Sunday, October 5, 2008

Rumor: eBay to Announce Layoffs on Monday

According to Valleywag, eBay is going to announce layoffs this Monday or at the latest before the earnings call on the 15th. This comes at no surprise to me as eBay's stock has been tanking as of late(it closed at $18.94 on Friday). I think the consensus among the analysts on Wall Street is that eBay is no longer a growth stock and shouldn't be given the same P/E multiples it enjoyed during its growth phase.

The concerning thing to me about the layoffs is who are they going to cut? Has eBay just decided that "eBay customer service" is an oxymoron and it is not going to employ anymore customer service employees? Or is eBay going to cut its trust and safety department and let fraud run rampant? I guess I will just have to wait and see like everyone else...

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

eBay is now copying Google as well...Adwords for eBay

When you can't innovate on your own it always seems to make sense to copy others who can. eBay is now going to make its search results more like Google's search results by adding "eBay adcommerce" to their platform. Adcommerce from what I can tell is a knock off on Google's Adwords. It allows sellers to bid on Keywords to drive traffic to their eBay stores. I actually like the idea and its success I think hinders on whether buyers will actually click on the ads. The negatives to this change are that it will definitely hurt the smaller eBay sellers who can't afford to pay for the traffic. Please post any thought or comments below.

Link to the announcement and more details on Adcommerce-
http://pages.ebay.com/adcommerceintro/

Friday, September 19, 2008

Donahoe Approval Rating From Employees under 30%

Fortunately for John Donahoe the employees don't vote on who is CEO at eBay. According to Glassdoor.com John's approval rating is coming in at just under 30%. Apparently not even 1 in 3 eBay employees is happy with the job that John is doing at eBay.

According to a Wired.com article, John Donahoe is not rated last but next to last among CEO's with reviews by 50 or more employees. The worst rating that came in belonged to the CEO of Motorola. Although the ratings are probably skewed for a number of reasons such as:

1. A rumor is circling that eBay is going to announce a large lay off.
2. In general employees who are upset post on Glassdoor.com.
3. People who were pushed out when Meg Whitman left, left negative reviews.

Nonetheless, the data shows that a large percentage of the eBay employees is not on board with John and his plans for eBay. Just for curiosities sake I am going to put a poll up for readers to vote on whether or not they approve of John's job as CEO of eBay. The poll's goal is to get an approval rating from eBay users and compare it to the employees.

Also, please post all your comments and thoughts below as to why you think John's ratings are where they are.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Fed Loans $85 Billion to Small Business Owners...wait, no...to just AIG, 1 poorly run large business

This is not going to be a long post but I am still scratching my head about the fed's bailout of AIG. $85 billion loaned to just 1 poorly run company???

Being a small business owner myself, I just wonder if this money was well spent. Now imagine the Fed decided to actually lend this money to hard working small business owners. I think that the taxpayers of America would get a better return on their money if this was the case.

Anyway, I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on the government's bailout of AIG.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

eBay is Testing a New Listing and Search Page

An anonymous ebay seller has sent me these images of select screen shots of the new listing and search pages that eBay is testing. It appears from the screen shots below that the Amazonification of eBay is in full gear. The changes emphasize less of the actual seller and their description of the item and put more emphasis on eBay's product details.

In this first picture we see the importance of being in eBay's product catalog because there are only 3 matching items for "Sony VX2000"(you can click on the image for a larger picture). This change will pull out all of the accessories that typically flood the search results.(like batteries and chargers in this category) Although as you can see that the buyers will have to click on the "matching product" to get only those 3 results.



In this image below the seller has blocked out any identifying information. However, you can still get a feel for how the new layout looks.




In the image below, this is what immediately follows the image above on the new listing page. After this last image would be where the seller's description would show.



