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I know most people here don’t look at the ebay Boards very often, so I thought I’d pass this condensed info….ebay sellers were given an opportunity to post questions for the returning ebay exec Jordan Sweetnam. Questions were voted on by the readers, and the top five were to be answered by Jordan. He actually ended up answering a few more than five, and may yet answer some more. Here’s a link to the page:
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Ask-Me-Anything-Jordan-Sweetnam/idb-p/qfj
Best to actually read those marked Answered to get the full context, but for a quickie, here are the answers themselves (so far):
1.This is a great question, one that has been top-of-mind for me since I returned to eBay and one that I could go on about for hours in person. For me the answer ultimately starts with connection, listening and learning. We (eBay) need to be more closely connected to all of you, what do you sell, why do you sell it, how do you make money and how can we help *you* deliver the best possible experience to buyers. I firmly believe that if everyone at eBay could go out, visit our sellers (large and small), it would change how we see our role in developing this marketplace. When I meet someone who has been selling on Ebay for 15+ years with almost 6000 feedback it’s pretty humbling. The first thing to come to my mind is “Thank you for your time, your commitment and for helping eBay to grow”, but then I start to think about the thousands of happy buyers and it really hits just how connected our marketplace really is. There are large businesses on eBay, there are people who sell a few items a year, and there is everything in-between. That is the awesome challenge and opportunity that makes up eBay.
Tactically there are a few things I’ve kicked off to get us going but there is a lot more to come…
From an organizational perspective, we’ve brought back a unified Seller Operations & Engagement team, with Marni Levine leading the team. She will work, alongside Harry Temkin (VP, Seller Experience), to be accountable for delivering only the right end-to-end experience for our sellers. You can read more about this in my most recent Seller News Announcement.
From a business perspective, 2020 will be a year where you’ll start to see more around how we begin to differentiate our business across the different categories that exist on eBay. ‘Retail standard’ as a concept is right, but I think the opportunity is to recognize that ‘Retail Standard’ is different if we’re talking about new Cell Phone cases vs Vintage Christmas Ornaments vs Plants. We need to move from “what is THE retail standard” to “what is the customer expectation in THIS category/condition”.
We’re committed to more timely and transparent communication. As I’ve said previously, I’ll be hosting these quarterly AMA sessions on the eBay community board and appearing regularly on the eBay for Business podcast throughout 2020. I know how important it is to hear from all of you on a regular basis, so please keep the questions coming!
Outside of the online community boards, we’re looking at ways to get more face-to-face eBay staff interaction with sellers throughout the year. Keep an eye out for more details on eBay UpFronts, Meet-Ups, and other seller summit events happening in 2020. We’re looking at some different ideas for 2020 so don’t be surprised to see us experiment with a few different ways to connect in person.
2. Another tough one and as I’m sure you all appreciate there is no easy answer.
We did introduce new measures in seller protection this year to proactively find abusive buyers and then apply consequences to them which could include anything from the loss of eBay Money Back Guarantee coverage up to account suspension. This will help, but my perspective is that we have a bigger opportunity.
There isn’t one eBay category, we have hundreds of millions of items spread across different categories and different item conditions. By extension, there shouldn’t be one retail standard. Buying a brand new TV, the retail standards need to be consistent with a new retail store experience where customers fully expect returns. So if you sell new TVs you need to be able to offer a customer experience (including returns) that is consistent with what buyers can get elsewhere (and as you all know sometimes those customers can be demanding). However, if you’re selling collectibles, one of a kind comics or even closeout/final sale the “retail standard” is totally different. Buyers should have no expectation of returns – that isn’t how it works if they shop for those products anywhere else so we need to recognize the same on eBay.
For as long as I’ve worked at eBay the “(brick, rock, different item) in a box” problem has been around. Unless we “touch” every transaction we can never know what is really in the box, but I do think there is more we can do to look at BOTH the buyer and seller history to get a sense of who we should believe. 10,000 happy buyers and one person claiming you sent a brick? Seems pretty clear. Top buyer shopping from a new seller? Also seems clear. A top buyer shopping from a great seller and something goes wrong – guess what, that happens every day in retail… this is where I think we (eBay) have a better opportunity to balance the risks/costs in those situations with all of you.
3. Good question with a few tricky answers. I’ll offer up my standard disclaimer that I’ll give you the honest answers (for better and worse).
