July 11, 2011 will mark the three-year anniversary of the launch of Apple’s App Store. That’s when Apple officially opened the App Store for business, launching with over 500 apps including our very own eBay and PayPal mobile apps. Apple has unquestionably started a revolution in mobile computing and we’re delighted to have been there from the very beginning… I even wrote the first blog post about eBay Mobile back in June, 2008 – 5 weeks before the App store even launched.

In three short years, eBay and PayPal have emerged to become leaders in mobile shopping and payments. eBay’s mobile apps are now available across the globe in eight languages and 190 countries. We have also gone on to develop several apps customized for Motors and Fashion enthusiasts, StubHub, Half.com and Classifieds customers. In 2010 – based on the company’s early success on the iPhone – eBay was also one of the first apps available at the launch of the iPad.

As of today, eBay’s mobile apps have been downloaded more than 45 million times and one purchase is made every second of every day via eBay mobile. eBay expects to generate $4 billion in mobile sales this year – double the nearly $2 billion it did in 2010.

PayPal has been working on mobile payments since 2006 when we introduced text-based peer-to-peer transactions. Since then, PayPal has launched mobile applications in 80 markets and in 16 different languages, and like Apple we’ve also opened up our APIs to third party developers via PayPal X. We’ve also seen tremendous year-over-year growth in mobile payment volume: from just $25m in 2008, $141m in 2009 and $750m in 2010.

Just last week we increased our estimate for 2011 mobile total payment volume to $3 billion, and we’re processing up to $10m in mobile payments per day – that’s up from $25million per year in just three years. PayPal is on track to handle a significant portion of the entire payment industry’s mobile transactions, which Forrester Research predicts will grow to $31 billion by 2016.

It’s hard to remember what life was like before we had access to the wealth of information and entertainment that mobile apps bring us every day. If you look at the archived posts specific to eBay Mobile on eBay Ink of the past three years, you can see how all of the apps have evolved so much in a relatively short amount of time to reflect the feedback and needs of consumers using them.

eBay and PayPal are thrilled to have the opportunity to develop for a platform that is only becoming more important in our daily lives, and we’ll continue to innovate for shopping and payments on the mobile phone…and whatever comes after that.

Cheers,
RBH

eBay mobile gross merchandise volume is expected to double to $4 billion in 2011.

Cheers,
RBH

I hope everyone had a safe and pleasant holiday. It was all a bit of a blur (albeit brilliant) for me to be honest. My wife and I hosted Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day at our house and then set off for Disneyland for New Year’s Eve with the kids. Upon returning home, I prematurely arrived at the office on Monday only to remember that we had the day off and now I find myself typing this blog post in a hotel room in Las Vegas about to head off to cover the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2011. Phew.

My primary reason for attending CES this year (it has been 8 years since my last attendance at this show) is RedLaser / eBay Mobile. Quite fitting then that I share with you some predictions from the eBay Ink Social Media Sellers for the year ahead as they are dominated by features and trends directly related to both RedLaser specifically and eBay Mobile in general.

Thanks so much to all the eBay sellers who took the time to send the following answers over the holiday break. Much appreciated and I can’t wait to work with them and more in the coming year.

“What are your 2011 predictions for ecommerce, social and mobile commerce?”

In addition to addressing integration of social and mobile commerce and video’s continued growth in the ecommerce space, Cliff sees reason for concern when looking at product shipment expectations of the consumer. I would add that a recent “local” focus by online marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon will also factor into the way online sellers offer products to consumers over the coming months…

Cliff Aliperti (@IEphemera)
“Nothing earth-shattering. Further growth and integration with an edge toward established brands such as eBay and Facebook. Video will continue to grow in importance. The greatest concern is in shipping physical goods, an area falling outside of our control where I believe continued price increases combined with little increase in service and an increased customer demand for instant satisfaction spells potential trouble.”

