What we're going to be discussing and demonstrating is some new technology that connects three systems together: eBay MyMessages/AskSellerQuestion, ChannelAdvisor and Salesforce.com.  The end-result is a best of breed solution that customers are telling us dramatically reduces their customer support costs (by improving the performance of their customer service reps).

The key is leveraging the incredible salesforce.com system that puts all of the information your rep needs to answer a customer's questions such as: order info, purchase history, tracking numbers, product specifics, eBay specifics, etc.  Additionally, you can create 'solutions' which are pre-canned answers to questions.

Finally, the analytics are incredible and allow you to answer questions such as:

• Which of my products generate the most queries?
• What is my customer satisfaction level?
• What is the average turn-around time of questions?
• Who are my top buyers?
• Who are my most demanding buyers?
• Which reps are most productive?
• Which reps get the highest customer satisfaction ratings?

If you'd like to join us to see and learn more, you can learn more and register here: http://www.channeladvisor.com/webinars

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Rakuten is clearly serious

This does nothing but solidify my view that Rakuten is gunning for eBay and Amazon in a major and global way and now has put down major flags in the US, EU and China.

What's next?  Well, if we assume Rakuten is going to continue this rapid expansion, some interesting options come to mind:

• Mercado Libre (NASDQA:MELI) - Valued at over 2.5B, probably out of Rakuten's reach, but if you want to be in Latin america, this is the way to go. eBay owns ~20%, but for some reason has never pulled the trigger on getting these guys in the fold.  It would be strategically very bad for eBay if this rug was yanked out from under them.
• CSE shopping-fest – The industry is full of rumors that various CSEs are for sale by their acquiring entities.  In the US, shopzilla (Scrips owns), smarter.com/pricerunner (Valueclick owns), and NextTag/PriceGrabber (PE firms own).  In the EU, Y! sold Kelkoo to Jam
• Smaller US marketplaces – Bonanzle has a rabid following as does Etsy – these would be interesting feather's in Rakuten's cap – not needle movers, but definitely would be interesting as part of a 'global network of marketplaces' play.
• Other geographies – Russia, Singapore, Korea, etc. are all areas they could plant the next flag.

Anything I missed?  Sound off in comments.

SeekingAlpha disclosure – I am long Google and Amazon, eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor.

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In fact there are several online utilities that have been built to give buyers the same functionality such as:

• Toolhaus - This one has been around forever and has a lot of usage (20k+/m) as it is the top result in google for 'filter ebay negative'.
• feedbackselector - Allows you to also search the item text – e.g. show me all the negs for watch sales vs. 'all' sales.
• abef - A better ebay filter – this one is a very popular greasemonkey script.

Here we are in 2010 and eBay slid the feature out yesterday with nary a whimper from sellers.  Let's look at the feature from both a buyer and seller perspective and I'll offer a strategy for sellers at the end.

Buyer perspective /use case and a tour

From a buyer's perspective, I do like the feature as it a) saves me time from looking through page after page of feedback and b) let's me educate myself on the types of bad experiences I could face and c) see what the seller has to say about it (if anything).

Here's a tour and a use case wrapped in one.

Let's say I'm considering buying something from eBay's new FashionVault flash sale experience - which goes under the seller ID stylepremium.  I look at their feedback and notice three things of concern:

• They have a 99% positive rate which is promising
• They are not a top rated seller (which means they are a Above Standard Seller, but not eTRS)
• There's a gnarly 4.4 star on shipping and handling (for 12 months, 4.0 for last 30 days – ouch! Wait, doesn't that violate the seller performance standards of a 4.6 minimum? I digress. )
• 30 day negatives are 14 and there's 43 over the course of 6 months so they are accelerating

Before the negative feedback filter functionality, I would have to look  for the 15 negatives in a sea of 800 feedbacks  At 25 / page that would be 32 pages of feedback with an average of a negative every other page.

Now with this change, I can click on the '43' in the feedback ratings panel and it automagically shows me just the 43 negatives for the last 6 months for this seller: (click to expand)

A quick scan of this feedback reveals a lot about that 4.4 star:

• Most comments talk about two weeks shipping time as a problem
• There is some incidence of the wrong product being shipped.
• Generally the seller is issuing refunds for people that have a terrible experience.

Now as a buyer I can decide if I am willing to risk great prices in exchange for a possible long wait time, but know that if I get the wrong product, I can probably expect a hassle-free refund.  

