eBay Express - Promise Your Customers What They Expect
Infoworld posts an interesting article about the underwhelming performance of eBay Express.
In short, the sales aren’t there and this comes as no surprise. The article cites a large seller with some 4,000 items listed in Express, resulting in 33 sales. Anecdotal reports from other sellers, both large and small, report similar results.
Why? Well, it certainly isn’t because of lack of promotion. eBay has been tub-thumping Express vigorously to its membership and via the media since April. The problem is that eBay Express is simply a repositioning of the BIN ( Buy It Now) items from the parent site without any discriminating message that sets it apart as a value or marketing statement. Express items do not represent a unique product set as they are a sub-set of items already available on the parent site.
eBay’s rationale was that “Express” would convey the idea of new items (nothing used is in Express) ready to sell, without the drawn out bidding/auction process. The trouble is, it doesn’t judged by these lackluster results. While urgency is certainly a prime motivator, the marketing of eBay Express demands that potential buyers understand, almost intuitively, the relative difference. And even if they do, that they appreciate and are rewarded for appreciating the difference so much so that they adjust their mind-set regarding the site and thus their browsing habits.
This is a formidable if not impossible task when it comes to eBay. What eBay “means” to the market as a whole has to be realistically understood by those within the company before they set about trumpeting a service that is not a direct extension of whatever the “meaning” is. In eBay’s case, the brand is about first, bargains and secondly about assortment/variety. The speed of transaction has never been a unique statement for eBay. Speed only motivates when juxtaposed (as it is on the parent site) against like-item auction format listings where potential buyers can weigh price against time. There the dynamic makes sense and can actually be used by sellers as a selling strategy by trailing an auction type listing by a listing for the same item at a Buy-It-Now price.
Divorcing the listings from this dynamic renders the BIN items listed and thus eBay Express as simply another e-commerce site, albeit one that still carries with it the inherent problems inherent to the eBay brand itself, namely trust & security…an issue that eBay has only recently begun to address directly regarding the listing of fraudulent brand-name items.
Interestingly, eBay has chosen to emphasize variety (finding “IT” on eBay) rather than the bargain aspect. Why not shout about and thus underscore your most compelling feature, price? As a brand, eBay is as well positioned as any retailer to emphasize price but rarely, if ever, does so. And this pricing advantage is for the most part lost when Express is encountered as a stand alone by buyers. If the buyer finds an item based upon natural search results (on Google, for example), where are they? Do they understand that they are in a sub-set of the site and that their usual encounter with eBay is this time different - “where are the other items/sellers I’m accustomed to seeing?” - and that the heavily advertised “IT”, in terms of variety, is missing as well.
Underestimation or overestimation of your customer’s reasonable and usual expectations when they visit your site should be of paramount concern to any e-commerce site, whether large or small. Confuse yourself about these expectations and I guarantee, your customers will follow suit.
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eBay Express - Promise Your Customers What They Expect
