eBay Celebrates Recommerce Day With Live Shows For Luxury Pre-Owned Goods
eBay is celebrating their inaugural Recommerce Day with a homepage takeover & livestream events featuring pre-owned luxury and refurbished goods.
Recommerce Day features a “takeover” of the eBay homepage with opportunities to learn more about recommerce, find great pre-loved deals, and participate in an eBay Live program featuring exclusively pre-loved items. Throughout the day, starting at 9am PT, there will be opportunities to win fantastic pre-loved and refurbished prizes during the eBay Live stream
eBay has also released their annual Recommerce Report, surveying more than 28,000 people around the world to assess the overall trends and sentiment around recommerce at a global consumer level.
The homepage takeover consists of banners encouraging buyers to shop pre-loved that lead to a special Recommerce Day eBay Live page showing the schedule for livestreaming events.
Unfortunately, because eBay has chosen to use ad spots that normally host 3rd party Google ads for this purpose, anyone visiting the homepage with their ad blocker turned on will likely never even see these banners.
While there are a wide variety of sellers who engage in "recommerce" on the site (selling pre-owned items), unsurprisingly eBay is sticking to their limited focus vertical category theme with events featuring pre-owned luxury handbags, jewelry, watches and sneakers.
That's sure to disappoint sellers of vintage, collectibles and other items that squarely fit within the definition of "recommerce" but have felt excluded by the narrow "high value buyer, vertical focus" strategy eBay has pursued in the last few years.
Some of those sellers shared their thoughts in the eBay community, asking community staff if there were any marketing plans that might include them or discount deals they could opt into for additional visibility on Recommerce Day.
I sell vintage, antique, used stuff. Always have. Which, in the past, has meant I've been a "secondhand seller" or a "flea market dealer"
But, in today's world, I am, of course, no such thing. Today, without having to change anything about my business model, I am "engaged in recommerce"
So, as one engaged in recommerce, I am pleased to see ebay has designated May 21st as "Recommerce Day"...
...So, how do we ordinary "recommerce" folk take advantage of this? Will ebay be promoting our stores in some way? Perhaps providing us with some sort of "Recommence Day Fee Discount"? Maybe supplying us with social media graphics we can use to promote Recommerce Day for our stores? Anything at all?
What I'd like to see ebay do...whether for recommerce day or Fathers Day or whatever Day they are promoting....is ....give us some ways to participate in, or at least to, ride the coat tails of, ebay's promotion. Why ebay refuses to leverage their millions of sellers to get even more benefit from these promotions is beyond me (especially since a lot of things could be done at a fairly minimal cost).
On 5/16, Devon@eBay responded:
That is a great question and I will reach out to our Refurb team to see what more details I can get to share on this!
But there have been no further details shared since then, despite multiple posts requesting updates in time for sellers to take advantage of and benefit from the Recommerce Day buzz.
According to eBay's 2024 Recommerce Report, 79% of surveyed sellers said they started on eBay by selling pre-loved goods - and it's safe to bet those weren't all luxury goods or refurbished electronics.
eBay could and should have tapped into that core base of millions consumer to consumer and small business sellers who CEO Jamie Iannone called "the foundation of the company's success" back in 2020 if they really wanted to make the first Recommerce Day a resounding success.
After Chief Business Strategy Officer Stefanie Jay stepped down in January, eBay showed signs of pivoting back to a wider consumer-seller focus, with job postings and internal promotions across the US and international markets.
Iannone also highlighted C2C success in Germany on the Q4 2023 earnings call and other recent investor conferences, while carefully trying to make it seem like this was all part of the vertical focus strategy all along rather than the sudden strategy pivot it appears to be.
Liz Morton
eBay has been surveying buyers about C2C initiatives with a possible revival of the "eBay It Forward" campaign briefly tested in early 2021 featuring a wide range of items such as kitchen appliances, outdoor equipment, home goods and more with a theme of "Sell What Didn't Work Out To Make Room For What Does."
Liz Morton
Dedicated social media accounts for sneakers and watches have been shut down, directing users back to the main eBay channels for support and announcements going forward.
The C2C strategy pivot has already started to take shape in the UK, with a new Seller Success team and initiatives to boost consumer and small business selling in what eBay is calling the "fix the fundamental aspect of UK Win back plan."
They also began testing fee free selling for private consumer sellers in the UK earlier this year, mirroring changes they made to the German marketplace last year, and announced in April that selling fees have been permanently dropped for private UK clothing sales.
Liz Morton
Interestingly, the Recommerce Day homepage takeover does not seem to have included eBay UK, which would have been a natural fit with the recent intense focus on pre-loved fashion and launching eBay Live in the UK market as well.
Hopefully next year's Recommerce Day will do a better job of engaging with the wide variety of sellers of used goods on the platform, as this year looks to be a giant missed opportunity to showcase what makes eBay truly the best place for pre-owned enthusiasts across all categories - not just luxury fashion and refurbished tech.
