Murray Lambell eBay Roadshow Q&A

Category: News

At last week’s eBay Roadshow, I caught up with eBay UK General Manager Murray Lambell, to catch up a range of topics.

First question was how are the eBay Business Roadshows performing (you can read my thoughts on the Reading event here – as you’ll see from the one-to-one clinics in the the background it was busy with over 250 attending).

Then the Q&A with Murray turned to the economy and how it’s impacting eBay trading, which naturally led to eBay’s latest partnership with Love Island the the impact that’s had on eBay.

Finally, Murray is presenting at ChannelX World on the 13th of October and he shared a preview of what you can expect to learn at the conference. (Book your tickets here).

Q&A with Murray Lambell

Watch the video above or read the transcript of the Q&A with Murray Lambell below:

We’re here at the sixth eBay Roadshow in Reading, how have they gone for eBay so far?

It’s not about how it’s gone for eBay, but hopefully there’s some really good content for the businesses that have been in attendence. What we’ve really done is played around a lot with the format, so we’re trying to work out what works well for the customers to be close to you, to provide the services and knowledge that we need, and also thinking about who are the partners that we show up with because running your business online is about eBay and about a lot of other component bits and we’re hoping that we can bring that together in today’s content. So a shorter sharper format is what we’re doing now in the roadshow and there’s great attendance which is great to see.

In different locations we’ve had surprising numbers of attendance, we’re really blown away by the level of entreprenerism, the interest and engagement, and the mix of busineses.

The economy is in turmoil, how is it impacting small businesses?

The consumer sentiment is the lowest it’s been since records began, we’ve seen that in various formats and it’s really clear. I think we’re at a slight hiatus in the summer where consumers are out there spending but they are spending more in leisure more so than they are on consuming goods.

The way that we’re thinking about is is that demand is still there, people are still wanting to buy things but they are very thoughtful about how do I trade differently, so this is the what alternative can you give me from a mainstream products that I might get.

Supermarkets talking about trading down from luxury ranges to more middle ranges to economy ranges. I think in the eBay environment it might be trading down from buying a new phone to buying a refurbished phone or looking at Outlet or looking at PreLoved, and that mix of C2C – so new and used together – is going to become increasingly important to customers.

The last bit I’ve heard talked about is busineses thoughtful of “Do I pass my costs through?”… as is this a temporary cost increase or is it a permanent cost increase. So it’s a different proposition. Consumers understand that costs are rising and they will expect costs are coming through at some stage and it’s just being thoughtful of which of those costs you might pass through to your buyers.

How has the partnership with Love Island impacted fashion buying on eBay?

The reason for getting involved with Love Island was partly about fashion but it was more to address in the market this elephant in the room that no one’s talking about – People are very thoughtful about sustainability and thoughtful about the ways to they need to do it.

Love Island was a brilliant place where no one expected eBay to show up. It created tons of talkability. What we found was starting to really address the problem up front – so consumers are very interested in how do I do this sustainable thing in a thoughtful way and we’ve had tons of businesses that have approached us subsequently to think about “How do I get involved because I’ve got inventory that fits this profile and how do I build it?”.

So it’s about fashion, but it’s also about Home & Garden and it’s also about other categories. It’s the first of several things you’re going to see us doing in this space.

You are presenting at ChannelX World in October, what can retailers expect to learn?

I’ll be very thoughtful of paying a lot of attention to where consumer sentiment is at and how they are changing their behaviour.

When we meet in October, we’ll be on the verge of Peak trading, so over the next couple of months me and the team are very focused with our business selling community to get you ready for that Peak trading.

We know it’s going to feel very different this year for our buyers – for your buyers, our buyers – and it’s going feel very different the way that eBay’s going to show up this year. So we’ll talk a little bit about that, and I want to be thoughtful about where’s Government and support and how do we think about planning for the year ahead.

12 Responses

  1. Instead of Love Island how about asking some proper questions such as:

    1. When will ebay finally fix the glitches and bugs, like the one that has just ruined the livelihoods of hundreds of sellers (the VAT glitch)?

    2. When will ebay finally crack down on the business sellers posing as “private” sellers despite many of them having 1000s items for sale, a history of purchasing stock as well as sales, and yet do not have to pay listing fees or offer returns (or show their address!)?

    3. When is ebay going to fix their broken search engine?

    4. When is ebay going to get rid of mandatory item specifics that hardly anybody uses to search for items?

    5. When is ebay going to fix their payment system so that sellers get their money in their bank instantly, not having to wait til Monday for a sale made on Friday?

    6. When will ebay start building a call center in the UK and staff it with people who speak clear English, are well trained, have experience on ebay and don’t just fob you off?

    7. When will ebay be managed by people who actually have some experience of running their own business?

    8. When will ebay fix their dispatch time algorithm so that it doesn’t promise the buyer a faster delivery time than what the seller has specified?

    And that is just for starters.

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