eBay Monthly Chat Meltdown - How To Reach Your Customers?
UPDATE 7-29-22
eBay has helpfully decided now after monthly chat they are going to post a recap of the "top" questions and answers - I guess that's one way to make sure people don't see what an embarrassing dumpster fire the actual chat was. 🤣
If today's monthly community chat is any indication, eBay is the last place on earth that should be giving advice on "how to reach customers" - clearly they still have a lot to learn about customer engagement.
First, the "chat" format is confusing and has not been explained well to make the transition from the previous weekly chat format go smoothly.
The topic for the monthly chat is announced a week ahead of the actual chat date and a discussion thread is open for users to ask questions in advance. The regular community team answers those questions throughout the week and then by the time the chat rolls around the discussion is already 50 posts deep.
Then, instead of having a dedicated separate thread for the actual chat with the "appropriate team", the discussion is just supposed to continue with no announcement and no introduction to the team members who are supposed to be there to answer questions during the 1 hour chat window?
Please someone, make it make sense! 🤦♀️
Community members who were initially confused by the format were given this explanation:
to clarify, the board is posted in advance, for questions to be posted and we will reach out to the specialty team for responses. Once the Chat goes live, our specialty team will be here to answer your questions personally! This is especially tailored to those who can't be here for the live portion, but all are answered by the specialty team.
Ok, but the chat was supposed to start at 1 PM and it took more than half the allotted hour for them to wade through the previous 50 posts, answer a few, and then get to questions from the members who had showed up for the live portion.
In the hour long chat window, the specialty team provided a whopping 8 responses, half of which were basically some form of "we have no update to provide" or "we'll pass that on to the appropriate team."
Wasn't the whole point of this supposed to be to have the appropriate team available to provide updates and answers live?!
I tried to ask what the goal of this whole monthly chat debacle really was:
I'm curious what the goal of this type of monthly chat format is?
Maybe if the community team can communicate what they are trying to accomplish here, we can provide some feedback about how to do it in a way that makes sense for community participation.
As it stands right now, it doesn't appear community members are getting much value out of this format and I can't imagine the last half hour of discussion has provided eBay much in the way of valuable insights worthy of taking the seller team away from their regular duties either.
There has been no response from community staff as of this writing.
So, did we get any useful information out of this fruitless exercise?
One seller asked a very pointed and pertinent question (and they aren't the only ones):
Is eBay working on any tools for sellers to reach more customers that don't involve having to pay more in fees or having to lower pricing?
The Seller Tools Team responded:
Check out the Stores section in this article (https://www.ebay.com/sellercenter/resources/seller-updates/2021-fall/business/) to learn more about building your brand with your store and reaching more customers with store newsletters.
Obviously the specialty team didn't review last month's chat with the Stores team where there was extensive confusion and discussion about lack of usability with basic functions of the store newsletter feature, like how buyers can even sign up to receive newsletters.
Liz Morton ~ Founder
Another seller was looking for some detailed data analysis to provide in depth insight into best practices for coded coupons and also provided a suggestion to leverage existing partnership with VistaCreate to provide more flexibility to design packing slips.
Coded Coupons:
After they first came out, I immediately began adding coded coupons to all my packing slips. Result: No additional sales. This could be for a number of reasons, including that I don't sell in a niche, or maybe my discount was not attractive enough (I experimented with different levels).
- Could you mine your data and give us best practices for coded coupons?
Also, I feel that the existing coded coupon does not stand out very well on the Packing Slip. I know ebay has a partnership with VistaCreate for Store billboards, etc.
2.How about giving us a template we could use to spruce up our packing slip coupons (including some best viewed in black and white, since many of us prefer to send B&W packing slips, to save on printer ink costs.) There are a lot of creative ebayers who design coupons that would get noticed.
In response, they were given extremely generic information about "best practices" that any seller could find on existing help pages or Seller Academy modules and the specialty team missed the point all together that the seller was suggesting design capabilities above and beyond what is offered in the current set up.
Two parts to your questions:
- In terms of which discount template works best for coded coupon, in the Coupon campaign setup flow the best performing discount templates are on top of the list. Other best practices include creating a compelling discount that will generate interest and offer the buyer a good deal; send coupons with relevant inventory to the buyer based on their prior purchases and send a coupon to the buyer soon after they make a purchase to encourage them to come back.
- There is an eBay template for packing slips with coupons available via the Seller Hub Orders page. Select an order or orders you want to print out the packing slip, and then choose Shipping - Print packing slip and more. Once on the screen, you can customize the packing slip.
And...that's it, those were really the only questions/answers even worth mentioning.
Commenting on the absolute mess of a "chat" session, one user said:
Just a general comment since this is about over........
Communication is a key for sellers and buyers.......since ebay is the "seller" to us and we are the buyers.....ebay need to understand the basics of sharing information....... A "real" name, ie Joe Doe makes anyone "easier" to communicate with...... If a discussion isn't going well, someone who is responsible for it needs to jump in and jack up the discussion... Just explaining what the tools are.....how easy they are to use.....etc.......
I couldn't agree more. If you need an example of How Not To Run An Engaging Community Experience 101, today's event was the prime example.
VP Seller Engagement Andrea Stairs and Director Seller Community & Engagement Rebecca Michals should be utterly embarrassed by what has become of the eBay community.
Maybe it's time for some competition to show 'em how it should be done. 😉
And that's from the time they lost Alan and hired a replacement who obviously had no experience whatsoever with the eBay community.
Then there was the software revamping debacle, losing long-time blues, new blues who'd worked in that position only a matter of weeks suddenly selecting solutions for threads, switching from a weekly chat format to this monthly chat waste of time, and right up to the issuance of the vague, poorly written, completely subjective Community Guidelines.
It's been one tone-deaf misstep after another. There are very few participants who post reliable advice anymore, and the current blues are all but worthless.
Anyone who disagrees or objects to anything this "community team" does gets hammered by Bully #1--the community team's enforcer--via private message, person email, or even phone call, as the author of this website already knows.
IMO, the whole community should just be disbanded.
As an eBay employee, being voluntold you're participating in eBay's monthly chat probably feels like you're a Star Trek character wearing a red shirt on an away mission.
Like eBay's archaic feedback system, this whole 'chat' thing needs a full revamp in order to not suck.
Seems like a joke to me. The goal is obviously to both reduce communication and control the narrative. As it's apparent they aren't going to give clear answers even on the selected subject.
Difference now is they have limited time with the "experts" so they can pick and choose a few to reply to, and they don't have to deal with the difficult questions that people ask.
The times I'd used their chats in the past was in attempts to deal with severe issues, as that was one of the few times you could actually get eBay's eyes on an issue and get a response. Without that, it's pretty pointless.
