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This is part II, part I is here.  

(continuing with the three topics that Dinesh is covering – Listening and Innovating)

Listening

They have made more seller visits in the last 3 months vs. the last 10 years.  eBay Onlocations are giving them a better ability to go listen to smaller sellers.  They have been doing regional meetings with larger sellers.

Velocity – He showed how they are highlighting some brands in the suggestion box (do a search on eBay for 'Mickey Mouse' and you will see as below:

Trust - Making sure sellers put the condition in the listing and work on the buyer surfacing of this information in unison.

Value and Selection -  Dinesh talked about the new item page and how they are working hard to get more of those – showed an iPod example.

Efficiency - Talked about several other initiatives around Excel automation and what-not.

Lots more to do though, still room to work on insertion fees, UPIs and Search.

Innovating

On innovation, Dinesh hit on several points:

• Fashion or CSA in eBay-speak – he talked about the release of this micro site and some of the changes coming to the category.  For example, the category will be much more visual going forward.

Question 3 – What's the download volume of the eBay App for the iPhone – Answer – 8.7m

Question 4: How much GMV is eBay expecting through mobile in 2010 – Answer – $1.5b

Dinesh showed a demo of the iPad application – very good highlights of the app and headed into Q+A (next post)

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

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 This morning, eBay's VP of North America (in charge of the Buyer and Seller experience), Dinesh Lathi, is presenting 'eBay's Evolution and what it means to you'.  These are my live blogging notes.

 Three focuses:

1. Delivering
2. Listening
3. Innovating

Delivering

A year ago, Dinesh talked about buyer focus (trust, value and selection) and for sellers (velocity, efficiency and reliability).  Over the last twelve months they have delivered on a lot of these areas.

Top rated sellers grew 13% vs. 11% for overall e-commerce.  The top of the top sellers (largest sellers) are outpacing e-commerce growth even more.

Dinesh then did a fun quiz – about the top selling item over 5,000 units.  LED headlamps was the answer.  He then shocked the crowd by giving out an iPad for the correct answer.

Daily deal sold 1.2m unites in 2009.  In 2010, they've already sold 600k units this year.  One Toshiba TV sold 20k units in hours.

DailyDeal is a great way to move velocity.  eBay has delivered on velocity.

Efficiency – Dinesh highlighted several initiatives eBay rolled out over the last year such as the UPI assistant, tracking numbers on the site, 

There was another question for the crowd – How much has eBay lowered the listing fee for fixed price – the answer was 99%.  They then showed a chart illustrating that decline over time.

For buyers, they talked a lot about trust. eTRS GMV is up from 22% to 32% since the launch of the program through April 2010.  Dinesh then reviewed the buyer protection program.   He highlighted the eBay bucks program as part of how they are driving value.  Some segments of buyers show a 4X increase in activity in the program.

Selection – eBay has dramatically increased the selection on the site.  They talked about a lot of the large brands (Dell, eBags, Shoemall, Disney, Brooks Brothers, Black+Decker, TigerDirect, SportsAuthority, Timberland, Music123, Football fanatics) now on the site.

(continued in part II)

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

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It came to our attention from sellers that noticed a decrease in Bing cashback transactions in the last 24 hours that eBay appears to be out of the Bing cashback program.  We verified this on the screen shot below. (click to enlarge).  We'll dig into what's going on at the conference.  For most of 2010, eBay has been in the program at the 8% level with items purchased with PayPal.

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

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Yesterday (April 27, 2010), eBay announced the set of changes that will roll out this Summer (July 27, 2010) – this is their second set this year and they are already talking about a third set coming in the Fall. I would classify this release as very incremental – nothing earth shattering here, but as a package there are some good improvements that have a (hopefully) minor impact on sellers and a large positive impact on buyers.

There's a lot of material available on the changes so I'm going to focus on highlights –  if you want details:

• eBay announcement is here
• eBay details are here
• Auctionbytes coverage is here
• eBay blog coverage is here

Summary of changes

• eBay is adding buyer claims to the eTRS designation in addition to the DSR stars
• eBay is making item condition required
• They are eliminating featured first – thus putting the final nail in the coffin of all featured listings.
• They are making email communications anonymous (this is the third time on this one, maybe it will stick this time)

Impact on sellers

The macro impact on sellers for this release is pretty minor.    If you are a seller that doesn't respond to claims, don't provide condition and drive a lot of sales off featured first listings, this is a bad release for you, but frankly that's probably a good thing – that's a good transition to the buyer view.

