eBay Strategies

Big changes with the eBay search team - there's a new Sheriff in town.

Scot Wingo — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 07:27:07 -0700

Outgoing Sheriff - Jamie Ionnone

New Sheriff - Hugh Williams

I've been pretty vocal that while the recent eBay changes are in the right direction, I don't think they nailing the top 20 priorities. Everyone always asks, what do you think the top priorities are? My answer for the last 2yrs+ has been: search, search, search, search.

A core part of my 'A new hope for eBay / eBay 2.0' thesis was that the search needs a major overhaul and pretty much everyone agrees that the current eBay search experience is pretty much very broken (We did an internal meeting on this and came up with the top 10 things wrong with eBay search - if time allows, I'll have to post that as it's pretty interesting/scary when you really dig into this topic).

The first glimmer of hope for eBay's search woes came earlier this year when eBay acquired a little startup that was led by some ex Amazon/Microsoft search gurus including Chris Payne.

Today we're getting news of many more changes with the eBay search team:

First, Jamie Iannone, eBay's VP of Search, has been hired by Barnes and Noble to run their ecommerce group. This seems to have caused a cascade effect.
- I've met Jamie numerous times and was a big fan. He was the driving force behind eBay Express which I actually think we will see eBay turn into slowly over the next couple of years. It's a loss to eBay to see him go, but like many larger companies, sometimes its hard to have the kind of impact you want to as your tenure increases and I'm sure he's looking forward to a new opportunity - I wish him the best of luck at Barnes and Noble.
Second, news has leaked out that Hugh Williams has joined eBay as VP of Search to backfill Iannone. Hugh was a Partner (MSFT for 'very senior') developer manager of a piece of the new Bing search engine at Microsoft. Hugh is an Aussie that appears to have been pretty darn active as there's a good bit of information out there about him online. For those that want to learn more about the new grand pooba of eBay search:
- Linkedin profile is here
- Facebook is here
- Twitter is here - twitter.com/hughewilliams
- He has co-authored two books - both about mysql - wonder how he will like the eBay massive oracle infrastructure?
  - You have to keep an eye on these book authors - lots of hot air ;-)
- His personal website is here
- CV/Resume is here
- Here's a podcast of him talking about Live/Bing.
- And for my uber-geek readers, here's an ACM paper he wrote on the efficient online index maintenance for contiguous inverted lists (I was wondering about this problem just the other day ;-)
- He's in this microsoft research video.

The bottom line is there's a new sheriff in town for eBay Search and it will be interesting to see what kind of impact he has going forward. Also, is it too little too late?

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

A couple of interesting eBay items this am and a new Weird Al Song!

Scot Wingo — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:04:43 -0700

Super busy this week but wanted to throw a couple of news items out there:

