An update to the eBay Announcement Board went up yesterday afternoon that I wanted to share with folks:
Improvements to the process when you open an unpaid item claim manually
* If a buyer doesn’t pay and you cancel the transaction, the buyer will no longer be able to pay for the item.
* If you open an unpaid item case, it will be closed automatically when the buyer pays using a safe electronic payment method such as PayPal or Moneybookers.
The new Unpaid Item Assistant is expected to be available to all sellers by the end of March. (More …)
All,
I’m still answering specific questions through email and comments here on Ink but in the meantime, I wanted to share a little sneak peak into what is happening behind the scenes. In addition to our usual Customer Service call center and PR efforts around news like this, we have also established two dedicated Communications rooms to allow for real-time collaboration across social media platforms and chat rooms to ensure we could get answers out to folks as quickly as possible. These have been staffed since 6am PT yesterday morning and include folks, such as myself, focused on communicating through a specific channel (forums, blogs, Twitter, email, etc.).
I took a quick video of our Comms Room here in San Jose HQ to give folks a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re working together to communicate information in real-time. The desks are set up in a horseshoe so we can easily ask questions to anyone in the room (representatives from the Buyer & Seller team, Corp Comms, Social Media, Engineering, eBay Annnouncements, etc. are all in here) for quick response…
Out in Salt Lake City, in addition to the Customer Service center, we have another comms room devoted to social media outreach and response. What follows is a sequence of photos taken out of that room where you can see folks on Twitter, Facebook, etc…
Personally, it has been great to see so many people involved in proactively communicating information – regardless of channel or platform. As a global organization, I am hoping we can build on this for the future.
The following video was recorded earlier today at eBay’s Customer Service HQ in Salt Lake City, Utah. Andrew Chase (aka @ebay_andy) has joined me on past podcasts to help answer seller questions around previous announcements we’ve made in the marketplace. I find him an extremely knowledgeable and unsung hero for our community – similar to a number of Customer Service folks out in SLC – who has made it his mission to get information out to as many people as possible.
Here, he talks about the first few hours of reaction to the eBay Seller Release of earlier today…
All,
I was also able to spend some time with Lynda Talgo, Senior Director of Resolutions at eBay, to discuss the eBay Buyer Protection news coming out of today’s Seller Release in more detail. What follows is a 3-part, face-to-face with Lynda in the lobby of the Community building at San Jose HQ. Again, like the video conversation with Dinesh, I’ve embedded the questions right into the videos. (More …)
All,
I was able to spend some time with Dinesh Lathi, VP of Buyer and Seller Experience at eBay, to discuss the news coming out of today’s Seller Release (eBaySR) in more detail. I did my best to anticipate some of the more challenging questions that may be on Ink reader’s minds and posed them to Dinesh (I realize you’ll have a ton more… and I’m happy to ask those too). What follows is a 7-part, comprehensive sit-down discussion with Dinesh in the lobby of the Community building at San Jose HQ. I’ve embedded the questions right into the videos. (More …)
eBay announced some significant changes to the selling and buying experience in the US marketplace today. Beginning March 30, sellers across the board will be able to experience lower up-front cost (in some instances zero up-front cost) when listing items on ebay.com.
Here’s a look at what’s new for sellers and buyers:
New standard rates …
For sellers who list items occasionally, new “eBay Everyday” rates are available. Auction-style listings with a start price of 99 cents or less will be free (with no insertion fees for up to 100 listings per month). When an item sells, the seller will pay a flat final value fee of 9% of the sale price — and never more than $50. If an item doesn’t sell, the seller pays nothing. (More …)
Every time I think I’ve seen it all, the power of the individual, coming together with their fellow man/woman, comes face-to-face with my expectations and blows them out of the water. I received a very brief but powerful email overnight that contained two statistics I wanted to share with all of you.
eBay
A reminder that you can buy, sell and/or donate items via a dedicated landing page on eBay.com, with proceeds going to Save the Children, The American Red Cross, and other nonprofits involved in the relief effort. The eBay Community (over 326,000 donors) has now raised over $1 Million as of Midnight EST last night across the US & UK sites. (More …)
For those of you who don’t know, my previous “job” (I put the term in quotes because neither feel like your typical job) was acting as a kind of A&R agent for independent producers on a network called Mevio (then called PodShow). As a result, I still find myself following the hundreds of shows of people that have become friends and like to refresh my podcast lineup every other week with 10 rotating shows. However, there are 10 shows that never get taken out of rotation. They consist of a small number of sports, film and BBC shows and four eCommerce related shows. I thought it would be nice to share those four shows with folks here on Ink. (More …)
This twitter session contains non-GAAP measures relating to the company’s performance. You can find the reconciliation of those measures to the nearest comparable GAAP measures here.
This Twitter session may make forward-looking statements relating to our future performance that are based on our current expectations, forecasts and assumptions and involve risks and uncertainties. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding expected financial results for the first quarter and full year 2010, the focus the Payments and Marketplaces business units going forward, and future growth in the Marketplaces and Payments businesses.
Our actual results may differ materially from those discussed in this Twitter session for a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to, the further impact of the credit crisis; continued or worsening global economic downturn; changes in political, business, and economic conditions; foreign-exchange-rate fluctuations; the impact and integration of recent and future acquisitions; our increasing need to grow revenues from existing users in established markets; an increasingly competitive environment for our businesses; the complexity of managing an increasingly large enterprise, with a broad range of businesses, our need to manage regulatory, tax, IP and litigation risks (including risks specific to PayPal, Bill Me Later and the financial industry); and our need to upgrade our technology and customer service infrastructure at reasonable cost while adding new features and maintaining site stability.
You can find more information about factors that could affect our operating results in our most recent annual report on our Form 10-K and our subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q (available at http://investor.ebayinc.com). You should not unduly rely on any forward-looking statements, and we assume no obligation to update them. All information in the presentation is as of January 20, 2010, and we do not intend, and undertake no duty, to update this presentation.
eBay Inc. announced earnings for Q4 and full year ended December 31, 2009. Fourth-quarter revenue was $2.4 billion, up 16% from the same period last year. This includes the $112 million in revenue from Skype during the period that we still fully owned it. The year-over-year increase was attributed primarily to “excellent growth in PayPal and StubHub and improvement in growth rates in the core eBay business, as well as the positive impact from foreign currency movements.”(More …)