Impact on buyers

If I had to give a short summary of 10.2, I would call it the "catching up on the buyer experience" release – especially around the trust side of things.

Some of these probably surprise many people that aren't hard-core eBayers that they are holes that were not plugged already.  For example, why would you ever allow a seller to list an item and NOT provide condition?  Certainly that sets up buyer expectations to be horribly missed.

As eBay focuses on NPS (more details on this later), I think they are finding some common themes that I would call legacy loopholes and are working to close them.

Deep thoughts on 10.2

I'm a software guy, so I think in terms of major (2.0 -> 3.0), minor (2.0 -> 2.1) and very minor (2.01 -> 2.02).  This is a 'very minor' release in my view.  That's not a knock on eBay or anything – it's very hard to do three major or even two major and a minor release a year at eBay's scale. It will definitely be interesting to see if the last (10.3 or 'Fall') release is minor or major (I doubt it will be 'very minor').

In isolation, it's great that eBay remains focused on improving the buyer experience and that they are fixing some of these long standing problem areas.

I'm also glad to see featured finally get phased out (although this view isn't popular with a lot of sellers).  My reasoning is that the family of upgrades like 'featured' exist to subvert the relevancy of the eBay search engine.  If the search engine is doing it's job (ahem), then the best items will automatically be surfaced and featured will, by its very nature, be less relevant.  Google has proven over and over again that relevancy is what searchers/buyers want and respond to and it's great to see eBay getting this religion finally.

All that being said, I continue (starting to feel like a broken record here – sorry long-time readers!) to believe that the eBay search engine isn't improving at a pace it needs to. 

Out of isolation, eBay is losing share in e-commerce and massively to Amazon. The search experience is the key to closing that gap and it's disheartening to have a release where search hasn't taken a step forward (other than the minor featured piece).

In fact, with the 3/31 changes that rolled out, eBay's search engine took some steps backwards as the flood of listings came on the site out of the store format.  But that's a tale for another post (coming soon).

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

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Only one week left to ChannelAdvisor Catalyst and we are officially sold out (second year in a row)!  We do have a wait list so that if there are any cancellations we can accommodate people in the order they get on the queue. The link to the waiting list is here.

Everyone at ChannelAdvisor is really looking forward to seeing all of our customers and retailers that are interested in learning more about what's going on in the World of e-commerce channels.  We have a couple of interesting surprises in store and a lot of exciting content this year, so get some sleep this weekend and get ready to learn a TON next week.

I'll attempt some live blogging of the eBay presentation, Google's presentation and a few others.

Holy cow, I guess I need to start working on my presentation..

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Earlier this evening, eBay announced Q1 2010 results.  This post focuses in on the marketplace side of the business.  You may want to review our same-store-sale data for Q1 here.

GMV – the pulse of the marketplace.

eBay provides a myriad of data points for the marketplace business, but we always counsel folks to look at the primary datapoint – GMV (Gross Merchandise Value). Registered users, items sold, segment revenue, etc.  Those are all useful secondary metrics, but they don't shine as much light on the business as GMV does.

For the earnings call, eBay provided this handy chart with the GMV metrics: (click to enlarge)

eBay's overall GMV was $15.4b for the Q, but to get a true apples to apples for GMV, you have to pull out three pieces:

• Autos - a drag on eBay's GMV growth and the economics are very different (more like a classifieds site) so they aren't applicable.
• Gmarket - eBay acquired gmarket and the gmarket is inorganically in Q110, but not in Q109.
• Currency (FX) - The GBP and Euro are fluctuating a good bit and their impact need to be taken out to compare year over year trends.

The following numbers are all ex-autos, ex-gmarket and ex-FX.

While domestic showed some good trends, the decrease in International is concerning.   In the key eBay International markets, eBay is a year into the same fee changes they are rolled out in the US on 3/31/10.  If those changes are already 'tapped out', that could indicate problems for the domestic side in the near future.  The International deceleration caused the overall number to come in flat Q/Q.

But what about Amazon and e-commerce?

