Smoke and Mirrors

Why can’t I login using my eBay ID?

I’m just saying…

As anyone who follows eBay is aware, eBay raised their pricing on Store listings last week. Here are some of the messages eBay is trying to send:

1 - if you’re a media seller, put your top sellers in core auticons, and the rest on Half.com.
2 - if you have a store populated with junk that doesn’t sell, we don’t want it on the site.
3 - eBay Stores as a “platform” isn’t viable.

For #3, I think eBay is trying to, in some ways, encourage sellers to get into eCommerce — I’m actually surprised they didn’t mention their ProStores offering as part of their announcement.

eBay Stores has always been somewhat of a red-headed stepchild on eBay, and with the new fee increases, it has even less of a place on the site. I think a year or two from now, there may not be a venue called eBay Stores.

It will be: eBay Core, eBay Express, ProStores.

This discussion goes back to my earlier post about relevancy and store listings.

One discussion that has intrigued me recently is what eBay could do instead of MORE trust and safety regulations to increase the health of the marketplace. At this point, Trust and Safety seems to often have the first and last word on tons of policies at eBay. From a business perspective, you could call that a moat, or you could call that a liability if another service could come along and eliminate the need for it due to clever technology.

As Scot likes to piont out, Overture was pretty sure it had a huge moat in that it was supposed to be way difficult to build a paid search platform, and Overture had the benefit of network effects in terms of its distribution. And eBay sellers themselves sometimes convince themselves they have a huge moat in their business.

The truth is, in the face of disruptive innovation or true competitive differentiators, a moat that once kept competitors out can quickly keep you “in”. Overture viewed the fact that it didn’t have to maintain a public-facing site as an asset — all of this was run by partners. When Google came along, they proved otherwise QUICKLY.

What if eBay were to implement its Trust and Safety policies in the form of relevancy in the search? As an example. As a seller, I list 1 million products just to flood my category. No one buys them. Why couldn’t eBay track this and add this to the seller’s relevancy score? The next time the seller lists, if they want to show up in the place they showed up previously, they have to pay higher listing fees (a disincentive), or they show up lower in results.

This way, the system tends to self-correct for this type of things.

Let’s take another space that eBay is currently wading into currently: shipping rates. Unless you have a bright-line policy like Amazon and Half.com does (where they say explicitly what they will credit sellers on shipping), you are treading in a morass of policy upon policy, until soon you are forced to introduce a policy hub to explain it all. And of course, does that really explain it? Well someone has to maintain that policy hub, and the wording behind it. And then you need teams of lawyers to enforce those policies which translates into even higher overhead.

Does relevancy provide a solution here? Perhaps… Perhaps. Personally I think click-through (Google’s current method) is a poor measure of relevancy. It rewards misleading titles and keywords — another huge policy concern for eBay as well BTW. I can’t tell you how many sellers I’ve known taken down for keyword violations in titles on nuances buried in policy portals.

A better solution is to base relevancy and search result position on conversion. A buyer clicks on a listing. Sees $50 shipping - are they likely to buy from that seller? Maybe, maybe not. If eBay keeps optimizing its listing pages like eBay Express does (as opposed to traditional eBay), then it certainly becomes far less likely for the buyer to miss the fact that shipping is $100 on a $5 item.

So what does the buyer do? Click back. For a reasonably priced seller, it is more likely to convert. Boom. This feeds into the seller’s relevancy score, and they are rewarded with more business and a lower listing fee for that behavior. The untrustworthy seller’s listing fees go up due to their overall poor relevancy (likeliness to convert).

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a virtuous feedback loop.

eBay has ended, at least temporarily, an experiment with virtually unlimited stores listings showing up in results.

In the meantime, during this experiment, every seller I’ve talked to has noticed an increase in Store sales.

Reasons cited include “buyer confusion” due to too many results. Is that the real reason?? — Usability studies show most people stay on the first page. Beyond that, many buyers stay above the fold and don’t scroll down.

