When the Army, NHS and Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) came calling, looking for a partner to build a platform to distribute PPE across the nation, eBay immediately stepped up to the plate to deliver an eBay NHS Portal in record time. It was announced in today’s Government Coronavirus briefing by General Sir Nicholas Carter standing alongside First Secretary Dominic Raab.
The new eBay NHS Portal to supply PPE to non-acute health providers will provide primary care and social care providers with access to PPE for free at the point of order from NHS Supply Chain and already 42,000 pieces of PPE have been delivered in the pilot phase.
This is of course eBay’s expertise, but it’s an area the NHS are lacking. Accustomed to delivering PPE to hospitals, they simply didn’t have the logistics (thank you to the Armed Forces), the distribution (thank you Clipper and Royal Mail) and the technology (thank you eBay) in place to deliver to maybe 50,000 care providers across the country. It’s immensely encouraging to see what’s often been dubbed ‘The Worlds Favourite Marketplace’ step up in the UK’s hour of need, bringing their incredible expertise to support our NHS.
Within a days of eBay being enlisted to support the NHS, a bespoke eBay NHS Portal had been created, which allows an NHS database of healthcare workers to log in and ‘order’ for a limited range of non-acute PPE via the NHS Catalogue. The PPE items are being supplied by NHS Supply Chain via the Clipper Group and despatched via Royal Mail.
“We are hugely grateful to frontline staff working tirelessly to save lives across the country, and it is absolutely vital they receive the PPE they need.
Since the start of the outbreak, we’ve delivered over a billion pieces of PPE to the frontline, but we recognise more still needs to be done.
This is why I’m delighted to be partnering with eBay to pilot a new online portal which offers an additional route for health and social care workers to access PPE.”
– Jo Churchill, Health Minister
The eBay NHS Portal pilot is now in the final stage of testing and is being reviewed on a daily basis, and will be scaled in phases to ensure technical updates can be applied ‘in real time’. The portal uses eBay Marketplace technology that has been developed over 25 years of connecting buyers and sellers, and which is used in the UK alone by 300,000 small and medium sized businesses.
“We were asked by the NHS and other partners to deliver technical expertise and resources to address the pressing issue of PPE supply. eBay software engineers from around the world, including at our sites in Portland in the US, Berlin in Germany and here in the UK, have been working round the clock to get this live and I’m delighted that we are now up and running with the pilot. It’s important that we all do what we can to help the NHS at this critical time, we are excited to be a part of this.”
– Rob Hattrell, Vice President, eBay UK
eBay’s role is to build the platform to allow NHS bodies to request it, and is providing this service free of charge to the NHS.
30 Responses
I have come over all warm and fuzzy
Ebay really has a soul
Thank you ebay!
Bravo Ebay !!!
And big Thank You from me and my colleagues at the GRI.
GZ
Well done EBay. I’ve not typed that on this forum for many a month.
Amazing Work from eBay. Absolutely super stuff
Apparently it is already over 2 weeks later than promised and is causing ‘Overwhelming angst’ amongst health and care providers
https://www.hsj.co.uk/finance-and-efficiency/exclusive-overwhelming-angst-over-delay-to-ebay-built-ppe-website/7027449.article
Chris Dawson
Dont worry they are a small minority of political fanatics looking for trouble
We can all see that what Ebay has done, what the military has done, the NHS, the NHS procurement, the Government procurement and everyone involved have been amazing and worked tirelessly. I dont think the people could have come together quicker and if we count the successes and listen to the military logistics team
Its an easy target to point out any gaps, especially as the focus must change as soon as you fix one issue.
An awful lot of achievement in a few short weeks transforming a centralised distribution to distributed and Ebay have created their website in short order
Hate to be the only one to crap on this lovefest, but do we know if ebay took payment for this? and if so, how much?
by the spec of what’s needed, i probably could have knocked this website out in an afternoon on shopify for free, and i’m by no means a coding expert.
you can knock up a full website yourself in a day if the required resources are provided, if you limit that to only 50k potential customers, with accounts pre-setup, a limited number of products, and no payment required…. well it just sounds easy now.
This PPE thing is mad and NHS procurement must be absolutely shocking, it is good eBay have done this.
Time is of the essence and this saga has dragged on for weeks with normal Tory waffle. By the looks of things we are all going to need it soon also.
My wife’s cousin has been buying the stuff from the UK and selling it in his country to the forces over there he distributed it and everything been at it for weeks.
We do actually have the stuff being made here there has to be a proper gateway to get it to where it needs to go and maybe Amazon could provide logistics as they owe enough back to the UK as they have taken plenty out.
Well done eBay for a change. Any support for our fantastic NHS staff is great news.
I have a supplier who can supply PPE like masks and gloves in bulk
Is this the same eBay that curtailed our listings for our reasonably priced top quality sanitiser for no other reason than we did not appear on their elusive white list thus denying buyers access to a fair priced product when many outrageously priced products are still being sold on their platform. There is no recourse, no appeal, no way of giving access to our Swiss manufactured product. Thank you to Amazon for seeing sense and allowing us to offer it for sale on their platform.