eBay Live Expands To Clothing; Hopes To Lure Experienced Livestream Sellers With Incentives
eBay is finally starting to expand eBay Live livestream selling to more sellers, adding pre-loved clothing to the mix, but progress has been slow on this 2+ year "beta" program, leaving eBay looking for incentives to try to draw sellers away from competitors who beat them to the punch.
eBay Live launched in June 2022 and while a few new categories have been added in that time, as well as introduction in the UK, and availability on both desktop and mobile, many sellers have been frustrated with the glacial pace of rollout and the restrictive application process - with some moving to competing platforms like Whatnot instead.
The expansion to include more fashion and clothing categories in eBay Live was announced by VP GM Global Verticals Ashish Chhabra at eBay Open 2024, but the eBay Live seller application form shows even more recent changes and a clear focus on finding sellers who are already established on other livestreaming platforms and/or a significant social media following.
First, eBay wants to know how many sales and followers you have already on the site.
They also want to know what categories of inventory you have (Sports Trading Cards, Collectible Card Games, Sports Memorabilia, Coins & Bullion, Comics, Toys, Apparel, Handbags, Footwear, Watches, Refurbished Electronics, Other) and whether your primary business model is as a consignment seller, authorized reseller, brand/manufacturer, reseller or other.
Next, eBay wants details about your activity on competing platforms including how many followers you have on social media and a dollar amount earned in the last year and time spent streaming per week.
Competitors eBay is clearly keeping a close eye on include WhatNot, TikTok, Fanatics Live, Poshmark Live, Loupe, Drip, NTWRK, and Popshop Live.
Interestingly, many of those were also named in a recent survey conducted by Whatnote for the first State Of Livestream Selling Report - but eBay did not make it on their list.
Liz Morton
eBay is also clearly looking for sellers who will be willing to commit a decent amount of time to streaming on their site every week and appears to have a preference for livestream sellers who have an experienced host and professional studio space and equipment ready to go.
Toward that end, it also appears that eBay is working to create an incentive program for eBay Live, with a new job ad looking to hire an Incentive Program Manager specifically to "set up new onboarding processes for Live sellers, design incentive programs to increase streaming hours, and develop seller communication programs."
It certainly wouldn't be the first time eBay has sought to incentivize certain selling activity on the site - for example, eBay will often offer subsidies to sellers who participate in the Daily Deals program, make up the difference between retail and average market price for sellers who provide inventory to the eBay Top Star program, or offer other subsidized, invite only discount and promotional opportunities.
That last point in the job ad - "think creatively to overcome organizational or technological challenges" - is particularly crucial as eBay Live has suffered some very embarrassing technical problems, like the recent Elton John Charity Event that experienced terrible pixelation, extreme lag and buffering that turned everyone on camera into unidentifiable blobs of color moving around the screen.
Liz Morton
Those tech failures are clearly on eBay's mind in the seller application process as well, as they admit eBay Live doesn't "currently support some use cases that you may be used to seeing on other Live platforms" so they're looking to recruit tech savvy merchants who are "comfortable dealing with technical challenges and creating workarounds" because they will "likely encounter friction" in the product experience.
All of that might be understandable and could be maybe even be forgiven if this was a newly launched product, but it is absolutely inexcusable that this 2+ year old "beta" test is still in such a state that disclaimers like that are needed.
No matter how much media manipulation they attempt to try to "position eBay as a top-tier technology company", it's clear that technical misexecution is still a huge problem at the company and executive leadership in that area from Chief Technology Officer Mazen Rawashdeh and Chief Product Office Eddie Garcia is failing to keep up with the competition.
Liz Morton
Why would tech savvy sellers who already have their own solid social media following choose the "friction" of a buggy experience that doesn't cover needed use cases and requires "workarounds" instead of just using their existing social media accounts or other livestream selling options?