Please post your thoughts and comments on the changes. For the most part it seems to me as if the changes will allow buyers to find the items they are looking for more quickly. However, by minimizing the focus on the actual seller and more on the product for sale, I believe that this will make it difficult for sellers who are trying to differentiate themselves based on their feedback and customer service. Nonetheless, these are just another bunch of changes that eBay is throwing at sellers and will likely cause some stress for many sellers as they will have to keep constantly changing their listing strategy. Anyway, those are just a few of my thoughts and I would love to hear what everyone else thinks on the topic. Please post your comments below.

Monday, July 28, 2008

Top 5 Mistakes eBay Sellers Make

Here is a list of the top 5 mistakes that I see many eBay sellers make.

1. Having a bad eBay account name- I can't tell you how many times I have seen crude and sexually explicit names on ebay or just downright disgusting names. You account name is part of your marketing strategy and having a name like stinkyfinger or bluevommit just doesn't make people want to buy from you.

2. Taking bad pictures- a picture is worth a thousand words and the last thing you want is a bad picture of the item you are selling. Many sellers don't take the time to take good pictures of the items they are selling and this hurts the prices that they get on their items. If you are going to take a picture make sure you have sufficient light and don't have strong shadows.

3. Using Stock Photos- This only applies to sellers of used goods. Using a stock photo as your only picture or not having any photos at all will significantly discount the item you are selling. Obviously if you are selling items that are worth less than say $10 then it might not be worth your time to take the photo. But for everyone else you need to have actual pictures of the items you have for sale.

4. Answering emails slowly- people act on impulses and when a buyer has taken the time to ask a question about your item, however crazy the question it might be, you need to respond quickly. Your response time conveys a lot of information to the buyer and if you are quick to respond you are probably also quick to resolve any issues that might arise during the transaction.

5. Failing to clearly post your return policy, shipping policy, and any warranty information in your listings- As a seller you need to put in all the relevant information about your items in a clear format so buyers can easily get answers to their questions. If you fail to do this you will definitely get many time wasted emails about your shipping policy and return policy. Save yourself some time upfront and answer these questions once, when you create your listing, and not repeatedly through email.

Monday, July 21, 2008

Will Facebook treat its developers like eBay has treated its sellers?

Much of eBay's success can be attributed to the thousands upon thousands of small mom and pop eBay sellers who helped start the site in the early days. These sellers helped eBay grow, and eBay wouldn't be where it is today with out them. eBay was reliant upon these sellers in the early days and because of this treated them for the most part fairly. By doing this, eBay was able to create a vast marketplace unrivaled in its unique content (you can find just about anything for sale on eBay). Nonetheless, as times changed and eBay's fortunes weren't growing as quickly as it would have liked, eBay began to squeeze these same sellers who helped make eBay what it is today. Many of these small sellers are now going out of business as eBay is making deals with large retailers like Buy.com, which disadvantages these many small sellers.

The reason I mention Facebook is that having been a small eBay seller who was squeezed by eBay, I see a possible red flag for many small developers making those quirky applications on Facebook (which can allow you to toss sheep at friends or play Scrabble). Although Facebook has opened up their site to allow developers to create applications, there are still many signs that Facebook will squeeze its developers as soon as it needs to keep its own fortunes growing. For instance, Facebook intermittently shut down the Super Wall application in the past month for a supposed violation of the privacy agreement (which reminds me of the time eBay pulled one of my listings for a listing violation). This is just a friendly warning to those developers spending lots of their time and money on developing these applications: as soon as Facebook needs to meet growth expectations or fails to make enough money to go public, your applications will be the first to feel the pain.

For eBay, it was just business as usual -- it needed to grow, and the eBay sellers were just in its way. For Facebook, the same thing is bound to happen -- history repeats itself, and it is unlikely that the big fish in the Facebook ecosystem, Facebook, is going to let other small fish live forever.

My only suggestion to the developers is to create a union-like organization that behaves similarly to PESA (Professional eBay Sellers Alliance) and try to negotiate deals with Facebook now before it is too late...

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Sunday, July 20, 2008

How could sellers take down eBay?

