The President of eBay Marketplaces, Devin Wenig, spoke at Channel Advisor’s Catalyst event in the USA this week. Topics covered included cross-border trade, competing with Amazon, mobile commerce and its staggeringly fast growth and much more. And he speaks ut about the future of auctions…
Here is a pick of a few snippets from Devin taken from the Channel Advisor blog which is well worth a proper read.
Devin on Amazon: I’m blown away by Amazon; the scale of their ambition is breathtaking. The world isn’t going to be eBay or Amazon it will have both. They’re great and we’re great; and we can both be great.
Devin on eBay growth: The eBay you’ll see going forward? More innovative, bigger bets, pushing the break through the seller/buyer experience. Who are eBay’s new customers? We’re at 116 Million users. We want to roughly double that this year, and we think we will. They are younger, emerging markets. They skew more female which is great for fashion categories.
And here’s one many of you have been waiting for: Will eBay eliminate auctions?
Devin says: “Absolutely not; auctions are great for some categories. It’s a great price discovery and works really well in long-tail categories. We’re following our customers.”
3 Responses
All this ambition seems a far cry from the day-to-day glitch ridden seller experience currently endured.
Where are the troops?
if ebay cancels the auction, that means they shut down their business! we all know eaby from auction first and that is the image of ebay.
“Auctions are great for some categories”. Hardly a ringing endorsement of the auction format. Clearly they are not seen as “great” for most of the other categories. Which categories are favourites to have the auction format consigned to history?