Gene Munster @ PJC has an interesting piece out today on eBay (and Amazon - check amazon strategies for details on that one.). Every quarter they do a survey of ecommerce shoppers (315 in this survey).
- This quarter, 13% of buyers said they like to buy with the auction format vs. 19% a quarter ago and 23% in Sept. of 2008.
- 69% of eBay shoppers were 'satisfied' or 'very satisfied' with their experience vs. 71% last Q and 74% in Q408. FYI Amazon is at 83% in the survey.
- If eBay were to get a DSR for this, by my calcs they'd get a 3.45 and have to kick themselves off the site ;-)
- In all seriousness, these two data points are concerning on a number of levels, but primarily:
- - I've long posited that the eBay brand is synonymous with auctions. Thus auction fatigue = eBay fatigue. Also while eBay is transitioning to fixed price as quickly as possible, 40% of eBay's bottom line is generated from the auction platform that is rapidly losing interest with the consumer.
- It's unusual that Gene's satisfaction levels are showing a decline, while eBay is out telling the world their NPS scores are on the rise and that sellers with DSRs > 4.8 are now a big chunk of the GMV.
- It's a small sample size, but what do you guys think - are auctions dead in the mind of consumers? Are consumers increasingly dissatisfied with eBay transactions?
eBay UK has put out their quarterly Online Busines Index where they survey sellers and give an update on the eBay UK market. I did a quick scan and this report makes seem pretty rosy in the ole' UK:
- This report breaks down the EU (UK, DE, FR and IT) GMV for eBay which is the first time I've seen that in print. They say that DE is €3.1b/yr, UK is €1.9b/yr, FR is €341m/yr and IT is €273m/yr. Which pegs eBay's EU GMV At €5.7b.
- 65% of UK retailers are expecting orders to be up this Christmas
- Price pressure is off, margins are up and the sales outlook is bright
- Maybe they did this survey during that week in the UK where it's actually sunny ;-)
- Thanks to Mark@Dangleberry for the tip on this one.
Finally, I love the Doors and have been a Weird Al fan (gosh should I admit this in a public blog?) since I was literally 15. Wel, Weird Al has a new song out called Craigslist that is a brilliant spoof of the Doors, but with a fun ecommerce twist. I mention this here because I'm sure in the eBay world we all remember the excitement when Weird Al captured the eBay phenomena with his song 'eBay' which was a parody of a backstreet boys song. I don't think the Weird Al eBay song is on youtube (that I can find), but here's a link to the new craigslist song.
- Weird Al's move to Craigslist signals that the site is officially mainstream now and I believe has replaced that 'seredendipitous random stuff' buying/selling in consumers heart. I've long said that eBay faces a squeeze play from Craigslist at the bottom with the FSBO crowd and Amazon at the top. This is another datapoint that supports that.

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

Live VSL listings and a Free Shipping discounts update.

Scot Wingo — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:15:52 -0700

I'm working on Part II of my Variation Style Listings series, but wanted to point out a couple of live listings on the site. These are not ChannelAdvisor listings (we are still working out some issues we are having with the production implementation), but they are good examples of what this looks like if you are curious to see something 'live' vs. screen captures:

(disclaimer - live listings and searches change over time so I can't guarantee as you are reading this that these will still be live - this is as of 3pm ET on 6/18/09)

Women's ballet flats - This one has size variations
Women's sandals - This one is funny as it has size variations, but only one size, so looks like a seller that went through one of the eBay seller tools and didn't understand the concept (going to be a common problem I fear).
Men's boot - This one has size/width variation which is interesting as it has 24 variations. I have to wonder if that's really the case.
Soccer shoe - This one has size variations.

Those are the item pages. Here's a stab at what it looks like in search - notice the 'more options plus box':

The men's boot above in search results
The women's ballet flats above (as a bonus, this one has a wildly un-targeted/irrelevant ad for some wigs that is pretty funny)

Free Shipping Confusion

Back in August of 08, eBay introduced some rewards to sellers for offering free shipping (details here). Sellers got double powerseller discounts (that are tiered by DSR ratings if you recall) for items sold with free shipping.

That promotion ends June 30 and I know many sellers may not remember the timeframe on that offer. Also there has been some folks saying that eBay was going to extend this or were rumored to say as much at the PESA conference. I'm pretty sure that's not the case and this is really going to end on June 30 so you may want to look at your business model and make sure you are ready for the double rewards to go away.

I have a posting on Free Shipping coming shortly that I don't want to spoil, but my guess here is that eBay used two levers to drive free shipping: fee reductions and search promotion and search promotion has worked very, very well, so no need to invest in fee reductions.

My guess is most sellers will just put the $ they are losing on FVF credits into items prices so we'll see prices tick up on eBay 1-2% points here over the summer which should be interesting.

