eBay Open Online - Day 2
I noticed the videos for today's sessions were actually uploaded to YouTube yesterday. Apparently the video portion of these sessions is pre-recorded and it's only the chat sessions that are really live?
If that's case, I have to wonder why they are presenting it like a live event with scheduled overlapping sessions. I think it would have been more user friendly to simply post the videos as on demand content with a running chat feature hosted by eBay staff available to answer your questions during certain hours.
I'll post a few of the sessions I found interesting individually below - check the link at the end for the full playlist of all eBay Open videos.
Reimagining The Product Experience
It seems like Pete Thompson may have been picked to present the segment that presumably would have been covered by Harry Temkin before he announced he was leaving at the end of June.
Liz Morton
Pete covered very high level points about eBay's product strategies an seller experience pillars of Efficiency, Conversion & Profitability. Harry has covered all of those pillars in several of the Seller Check Ins through the year, so if you want more detail, check out the Seller Check In playlist on the eBay for Business Youtube channel.
Grow Your Business and Build Your Brand with eBay Stores
Tom shows some of the new enhancements to Stores. The demo shows Stores mostly in mobile, but hopefully these will make it to desktop view as well.
Again, most of this is ground that has already been covered - video in listings was first announced in the April Seller Check In and is currently still limited to sellers using a select few third party listing tools like ChannelAdvisor.
Other new Store functionality and updates Tom mentioned started to roll out in early July.
Liz Morton
One new feature was the enhancement of social sharing capability along with reduced fees to incentivize sellers to promote their listings on social media.
We all know that increasingly buyers are discovering products and getting validation of those products through their social channels. And so, first we're improving the basic capabilities of how you can go to the listing page and share your listing into these different channels.
But more importantly, we're changing the pricing to reward you and to thank you for bringing traffic to your Store and to your listings. So whenever a buyer clicks through a social link, back to your listings, back to your Store, and makes a purchase, you're only going to be charged 2.5% Final Value Fees plus a 30-cent transaction charge.
No details on exactly how the new social sharing will work and how eBay will know to attribute sales to social sharing for the lower fees, but I'll update when more information is available.
A breakout session later in the day went into more depth on the new eBay Store experience.
Coincidentally, eBay sellers reported technical problems with categories not appearing in their Stores shortly after this session, though it's not clear if it is related to any of the new Store/Categories functionality mentioned here.
Liz Morton
Driving Sales With Ad Solutions
Alex Kazim introduced Promoted Listings Advanced Cost Per Click adverting during the eBay Connect Developer Conference in June, but this may be the first time sellers have heard about it.
Promoted Listings Advanced will allow sellers to compete for the top slot in search using targeted keywords and daily budgets. This program is currently in beta status and only available in the US and UK.
Liz Morton
Harnessing the power of eBay data to optimize your business
Adi touched on seller tools like Terapeak Research and Sourcing Insights. I'd love to hear what sellers think about Sourcing Insights - it's still not working in Motors categories as far as I can tell.
Liz Morton
Oded tackled the Listing Quality Report. The Listing Quality Report was initially rolled out to some sellers back in January. I was in one of the earliest groups to gain access and provided extensive feedback in the eBay community.
Harry Temkin joined the community to address the concerns and feedback and Oded and his product management team reached out and invited me to a conference call as well. I'm glad to see much of the feedback and insight provided in those early stages has been incorporated into the LQR.
Now that variation listings and a few other enhancements have been added to the report, I'll be doing an update in the coming weeks to see how the latest iteration measures up.
Full playlist of eBay Open videos from the eBay For Business YouTube Channel