This post is more or less an open forum for sellers to brainstorm and offer their ideas on how eBay sellers as a group could take down eBay. I will start the discussion with a couple of ideas that I think could be a good start for the discussion.

1. Create a free, seller-owned, non-profit, fixed price, eBay-like marketplace- The only stipulation for the site is that all products listed must be cheaper than the equivalent listing on eBay by at least the amount of the eBay final value fee. The reason is that since the site is free, the sellers must pass along the savings to the buyers to attract them to the site. I think an eBay seller-owned site that is "always cheaper than eBay" would be a great news/PR event that could help drive traffic to the site. It could be named something like minuesthefees.com or some other name that expresses its strongest value proposition: that it has the same products as eBay but they are just cheaper. My feeling is that most eBay buyers are attracted to bargains and would flock to the site. Maybe someone at PESA could organize something like this with all of the PowerSellers...

2. Create a free, open source, multichannel listing tool- In order to make it easy for all eBay sellers to list their items on minusthefees.com, we would have to have a listing tool that resembles Turbo Lister but actually works, that pushes listings to eBay, Shopping.com, etc., in addition to minusthefees.com. Maybe Craig over at Craigslist would let the tool push the listings to Craiglist as well -- or maybe Craig could help create the tool and help organize the marketplace. Another option could be to ask Scot over at Channel Advisor to put out a free version of CA's product that pushes items to just eBay and minusthefees.com, and then he can charge for adding the ability to push your items to other sites like your website or Shopping.com.

Anyway, those are my first few thoughts on how to get started. Please post comments on new ideas or on how to improve upon my suggestions. Thanks for reading and please subscribe to this post's rss feed. Also, if you do like it please bookmark/share it with one of the social bookmarking sites on the top right of the blog.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Should you change your fixed price listings to "pseudo" auctions?



I was recently looking to make a purchase on eBay and noticed the "Auctions Ending Soon" featured on my search results.(see the picture above with the horizontal results for auctions) It dawned on me that listing items in a fixed price format doesn't make sense any more. The reason being is that buyers are now being pushed to auctions in the search results and you want your listings to get that visibility.

Consequently, you can list your items in a "pseudo" auction format. For instance, you can list your camera for a start price of $300 and a Buy it now price of $300 as well. This will get you more visibility for you listing because when the "auction" is ending you will get placement at the top of the search results and be featured.



Please check back frequently or subscribe to my blog as I will have more posts to come on eBay selling strategies.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

eBay's competitive advantages and ramblings

After listening to eBay's earnings call yesterday I had some thoughts and wanted to write them down.


Ebay's competitive advantages

  1. It's auctions- as a seller if you are going to auction off a used electronic item, ebay is the best place to do it.

    1. Why?

      1. Risk of low selling price- On another site you will probably fail to get fair market value for your item because you won't have the buyer traffic that ebay gets. On eBay you might get an non paying bidder, neg'd and then NARU'd for leaving negative comments in the postive feedback, but at least you tried.

  2. Product Depth- “You can find it on eBay”....buyers are attracted to eBay because it has just about anything you can think of for sale.

Non Competitive advantages are:

  1. Fixed Price Listings- anyone can come in and launch a site that allows sellers to list items on their site for free and then just charge a final value fee. The incremental cost of listing an item on another site to sellers is near negligible with the multi-channel products such as Channel Advisor. They can then drive traffic to the listings through paid search advertising or comparison engines.

  2. Seller negative brand equity- sellers are upset and would love to see eBay fail.

  3. Shop Victoriously”- a stupid slogan and making people think they are winners for buying on eBay just doesn't work. Maybe “Neg Victoriously” would work....I don't know.

Useless eBay metrics-

ASP(average selling price)- I don't understand why everyone is so caught up on ASP's as a whole. If the basket of products being sold changes, then most likely the ASP's change. For instance, if I sell DVD's and then one day auction off my BMW, my ASP's will jump. Does this tell you anything about how well my core business is doing? NO. Most likely the reason for the drop in ASP's on eBay is the mix of products has changed. For example, they mention that motors has slowed and other lower selling items have done better. Consequently, we have lower ASP's.