Taken in a vacuum, eBay's results are decent.  But their stated goal is to grow with e-commerce.  .  Comscore came out with data this week that indicates they saw March come in (ex travel) at 19% y/y and they pegged Q1 at 11% y/y.  So at 8% overall, eBay lags that growth rate by 3% and the comscore data is US, so the comp is 6% vs. 11% – or a 5% delta. So eBay isn't out of the woods yet and needs to continue to work on growth strategies.

Amazon announces tomorrow and we'll have coverage on Amazon Strategies – our SSS data indicates there is no slow down there and we suspect sales will be up > 30% again for Q1.

Seeking Alpha Disclosure  - I am long Google and Amazon. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor.

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I noticed starting yesterday that eBay seems to be doing a pretty significant 'blanket' (I'm seeing it on most of the major ad networks) of an online marketing program around the buyer protection program.  They are doing interactive rich media ads.

I've seen a couple of treatments:

Spinning shield

The first treatment has the shield logo used in the program that spins around (this definitely catches your eye) and then it has some color stripes and reveals the "You're covered by the shield' message you see here:

The Learn More button takes you to the same 'about the buyer protection program' page you are taken to when you click the shield on the site.

Bullet points

The second treatment I've seen is more of a bullet pointed list as you see here:

So the key points they are hitting on:

• Program does not cost extra (Absolutely free!)
• Quick access to customer support
• Covers purchase price plus original shipping

Sign of things to come?

eBay has been hinting that they feel they are making big strides in trust and buyer protection.  It's good to see they are ramping up some exposure here.  I wonder if this is a ramp up to a more serious multimedia (radio/tv/print/online) push that we could see later this year to prep for Q4.

Let me know your thoughts and if you have seen any other ads in comments,

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

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This is part Three of a two part series – you can find the first to pieces here and here.

Jody Ford from eBay has now finished and is opening it to Q+A – I wanted to capture some of the more interesting exchanges here.  Jody has several colleagues helping with the Q+A.

Q: eTRS is such a high bar, how do you help sellers get over that bar – one or two one-stars can destroy you.

A: Buyers have a high bar, we have to have one as well.  No plans to raise the bar again.

Q: You just announced the fashion focus today.  Fashion has a higher return rate vs. other categories.  Each return could be a low DSR.  Could you have different standards for different categories?

A: You maybe right that some categories have different return rates.  The way we look at it is eBay and sellers need to manage the buyer expectation (including sizing charts and what-not).  They worry that buyers would be confused if there were different standards for different categories. Everyone in the category is in the same boat, so it's somewhat of a level playing field.

Q: Does the fashion outlet pre-populate the outlet with only the sellers in that program? There's only one suit on there and I sell suits and would like my products to show up.

A: Yes, this is a constrained set of sellers.  But it's not a replacement for our normal search experience.  When we drive in new buyers, we want to leverage that traffic into the new experience.  (question asker chimes in that the US new fashion.ebay.com is a better experience in his experience).  We've spent a lot of time understanding the buyer segments:

1. buyer enthusiast – similar across the globe. Not high fashion people, but want normal items (they are 35% of commerce) – Marks and Spencer's as example.

2. fashion fanatics – trend and brand driven, already on eBay, want to do more in the future.

Q: I have a question about international SiteVisibility (SV)- it's .30, is that a fair price (feels expensive)

A: We have bought back SV – we are looking at the fee ongoing to understand the impact.  They aren't trying to make money, but are trying to make sure they have the right balance between the two.

Q: (Sue from tamebay)  eBay is languishing around 1999 technology – why no cart, why UPIs, why no immediate pay for multi-items, are you doing anything to fix this?! Why fiddle on fashion when these basic things are broken?

A: Generally we are addressing these items (mentioned 'more like this' ) and mobile as innovation points.  UPIs – they want to get better.  Cart – know it's a problem, looking at it closely.  

Q: Freeshipping – how does it relate to BestMatch (BM)?

A: We don't talk in detail about the BM algorithm.  We do call out some things that help get you promoted.  Free shipping is really important in the UK and we encourage you to use it.  There is still a boost in eBay UK for free shipping.  There will be a session tomorrow with details on BM. eTRS and value are two key factors along with relevance. 

Q: We currently list directly into DE/SP and UK – the fees are higher there and we are told conflicting information on if we can create a shop there and get lower rates.  What's the real story?

A: Take it offline.

—This ends the Q+A session—-

Disclosures:

I am long Google and Amazon. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO. eBay is a sponsor of Catalyst UK.  