John Lawson is a bit like a shark and I mean this as a wholehearted compliment. Sharks need to keep moving or they cease to exist. I get the impression that he’s so incredibly focused on following his own advice and business mantra that when an email from me pops up in his inbox it simply distracts him from continuing to move forward (I’ll keep them to a minimum in 2011). As such, he takes a business-as-usual look at the year ahead (just keep moving)…

John Lawson (@ColderICE)
“Prepare for the increase of opportunity and competition:
** eCommerce (i.e. making sales via the web) will rise rapidly in 2011 and with it your opportunity to capitalize on the increase.
** With the increase of web consumers will come an equal increase in competition.
** Shore up your current customer base and use that information to market to other growth prospects.”

Marlene breaks down the question into three parts… because it was, after all, a three part question. I’d love to dig deeper on the “search by reviews” point she makes (almost like a Yelp! for eCommerce) and partner that with the personalization aspects and you have a key trend for the future…

Marlene Gavens (@TheSavvySeller)
“** eCommerce = “ratings and reviews” will become the way to search for items vs. search engine results or price.
** Social commerce = it will become more personalized (i.e. asking for friends’ opinions during the purchase process).
** Mobile commerce = this will be the year that there’s an increased awareness and use of QR codes.”

Danna and eBetsy both take the viewpoint that we’re just on the verge of something much bigger; that until now, we’ve simply been scratching the surface. I agree that there is lots to be excited about over the next 12-24 months…

Betsie Bolger (@eBetsy)
“I see mobile ecommerce continuing to boom, with new technology like augmented reality for eBay Classifieds coming down the development pipeline to astonish and amaze us. As for social ecommerce, given eBay’s investment in brands4friends and the ongoing rise of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites, I have to believe that there’s more to come in that area as well. All in all, an exciting ride ahead for ecommerce merchants overall!”

Danna Crawford (@PowerSellingMom)
“More mobile apps will be available helping to make life easier as a shopper and an online seller. I predict social sites will continue to grow keeping up with the mobile momentum as it sets the pace for an amazing future. I feel we are just babes in learning!”

Finally, Hillary echoes some of the same sentiments of John and Marlene around more and more business coming online and the potential positives and negatives associated with it…

Hillary DePiano @hillarydepiano)
“While the down economy may have sped up the process, I really think 2011 will be bad news for brick and mortar stores as the last holdouts switch to shopping online. While this may seem like good news for us e-sellers, it will mean a lot more crowded marketplace and one filled with inexperienced sellers that may cause us in the old guard problems. As for social and mobile commerce, to me they both go hand in hand with traditional ecommerce and should only continue to rise over the course of the year.”

Lots to ponder as we start to tackle the year head-on. What are your thoughts? Do you agree with some of the above? What else do you see coming to the forefront in eCommerce over the next 12 months?

Regardless, here’s to a healthy, successful and wonderful 2011 to you and yours.

Cheers!
RBH

Have a very safe and happy New Year!! Back with you all next week.

Cheers!
RBH

In the U.S., the top five categories ranked by the number of items sold through eBay’s mobile apps for the year were: clothing shoes & accessories; cell phones & PDAs; collectibles; jewelry & watches; and toys & hobbies.

I’ve written about eBay’s interactive infographic application already and have been impressed with how it allows folks to see eBay mobile shopping trends for the year within the top 20 eBay product categories. Looking back, eBay’s infographic reveals the following trends:

High-End Holiday Spending: Designer handbags, diamond rings and Rolex watches topped this year’s most expensive holiday purchases. During the holiday shopping season (Nov. 25 – Dec. 25), U.S. mobile sales 134 percent over the same period last year, generating nearly $100 million in GMV; worldwide, mobile sales grew 166 percent generating $230 million in GMV.