Live blogging eBay talk at Internet Retailer - Stephanie Tilenius

Scot Wingo — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 06:38:09 -0700

This am in Boston, Stephanie Tilenius, GM of eBay North America, gave a short keynote to over 4000 retailers. I attended and captured the following notes in outline format. Here's the blurb:

eBay overview:

3m items sold every day
Secondary market is $500b - eBay's sweet spot
Talked about daily deal and how they tweet the deals
iPhone app has had 3m downloads

eBay is focused on three things:

Selection
- Making search easier - she talked about BestMatch some
Value
- 28% of listings on eBay come with free shipping
Trust
- DSRs
- 33% of sellers have 4.8+
- Sellers with 4.8+ DSRs grew at 11% y/y - faster than ecommerce

This fall, eBay will roll out a program that further enhances trust. (didn't say more, interesting teaser here.)

Now showing a TigerDirect video, Bruce Matthews, VP of BD - TigerDirect.com

eBay helps us sell more
Give us a dedicated rep
Growth in sales has been huge
Exposure to customers wouldn't meet otherwise
Doing 7k orders on ebay - $500k
99.4% positive rating
12,000 items listed on eBay
Daily deal has been great for Tiger - driving lots of inventory

On eBay, you are seeing new merchants, a new buyer experience and a new eBay.

"We are building a better eBay every day."

Want to partner with retailers to tap into the World's largest marketplace. As we help our retailers grow, we can transform ecommerce. Ecommerce is only 5% of overall retail today and we think it should be 20% - let's work together to do that.

We're excited about moving up-market, thanks for your time.

SeekingAlpha Disclosure - I am long Google, Amazon. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor.

UK eBay Variation style listing (VSL) Webinar - June 25th

Scot Wingo — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:47:36 -0700

Speaking of Variations, our UK team is hosting a great (free!) webinar with eBay to help answer seller questions about Variation Style Listings.

You can sign up here and here's the blurb: "Taking Advantage of eBay’s New Multi Variation Listing Format"

Part I/II - eBay Variation Style Listings - Backgrounder - A Big Change for eBay Sellers.

Scot Wingo — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:13:13 -0700

This is a big week on eBay with the roll-out of what they internally are calling "Seller Release 1 (SR1)". The biggest impact from SR1 is the introduction of variation-style listing or VSL for short. You may have heard multi-sku or parent-child mentioned before - these are all the same concept, but eBay has settle don the VSL moniker for their implementation.

Personally, I think VSL is the biggest change conceptually to hit eBay, probably ever, and will have a huge impact on sellers going forward on how they think about eBay selling and how they list on eBay. With that in mind I wanted to do a series on the topic so we can go a little bit more in-depth than a shorter blog post.

Thus this is part I of II - VSL Background information. Part I lays the ground-work for the real meat and potatoes discussion in Part II which is VSL Strategies. In Part II, we'll be looking at various pros/cons for adopting VSL in general and then some thoughts on advanced selling strategies around VSL.

Before we continue, hopefully you can tell we think this is a pretty big deal @ ChannelAdvisor. That's for a couple of reasons. First, we power literally hundreds of eBay's top sellers in the Clothes, Shoes and Accessories (CSA in eBay-speak) categories that are going to be MAJORLY impacted by this. Secondarily there are some really great strategies that early adopting sellers will be able to take advantage of that those who wait will not. For example, imagine you can get your VSL listings parked at the top of BestMatch before your competitors? With this in mind, we have made advanced VSL support a top priority. This could be the biggest gold rush on eBay since the clamor to grab store names.

We have details available for ChannelAdvisor customers on what to do in our software to prepare for VSL and after we've done a short (days) closed-beta to make 100% sure the production eBay system is acting as we expect, we'll be opening support for everyone.

The Strategy and Support Center, SSC, has two resources for sellers to start examining (Note these are open to all if you are curious about how this works)

Supporting Variations - this is a guide to get your inventory setup correctly.
Using Variations - Once you have your inventory properly configured you are ready to launch variation listings to eBay.