Good eBay metrics-

GMV- Obviously the ability to monetize the site is dependent on the value of goods traded on the site. GMV is very important.

Revenue- No brainer here...

Earnings- Again, a no brainer...



Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Are your PayPal balances safe? Are they FDIC insured?

With all the banks that are supposed to fail I was beginning to worry that maybe I should be more careful about carrying a balance at PayPal. I know lots of sellers sometimes maintain a balance at PayPal for a number of reasons.

1. To process returns quickly
2. To pay eBay fees
3. To pay for other items they might purchase on eBay

So I did a little digging and read through the PayPal user agreement. PayPal is officially not a bank. PayPal is only a Payment Service Provider. Consequently, Paypal only acts on your behalf and deposits your money in a bank for you. So your PayPal balance is held at a bank at which PayPal deposits your money. Here is a list of the banks that PayPal currently uses.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/pop/fdic_banks-outside

Now there are 2 ways in which you can hold your money at PayPal. One way is to have it saved in a money market account and the other is so it is put into a bank account. The money market account, like all money market accounts, is not FDIC insured. However, when PayPal acts on your behalf and deposits the money into a bank account, not a money market account, the account qualifies for FDIC Pass-Through Insurance. So it appears that any balances you hold at PayPal, that aren't money market accounts, should be insured. However, if you read the fine print PayPal says,

"Pass-through deposit coverage is contingent upon PayPal maintaining accurate records and on determinations of the FDIC as receiver at the time of a future receivership of any bank at which we place your funds. FDIC pass-through deposit insurance protects you only against the failure of the bank at which PayPal places your funds, and does NOT protect you against PayPal's insolvency."

Here is the link to PayPal's disclaimer on FDIC Pass-Through Insurance.

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/UserAgreement/general/FDIC-outside

So apparently you are at PayPal's mercy to keep "accurate records" and not become insolvent. I think the later part of that statement is probably the most concerning to me. Although I have little faith in eBay/PayPal to keep accurate records, I would be most worried about eBay going bankrupt. Anything can happen these days and with markets as volatile as they are it can happen in an instant. (Think Enron or IndyMac Bank)

Another issue to worry about is that with PayPal is that it takes a long time to withdraw your money. You can't line up outside a bank and wait to withdraw all of your money. At PayPal you have to put in an ACH request to withdraw your money and wait a few days. Consequently, if any of the banks where PayPal's money resides fails, it would probably put PayPal users at a significant disadvantage.

Anyway, this author is going to make sure he withdraws all of his PayPal money as quickly as it comes in. Please let me know if anyone has any thoughts or comments on this. Also, please check back regularly or subscribe to my RSS feed as I will be posting many more eBay stories to come.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

eBay must block the sale of all GENUINE LVMH products

eBay has recently been ordered by a French court to stop the sale of all LVMH items. This includes both counterfeit and GENUINE products. Yes, you read it correctly, a French court is saying that eBay cannot have any listings for genuine LVMH products. The reasoning behind this is that LVMH is allowed to pick its own distributors and eBay is not a liscensed distributor of their products.

The court is telling eBay that it must pull all the listings of LVMH products or it will face a daily fine. The court is saying that any website that ebay owns, not just ebay.fr but also ebay.com must pull all the listings. This is a scary issue because if this is upheld and enforced, then all brands will be able to do the same thing. I am sure that Sony and Canon would like to curb the secondhand market for their products. The secondhand market definetly hurts their sales because people don't purchase new items but just buy used ones.

Obviously an issue of jurisdiction comes into play here. I would be curious if anyone knows how it is possible for a French court to enforce a judgement on ebay if they were to stop selling to France altogether? and did not maintain a physical presense there? I am not sure what eBay.fr sales are but it might be its best option. This way the French people might get upset because they are not able to use eBay and then they would push to change the law.