eBay Council Changes: Listening More While Turning Off Comments?
eBay closes off yet another avenue for seller engagement as eBay Council changes remove social hub and commenting, limit interactions to one way surveys.
eBay Council was first launched in the UK in 2022, then expanded to the US and was billed as a way for users to have a "two-way conversation" with the company to help "improve existing products and influence the development of new ones."
Hello and welcome to eBay Council, an online panel and community where you can share your thoughts and feedback directly with eBay. Being part of eBay Council gives you the ability to improve existing products and influence the development of new ones that haven’t been released yet - to ultimately help build a better eBay for all buyers and sellers.
What’s in it for you?
Take part in a two-way conversation between you and the eBay team - answering online surveys and joining group sessions. We want to give you the opportunity to be heard!
- Learn about upcoming developments on eBay and be part of their creation
- Have your say and take part in shaping the future of eBay
- Get opportunities to meet and network with other eBay sellers
Your commitment is only a few minutes each month, providing feedback on the features and products you use. If we organize group sessions or interviews we will let you know first by email and there is no obligation to take part.
We’ll be incorporating your thoughts and feedback back into our eBay plans and development. Accessing the eBay Council Member Hub, you’ll get insights on new products and features, and updates on our activities.
But eBay informed eBay Council members today they're making significant changes to the program, stripping away many of the interactive and two-way aspects of the Member Hub, leaving only the opportunity to participate in individual surveys and research going forward.
Bizarrely, eBay's explanation of these changes tried to paint them as "listening even more" despite the fact that users will now have less opportunities for two-way engagement or to interact with other Council members in the comments of the social community of the Hub.
Thank you for being a part of our Council panel. Your feedback has been valuable in helping us improve eBay for you, our customer.
We are making some changes to allow us to focus our efforts on listening to you even more. You will still be able to share your perspective by taking part in our research, but there will be changes to the Member Hub and support email.
Member Hub
- Our social community for posting updates, polls and inviting your comments will no longer be available as of December 31, 2024.
- We invite you to continue interacting with other eBay customers by joining our broader global community at community.ebay.com, where you’ll be connected to a network of other buyers and sellers across eBay.
- To stay up to date on activity from eBay, we encourage you to follow us on social media (see links at bottom) to view all our latest content.
Member Support Contact Email
- Should you need to contact us about an issue with eBay Council or any of our research, our new support email address is panelsupport@ebay.com
- If your query is about your eBay experience as a customer, you can visit our help page ebay.com/help
If you wish to continue to take part in eBay customer research, there is no need to take any action. You will remain on our Council panel and continue to receive invites to research that is relevant to you.
If you no longer wish to participate in research activities with eBay Council, you can unsubscribe using the link at the end of this email.
The suggestion for members to simply join the eBay community instead is laughable - the community experience has been going downhill for years with dwindling official participation, first moving a weekly general topic chat with staff to a monthly limited topic event, then discontinuing the monthly chat for sporadic and occasional "Ask Me About" sessions.
Liz Morton
The Community team tries their best to address customer questions and concerns both during designated chat events and general daily forum posts, but they are often handcuffed by internal procedures and roadblocks, unable to do anything except "pass the information to the appropriate team" where they often get no follow up answers for weeks or months, if ever.
The most recent "Ask Me About eBay Ads" event was a perfect example of everything wrong with the current state of internal communications with many questions waiting a month for answers and some never receiving any response at all.
Liz Morton
The fate of eBay Council comes in a long line of other failed "seller engagement" experiments that always start off with the company claiming the best of intentions but eventually end up on the back burner, left to fade into irrelevance or abruptly ended with little to no notice.
Liz Morton
For example, eBay launched the eBay Voices program (again) in 2021, an iteration on previous seller engagement efforts from years past.
The pilot program started with the Collectibles category and was supposed to give eBay community members the opportunity to share category-specific ideas for improvement with the Category Manager, then received responses on a monthly basis - but things fell apart quickly with eBay participation promises unfulfilled and eventually the program was unceremoniously discontinued.
Liz Morton
More recently, the eBay for Business Podcast hosted by longtime eBay guru Jim "Griff" Griffith was also abruptly discontinued.
Liz Morton
Rumors surfaced last month that Valeri Yee might be taking on a new Seller Advocacy and Community Engagement role at the company, but so far that speculation has yet to come to fruition.
Liz Morton
Meanwhile, eBay VP Global Customer Experience Derek Allgood has been making the podcast rounds touting eBay's supposedly "phenomenal" customer experience.
Liz Morton
What do you think of these upcoming changes to eBay Council and what suggestions would you have for eBay to improve engagement with users going forward? Let us know in the comments below!
