Ebay Secrets Blog

I have 5 myHermes deliveries to give away to some deserving soul.

In the absence of any obvious selection method I will give away the deliveries to the person who comments with the funniest joke.

Good luck!

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Karen and I just returned from two days at the annual SCOE – Sellers Conference of Online Entrepreneurs, which is actually an annual conference of Amazon sellers. I am pretty sure SCOE would like to call it that, but Amazon doesn’t allow the use of their name that way.

Anyway the conference has been going  on for several years now and is growing every year. Last year when I attended there were about 230 sellers. This year it had grown by almost a hundred additional sellers which overcrowded the venue at the Marriott Airport Hotel in Seattle. If the organizers want to do this again next year they will either have to limit attendance or move to a new venue as the Marriott has reached its limit.

The conference is organized by Rhonda Schnieder who is a great lady and my hat goes off to her for what she has accomplished over the years. But the size and scope of the event has outpaced Rhonda’s organizational ability and it’s time she sought some professional help with the event. One of the most common remarks I heard was considering the cost of the conference and the cost to attend, how the conference didn’t quite live up to people’s expectations. Many of the seminar rooms were so overcrowded people were leaning against walls and sitting on the floor.  The handout materials were pretty amateurish and sessions routinely started late and often ran over time.  I was in one session where the next presenter had to literally kick the previous presenter out so he could start his session.

The first day, Saturday, was composed of vendor presentations which weren’t that interesting. The sessionss were essentially sales pitches and I got as much just visiting the vendor booths in the hall.

There were some interesting vendors this year. This is not a complete list but they included Media Scouter, Bookstores.com,  FBA Power, Stamps.com, Spaceware,  DHL Global Mail, Abe Books, Endicia, Monsoon and others.  I was expecting Vendio but they didn’t show this year. Probably the most interesting new vendor was FBA Power a total solution for Amazon sellers that included inventory control, listing tools, and a really cool scanner for all types of products –not just media.

The coolest new tool, was a Android phone scanner from Media Scouter. If you have an Android phone, you can get the scanning software for just $4.99 a month.

As someone who has sold mostly on eBay for over ten years now and on Amazon for the past two years, I was impressed by the variety and sophistication of the tools and resources for Amazon sellers. The number and depth of third party solutions is right up there with eBay –and in fact may pass eBay pretty soon as more and more companies develop products for Amazon sellers.  I don’t have room in a blog post to review all of these but my next newsletter will cover some of the more important applications in depth.

The second day was taken over by Amazon. Amazon sent about 25 employees who conducted seminars on various aspects of the Amazon platform. They also hosted two sessions where sellers could make appointments with Amazon experts to discuss their business and their problems.  Last year the program included a visit to Amazon HQ in Seattle on the Monday after the event, but this year that didn’t happen as Amazon is in the middle of moving to their new headquarters in the South Lake Union area of Seattle.

I was a little disappointed in the Amazon sessions.  Last year the sessions were more educational, whereas this year Amazon spent most of their time promoting their services such as Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) and Amazon Webstores.  But I must say the Amazon people were extremely friendly and accessible to sellers.  In all of their talks they stressed how critical sellers were to their success and went out of their way to make us feel welcome and important. Whenever I attend an eBay event, the eBay folks always make the same noises but Amazon doesn’t just talk the talk –they walk the walk.

All in all, despite a few issues the conference was a success and I would recommend anyone selling on Amazon to try and make next year’s conference.  You can get more information at the SCOE Home Page.

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It was announced this morning that eBay will be one of the first customers of Microsoft’s new Windows Azure platform appliance for cloud computing. The announcement was made at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) taking place this week in Washington D.C.

According to the announcement, eBay will incorporate the Windows Azure platform appliance into two of its data centers. The goal being to further optimize its platform and achieve greater strategic agility and datacenter efficiency. The agreement comes on the heels of a a successful pilot deployment by eBay of Microsoft’s public Windows Azure platform – eBay’s page for iPad listings (http://ipad.ebay.com) is hosted on the public Windows Azure platform.

eBay VP of Technology, James Barrese, (@jamesbarrese) took the stage this morning at the WPC but I managed to catch up with him before eBay: On Location this past weekend and interviewed him about the news. We talked, among other things, about what cloud computing means for eBay and what it means for buyers and sellers in the online marketplace. Here you go…

Cheers!
RBH

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All,
In addition to releasing the eBay application for Android internationally earlier today, eBay also announced the international release of the eBay Selling application and the eBay for iPad app. The Selling application is now available in Germany and the United Kingdom, and the eBay for iPad application is now translated into French, Italian, German and Spanish for international users and is currently available through all of Apple’s iTunes App Stores.

eBay has done an excellent job positioning itself as a leader in the mobile commerce market in a relatively short period of time. eBay launched its first mobile application for the iPhone in the Summer of 2008. In 2009, eBay generated over $600 million in GMV through its mobile platforms. eBay expects to generate over $1.5 billion in mobile GMV in 2010. Over half of eBay’s mobile GMV comes from international purchases. Here is a list of the eBay app portfolio:

** eBay Mobile App for iPhone
** eBay Mobile App for Android
** eBay Mobile App for Blackberry
** eBay for iPad
** eBay Classifieds App
** eBay Selling App
** eBay Deals App
** PayPal Mobile
** Shopping.com App
** StubHub App

Cheers,
RBH

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The eBay Application for Android is now available in three additional countries: Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. The new, updated app includes the ability for immediate checkout through PayPal, and voice search capabilities unique to the Android platform.

