For the Wall St. readers out there, we have three events on deck around the topic of Holiday sales trends:
I was reviewing last year's Black Friday and CyberMonday results and trends and noticed some interesting differences in eBay's strategy between 2008 and 2009.
2008 - A
eBay took over some real estate in the heart of Manhattan on 57th for a pop-up store.
Sellers had three concerns coming out of this weekend's outage:
Is eBay going to be stable for Q4
According to AB posts and comments in the press, it looks like the outage was due to a software problem that eBay has found and fixed. Evidently a 30% surge in listings caused the problem to rear its ugly head.
What about buyers that were impacted?
eBay is giving all buyers (winners) of auction-style items a 10% off coupon - this is the first time I've ever seen eBay do anything like this and I imagine it will turn this negative to a positive as now we'll have all of these buyers with unexpected 10% off coupons during a key purchase time.
eBay seller impact/compensation
eBay sent a letter to sellers Monday that detailed the compensation they are providing for the search outage. In addition to the normal listing/fvf fee reversals, it was great to see eBay not only give sellers the ability to cancel sales (auction-style listings) and be
Around noon ET we started to get some inbound requests from sellers asking about the status of our systems because of unusually slow order flow.