Sports Shopping Spree: Major sporting events drove fans to shop on eBay mobile to commemorate some of the most highly coveted competitions. Based on mobile sales, the sports memorabilia category peaked in Canada, during February’s XXI Olympic Winter Games held in Vancouver, B.C. The category also peaked in Germany during the 2010 FIFA World Cup™ South Africa, where Germany placed third, in June and July, and in France during July’s Tour de France®.

Gaming Lovers: Valentine’s Day has become a boon for the video game industry as World of Warcraft® and Final Fantasy® hosted special online gaming events. Video game sales through eBay’s mobile apps spiked 68% week-over-week for the week ending on Feb. 14.

Must-have Gadgets: In the U.S., tech lovers flocked to eBay as the iPad made its debut on April 4, driving the consumer electronics category to its annual peak the day after Apple’s tablet device first arrived in retail stores. On June 24, the day the iPhone® 4 launched in the U.S., the cell phones & accessories category hit its annual peak as a flurry of new and pre-owned iPhones listed on eBay.

Fashion Fanatics: As eBay released its Fashion app for iPhone this summer, clothing & accessories was a consistently popular category on mobile. In Canada and France, clothing & accessories was a top category overall based on mobile sales; it was a top three category in Australia, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. During the busy shopping period between Black Friday (Nov. 29) and Mobile Sunday (Dec. 12), the category ranked number one in the U.S., in both GMV and sold items.

What I’m really fired up about playing with is a new interactive infographic app available at ebayinc.com/mobilecommerce that captures eBay mobile shopping trends from Nov. 22 through Nov. 29 within the top 20 eBay product categories across eBay’s leading m-commerce markets.

Check out this demo video showing it in action:

U.S. Mobile Trends for U.S. Thanksgiving Holiday Week, Through Cyber Monday
• In the U.S., cars & trucks topped the list of products purchased by mobile phones, based on total mobile GMV.
• Cell phone & PDA accessories and women’s clothing led in terms of total number of transactions.

U.S. Regional Leaders in Holiday Week Mobile Shopping
• During Nov. 22 through Nov. 29, the most money was spent using mobile phones in California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania.
• California was the most active state in both sales volume and number of transactions.
• The clothing & accessories category accounted for the highest percentage of mobile sales in California, followed in order by cars & trucks, sporting goods, auto parts, and cell phones & PDA accessories.

Mobile commerce is showing strong growth worldwide. eBay mobile commerce purchases were up 230% year over year from Nov. 22 to Nov. 29 in eBay’s top six global m-commerce markets:
the United States, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia. Cars and trucks, and clothing and accessories, were the most popular categories.

International Mobile Trends for Nov. 22 through Nov. 29
• From Nov. 22 to Nov. 29, cars & trucks led in mobile GMV in all of eBay’s top markets except for France. Instead, French mobile shoppers focused their purchasing mostly on clothing & accessories and toys.
• In sporting goods, Australians made the most mobile purchases.
• The U.K. was by far the strongest in purchases of cars & trucks, which made up 20 percent of mobile sales, while Germany was the only country where auto parts appeared as the number one category.
• Canada was the only country in which collectibles ranked in the top five for the holiday week.

Cheers,
RBH

Sprint has teamed up with some of the most recognizable brands in the country to bring this revolutionary experience to customers – brands including Amazon, Blackboard, Comcast, Disney, E!, Electronic Arts, eBay, ESPN, Home Shopping Network, LatCel, MTV, Notre Dame, Oprah Winfrey Network, RadioShack, Weather Channel, Where and Yahoo!

Sprint customers can customize their device with up to five ID packs. Once an ID is loaded – easily in one quick step and free with a select service plan – users can further customize it with additional apps and content. ID packs can be easily switched out without customers losing the apps and content they value most. Because Sprint ID packs are built using the Android platform, the ID packs work across various manufacturers and will launch on three Android handsets – Sanyo Zio™, Samsung Transform™ and LG Optimus S™. A range of lifestyle packs, plus Yahoo!, game packs from Electronic Arts and business packs, will be immediately available with more packs rolling out in this quarter and beyond.