As an example, I searched on “Nikon D70″. Google returned 17 million results. Yahoo returned 4 million results.
I understand that Google continuing to gain search share is separate from the eBay buyer experience, but clearly the game is not just about result count.

The key is relevance. eBay is growing beyond its “sort by closing time” roots. That’s one of the improvements eBay Express is going to introduce when it launches…

Why not rank things like Google does - based on buyer behavior?

Nothing major… Here’s a screenshot. | eBay.com

The biggest “bravo” goes to making shipping costs more prominent. This always helps.
Second most important is trying to create trust using the “Buy Safely” area.

Finally, the “Listing Details” area is going to be hidden by default. This is OK for the most part, except for the payment options. I think it makes sense to keep those somewhat prominent. The rest of the stuff in that area has always been somewhat of a “yawner”.

Will it help? Who knows….

Have fun…

Sorry to you eBay Live Auctions sellers (Ro?) in the audience: no reduced fees for you!

Search still effective? yes and no | ContextRulesMarketing.blogspot.com

This blog mentions that those who are most effective in search use it as part of a larger strategy.

I would say this is true of eBay, comparison shopping engines, search, or almost anything in life. You wouldn’t put your entire net worth in one stock would you? So why would you put all your online growth prospects into one channel?

Google, Yahoo, eBay, Shopping.com, Shopzilla? Your answer should be: whatever works for me. As long as you are meeting your customer acquisition and/or margin targets, you should really be agnostic to the channel.

SA no more! | eBay.com

Woah! 3 months notice? Microsoft gets hell for giving people 5 years notice. If there was an earlier announcement, I supposed I missed it… but I doubt people would have paid attention until eBay published a definite end date for support.

And the wrinkle this post doesn’t make crystal clear I don’t think. eBay says it won’t be supporting SA anymore because the old API is going away. Well the old API is completely dead June 1. This means that not only will eBay be not “supporting” this product (which to me means answering support e-mails on the product), but the product will cease to function completely on this date.

If this is true, I can’t help but think this would mean a GMV hit to eBay.

Maybe we can get a clarification here from some of the eBay folks that frequent here.

Update: I did find this in the FAQs. I still think the wording is extremely confusing.
Most users see the word “API” and glaze over. I don’t think people will keep reading and intuit that because the API is different it will go away.

To me, when something will completely break after a certain date, you want to make that crystal clear. “Ending support” is not crystal to me, and that’s the headline, not something like “ALL USERS MUST MIGRATE WITHIN 90 DAYS OR YOU WILL NO LONGER BE ABLE TO RUN YOUR EBAY BUSINESS”, which is more like what is happening.

If you rely on Seller’s Assistant to run your eBay business and don’t realize what’s going to happen to you, then it will be quite a jolt on June 1. My bet? eBay will enable a back-door for their own products to avoid this.

Why is eBay ending support for Seller’s Assistant?

Seller’s Assistant relies on eBay’s API (Application Program Interface) to list items to eBay and receive information from eBay. Seller’s Assistant currently uses the original API structure which eBay introduced in 2001. In early 2004, eBay released a new API structure which provides broader support for more technologies and more developers.

Over a year ago, eBay made the decision to only support the new API structure and to end support for the original API structure. Support for the original API structure will end by June 1, 2006. As a result, all applications based on the original API structure, such as Seller’s Assistant, must be built on the new API structure in order to work with eBay.

When Seller’s Assistant was redesigned, it was built on the new API structure and subsequently renamed Blackthorne.

Is anyone else tired of “the eBay of X” applied to anything?

I got an e-mail last week from Salesforce.com and at the bottom (which I suppose was promoting the AppExchange), the tagline said “The eBay For Applications”.

Wack.

Enhanced buyer requirements tools | eBay.com

This is cool cool cool. Now you can figure out who you are missing by blocking bidders. Anything that helps sellers make informed decisions about their business is extremely welcome.

This log will show you who has been blocked in the previous 60 days by your Buyer Requirements preferences. This information helps sellers make more informed decisions about their Buyer Requirements selections.