David Brackin is the co-founder of Stuff U Sell and has sold over 200,000 different items on eBay. He is also a regular contributor to Tamebay and today has reporting from the ChannelAdvisor Catalyst EU 2015 conference. He attended the session delivered by Marty Ellis of eBay. Not normally one to mince his words, afterwards he was pretty positive about eBay’s comments and here’s what he had to say:
How to grow your business with eBay
The main eBay speaker at Catalyst this year was Marty Ellis. As sellers, we often love to grumble that eBay isn’t doing enough to help us, but the appointment of Marty to lead the seller experience team is really good news: he’s one of the good guys who gets that eBay’s success is the same as seller success and is focused on knocking down barriers to growth. Today he spoke about the ways in which eBay can go beyond being simply a provider of traffic to using its scale to address the big problems that smaller sellers lack the resources to do. He also announced some very welcome initiatives to support and engage with sellers.
Mobile commerce
eBay always talk about how important mobile commerce is becoming. In the last few years eBay’s mobile sales have risen from $5bn in 2011 to $28bn in 2014 and half of all transactions are “touched” by mobile. Marty sees the challenge for smaller sellers is in customising across multiple devices and platforms and also overcoming the reluctance of users to download more than just a handful of apps. eBay’s app usually makes that list and it has the technical resources to develop and maintain across all the platforms. The seller can focus on providing inventory and let eBay do the tech stuff that makes it look right on the buyer’s device.
Competition is intense
The success of ecommerce means that the large retailers are starting to re-focus form having an online offering as an afterthought to using large distribution and retail networks to support their offering. Experience suggests that buyers love the Click n Collect services pioneered by these retailers. Smaller sellers are unable to match this, but eBay’s scale opened the door to the deal with Argos to allow this to be rolled out for eBayers.
To go global you have to act local
The final challenge where eBay’s scale can help is international sales. Most growth in ecommerce will come from overseas markets, but success here depends on localisation and successful shipping. To this end, eBay is pioneering machine translation and customisation of its 800m mostly English-language listings to local languages. It has also expanded the Global Shipping Programme to cover 32 countries: this is the service where eBay provides a UK forwarding address for otherwise unreachable international buyers and handles all of the onwards shipping (and – subject to a few minor issues to be ironed out – protects from any buyer problems or feedback issues arising).
The impressive thing about nearly all of these initiatives is that as a seller, you need do nearly nothing to participate: it’s the marketplace solving marketplace problems without disrupting the sellers who are focused on sourcing inventory. This is really refreshing when compared with so many initiatives which require sellers to do all the heavy-lifting.
Seller initiatives
To round off, Marty was refreshingly straight-forward about the grumbles which sellers have about the marketplace, and he hinted at a number of areas where he is driving for the kind of changes that we clamour for:-
- The feedback system needs to work better. Marty told us that whilst creating a trusted marketplace for buyers, it is equally important that seller ratings allow businesses to thrive in a stable environment and to focus on growth rather than the niggles. Can we finally stop worrying and start selling?
- While there must continue to be site changes, the message has got through to eBay that where these affect sellers, they need to be communcated much more clearly, much earlier and supported properly. eBay will be hosting a series of one-day conferences around the UK to engage with sellers and hear their concerns.
- Finally, the tools available to help sellers will be reviewed: some of the less well-known tools will be made more widely available and other tools developed. He hinted at some developments in search visiblity — will we at last be seeing some kind of bid-based Adwords-type product for eBay search?
Overall this was a really positive talk from eBay, and it was noticeable how well populated and visited their stand has been throughout the day with over 20 staff engaging with sellers on a one-to-one basis.
4 Responses
I was disappointed by this talk (as I usually am by the Ebay ones). It was full of a lot of stats but not much useful information unless you haven’t been following the ebay changes anyway. They are good changes but have been present for ages.
There was no insight bar the speculation bits at the end which hinted at things but gave us nothing concrete.
The feedback system isnt great but at the same time it gets changed almost yearly. This is ridiculous.
Every year ebay talk about communicating better with sellers and then they go ahead and make changes unannounced.
The search visibility point could be interesting. It could result in a big shake up or it might just be the return of the featured first listings. It will be interesting to see.
Before I want to hear of any new initiatives I want to hear about a Shopping Basket that works across all devices for both domestic and international buyers.
If what exists already does not work properly it will continue to piss off buyers and sellers in equal measure and lose eBay sales to other venues.
Any news?
Ebay’s attempts to take the tech out of the sellers hands has unfortunately broken a majority of our ebay listings right now. While previously our descriptions worked on mobile with some amateur responsiveness in place – they now are completely unreadable and often don’t load segments on pc either.
We are going to have to redo our descriptions from the ground up in a way that works with ebays current system – unfortunately it’s impossible to talk with anyone that has a clue about it there.
I may be wrong, but think ebay are now behind the curve with mobile. My tiny simple, insignificant and inexpensive (in ecommerce scheme of things) website is mobile optimised; no app to download. The site detects the device and presents in a mobile format. I think most ecommerce websites are heading this way if they arent there already, particularly now Google have said non optimised will be demoted in search.
Where ebay seem to me to have become confused and over obsessed with mobile use is the broad description. A mobile device (from my website stats) is 70 to 80% of the time a larger tablet/iPad, or as I prefer to call them – a thin laptop. Phone, or small tablets are used for about 5 to 10% of total visits max.
Would prefer the focus to be on fixing the myriad bugs that, as I regularly see and hear first hand, make life very difficult for buyers and sellers alike. In all cases I engage in correspondance to help the buyers, and later after they have given up, some buyers (with absolutely no prompting from me) search for the products again using Google, Bing etc, find my website and buy from there. I can see the search terms used and they aren’t looking for my site name from something they saw on Ebay. How many other buyers are doing the same ? Rhetorical question.