eBay Spring Seller Check In - Q & A With Product Teams
eBay recently held the Spring Seller Check In event, with one main presentation and then additional breakout and networking sessions after the main events.
The main presentation was recorded and you can find the replay and commentary here:
Liz Morton
Unfortunately, eBay decided not to provide replays of the breakout sessions. The platform that eBay uses for these events, Bevy, does have recording capability for all sessions. Since they have multiple breakouts overlapping, and it's not possible to attend them all real time, it's disappointing they've chosen not to record the breakouts as well.
I hope eBay decides to make all content from seller check ins available in the future.
For this check in, I chose to attend the breakout sessions Q & A With Product Teams hosted by VP Stores Tom Pinckney and Director Advertising Growth Julie Klein.
Stores
Tom revealed from the data eBay has collected, they see Stores drive conversion - buyers who visit a store have a 20% higher repeat purchase rate with that seller than those who didn't visit the store and buyers who visit a store spend 25%-50% more depending on category.
He then went through some of the new stores enhancements that have rolled out over the last few months like marketing and promotion banners, About video, and the feedback module.
Liz Morton
Liz Morton
Liz Morton
Automated inventory strips - previously you had to manually create inventory strips for your store like "newly added". eBay will now automate strips or feeds for "newly added" and "ending soonest" and sellers will still have the option to manually create other inventory strips as needed.
Newsletters now have an option to send coupons to subscribers, with segmenting for repeat buyers coming soon (let's hope it works better than the send coupons to buyer groups feature that was recently rolled out missing key functionality).
Ads
Julie Klein basically just gave an overview of the various advertising options that eBay has expanded on in the last year.
Promoted Listings Standard is the ad product we've all been familiar with for years, the biggest update to this product last year was the addition of external visibility for these ads.
Liz Morton
Promoted Listings Advanced is eBay's cost per click ad product that gives sellers access to the top slot in search results (more ad slots coming soon!).
Liz Morton
And Promoted Listings Express is eBay's ad product for auctions.
Liz Morton
Julie also highlighted recent updates in reporting capabilities and informaiton provided in the new advertising dashboard in Seller Hub.
Liz Morton
None of what Julie talked about was new information or looking forward. Everything in her segment had been previously announced or released to sellers before this event.
Surprisingly, there was no mention of the new ad product to promote Stores that VP GM Global Advertising Alex Kazim announced in his presentation at Investor Day earlier the same day as this seller check in.
That's right - if you thought all of these recent Stores updates were just eBay's way of helping us sellers out, be prepared...eBay fully plans to monetize these enhancements through advertising as well.
Q & A
Just a few of the more interesting questions and answers from this breakout session.
Is there a way to see sales that are coming from your store vs your listing?
Tom:
No, there's not. We're thinking about how to do it. It's a little more complicated just because buyers may look at a listing, go into your store, browse some, go back to a listing, so it's hard to say that this sale came specifically from your store...
...and so we would prefer to think about just the sales we're able to generate for you regardless of the exact click path they go through to make that sale.
What's the best way to find keywords that customers are searching for to promote?
Julie:
They should use suggested keywords and search query reports and again lots of even more detailed information specifically on those reports within seller center and campaign dashboard.
Why isn't the store icon on all pages?
Tom:
It's coming, we're working on it. There are a lot of different experience across eBay that we're updating and we're doing an audit of all the experiences to see where Stores should be linked from, where does it make sense to show a customer that you have a store and frankly some places where it doesn't necessarily make sense.
If we think they're about to convert, we don't necessarily want to get in the way, so it's an ongoing process to get all of the links and icons across the site updated.
Is there any data on effectiveness of Promoted Listings Express (for auctions)?
Julie
Definitely still a new tool, getting a lot of great seller feedback but the initial results listings with Promoted Listings Express got roughly 48% more views and nearly 20% more bids than if not promoted.
While it wasn't part of the official presentation, I did ask in the chat about the 2.5% FVF social sharing discount Tom had discussed back in August at eBay Open Online.
Tom said:
It's coming soon. It's going into a limited release in AU. As they say, that took longer than expected. 🙂
Liz Morton
Did you attend any of the other eBay Spring Seller Check In breakout sessions? Let us know what you thought about them in the comments below!
