Checkout enhancements coming to eBay

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eBay held a session based around the new eBay checkout experience at ChannelAdvisor EU Catalyst today with updates on a number of developments. This will be of particular interest to sellers who currently use 3rd party checkout which is due to be retired on the 30th June this year.

eBay’s aims for checkout are to have a fast simple checkout at the ecommerce standards buyers expect today. They also want to add value for buyers with merchandising and discounting where available. To achieve this a number of new features will be coming.

Shopping Basket / Shopping Cart

The shopping cart is currently being trialled on eBay UK and eBay.com with the expectation that it will be rolled out this summer. It’s now looking likely that it will be late summer and probably won’t appear on any other eBay sites until fully implemented in the UK.

Mobile Checkout

eBay expect over $4 billion to be spent on mobile devices this year (last year it was over $2 billion). Control of the mobile checkout experience is one of the reasons for retiring third party checkout as it gives eBay control of the full transaction and enables them to build the checkout features into the eBay mobile apps.

As an aside $4 billion of mobile sales at average 10% fees gives some $400,000,000.00 in eBay fees (plus of course PayPal fees) demonstrating just how important mobile commerce is to eBay.

Product Bundles

Product bundles have been trialled on eBay.com and are currently being trialled on eBay UK. The likelihood is that these won’t be rolled out site wide until the Shopping Basket goes live in the summer.

Discounts

eBay are currently exploring ways to enable sellers to offer product discounts. These could be offered in a number of circumstances for instance item level discounts when a buyer chooses to buy a quantity of a particular item. Up until now sellers have only been able to discount postage, not the item cost, so the ability to offer discounts to incentivise buyers to increase quantities at checkout will be welcome.

Fast Checkout

eBay are looking at ways to enable a quick checkout for buyers who only want to purchase a single item. Rather then make them go through a multiple step checkout process it makes sense to introduce a single step checkout, if possible direct from the view item page.

We’ll update as and when we hear more news and timescales for all of these checkout enhancements, but (barring testing to ensure that they work) the quicker they are implemented the better.

4 Responses

  1. A combination of the new eBay in house only style checkout and the eBay in house only message system and there is a sense that eBay want all comunications between buyer and seller to be in house through eBay.

    Buyer and seller email addresses would no longer be relevent in the world of eBay and so it would not surprise me if eBay at some future point would prefer to no longer provide email addresses to either party to a transaction.

    And eBay may introduce a policy that listings must not include a direct contact email address.

    Is this legal though as business sellers do have to provide contact details?

    And as this is the case is not the proxy email address system of eBay legal?

    But what about Paypal and payments in general?

    How does the law stand on the use of proxy email addresses?

    There is a sense that all eBays efforts to have all sale communications in house are doomed!

    eBay say security is the main factor behind all this yet eBay are going overboard to attract mobile phone business with new systems and apps specifically for phone users.

    Yet this is probably the most insecure form of communication in the world!

    It is so easy to phone tap as the UK press have shown.

  2. With regards to product bundles I read on the PS forum the other day that we won’t see them until the next seller update in the Autumn.

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