eBay Open 2024 Day 1 - Where's The New Stuff?
CEO Jamie Iannone kicked of eBay Open 2024 with a keynote presentation heavy on platitudes about how much eBay loves its sellers, but it will take more than uninspiring speeches and stale announcements of "new" not really new features to keep sellers coming back for more.
The theme for this year (repeated by several presenters) seems to be "eBay: we win, when you win."
At least someone seems to have finally given Jamie the message to drop his favorite old line about eBay not competing with their sellers.
That claim has arguably been questionable for years, but is definitely no longer true now that eBay is selling on their own site under their subsidiary TCGPlayer brand in direct competition with third party collectible card game sellers - and it's a good bet the increasing regulatory scrutiny and FTC attention on this issue in particular heavily influenced the script writing process for today's event.
Liz Morton
Of course it wouldn't be an eBay event without eBay glitches with many sellers reporting they were kicked out of the main session and having trouble signing back in, receiving an error saying their ability to participate had been "restricted."
One seller posted in the chat: "I am also restricted....I hate to say this, however this is typical Ebay GLITCHES" - yikes!
Announcements/"New" Features
Jamie, General Manager US Dawn Block, Chief Product Officer Eddie Garcia, VP Seller Experience Xiaodi Zhang, VP Buyer Experience Blair Ethington and others all took a turn introducing "new" features and experiences on the platform and talking about eBay's commitment to sellers.
Best Offers Experience
Jamie said the "new" best offer experience will require all US buyers to provide a form of payment for placing an order.
It's unclear if that means eBay will be removing the option from sellers to set their own requirements and decide for themselves if they wish to require immediate payment on offers - but if eBay does remove that option, history suggests sellers will not be very happy about it.
Liz Morton
Jamie also said there will "soon" be new consequences for non-paying buyers, but failed to provide any details about what those consequences will be, leaving sellers skeptical especially after the recent change to extend the offer acceptance timeframe to 4 days with no notice.
Liz Morton
Updated Search Design
Iannone also talked about eBay's latest efforts to "reimagine" search but when the new experience was rolled out in August with promises of a more seamless, intuitive and reach design, savvy users struggled to find anything actually new or innovative in the update.
Liz Morton
eBay Live
eBay Live has expanded to include select clothing and fashion sellers with VP GM Global Verticals Ashish Chhabra saying they will also be introducing a new and improved Live Hub to better showcase seller's Live events.
Hopefully that includes some serious investments on the tech side to avoid a repeat of the Elton John Charity Event debacle in June.
Liz Morton
eBay International Shipping Combined Shipping
Chief Product Officer Eddie Garcia held out combined shipping in the eBay International Shipping program as a prime example of eBay's innovative tools and experiences to help sellers - but didn't mention that has been an almost year long rollout that still isn't quite working in many scenarios.
Liz Morton
AI Background Enhancer
Garcia's other example, the AI-powered background enhancer, is at least a little fresher, having been introduced in June 2024.
Liz Morton
Simplified Listing Flow
VP Seller Experience Xiaodi Zhang previewed a new simplified listing flow for the eBay app experience, but her comments about the shipping experience in the listing flow received a strong response from an experienced seller in the eBay community.
wastingtime101
WOW eBay got this WRONG:
Xiaodi: I would be remiss not to mention shipping today. First, we are simplifying shipping related decisions for you during the listing flow. We are pre-selecting the best options for your items so you can list without having to worry about shipping options. Our goal is to reduce the number of clicks as much as possible in order for you to list even faster.
Hi Xiaodi - sellers want less clicks, correct. But you're doing it in the wrong area!! When it comes to setting up shipping I hear from numerous sellers about how eBay's prefilled estimates are costing them money because the estimates are not good enough to accommodate the items they're selling. There is no substitute or shortcut for a seller entering actual weight/dimensions when they are new to shipping and don't know what they're doing!
Less clicks in Seller Hub, please - the new overview menu is awful because it takes 6 clicks just to filter by 1 single sub-category.