Cancellations after purchase happen… that isn’t just an eBay problem. Amazon made it so easy for buyers that is actually the expectation across all commerce sites now… someone finds an item, purchases it and then might check 1 or 2 other sites to make sure they did get the best price (or even read 1 more product review to make sure they got the right model). I offer this up first to say that even if we did everything perfectly, buyers will cancel orders.
With that said…I went back and looked a number of my recent “Order confirmed” emails and it doesn’t take long to find examples that none of us would say are correct. If you just bought an item WHY would we show you the exact same thing (whether cheaper or more expensive)? There is a lot we need to do here, but the candid answer is that the fundamental challenge is that not having a catalog makes this problem much harder. If we want to show you items to “complement your purchase” and we are showing you other items that we think are similar from the same category we actually can’t tell the difference between similar and same. We can fix it, but it is much harder without a catalog.
Our emails are more effective now than they’ve ever been at driving incremental sales (that’s good for everyone), but I agree we still have further to go to make them more relevant for buyers and less frustrating for each of you.
(I’ll continue the rest in the next post….)
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4 Thanks for this one – think I’ve covered it in a few of the other answers around returns changes + differentiating retail standards on eBay by item condition/category. Some areas of the site will continue to need to have generous returns policies and that has to be build into the cost of selling in that category if that is the competitive benchmark, but others we can dial back the open approach to returns today and deliver an experience that still fully meets buyer expectations without exposing sellers to situations where they can be taken advantage of.
5. Great question – obviously Paypal is their own business and is free to make the choices they feel appropriate for the service they provide. There is a cost to process a payment and there is a cost to refund a payment… so it’s hard to question the entirety of their decision.
Now is that cost to serve equal to the full amount of fees paid? That doesn’t sit right with me. At the core I still operate under the philosophy that we (eBay) are successful when you (our sellers) our successful… if you sell something we both make money… if you get a refund I’m not sure that should put you in the negative on the transaction. I can’t promise you where we will land with managed payments (there is still a lot our teams are working through), but this should give you a sense of where I’m philosophically leaning.
6. To tackle the immediate question… No, there are no plans to reverse course of managed payments. I want to bring as much stability and predictability to your business as possible and the current setup with PayPal doesn’t lend itself towards that. Look at what happened with the USPS and the UPU in Sept/Oct – we were precariously close to all US sellers losing the ability to export anywhere in the world! That’s crazy. I’m not a fan of PayPal keeping the fees on a buyer return/cancellation – but same problem. When eBay is fully dependent on one solution we can’t bring the best solution/cost to your businesses.
Moving to managed payments still allows buyers to use PayPal, but as we progress it will also allow GooglePay, ApplePay and solutions like EFT + Wire Transfer. All of these additional payments will bring more shoppers onto our platform and, in the case of EFT + Wire Transfer, allow sellers who can’t make money with today’s PayPal fees be successful on our platform on really high priced items. We’ve already processed over $1 billion in payments and have no plans to slow down.
Having said all of that, it was actually news to me recently about the difference in the “per item” vs “per transaction” fee. If you are selling 40 different postcards to one customer in the same transaction I agree it would seem odd for us to charge the per item on each one. I don’t have the full history here, but will dig into it.
A lot will change and become clear as we get further into next year so please keep providing the feedback.
7. We have no plans to reverse the decision here. I’ve heard of a lot of things since I’ve returned that don’t make sense (and will drive to change), but to be clear I haven’t seen (yet) an example where the move on GTC is the wrong one.
GTC listings have better sell thru, the permanent item ID improves how those items appear in SEO (that helps everyone) and a consistent item ID helps search deliver better ranking.
I’m not sympathetic with the strategy of starting/stopping short duration repeatedly to appear at the top of time newly listed (this is bad for buyers and overall search relevance which actually hurts all sellers even if the person doing it wins).
If you’d like to share other use cases I’m certainly willing to listen and discuss.
8. Hopefully this one is covered in all of the other answers, but ultimately it ties back to the question on “how we are going to improve the relationship with our sellers”. More connection + understanding, a clear articulate of “value for fees” and a focus on where eBay has a right to win on our terms vs trying to be someone else.
9. Wrapping up for today so I’ll keep this one short, but I agree with the concerns raised.
It’s something I saw pretty quickly after my return… great sellers (top rated, amazing feedback, great prices) were ranking below sellers with 0 (!) feedback or (even worse) feedback scores of 94%, 96%, etc…
I think promoted listings is great tool for sellers when used correctly. Have a new product and want to have it rank up in search quickly? Use PL. But if you are new to the platform and haven’t proven that you can deliver the buyer experiences of our best sellers it doesn’t make any sense to have those items appear at the top. I certainly *do not* want someone taking $s out of shipping faster or packing better to invest in paying for a promoted listing placement instead.