What I'm really excited about is the team was able to make this near effortless for customers already following some simple practices like using the ChannelAdvisor parent/child inventory system, attributes, etc. If you are, all you have to do is 'turn on' VSL! Also the real icing on the cake is that once you have started using our inventory system for VSL on eBay, you are automatically over the biggest hurdle (parent-child) that most eBay sellers encounter when moving to Amazon.

Now with that said, on with Part I.

Variation Style Listings Part I - Introduction to VSL

eBay is releasing VSL today, June 15th (you'll start seeing them tomorrow) in the Men's Shoes and Women's shoes categories. Then in mid-July, VSLs will come to the entire Clothing Shoes and Accessory (CSA) category and some Home and Garden categories. I suspect eBay will give them time to 'age' in these categories and if they go well, it makes sense to move them into other 'practicals' categories like Sporting Goods, Jewelry, Electronics, Photo, Computer, etc. So even if you aren't in CSA, you should pay attention to VSL because it WILL impact you in the next year most likely and it is a big change.

You can read eBay's VSL documentation here. Personally, I don't like their t-shirt example - it's not very helpful as I've never seen anyone sell anything like that, ever. It seems like a dreamed up crazy example and I've seen it really confuse the heck out of sellers.

This post will stick to shoe examples, because that's what's live today, but it doesn't take much imagination to see how this would apply to other apparel items, or anything that is sold in a variety of size, color or bundled items.

Our example for this series - Mythical Shoes

As an example for this series, I'm going to pick a mythical men's shoe that has 6 sizes (7/8/9/10/11/12) and 3 colors (red/blue/green) or 18 (6*3 variations).

Before VSL

Selling Shoes on eBay is pretty expensive because for every 'style' (combination of size, color, design), you historically had to have a unique listing. Before FP30s .35 listing fee, auction-style listings made it VERY expensive to sell shoes on eBay. Using our example for this series, the average shoe seller would have 18 listings for that one shoe:

Men's mythical shoe size 7 red
Men's mythical shoe size 7 blue
Men's mythical shoe size 7 green
Men's mythical shoe size 8 red.

And so on through 18.

This is clearly a bad seller experience and many shoe sellers only source top-selling sizes and color combinations which makes their sourcing complex and limits the amount of selection they put on eBay - many shoe sellers wholesale out the size/color combos that don't work on eBay.

If it's a bad seller-experience, it's a TERRIBLE buyer experience. I know this from personal experience. I'm a size 10 and whenever I enter 'mythical man's shoe 10 on eBay, I get all the 10.5's. Also how many other ecommerce sites do you have to enter something like that? Usually your buying model is:

find the make/model/color you like
check to see if it's in your size
purchase

eBay forces you to do things through the search engine. For an example of what I'm talking about checkout this screen shot of Zappos vs. eBay - Zappos is about 1000 times easier to use than eBay.

Perhaps more important than ease-of-use though, is selection (remember the ChannelAdvisor Ecommerce Framework?). eBay's economic model of charging listing fees (even with FP30) causes sellers to offer limited selection. The poor folks with size 2 feet and the size 15's are out of luck on eBay.

What is a VSL? Buyer-side

(Note every effort has been taken to make sure these links work, but in case they don't and you are reading this blog months after this post, some screen shots follow if you can't follow along 'live' on eBay.com).

With VSL, eBay is finally stepping into the modern world of Ecommerce. The buyer experience is three-fold: search results, item page and purchase.

On the search side, instead of 18 listings, the buyer sees one Variation listing as shown in this figure:

notice the plus box with the "more options" button - this makes the search result a good 50% larger than a non VSL.

When the user hovers/clicks they see this (this is sandbox, production is prettier):

I actually like this treatment. It is clear that the listing has variations and even gives the buyer the ability to 'peek' into the listing by hovering over the variations. Now with a glance/hover I can see if my size/color combo is available in this VSL.

