Listing on eBay has never been more complicated, but bizarrely these days it’s actually a lot easier to list on eBay mobile apps than it is to list on the site itself. On an eBay Mobile App it’s a very simple one page listing and you can add pictures directly from your smartphone camera. In fact I know many sellers who always list using mobile and then edit the listing once it’s live on eBay.
Speaking to Mark Carges, eBay CTO, at the recent event in New York, he told me that he’s keen to bring the mobile and desktop experiences closer together and combine the best of both. That’s both when buying and selling, and one thing Mark added was the possibility in the future of starting to list products on a mobile app, saving them online and then finishing any revisions on a desktop before launching the listings live on eBay.
This actually makes a lot of sense – why drag the product to be listed to your desk? You can fill out item specifics etc directly into your mobile with the item in front of you, and of course you have a perfectly good camera built into your smart phone. In fact smartphone cameras have come so far in quality that the one in my Samsung S3 is actually higher definition than my standalone digital camera!
Starting listings on a mobile and completing them on a desktop is probably not something that professional sellers will use, but it’s a great idea for casual sellers. It would also be pretty handy for listing those larger items which it’s not easy to drag to your desk to check details on.
The guys currently running eBay are certainly full of good ideas to remove friction which slows people down when using the site and have the aim of making both buying and selling easier. Whist there’s no guarantee that this particular idea will ever go live (I hope it does!), it’s encouraging to know that eBay are looking at every aspect of trading on the site.
6 Responses
Helloooooooooooo NY. we still get charged per picture over here in the UK mobile listing is not very sensible
If eBay want to really remove friction for sellers, then they could start by fixing Turbo Lister…
Mobile is OK for brand new items that require a single image and are sold exclusively into the UK and where you can scan in a code and all the info pops up.
And when you expect the sale to be a one off.
Once you get into the realms of entering descriptions for “used” items on a mobile device and international you soon give up!
And mobile is Paypal only. No other form of payment allowed. And then you have the multiple sales issues which cannot be configured on mobile.
The fact is mobile is for private sellers only. Business sellers are extremely unlikely to go down this route.
So I say as a business seller that it is a bad thing that ebay are apparently spending a lot of my money making it easier for private seller competition to compete with me!
Why not spend money making it easier for business sellers to list?