AI-Powered Bulk Listing Tool
Xiaodi also introduced the "new" Magical Bulk Listing tool for trading cards, which eBay has blasted out to media today with a press release - but this feature actually started rolling out in July, proving once again if you want to know what's really going on at eBay, don't wait for the press release. 😉
Liz Morton
Also, does eBay just expect nobody to notice the magical abracadabra switcheroo they appear to be trying to pull by promoting this new image-based bulk listing tool that only works for trading cards and not talking about the Magical Listing Tool that Iannone promised over a year ago would allow all sellers to just take a picture and have AI do the rest to create a listing?
Liz Morton
A year after showing a video mockup to wow investors, that version of the Magical Listing tool is still in beta testing with a very small cohort of select sellers and has yet to be seen in the wild.
Meanwhile smaller competitors like Mercari, Poshmark, and Depop have all beat eBay to the punch.
Liz Morton
Seller Hub Transformative Changes
Xiaodi then went on to describe some of the "transformative" changes eBay has recently made to Seller Hub - spoiler alert, sellers are largely unhappy with many of these changes.
Liz Morton
She also put a plug in for the new Ads Dashboard, which has been criticized by some for removing transparency and granularity from the Promoted Listings management experience
But eBay doesn't particularly seem to care about seller opinions on this one as they pump money into running paid advertising and sponsored influencer campaigns extolling the supposed benefits while ignoring the Ask Me About eBay Ads discussion in their own community forum.
Liz Morton
"New" View Item Page
VP Buyer Experience Blair Ethington started her segment talking about the "new" View Item Page that was unveiled last year.
Liz Morton
It's very telling (and in my opinion very disingenuous) that the screenshot shown on the screen while she was talking is completely absent any of the many Promoted Listings Ads that eBay currently stuffs on each and every page.
Here's what Blair showed:
And here's what an average listing page actually looks like with a competitor banner Promoted Display Store ad at the top, at least one row of Promoted "Similar" items, and a scrolling carousel with at least 12 more sponsored competitor ads all showing before you even get to the seller provided description (ads highlighted in pink.)
And it gets even worse than that - if you keep scrolling past the description, you may find 300+ additional ads depending on how many modules eBay has placed on the page and whether they have engaged the "infinite scroll" option to keep showing more.
So much for that promise the new Listing Page design was going to "bring critical information like Item specifics and seller description higher up on the page before any modules that show other items & ads" huh?
AI-Powered Discovery Tools
Blair also introduced AI discovery tools eBay has created to enhance the buying experience like Shop The Look and Explore - both of which have again are not exactly new.
Liz Morton
And that was about it for the main presentation.
There were also multiple breakout sessions throughout the day, but sellers commenting in the eBay community seem mostly disappointed, particularly in the lack of adequate time for Q&A.
wastingtime101
Has anybody ever noticed how things like the Keynote that talk about general overviews move sloooow and you want them to move faster, but the break-out sessions that discuss specific changes are fast-paced and you want them to move slower and allow a longer window for Q&A?
I'm finding so much of the talk to be... vapid. The side pane of chat is flying by so fast, with so many participants, that real conversation back and forth is nonexistent; it's more like a parade of one-liners. It is what it is...
Waiting for the "Creating a compelling listing" presentation to start. If they start telling us to use AI for our descriptions... well, let's not go there...
All of the sessions in this first block are for less experienced sellers.
eBay used to label these sessions with "beginner" or "experienced" - I wish they did that this year because it would have saved me a ton of time where I could have been doing other things.
I'm seeing less questions answered this year than in past years.
I know we're still near the beginning, but if we're comparing this year's eBay Open to the last 4 Opens (starting 2020), this one hits the bottom of the list. By miles.
I haven't heard much from people who attended the in person kick off events around the country last night - but it's great to see workers from TCGPlayer TCGUnion-CWA and the Responsible Online Commerce Coalition doing some outreach promoting their eBay Seller Survey to gain insights into how sellers feel they are being treated by the platform.
eBay Open 2024 will wrap up tomorrow, but unfortunately the Value Added Resource recap will likely be delayed as Hurricane Helene is set to pass this way in the next 24 hours - stay safe out there and let us know in the comments what you think of eBay Open 2024 so far!