Once the buyer clicks into the VSL, they are presented with some new items you may not have seen on the item page as shown in this image:

Note that as the buyer clicks on one of the variation images or chooses the variations from the drop-downs, the images and everything else update accordingly. Also note that as inventory sells out, the variations will self-evaporate as options in the drop downs. For example, if Red size 10 is sold out, that combination goes away. Also note that each variation can have a different price (thus allowing you to implement simple configurators down the road - more on that later).

Once the buyer chooses the variation (red size 10 for example), they click the buy button and are taken to the usual eBay confirmation screen seen below:

Note that the buyer is told about the variation consistently here and throughout the rest of the transaction.

What is a VSL? Seller-side

First of all, if it hasn't been clear, VSLs are for FP30 listings only. In other words you can't list a Store-style listing (SIF in eBay speak) or an auction-style listing (even with BIN) in VSL - it is FP only (7 and 30 day durations to be very specific).

From a seller's perspective what you have to do is 'package' all of your items together so eBay knows how the variations 'work'. What you do is first tell eBay the parent listing and then the variations. You need to supply all the variations (size and color), child pictures, prices and quantities. So for our example, you would have to provide eBay with 18 * 5 = 80 pieces of data.

Hopefully you're starting to see how this could change how you list on eBay. Also, many sellers are not very tight on inventory controls around variations today. VSL will give all of your styles increased exposure, BUT if you aren't managing this tightly, you will over-sell and of course your DSRs will get hit.

Coming soon - Part II - VSL Strategies

You maybe asking yourself some important 'ah-ha' questions at this point:

What happens if I don't adopt VSL?
What's the difference between an item specific and a variations? When do I use which?
How will VSL work with BestMatch, Recent Sales and eBay's search engine in general?
What will I do with my open listings?
If you use the eBay tools (TurboLister, Blackthorne, SellerManager, etc.) what is the impact?
How can I leverage VSL to win business over my competitors?

Well hang-tight as we'll answer those questions and more in our next installment which is coming soon....

Seeking Alpha disclosure - I am long Google and Amazon. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor.

Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition - See you in Boston!

Scot Wingo — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 06:46:41 -0700

I'm off to IRCE today in Boston to participate in the annual 5000+ strong meeting of larger and smal internet retailers. I'll be hanging out at the ChannelAdvisor booth - 749 and checking out most of the content. I should have some time to do a little live blogging and as always will be on the lookout for trends and news interesting to eBay sellers.

Stephanie Tilenius, GM, eBay (pictured above), is speaking on 'how all retailers can take advantage of eBay' - so I suspect it will be a pitch to the larger retailrs to come on the platform in the Diamond program. I'll definitely have some coverage of that.

IRCE is the new eBay Live?

Speaking of eBay sellers, over the last 3 years it has been interesting to watch the attendence at eBay Live decline and then the corresponding attendence at IRCE rise. As the trend towards multi-channel has exploded, more and more 'eBay sellers' are becoming 'internet retailers' and opening up to the broader topics of ecommerce. This year without an eBay Live, it will be interesting to see if there's a huge spike in that activity.

Let's meet!

If you want to connect while at the show - stop by the booth, shoot me an email or tweet me. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone, hearing what's new in ecommerce, and helping more retailers grow their business with ChannelAdvisor's software.

At the booth mention you are an eBay Strategies blog reader and we'll get you a free smoothie!

Donahoe may kill the Kijijijijijijijiji brand (fingers crossed), BillMeLater and a little joke for my seller readers...

Scot Wingo — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:09:00 -0700

There are two articles out today, both from WSJ/DJ that had some interesting snippets - plus a little bonus contest/joke to get you through the end of the week.

Donahoe Update - (or what is 'buy-bye' in Swahili?)

In the first ($ub required), Donahoe echoes what we've been seeing at ChannelAdvisor - that the ecommerce market has stabilized. (not down, not up, but more sideways since Feb).

