Auction Blog

Back in June, I talked about the various discount/cash back programs that eBay was testing including eBay Bucks (eB) and LiveSearch (LS).  As a buyer, I've been experimenting pretty deeply with both programs and wanted to report back on them.

eBay Bucks, XXXX (well I would use a rhyme here but it would be in poor taste)

I was admitted into the eBay bucks program and made sure all of my purchases qualified.  I was able to get $71 in cash back which was all great. Here's what it looks like as you gain cash back:

Great! Then on August 22nd I was told that I had a voucher for my $71 and in mid September, made a $100 purchase that I was going to use my $71 voucher on (being mindful that it can only be redeemed on ONE item) and much to my shock and dismay, eBay only gave me a voucher for $16.68.   What the heck!? See the screen shot below for proof of the short-change.  The red box and arrow are my additions, but you can see right here how it is only giving a portion, but on the previous page it literally said $71!?

I hopped on livechat and they informed me they don't have anything to do with eBay Bucks so I have to send an email to rewards@ebay.com.  You can guess how fast I've gotten a response on that one…..

Live search cash back experience

The Microsoft Live search cash back program on the other hand has been a great experience.  I signed up with Microsoft and made sure that every eBay purchase was initiated from live.com and that I saw the banners on eBay that proved I was logged in correctly. While this was a little more work than eBay Bucks, on the back end it has been great.

I waited the requisite 60 days, the funds from the rebate were available and then I was able to transmit them to my paypal account and spend them on a number of eBay items.  Oh yeah - the amount was RIGHT too, they didn't short change me.

Conclusion:
eBay bucks is a good idea with terrible execution that initially made me happy as a
buyer but because it essentially robbed me of $50, has
eliminated all possible good will and led to a net negative
experience.  eBay should cancel this program immediately, lest we have
all these buyers during the holidays getting short changed and leaving
eBay in droves.  It's a little easier on the front end, but even if I received 100% of the promised funds it has too many restrictions (have to use the $ in 30 days on ONE purchase).  Isn't it better to keep it simple?

Live search cash back is a little more complex on the front end but wins hands down because:

• It works (yes that's a requirement)
• It is flexible - I can shop with several vendors AND can use my $ back anyway I want to
• It is easy to use

SeekingAlpha disclosure - I am long eBay and Google

See the original post:
Update on eBay discount paypal coupon programs - Live search cashback and eBay Bucks

Ever since 9/16 when fp30 rolled along with a bunch of finding bugs, we have seen sales plummet in many categories with apparel and jewelry being hit the hardest.

While most sellers are focusing in on some of the eBay finding wackiness, one seller noticed google had all but disappeared as a 'source' of traffic in their advanced store reports.

Based on that tip, we started doing some looking and saw some very unusual behavior.

Here's a search for a popular Nike product's model number:

Notice that the second, third and fifth search results are all for eBay international sites and not “.com”

I've run literally hundreds of searches and you have to really work now to find eBay in the organic (and even paid I'll add) google results.  Interestingly enough, when I did find the occasional eBay listing in the index, it was an FP30.

Note that eBay's pagerank (PR) doesn't seem to have changed - it's at 8/10.

Theories on what is going on…
I have a couple of quick theories on what's going on:

• Given their track record in the last couple of weeks, it's possible that eBay has done something to mess up the crawlability of the site.
• It could be that eBay has asked google to not crawl anything but fp30 dramatically reducing the number of eBay listings in the google index (this doesn't seem very smart, but hey anything's possible I guess)
• It could be that Google is using this tough spot for eBay to kick them in the ribs and has decided that eBay listings are 'not relevant' and yanked them from the index.

Personally I think the last theory is the most probable given the near overnight disappearance of eBay's listings from the Google index.

Readers - any insights into what you are seeing/think is going on?
SeekingAlpha Disclosure: I am long eBay and Google

Is Google hitting eBay while they are down?

We're a couple of days into fp30 and confusion continues to abound. I'm working on some details around what we're seeing with Finding+fp30 here already and I owe you epiii - the UK changes.  Until then here are some quick links to some news items today you may not have seen:

• StumbleUpon a buyer? There are lots of rumors swirling
  that eBay is selling StumbleUpon which they acquired for $75m a little
  over a year ago.  Apparently traffic has plummeted from 4.4m users to
  1m users since the eBay acquisition - ouch.  Last May, I thought this would be interesting to integrate as a recommendation engine.  Well nothing ever happened so I think this makes sense.
• UK Webinar. For all you UK readers, we are hosting a free webinar for customers, and the community highlighting the eBay changes Monday September 22 at 1pm local time (GMT I believe).  Rafael Orta from eBay will be there to answer your questions. Register Here. This will probably be of interest to all of you cross border trade (CBT) people that are selling in the UK as well.  Their changes are vastly different and some would say even more aggressive around fp30 than those in the US so it's important to understand them if you participate in the UK marketplace.
• Town Hall. eBay's hosting a town hall today (with short notice I might add) from 11:30-1pm PT hosted by Stephanie Tilenius. As mentioned, fp30 is very confusing to everyone and I bet the focus of this call is to try to clear the air on the new format.
• Eric Shoup - GM of stores+prostores has left eBay.  I met Eric several times and thought he was a solid player so I'm sorry to see him go.  What's worse is he's going to a geneology company so we have no hope of continuing to work together as we have with lots of other ex-eBayers that are at other partners like google, yahoo, etc. Best of luck to Eric in his new gig.
• Search (ok, Finding) Finding on eBay just seems systemically broken.  They are changing so much so frequently that I can't get a consistent result day after day. For example, yesterday I was trying to show a reporter how the catalog is integrated in eBay and I literally could not find a single catalog item in the new or old finding experience.  Where the heck did that go? We're constantly seeing weird things like TES upside down, FP's at the back of search, etc.  While I think Jeff King and co are very sharp, something is going on behind the scenes that looks to have destabalized things to the point where Finding has turned into a new search each day.
  • Some days the deduping is on, others it's off.
  • Some days things are inverted
  • Some days the 10 listing/seller/page is on, others its off.
  • DSRs seem to count sometimes and others they don't
  • Sellers that create multiple IDs see a new ID with 1/4 the inventory have 2-3X the conversions of those that are multi-million/yr long-term accounts with eBay.  Nobody knows why.
  • Indexing of the new fp30's seems to be 6-12hrs behind so it might as well  be a fp29

The bottom line

Search chaos results in seller chaos- Search is the Yin to the seller's Yang.  Sellers can't settle on a strategy with search changing. If you want to learn more about this, just go to this forum and spend about 20hrs here reading all the problems people are reporting with search.  It's easy to take the position that these are a bunch of wackos and there is definitely some noise/signal ratio problems here in the eBay forums, but peel that away and you find many many reports of finding just plain 'broke' as we say where I'm from.

I sincerely hope eBay can get this resolved or at least stable to some degree before the holidays or we'll (continue to) have complete chaos.

SeekingAlpha disclosure: I am long google and eBay

Read more:
Some quick eBay news links this am…

Well today eBay officially launched the Multi-quantity 30-day duration fixed price listing (FP30 for short). 

I'm proud to announce that we are already not only supporting FP30 TODAY at ChannelAdvisor in both our MarketplaceAdvisor Standard and Premium offerings, but we've done some enhancements to take advantage of how the relist works so that our customers will be advantaged with their recent sales.

This was tricky because eBay hasn't had this in the API until it went live on the site at midnight PT, so we had to have a team working on this in real time to support it, test, it, etc.  In fact, this new format won't be in the eBay sandbox for weeks.  Clearly the business changes are coming faster than the rest of the company can keep up right now.

In fact, our sales team heard from one poor Turbolister seller that TL won't even support FP30 for at best a week or two.  Ouch, talk about a disadvantage.  Think of all that sales velocity this seller's competitors will be able to build up.  I don't know if Blackthorne or any of the other myriad eBay listing tools will support FP30 yet, but it's not a long shot given how it was rolled out that they will be days if not weeks behind.

Off to a slow start
Given all the hoopla in the press and supposedly nashing of teeth around this new format, it's off to a slow start.  We have about 150 customers that have listed an FP30.  Here's one of the first ones if you want to see what it looks like 'live' on eBay.

Part of what's going on with the seller base is, for lack of a better word, eBay fatigue.  Sellers feel their businesses have changes so much (DSRs, BestMatch, etc..)  for so little/no/decline in sales that eBay is increasingly becoming a lower priority for them and thus they will tend to be reactive vs. proactive as they would have been as recently as 6 months ago.  To be honest, most of our larger sellers are spending their time getting their websites and other channels ready for the holidays and eBay just isn't a priority.  Of course this doesn't bode well for eBay, but it's the reality of what is going on in the grassroots of ecommerce.

So unless eBay puts a promo on the FP30, I don't see this mass switch to FP30 over the store format or anything until maybe Q1 after the holiday dust settles.

I'll keep a close eye on the trends and report anything of interest.

For those ChannelAdvisor customers that are also blog readers, we have details on our FP30 support on the Strategy and Support Center (SSC) here.

SeekingAlpha disclosure: I am long google and ebay.

Read more:
FP30 is born!