That's a lot more information than a 4.4 / 5.0 rating on a star.

Seller perspective

From a seller's perspective, you need to be aware that there is now a huge spotlight that buyers can shine on your negative feedback.   Even if you are a 99% positive, you need to remember that buyers can and will choose to just look at your negatives. Also as you can see, buyers say some really scary stuff in feedback like fraud, scam, took my money, etc.  So you need to be aware that a) they can say pretty much whatever they want and b) buyers can now see all of that on one filtered page without all those positives to help pull the punches.

eBay Strategy – Be sure to respond to all negative/neutral feedback!

This brings us to a strategy that was a minor thing we generally recommend, but has now gone from a 'if you have time to think about it' to a 'you need to make this a top priority part of your customer service processes'.

Some sellers don't realize that eBay allows you as a seller to publicly respond – right in the feedback page there – to feedback.  I strongly, STRONGLY, recommend sellers start doing this now that this filtering is in place.  Compare the stylepremium feedback where you only have the negative customer voice to this camera seller's (ETRS, 99.6%, 4.9, 4.7, 4.8, 4.9) feedback where they have responded to every negative:

You can see that a feedback reply takes a negative like: "Did not include the bag as advertised"  and adds the seller's comment of: "Please call us and allow us to reconcile…" and more than softens the problem, it makes you wonder why eBay doesn't make buyers talk to sellers before leaving a negative (but I digress) – in any case it really helps with the perception and when you see it all on a page, you can tell this seller cares as they respond to every (well, all 3) negative.

In conclusion, this feature is going to shine a bright light on all of your negatives – you should take some time and gussy them up so they make it clear to buyers that you care and are going to attend to their problems as quickly as possible.

Customer service week at eBay Strategies (next week)!

This change at eBay and new strategy got me thinking – it's becoming increasingly important at eBay, Amazon and pretty much everywhere across the internet to have great customer service – why don't we spend a week or so covering topics really related to that important part of e-commerce.   We spend a LOT of time with retailers and capture a ton of best practices so I thought it would be interesting to have a week where we really drill in on a broad overall topic like customer service.  Next week, we'll be featuring a post a day about customer service – best practices, NPS, eBay-oriented customer service, Amazon, etc.  Stay tuned and let me know in comments if there are any specific customer service topics you'd like to discuss.

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Today, June 16, we are hosting a complimentary webinar at 2pm ET to update
everyone on the changes coming to Bing shopping and the end of the cashback
program.   We'll give you some practical steps you can take today and also talk
about some of the things coming in the future.  We'll also speculate somewhat on what this means for eBay and what you need to do as a seller to compensate for the potential loss of demand.

You can register at www.channeladvisor.com/webinars
or click here.

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The May results are in and here is where eBay and Amazon came out with some commentary and analysis:

• eBay - eBay declined in May to -4% y/y vs. April which was flat at 0%.  An analysis of the data reveals that the late March changes eBay made are having a negative impact on our customers. Customers in the CSA (Clothing/Shoes/Accessories or newly minted 'fashion') category were very negatively impacted.   Our research shows that the search results for CSA and many other 'soft goods' categories like luggage appear to have reverted to a 80% auction, 20% fixed price mix.  This doesn't make any sense to us because it seems totally misaligned with eBay's goal of a) driving fixed price sales, b) improving the fashion buying experience, c) driving adoption of features like variation style listings and d) a good buyer experience at all. You can see this by running a general search for something like 'nike shoes' – quickly eyeball the results and you will find 40/50 are auction and 10/50 are fixed price.  eBay tells us the mix hasn't changed, but our customers tell us otherwise – sound off in comments if you have a view on this.

• Amazon - Amazon declined in May to 67% from 72% in April. Our analysis of this trend leads us to believe that this was largely driven by our software cycles and not any fundamental change at Amazon. 14 months ago we released our Amazon 2.0 software which dramatically accelerated the growth of many of our Amazon customers AND our Amazon customer acquisition rates nearly doubled.  Thus we have a hard comp of existing customers ramping in May 09 and a bunch of new customers ramping in May 09.

The next SSS release date is July 7th.

