The second day of the eBay Live user conference kicked off with a panel session of top eBay executives.
Longtime employee and official eBay Ambassador Jim "Griff" Griffith walked onto the stage at Saturday's Keynote event to a standing ovation. He introduced a panel of eBay executives consisting of President and CEO Meg Whitman, COO Maynard Webb and Jeff Jordan, Sr VP of U.S. business.
The panel fielded questions collected from conference attendees and read aloud by Griff. There were several questions concerning international site issues, such as translation features, and eBay revealed that eBay Germany would host an eBay Live event in Berlin in
September.
Questions ranged from, "What is eBay doing to ensure the identity and survival of the Mom and Pop businesses as they try to compete with the corporate world?" to "What will the next hot categories be?"
Meg Whitman told the crowd that the questions with answers would be posted on the eBay community boards so that all members could see them.
Maynard Webb, who was brought on by Whitman and is credited with accomplishing site stability, said Friday was eBay's last scheduled outage. eBay had previously shut down every Friday between 1 - 3 am PDT to perform site maintenance.
eBay users asked several questions about what eBay was doing to bring new buyers to the site. The "Do It eBay" television campaign may be run on Hispanic television stations, Jeff Jordan said when asked.
eBay recently launched an optional feature that allows users to pay eBay fees with PayPal. Webb said eBay is working on automating that process so PayPal would automatically deduct eBay fees from users bank accounts, if sellers desire.
eBay also took questions from the audience. One seller got applause when she asked why non-paying bidders were allowed to leave her negative feedback, and another asked why users had to pay $20 to Square Trade to get "accidental" negative feedback removed.
Webb said NPBs (non-paying bidders) is "the biggest issue we continue to have, and we are working to address it."
The problem of unsolicited email, or spam, was raised several times. Webb said eBay is working on product features to make messaging safer, so that users would know an email is coming from eBay. Webb did not release details.