Conversations on this topic are underway – I can’t commit to a specific date or change – but don’t be surprised to see us testing some things in the new year and announcing changes by Q2.
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Its good to hear Jordan acknowledge all these issues sellers have. They’re saying all the right things. Lets see how they behave. eBay is a profitable company but has very heavy stress from stockholders to keep growing in an unhealthy way IMHO.
GTC listings have better sell thru, the permanent item ID improves how those items appear in SEO (that helps everyone) and a consistent item ID helps search deliver better ranking.
I’m not sympathetic with the strategy of starting/stopping short duration repeatedly to appear at the top of time newly listed (this is bad for buyers and overall search relevance which actually hurts all sellers even if the person doing it wins).
What do you think of this opinion. It matches with what I think about just letting items ride. The rush to keep refreshing items doesnt make sense to me, and obviously doesnt make sense to the eBay leader who must have access to all the numbers.
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Jay,
I’d be very surprised if ebay went back to offering shorter duration fixed price listings. I switched to GTC long before ebay required it, and I found it more convenient and saw no harm to my sales. The shorter durations are really just a legacy of ebays auction site origins, and had long ago lost their real value to the site. They continued to have value for sellers who were gaming search, but , while some sellers may have benefited from that, I don’t believe the site as a whole really did.
I also think the number of sellers who really care passionately about this issue is pretty small. There was (as always) a lot of complaining when the other durations were eliminated, and a few sellers may actually have left ebay because of it, but those who continue to complain are probably the few who continue to cling to the idea that they need to end their listings right before they renew, which is a hassle….I think many would find if they stopped doing that, and actually used GTC, they’d be OK.
so, this is one issue I just don’t see ebay back-tracking on.
I’m pleased to see they are looking closely at some other issues, but I also agree with you that we’ll need to see ebay actually MAKE some of the propsed changes before we applaud too loudly….
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My inbox would have me believe that everyone still ends and relists every month….and if we don’t get away from GTC, our store will fail 🙂 These kinds of sellers always point to some random talk an eBay engineer gave 5+ years ago where he hinted that “new items” get more search love.
If eBay wants people to trust that GTC is the right thing to do, they need to explicitly say that “new items” dont get better search results.
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Jay, Actually, I believe ebay has said exactly that. There is no real benefit in Best Match search order. I suppose there is some clear benefit in Newly Listed Search Order, but I personally think sellers have an exaggerated idea about the number of buyers who actually use newly listed search order. If ebay search is like most things on the web, the large majority of people use the default (best match) most of the time.
I’m pretty sure ebay can track how many sellers are actually ending their GTC listings early, and my guess is that the percentage is small enough that ebay doesn’t feel a strong need to try to convince those people that they are wasting their time. ebay doesn’t need to convince everyone, ebay just needs to convince enough sellers…if, as Jordan says, conversions overall have increased, then ebay’s GTC change has been successful, even if a few people continue to insist on using workarounds.
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Do you have a link where eBay has said things dont sell faster when relisted as new? I’d love to have a link to send to people.
I agree that maybe in the old days people searched by new, but I know if I do search a category by new, this means I’m just trying to snipe items and/or I’ll know the category well enough that I’ll know a new item is actually just old and relisted.
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The only place I use newly listed is on my search agents for which I get an email every day. My normal search order is lowest price first, but I will toggle to best match sometimes in checking standings.
I went to GTC many years ago and don’t regret it. Those who think they need to relist must be tiny sellers, they can’t grow because they are spending so much time with this that could be spent on listing new items.
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Thanks for putting this discussion up!
He seems to be connected and aware of the realities of the marketplace / love the differentiation between some one selling phone cases and someone selling collectibles. The buyers in each category DO have varied expectations!And also agree with the GTC perspective. If I learned anything from SCAVENGER LIFE it is list it and forget it. Theres no conspiracy that will overcome having something for sale that someone wants. Even if it takes a year or more, the right buyer will match up.
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this really stuck out to me:
‘Retail standard’ as a concept is right, but I think the opportunity is to recognize that ‘Retail Standard’ is different if we’re talking about new Cell Phone cases vs Vintage Christmas Ornaments vs Plants. We need to move from “what is THE retail standard” to “what is the customer expectation in THIS category/condition”.
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Ryanne, Same here. Very glad to see ebay realizing that one size doesn’t always fit everything. Next year should be interesting.
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