The following video featuring eBay’s Steve Yankovich was included in the Sprint keynote presentation at CTIA this afternoon…

“Smartphone technologies are transforming the mobile phone into the new digital wallet and consumers are clearly using their phones to shop,” said Steve Yankovich, vice president of mobile and platform business solutions, eBay Inc. “Our Sprint ID pack will help us make the most of that trend by making eBay’s mobile applications more discoverable and acting as an information hub so that shoppers never miss out on great deals and items they’re watching, bidding on or buying. Our ID will also notify users about new eBay apps or features we have released.”

Check out a video demo of Sprint ID.

You can read the full Sprint ID press release for further background too.

Cheers,
RBH

Chuck Pletcher has unveiled a new mobile app for eBay Classifieds over on the eBay Classifieds blog…

The app was built to have a similar feature set to our main iPhone app:

* Auto-locate directs you to your closest eBay Classifieds area
* Browse and search any category by keyword, price or any attribute
* View, reply to, or forward ads
* View ad location on Google Maps
* View all ad images on a single page
* Keep tabs on ads with our handy Watch List
* Super-easy ad posting with up to eight images from your camera or photo library
* Facebook and Twitter sharing

For you iPhone users out there, don’t fret, there’s a whole eBay Classifieds mobile page dedicated to you too, complete with two apps to download.

Cheers,
RBH

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

eBay Desktop
According to Alan, the majority of initial users of the Desktop application are those folks that are ahead of the technology curve, willing to try new things. He also pointed out that the interaction on Desktop vs. eBay.com is philosophically different with the former being more personal and the latter being more open and social. In a follow-up discussion, Alan indicated that the in-person usability study went quite well last week so I’d like to get more info on that too.

We both agreed that the seller functionality is needed on the Desktop application to propel it into more of a mainstream status and it appears that this functionality is written into the product timeline (no hints on dates here though I’m afraid). On the flip-side, one of my personal favorite features of eBay Desktop is “Search Feeds” or simply “Feeds”. This feature allows you to access your favorite searches or create new ones, and view them as “feeds” just as you would in an RSS reader. You can also see if an item is new and delete items you’re not interested in. As the Desktop application gains more traction this feature will need to be addressed on ebay.com too because users will come to expect it.

eBay iPhone Application
I had written about the eBay iPhone application back at the beginning of June and now that it’s live, I’d like to have a sit down with Ken Sun and Alan about the future plans of the app (including international plans). I did ask Alan what Steve Jobs thought of the application when Ken first demoed it to him in his office and his first impression was that he called it a real “meat and potatoes application” – something that actually brings value to the iPhone customer and not just a flashy feature. I guess when the app was first featured on the homepage it received 3 times the normal number of click-thrus and enjoyed the highest percentage of click-thrus for that slot.

On working at eBay
Alan has been with eBay for 4 and a half years now and we talked about the changes he has seen over the past few years and what his observations are overall. Sure, we talked about all the great things about working here at eBay and why we come to work every day but I wanted to talk about ways in which we could do better as a company.

He stressed that he feels communication has been flawed at times and that we need to do a better job communicating directly with all of our constituencies. Something we’ve talked a lot about here on Ink. He also talked about the shift in priorities. He contends that from 1999 to 2004, the company’s biggest priority was keeping up with the growth of the site and most decisions were made with scalability in mind. As a result, site usability ultimately suffered somewhat. Since that time, all new feature and product enhancements have been focused squarely on the user experience. Right now, we’re focusing on the buyer experience because this was a more neglected area during the time of great scalability… having said that, he also indicated that he didn’t feel like it is a buyer vs. seller approach (a lot of the time eBay users are both) but that every decision made is targeted at the overall user experience.

All in all, a very interesting discussion and one that I want to continue with him in the near future. Looping Ken Sun in too so we can chat more about the iPhone App.

Cheers,
RBH