The free eBay application for Android includes features such as:

* Buyer alerts – Stay up to date on the status of auctions and watched items with timely alerts
* Daily Deals – View limited time bargains on popular items, where items are often more than 50% off the original price and include free shipping
* Feedback – Leave Feedback for items bought and sold within the application
* My eBay – Improved experience that includes an easier to use interface so sellers can quickly access listings, watched items, bids and sales
* Member Messages – Buyers and sellers can now receive and reply to messages and emails sent through My eBay. Ask a seller a question or reply to an inquiry or keep track of notifications directly through the app
* Sharing – Enabled with sharing functions so that buyers and seller can share items via Facebook, Twitter or email with friends and family
* Payments – PayPal account users can purchase items directly through the application
* View Sellers Other Items – View what other items a particular seller has to offer across eBay
* Voice search – In addition to type search, the eBay application comes enabled with speech-to-text voice search

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For more detail on ChannelAdvisor's SSS data, please see this post.

Today we are releasing June data and in addition to the eBay and Amazon data, we are now breaking out search and CSE data as per customer requests.  We have also had requests to release more details around CSE and search such as CPC, CTR, CR and engine mix (CSE specific).  We'll be evaluating the addition of those metrics in the coming months.  One FAQ that I receive is about currency rates.  These SSS percentages are all in native currency.

June results

June saw a decline on all channels.  There are several potential factors contributing to this such as seasonality, weather, recessionary headwinds and of course a dip in consumer confidence.

The results for each channel were as follows with some commentary:

• Amazon - Amazon came in at 65% down from May's 67%.  We continue to annualize more customers on our Amazon 2.0 solution which is where the decrease is coming from as we saw in May. Our data indicates that this will settle down in the mid 50% range over time as we get a more true reading from the Amazon SSS that isn't influenced by a major release cycle at ChannelAdvisor.  That being said, we have several features that are in beta that are dramatically accelerating sales for those merchants in the beta programs.  Once those features hit, depending on adoption, it could cause an acceleration due to software features.
• eBay - The changes from 3/30 continued to take their toll on eBay sellers.  eBay declined to -5.2% vs. -4% in May.  Customers continue to be frustrated by the BestMatch algorithm, constant eBay tweaks to that algorithm and the very high eTRS bar.  If there is a silver lining to this problem, it has lead to more expansion in other channels (Amazon, Buy and webstore are the primary beneficiaries)
• CSE - Comparison Shopping Engines came in at 4.3%.  This is pretty common for the group to see sluggish growth in the summer months and then really outperform in Q1 and Q4 with some lift in Q3.  We know there is interest in more internal data here and are working on adding that.
• Search - Search continues to do well at 10.5% SSS growth.  Google has made several e-commerce changes (detailed on our Searchmarketing blog) and continues to drive incremental lift through improved conversion rates.
• Overall - Overall we see that e-commerce has slowed from the mid teens to the 10-11% range.  While there are easy comps to last year, this is the 'new new' and our belief is that we are seeing a slight slow-down and not a 'falling off the cliff' that we saw in the early days (Q308) of the Great Recession.  We'll leave it to the economists to pontificate if this is just a cooling down or a double dip or a 'bounce', etc.

SSS Chart

The following chart details the SSS data for 2010 through June:

How as June for you?

How as your June – I'm particularly interested in hearing about how eBay sellers are dealing with the challenges on that platform.  We have some tips we've been giving folks, but there aren't any silver bullets unfortunately.  We also hear anecdotally that sellers with the advanced stores with data tracking have seen google traffic to eBay listings/sellers/stores go to near-zero, indicating some big SEO/SEM challenges for eBay.  If anyone has some quantitative data to share in comments that would be great.

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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The following was just posted over on the eBay AdCommerce blog:

In order to focus on the best selling and shopping experience, the specific AdCommerce program that allowed eBay sellers to purchase pay-per-click advertisements on search result pages linking to their eBay stores and listings will be retired for eBay.com and eBay.ca as of August 4, 2010. The service will continue for eBay sellers using AdCommerce in Europe and Australia.

According to the blog post, those that have recently purchased AdCommerce ads for their store or listings don’t need to do anything at this time because the placements they’ve already purchased to appear on these sites will automatically expire on August 4 with final billing to be sent out in early September.

The AdCommerce team is in the process of proactively contacting sellers involved in the program via email and phone call.

The full AdCommerce blog post can be read here.

Cheers,
RBH

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Bill Zielke, senior director of merchant services for PayPal, has an interesting post over on the PayPal blog talking about mobile payments – specifically PayPal Mobile Express Checkout – a mobile version of PayPal’s Express Checkout service that allows merchants to offer the PayPal experience to their on-the-go customers.

We are in the early stages with Mobile Express Checkout, and it’s being initially rolled out on the iPhone and Android 2.0 (and higher) devices by a few innovative retailers, including Nike and Buy.com, over the next few weeks. Jeff Wisot, vice president of marketing at Buy.com shared a few words about Mobile Express Checkout recently saying, “We’re seeing a huge opportunity in mobile commerce right now. PayPal’s Mobile Express Checkout will allow us to enhance the convenient shopping experience for on-the-go customers.”

Mobile Express Checkout will be available for the rest of our merchants later this summer. Here are just a few of the features it will include:

* One-stop payment service that allows merchants to sell to millions of mobile shoppers
* Quick deployment and integration to get merchants in the mobile game fast
* A seamless customer experience which is especially important with smaller screens and keyboards – no cumbersome data entry, just a few clicks and customers are done
* Strong fraud detection

Check out the full blog post here and keep an eye out for developments over the coming months.

Cheers!
RBH

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