The New York Times has a rather fluffy feature on eBay head of Marketplaces, John Donahoe. Assuming that the average eBayer doesn’t really care that the very tall, very rich father of four is in the eBay gym by 7am every morning, there isn’t much in the piece that’s especially exciting. At least Donahoe acknowledges that “our user experience has not kept up with other e-commerce sites all around us”, but it seems that he’s only thinking as far as *buyer* experience: as Auction Bytes point out, Donohoe’s promise to have eBay’s search functions “make educated assumptions about what [buyers] might be looking for” is not likely to be popular with sellers whose items *don’t* get promoted by the search results.
Even more worrying is the comment by one seller that Donahoe is “the only one at the company who gets it, because he’s not entrenched in eBay culture”. If that’s true, then SJC needs more of a shake up than forcing its employees to give up their landlines for Skype.