The most interesting part of this is that JD slips in there they may get rid of the Kijijijiji brand. As much as I LOVE to type kijiji, I do think it should go and they should call it eBay Local. This was one of the top points of my eBay 2.0 diatribe and it's great to see eBay following my advice ;-) Here's the snippet:

He also said the company is weighing whether to scrap its separate Kajiji online-classifieds brand in the U.S. The company might merge Kijiji into the eBay brand as e-commerce formats -- such as auctions, fixed-price and classifieds -- begin to merge in a world where consumers use search engines to find what they are looking for regardless of format.

If they are following my eBay 2.0 business plan, next they will sell the corporate jets (on eBay of course - but they HAVE to use free shipping).

IntegrateMeLater

I've been getting lots of calls from Wall St. analysts asking why eBay hasn't integrated BillMeLater (BML) in PayPal yet. My answer is - "beats me". Retailers are able to integrate BML in 30-60 days and here we are closing in on a year after the M+A and it's still not integrated. PayPal President, Scott Thompson, was speaking earlier in the week and gave this update:

Thompson said BML this summer will become a payment option available to shoppers who have PayPal accounts. It will also become a checkout option for shoppers who use eBay's marketplace. He added that by the first quarter of next year, BML will be embedded as a payment option side-by-side with PayPal on merchant sites around the Internet.

It will be interesting to see if eBay passes any of the great BML economics on to lowly eBay sellers as they do to their retail partners or if they pocket all those gains for themselves (I think we can all guess how this is going to go).

What is the eBay Seller's Challenge?

(wait for it)

The eBay Seller's challenge is.... To stay in business these days! (har har har)

But seriously folks, some eBay PR flacks sent me a very detailed email about this competition eBay has sponsored by the Kauffman foundation. Spend hours on a business plan and upload a video and you could win $25,000 to help grow your business. $25k is nothing to sneeze at, but my sense is this thing is going to take a lot of time and it's not really clear that it is geared towards existing eBay sellers with that being only one of four categories - the others are:

Member of armed forces
Never sold on eBay
Part-time seller

For a kick, watch the video where the lady says she is going to use the $25k to buy a new camera and take better pictures. Hmmm, that's going to be one helluva camera!

I've embedded the video because that's just fun to do and proves I am a HTML WILD MAN:

eBay Strategies contest - I've got a box full of ChannelAdvisor goodies for anyone that uploads the best spoof video or silliest use of the $25k. Post a link to it in comments.

SeekingAlpha disclosure - I am long Google, Amazon and eBay is a minority investor in ChannelAdvisor

Free Shipping Episode II - An A/B Paid-search test..

Scot Wingo — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:34:02 -0700

Free shipping is a hot topic with eBay sellers these days (more to come on the topic) and I thought you maybe interested in some results that our COO, David Spitz, is reporting on over at sister blog - SearchMarketing.com.

Tying this back to the eBay world - eBay is one of the largest buyers of paid-search advertising. So perhaps the increase in performance we saw in the test David outlines is one of the factors driving eBay's increasing obsession with free shipping?

How Amazon develops 'products'/offerings...

Scot Wingo — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:46:31 -0700

Over on sister-blog, Amazon Strategies, we just posted an article that details how Amazon releases new offerings and then we give a list of the offerings of interest to retailers like Prime, Merchants@ and where they are in that framework. A useful way for retailers to think about Amazon and track what's going on over there.

I know you guys are hungry for some good eBay stuff, some blog posts are coming this week around:

The dreaded call - The unintended consequences of PayPal's bump up in reserves
PESA conference thoughts - eBay sellers do not 'heart' Free Shipping
eBay Variations/ Multi-sku - This is the biggest change to hit eBay in 2009 IMHO. We'll be covering lots of the nuances here shortly as this goes live on 6/15. Until then, here's a teaser for you (this is a link to one of the first multi-sku listings created by ChannelAdvisor's software).

Stay tuned!