This weekend, a Barrons article cited a report by an investment research firm, Wedge Partners (Brian Blair and Ryan Hunter) that says eBay is planning a 1500 person layoff.

Reuters has re-reported the story as well here. The big question I'm hearing from ChannelAdvisor customers and readers is: What will eBay layoffs mean for sellers?

Where are the people?

With 16,000 people in the company this would be a < 10% reduction.  Given that eBay hasn't really gone through this before, I'd guess this can be done with little to no impact on operations. 

To understand the impact on sellers, we need to think about where the cuts will/would come from.  While eBay doesn't report a break down of the 16k, we can guess where the pockets of people are.  If you peel the onion on eBay you have:

• Paypal - Paypal is the crown jewel of eBay and has grown substantially head-count wise over the last years. Here's where the people are:
  • Paypal has the business people in San Jose at their own campus (view on gmaps)
  • Paypal has tons of customer service/fraud prevention people in Omaha/Salt lake.  I don't think it would be prudent to do anything here given the busiest season starts now.
  • I'm going to guess Paypal has limited business people internationally, but probably big fraud prevention teams in their customer service center.
• Skype - Skype is probably a 1000 person company at this point and given that it's the fastest growing part of eBay.
• eBay marketplaces -
  • I'd guess that 8k of the 16k people are at eBay marketplaces and housed at the 'mother ship'.
  • 2125 Hamilton is the home of eBay Park which you can tour on gmaps with their cool 'Street View' (click here, zoom in and select street view - look to your left for the 4 buildings by starbucks and to your right for the other 4.)
  • With 8 very large building's I'd say there are a good 4-6k people in that park.  This report from 2003 cites 1500 out of eBay's total of 4200 at the time, so I'd imagine that number has more than doubled in the last 5 yrs (wow - eBay's headcount has gone up 4X since then!).  So let's say 5k in eBay Park
  • That leaves 3k that I' would say are about 1000 international and 2000 in Salt Lake.
  • The international offices are run pretty lean with most functions being supported out of the US (engineering and admin for example).
• Misc
  • There are small offices in LA, SFO and a variety of other places from acquisitions (StubHub, rent.com, etc.)

Where are layoffs likely?
This is all speculation on my part, but logically it seems like it wouldn't be prudent to do anything at Skype, Paypal or places like Stubhub that are big growth drivers. Thus you're left with eBay marketplaces which is the anchor to the conlomerate and should bear the weight of any downsizing.

Within eBay marketplaces, I don't think International has room for much change, therefore you're left with the 2k people in SLC and the 5k people in SJC.

This is where it gets tough.  Ebay has talked up the benefits of increasing customer service and TnS staff in SLC with Wall St.  That could make it hard PR-wise to cut there.

That leaves 5k in SJC at the most risk IMO.  If the 1500 were localized to that group, what looked like 10% now becomes 30% which is pretty deep and risky.  In eBay Park you have:

• Lots of 'admin' - finance, hr, legal.  I think one whole building floor is just legal.  With eBay's legal issues though, this could be an area that's hard to reduce.
• Seller experience - possibly impacted
• Buyer experience - probably not impacted as eBay doesn't want to be seen underinvested in such a strategic area.
• Marketing - probably impacted.  With eBay spending less and less on marketing, there are probably big reductions that could be made here
• Engineering - most of eBay's R+D is done in SJC with some pockets outsourced to India and other places.
• eBay Motors - Motors seems to replicate lots of the functions at other parts of eBay.  I'd guess lots of synergies could be found by undoing all of this duplication of effort.
• CS+TnS - eBay has some functions like community, customer service and trust and safety with some headcount in SJC that largely creates policies for folks in SLC.  There maybe room there to trim as well
• Middle management - eBay has lots of VP, Manager, Director level people that JD may look at eliminating as a way to streamline decision making.  Most eBay employees are at least 5+ layers away from JD which seems ripe for

  bureaucracy.

What's all this mean for sellers?

If I'm wrong here and SLC is hit with the bulk of the layoffs, that's where 90+ eBay TSAMs are (Top Seller Account Managers).  That would be bad for sellers as that group is the lifeline a seller has into eBay.  However, if customer service or trust and safety in SLC are decreased that wouldn't directly impact sellers, but it could hurt the buyer experience (which is why I don't think it will be an area that is touched).

Seller development is at risk, but I think it's a smaller group so probably not something that would be cut deeply.  Any admin, marketing or other cuts are likely to not

All in, I'd say there's a low (10-20%) that any reductions would impact sellers, but until we see what eBay does, it's all a guessing game.

SeekingAlpha Disclosure: I am long Google and eBay

Original post:
eBay layoff - impact on sellers?