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This part II of a live blog from the eBay UK talk at Catalyst UK – the first post is here…

Jody Ford continues…

Emerging buyer trends – there are three parts:

• The need for risk free shopping
• Deals – Consumers love deals, what is eBay doing to help them.
• Relevant shopping experience – Fashion and mobile

Risk free shopping

Consumers worry about issues such as returns, shipping and handling, etc. eBay feels this is where the battleground is in e-commerce.

eBay has had a strong heritage in value, selection and deals, but need to help buyers understand that the majority of sellers deliver a great experience.

Continuing themes for eBay in 2010 – eTRS program.  He gave a recap of the program and highlighted that eTRS sellers are growing at 35% y/y vs. the eBay avg of 17%.

The second item is the eBay buyer protection program.  eBay now standing up for every transaction (very similar to the US program).

Deals

Buyers have a strong desire to find great deals with buzz and energy.  They created daily deals to satisfy this demand.  The program is open to powersellers.  

Examples of daily deals:

• They sold 6,500 units of a printer
• 900 units of a laptop
• 1,299 units of a pair of boots.

That's a quarter of a million pounds in just a few deals.

New experiences – Fashion and Mobile

eBay UK recently launched a new focus on fashion which is a battleground of e-commerce. eBay wants to be in the forefront of this.  Buyers are reappraising what eBay is for.  eBay will do a series of things to 'jog' the buyer.  As part of that they are (re)launching the outlet -  This gives buyers the ability to find the name brands they want, for less.

Live in the UK is something called 'more like this' which launched today in beta (you heard it here first folks!)

Here's an example I just found.  I search for a kate spade bag and in the listing you will see a 'more like this' link above the image: (click to expand)

That takes you to an experience like this (that looks like it needs a de-dupe functionality)->

You can see this page live here (at the time of this writing)

Jody then went over some of eBay's mobile initiatives which we've covered in details here.

Next, I'll post Q+A highlights

Disclosures:

I am long Google and Amazon. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO. eBay is a sponsor of Catalyst UK.  

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It's 1:30pm here in the UK and we are fresh from a delicious networking lunch.  Jody Ford, who is in charge of the pan-European selling experience is set to take the stage.

During the break, Jody was telling me that Mark Lewis, who was the managing director of eBay UK and spoke at Catalyst UK last year,  is no longer with eBay.  eBay has decided to have a pan-European organization vs. a different org in UK, DE, SP, FR, IT, etc. so that's an interesting change that I hadn't read about anywhere else. 

Here are my real-time notes from Jody's talk:

Jody wants to talk about two things:

1. The scorecard for measuring how eBay is doing for sellers.

2. eBay wants to share some interesting trends they are seeing and what they are doing to generate more sales (Mobile, etc.)

This should provide more context to the things that eBay UK is doing,.

The eBay Seller Scorecard

There are three components to the eBay scorecard:

• Sales – are we helping you sell more?
• Profitability – Are we helping you with the costs to sell on eBay?
• Reliability – Are we a reliable partner?

Sales - The top UK marketplace – 17m uniques/m, 50m searches/day on ebay.co.uk, 17% y/y sales frowth (Q409).  Based on these numbers feel like doing really well. Feel great about this year.

Profitability - Two components – competitive selling fees and the cost of doing business on eBay. 

On the expense side, they lowered fees about a year ago and feel like they have the most competitive pricing in the market.  

On the cost of eBay side, they have introduced Multi variation listings, bulk editing tools and Live listing editing.

Reliability - If anything this is an area they could have done better on.  They did limit the number of releases and combine releases with 60-days notice.  Getting better here.

However, they did get negative feedback on free P+P (shipping and handling), and private seller caps. So they have rolled back the free shipping mandate in media.  They have also saw consumer sellers take advantage of the consumer zero listing fee.  They have taken steps to stop that (private seller caps).

Finally, on account management they feel they lead the pack.  eBay is investing more in this area.  Account managers will have fewer accounts to managers and they will be focused on 1-2 categories so they have deeper understanding of the seller's business. They are incented to grow seller's businesses.

This post will continue in part II where Jody talks about trends in e-commerce eBay is seeing.

Disclosures:

I am long Google and Amazon. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO. eBay is a sponsor of Catalyst UK.  

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