This week, we catch up with Murray Lambell, General Manager of eBay UK, to talk about the current trading environment. Starting with eBay’s 2nd year of engagement with Love Island, we discussed sustainability and consumer confidence and Murray shared that the outlook for 2023 is more buoyant than previously expected – great news for all retailers.
Murray Lambell also shared disappointment that Royal Mail and the CWU were unable to reach an agreement pre-Christmas, and how eBay are working with all UK carriers and working to ensure service levels that will delight consumers are made available to all retailers regardless of their size.
In this video you will find:
- 00:54 Love Island update – new discussions with consumers
- 02:05 Driving consideration on New/Used/Distressed stock
- 03:39 Sustainability experiences in retail
- 06:16 Stand out experiences for consumers
- 09:18 Logistics and Carriers Improvements
- 11:22 The economy and consumer spend more buoyant than expected
- 13:50 Giving consumer confidence
5 Responses
Giving consumers confidence, have to laugh at this when ebay continue to allow private accounts to clearly run a business and avoid buyer remorse returns. No matter how many times try reporting these accounts often with hundreds of listings of new, nearly new stock or two or three accounts that look the same from the same location and back ground pics ebay don’t care. Returns cost my business thousand of pounds a year in postage and damage to items. Yet private accounts don’t have to worry about this and can offer lower prices.
Starting to wonder if Murray and others in higher up management at ebay actually have a clue what they are doing as more and more of the policies and changes to the site are hurting small businesses. It is actually to the point where it is insulting to listen to ebay stand up on stage to say they support small business and then kill them with some of the policies they come out with.
Estimated Delivery Dispatch. Great idea in theory but in reality does not work as based on passed data.
Change to promoted listing fees, soon will be charged ad fees if promote one listing but buyer goes to your store and buys something else. There goes trying to promote a new item to give it a boost to get it selling as if buyers go buy other items could cost a fortune if they click on a expensive item. Imagine paying extra 10 – 20% for a low value item but buyer goes to you store and buyers a item worth a few hundred and you get a bill for 30% fees. No thanks
Returns – changed again from buyers have 14 calendar days to return item to now seems 21 days. If you want to only give part refund you have to give free returns.
Are ebay really that clueless, many big companies are moving away from free returns yet ebay are pushing it more and more.
Guess the shipping team must be playing musical chairs in the office again as seems every few months policies change. Changes from 14 calendar days to 14 business days then back to calendar days.
As a small business the only date I am interested in is sales and profit. Fed up with metrics and punishments for everything ebay can come up with. Yet when it comes to ebay’s own customer service, words I would use are poor, shocking, unreliable. All to often have to contact a number of times to get simple issues resolved. Time and money wasted for both sides or the promise to call you back to never hear back.
Clear lack of trust with many accounting practices at ebay from no clarity with return postage credits or grouping co funded coupons into one lump sum and no transparency as to which buyers used the coded coupon.
How many businesses were dealt with last year with issues around VAT registration. Listings removed, business basically destroyed overnight and a token couple of months stop credit as a sorry.
Fed up of hearing we listen or we are sorry we don’t always get it right. When you charge such high fees and provide such poor performance it is not good enough as it is not a one off it is consistently poor from ebay. Management have been there long enough and paid enough to provide a high level of service and site experience.
just a point – you said
“Imagine paying extra 10 – 20% for a low value item but buyer goes to you store and buyers a item worth a few hundred and you get a bill for 30% fees. No thanks”
actually the new system is
A Halo Item sale is the type of sale when a buyer clicks on one of your Standard ads and purchases a different Promoted Listings Standard item from you within 30 days.
A Halo Item refers to a purchased item from a Promoted Listings Standard campaign that resulted from an initial click (from the same buyer) on a different Promoted Listings Standard item of yours.
The ad fee for a Halo Item sale will be calculated based on the ad rate in effect for the purchased item at the time of the sale.
they can only charge you promoted listings fees for items included in a campaign, and they can only charge you the ad rate for that specific item. So your specific fears are unfounded. It is still rubbish to expand sales attribution this way but not AS rubbish as you say
Maybe the solution is we all ditch our business accounts and become private sellers. Ebay would be helpless to do anything about it, unless they banned everybody!
How about not hiding items when they match search phrase??
15 minutes of corporate babble, nothing we can utilise or act upon ,with any confidence