I hope you are able to make it, registration is open here:  and if you aren't able to make it, the recording will be available on the same page about 24hrs after the webinar in the 'Webinar Library' section.  The webinar is at 2pm EDT.

Come to think of it - the eBay ads are out!

Last week, eBay previewed one TV ad from its 'Come to think of it' campaign.  Seller reaction was negative with an occasional positive of 'at least they are doing something this year' as you can see in the comments of that post.

Today, eBay has a microsite up here, that shows off all of the new holiday ad campaigns.  Here's the blurb used to introduce the campaign:

eBay isn’t just a marketplace for quirky old lamps.  It is a fertile shopping ground full of deals on both premium-used and brand-new items.  The mission of this campaign is to prove that eBay is THE place to get a deal.  We did this in a compelling, funny, stand-out kind of way to get people thinking of eBay in a new way: as the smartest place to shop for deals on the new and old, high-end and bargain.

They are split into categories: TV, Web Videos, Print, Rich Media banners and Other banners. Let's briefly tour each.

Talent

There are three, well four, folks in the ads that are all up and coming comedians from Comedy Central.

• Jim -Jim Gaffigan, has some CDs and DVDs out. He's got a dry sense of comedy and a good delivery.
• Michaels - Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter.  You can find their Comedy Central show details here and bios on the links.
• Kevin - Kevin Hart - Stand up guy that tends to talk about his relationship stuff.  This is a great video (safe for work). 

Here's a funny sketch from the Michaels that will prime you for the eBay ads:

Michael & Michael Have Issues
Preview - Michael's Schedule
www.comedycentral.com
Joke of the Day Stand-Up Comedy Free Online Games

TV

There are three TV ad 'flavors':

• Kevin - this is the guy who's wife got last years dress at 40% off and now he's in chicken nugget hell.  He has two ads - Dress and TV.  Does anyone know if Kevin is a comedian or his full name?
• • Dress - we've talked this one to death
  • TV - I actually like this one, the cut to the TV is pretty darn funny (notice it covers the door frame),  and I think all guys can relate to the wife saying: "why didn't you get a bigger one?"  Tag line: "For deals on everything, big or small...Come to think of it, eBay"
• Jim - There are four Jim spots.
• Snowboard - pretty funny, guess he won't use it though as he doesn't even know what bindings are.  Tag line: "For deals on sporting goods, come to think of it, eBay."
• • Gift -This one kind of slams homemade gifts - funny shot of him in the store with the snow mobile. Tag line: "For a better deal on better gifts, come to think of it, eBay." P.S. Granny smells bad.
  • Treadmill -I don't get this one, he got a treadmill he's not going to use?  "For used stuff that's as good as new, come to think of it, eBay."
  • Vest - Vests are the thongs of coats. Tag line: "For new clothes for a lot less, come to think of it eBay."
     
• The Michaels - There are two Michaels spots - they are both called Michael and seem familiar, but I can't place them - anyone know them?
• • Camera - This one is the funniest by far - I won't spoil it for you - it's about a digital camera, but that plays a supporting role.  Tag line: "For the same stuff at better price...Come to think of it eBay."
  • Scuba - Pretty good, but not as good as other one. Tag line: "For a good price on great gear...Come to think of it, eBay. 

Personally, I'd have to rate Michaels/Camera #1, Kevin/TV #2 and then they fall off from there.  What do you think?

Web Videos

The web videos feature the same three folks (Kevin, Jim and the Michaels):

• Kevin - Talks about kids love gadgets.  Tag line: "Baby-proof your wallet, see great electronics deals" - note, no Come to think of it tagline, maybe it's in the surround or front/tail of the ad though that we don't see here.
• Jim - Boat, DVD, Gifts, Toaster, Toothbrush - a series of 5 where Jim sits in a chair and rifs on various topics. These are pretty good if you get his dry sense of humor.
• The Michaels - Bike, Mini fridge, headphones, gifts, video games - 

Print

There are seven different print ads - each featuring a product picture with a tag line in the bottom left with the 'come to think of it' tag at the end.  For example, Jeans says "New designer jeans for fifty percent off still make your butt look completely amazing." Other products are purse, cookware, tv, mp3 player, drill and crib.  The most snarky is the crib: "Your baby won't know it's last year's model.  Babies don't know anything."

Rich Media banners and other banners (online)

The three rich media banners are pretty clever- this fashion one features a walking model and you can see pop outs of all the clothes she is wearing and then find that stuff on eBay. The other two are cookware (Mark Sullivan is chef) and  mp3 player plays a Sydney Wayser song on a nondescript mp3 player.

The other banner ads are categorical and target: apparel, cameras, gifts, golf and cutlery with some clever little animations - for example you cut a tomato and pear with the virtual knife.

Conclusion

After seeing the complete campaign, the whole thing is growing on me.  I'm still not a fan of the 'come to think of it' tag-line, but I do like they are are showing a very wide range of things here from new to used to refurb and golf, cutlery, apparel, etc.  The comedians for the TV commercials were a nice touch and add some personality to things which should help get attention.  The ads started running on 11/3 so we'll report in if we see any bump in traffic or transactions from the campaign.  Readers, share your thoughts in comments.

SeekingAlpha Disclosure - I am long Amazon and Google. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.

Interesting Donahoe Video...

This came out this weekend and I thought it was interesting on a couple of levels:

• eBay still has some perceptions to fight - Maria introduces eBay as an 'auction site'
• They spend a lot of the interview talking about m-commerce.  FYI - I just finished a two part series on m-commerce and reviewed two application that do UPC scanning - check that out over at sister-site, CSEStrategies.com here.
• For feed readers, the video is embedded here so you may need to click through.

SeekingAlpha Disclosure - I am long Google and Amazon. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor whee I am CEO.