October 24th, 2009
(continued)
Can I go back, you asked about social networking. Our approach is there are going to be folks really good at that (facebook/twitter), they will be fabulous at the social graph. We're going to be really great at commerce+payments. We may look at bringing pieces in – e.g. facebook on eBay, and they may try to bring payments in on facebook (e.g. paypal on facebook).
Q: What we are finding in our data, people on facebook are dealing with friends, not looking to shop.
A: When we bought shopping.com one of the big assets was epinions. There will be hubs of some social/ecomm content, and I think we'll be able to access it. What we've learned is we're good at buyer-generated content, but not on products. We'll probably syndicate this vs. doing our selves. Some wonderful value-added configurators that enhance the experience that we will continue to see.
Q: We saw Wet Seal that had a 'build an outfit' and then share it model.
A: Now we are using technology to improve our search experience. Our challenge is unstructured data – we have only 10-20% on a catalog. The majority there is no catalog that exists. So we're working on community generated catalogs Embracing the wisdom of the community.
Q: You have a group called disruptive technology – what do they do?
A: Example – we embraced it – we bought 28% of craigslist and we are craigslist outside of the US. Learning from it and can now provide a balanced experience.
Q: Where do you look in eBay for innovation? e.g. Google has 10% time.
A: Most innovation comes from customers – we didn't think of them ourselves. The more we think in the ivory tower of San Jose, the worse off we'll be.
Q: What's the most interesting thing you've heard from them lately?
A: We were hearing a lot of frustration from Paypal users around an account for our family. That raised a kernel of an idea about kids buying online. We launched earlier this month PayPal student accounts. They have paypal debit cards Now there's a family account.
(more to come)
Related posts:
Posted in eBay Strategies