SSS Disclaimer

ChannelAdvisor Same Store Sales (SSS) are reported as a benchmark data point for ChannelAdvisor's internet retailer customers.  The SSS data is not a position or forecast of any e-commerce activity, but the real transactional data captured by ChannelAdvisor across over 3000 retailers and $3b of Gross Merchandise Value (GMV).  There are many reasons this data is not a proxy for overall e-commerce activity including, but not limited to:

• Customer variance - ChannelAdvisor's customers may not be representative of the overall customer mix of any individual channel.  For example, on eBay, our customers are skewed towards the largest eBay customer set, not the average.
• Category variance - ChannelAdvisor is over-indexed in some categories (electronics, sporting goods and auto parts) and under-indexed in others (collectibles, BMV/media, etc.)  For example, on Amazon, ChannelAdvisor has very few media customers so we have no visibility into that large chunk of the business.
• Cross Border Trade variance - While ChannelAdvisor does have a fair amount of non-domestic GMV (>25%), our mix and currency exposure is vastly different than other e-commerce players.
• Software Impact - At the end of the day, we are a software company. Some of our features cause a short-term bump in sales that may skew results high a the beginning and then lower at the end of a one year SSS cycle.
• Channel impact - Certain changes at e-commerce channels may cause more good or harm to our customer base, category mix, international mix and software.  While the data shows these changes, because we are not a material part of every channel, over 90% of that channel's business may not have the same impact (positive or negative).

SeekingAlpha Disclosure – I am long Amazon and Google. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor.

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We first started releasing same-store-sales (SSS) at the requests of our customers.  Retailers are always interested to know how they are doing against their peers (also known as benchmarking) so we started releasing the information as a resource for them.  Along the way, we grew the GMV that goes through ChannelAdvisor to over $3b and have over 3000 customers.  As we gained scale, analysts on Wall St. have become very interested in the data as a directional view of how e-commerce companies are doing (a view we don't necessarily believe in – see disclaimers).

Because of this additional focus on the SSS data, we wanted to add a little more structure to the data and how/when we disseminate it that we are rolling out today.

SSS Changes

• SSS will be published after 5pm on 5th business day after end of month
• We are making sure that the disclaimers on the data are clear and repeated with every SSS publication.
• We are going to eliminate the data point that we previously called ‘ChannelAdvisor’.  Customers don’t see value from that metric and prefer to see the individual channels.  The ChannelAdvisor number is highly influenced by our channel mix that is primarily driven by our product feature and sales efforts and not necessarily an indication of broader market moves.
• Starting next month we are going to add both search and comparison shopping engines (CSE) to the data and will report on those channels going forward

2010 Schedule

• June 8
• July 7
• August 6
• September 7
• October 7
• November 9
• December 7
• Increased frequency for the holiday period TBA

Disclaimer

ChannelAdvisor Same Store Sales (SSS) are reported as a benchmark data point for ChannelAdvisor's internet retailer customers.  The SSS data is not a position or forecast of any e-commerce activity, but the real transactional data captured by ChannelAdvisor across over 3000 retailers and $3b of Gross Merchandise Value (GMV).  There are many reasons this data is not a proxy for overall e-commerce activity including, but not limited to:

• Customer variance – ChannelAdvisor's customers may not be representative of the overall customer mix of any individual channel.  For example, on eBay, our customers are skewed towards the largest eBay customer set, not the average.
• Category variance – ChannelAdvisor is over-indexed in some categories (electronics, sporting goods and auto parts) and under-indexed in others (collectibles, BMV/media, etc.)  For example, on Amazon, ChannelAdvisor has very few media customers so we have no visibility into that large chunk of the business.
• Cross Border Trade variance – While ChannelAdvisor does have a fair amount of non-domestic GMV (>25%), our mix and currency exposure is vastly different than other e-commerce players.
• Software Impact – At the end of the day, we are a software company. Some of our features cause a short-term bump in sales that may skew results high a the beginning and then lower at the end of a one year SSS cycle.
• Channel impact – Certain changes at e-commerce channels may cause more good or harm to our customer base, category mix, international mix and software.  While the data shows these changes, because we are not a material part of every channel, over 90% of that channel's business may not have the same impact (positive or negative).

SeekingAlpha Disclosure – I am long Google and Amazon, eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor.

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This year we are at Booth 501 giving demos of some cool new features we're announcing later this week and I'm giving a talk Wednesday at 11:30am with Peter Cobb from eBags on Comparison Shopping Engines.

We usually have a lot of blog readers in attendance so come on by the booth and say hello, I generally spend the bulk of my time in the booth so look forward to seeing everyone.

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