eBay are to rationalise their geographic regions bring the leadership together under one global team. The markets included in the new structure will be the Americas, APAC, UK, Central and Southern Europe, as well as Cross-Border Trade and the new team will be led by Jay Lee, eBay Senior Vice President, General Manager, Markets.
Key benefits of a global eBay leadership team
eBay say that the key benefits of their reshuffle include:
- Strategic alignment of global priorities (buyer growth, conversion, payments, advertising) across the company’s largest markets;
- Faster decision making and execution;
- Streamlined resource allocation with a greater impact on global priorities; and
- Improved and simplified collaboration with the Core Product and Technology (CPT) organization, led by CTO Steve Fisher.
UK and European impact of the new Global eBay leadership team
Jay Lee has previously been SVP of APAC for eBay and from August 2017 has been leading the EMEA business and responsible for global Cross Border Trade. That means that the UK eBay boss Rob Hattrell will have already been working with Jay. For eBay sellers in the UK and Europe, for a change someone is leading the global team with recent European eBay experience and that can only be a good thing – eBay in Europe, with business seller accounts, is very different to their US operations. One might view the promotion as adding on the US and other regions to the UK and Europe which were already in his portfolio.
Whilst Jay may be relatively unknown to Tamebay readers, he has been with eBay since 2002 and so is one of the most experienced of the leadership team (eBay CEO Devin Wenig didn’t join eBay until 2011). One of the things I’ve often rued about eBay is their relatively short corporate memory, but Jay brings this to the table and has worked for eBay longer than I’ve been writing Tamebay!
Jay will also act as interim head of the Americas while a search is conducted for a new Americas leader who will report to Lee. Scott Cutler will be leaving eBay after four years with the organization, first as president of StubHub and then as SVP of the Americas for eBay.
What will happen to the UK eBay leadership team?
To ensure each market remains responsive to the needs of their customers, eBay say that local teams will focus on inventory and merchandising, advertising, marketing, seller and brand acquisition, buyer acquisition and retention, shipping and fulfillment, and payments activation.
Note the last two words – ‘payments activation’. eBay have announced that a second country site will start a roll out of eBay Payments with an announcement in the next quarter, but we expect this to ramp up pretty fast and would be surprised if eBay Payments weren’t starting to be rolled out in Europe by the end of the year.
Whilst local teams will focus on seller and brand acquisition, we recently reported that Harry Temkin, eBay VP of Seller Engagement visited the UK to meet the regional teams and talk about eBay’s plans for sellers in the first half of 2019. With this in mind, whilst we have zero visibility from eBay, we would expect the first seller release of the year to be announced within the next few weeks – in 2018 the first seller release of the year came at the end of February.
8 Responses
What will happen to the UK eBay leadership team? P45s would be nice
4% fines were still introduced
so whats the point?
Not looking forward to the next seller release, whoever is in charge.
Expect to see more fee rises and even more problems for sellers to negotiate.
Ebay has stated to the markets that it’s focus will now be on making as much money as possible from its existing base.
Buy, hey, remember it’s a “privilege” to sell on Ebay and, if you don’t like any changes, click here —————-> >>> link to close your account.