eBay Community Chat Changes -Less Engagement & Support
UPDATE 6-2-22
The June 8th monthly chat at 1 PM Pacific/4 PM Eastern will be all about eBay Stores feature Product Operations Manager for Stores, Chuck Van Pelt.
This month's chat you’ll have an opportunity to talk to Chuck, who’s the Product Operations Manager from the Stores team. Start brainstorming your questions for Chuck before hopping on the Monthly Chat board on June 8th at 1:00 pm PT.
If you can't make it to the chat and have questions you'd like answered - drop them in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. 😉
eBay community staff announced today the weekly open-ended chat is being discontinued and replaced with a monthly chat that will be limited to specific topics or themes.
Rather than continuing with weekly chats that cover general questions, we’ve decided to move to a monthly cadence with a theme. Since Community members can tag us whenever they want and we’ve heard from you that you want themed chats, we’ve decided to go this route.
This new guided chat format will occur every second Wednesday of the month (starting June 8th) and we’ll invite experts from various teams to participate. We’ll also let you know in advance what the topic will be about so you can come prepared...
...And don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. We’ll continue to monitor the boards and pipe up where needed, and of course, we’re always here and happy to help when you tag us.
Regular chat participants were caught off guard by the news, with some expressing doubts that invited experts would show up or be helpful and others saying they believed it was a way for eBay to avoid tough questions.
we’ll invite experts from various teams to participate.
We've been asking for this for years..........and you've said you've tried to get them........apparently (for most) to no avail.......... What makes you think the teams will be agreeable to come now?
Caught off guard to often with all the 'on the fly' changes? Running out of ways to say talk to FB, Twit or CS? Not getting any feedback from the 'teams' of the continuing problems and requests for updates? I suppose it isn't a big surprise.
Thought there had been requests in for people from the teams to come by to participate and not much positive response from them. Really think you will be able to get 12 a year?
Not meaning any disrespect, but this seems to really kill the purpose of a weekly chat for a chance to give feedback and get responses for those that can't wait for a 'maybe' response to a tag, sometime in the 'near future'.
This is just the latest in changes to community and seller events that have served to decrease transparency and seller engagement.
Sellers recently sounded the alarm over community staff granting themselves the power to select solutions to forum posts, which can have a chilling effect and serve to quickly bring active discussions to a conclusion.
Liz Morton ~ Founder
Earlier this year, eBay also changed what had been monthly Seller Check Ins over Zoom to quarterly events that are much more scripted presentations than opportunities for actual dialog and seller engagement.
Liz Morton ~ Founder
For all the lip service CEO Jamie Iannone and CMO VP Seller Community Andrea Stairs have paid to the idea of seller engagement and feedback loops, their actions have once again confirmed they only engagement and feedback they are really interested in are ones that fit into their carefully curated, echo chamber amplified narrative.
However, just because eBay doesn't want to engage with us, doesn't mean we can't still bring important seller impacting issues to light in a way that they cannot ignore.
If there's interest, I'd be open to considering hosting a weekly chat here on Value Added Resource to surface those issues to a wider audience and collect seller questions/concerns to forward to eBay for comment.
As always, comments here are open as are my messages on Twitter, Facebook and email - if there are questions or issues you'd like to see addressed by eBay, send them my way!
