eBay held an online Town Hall meeting with its Vice President of Marketing and Merchandising Michael Dearing last Thursday evening. eBay users were invited to hear Dearing discuss the strategy behind recent category changes on eBay, including Item Specifics and "category rollups."

eBay buyers and sellers have been concerned about eBay's move toward Item Specifics because of its effect on how potential bidders find items. Visitors to eBay often browse categories in addition to searching for items on eBay. Sellers are careful in choosing which categories their items appear in, sometimes spending extra to have the item appear in more than one category - listing in two categories doubles the listing fee and listing upgrades.

eBay members tuned in to last week's Town Hall to get answers to questions about Item Specifics, Pre-fill and category rollups, the elimination of some lower-level categories. At least 200 eBay members attended the online meeting.

When participants expressed concern that sales may be going down due to the changes, eBay's Michael Dearing responded, "All indications are that gross merchandise sales in these categories are beating our expectations for growth."

He went on to explain that eBay tracks buying and spending activity very carefully in all of the categories that have Item Specific changes. "The growth rates have either held or increased, and buyer usage of the product finders is increasing rapidly, particularly in video games, movies and music. We expect to see the same effect in books." (eBay will begin rolling up the Book category within the next few days.)

Dearing also said, "Category changes in books, movies, music, and video games are among the most significant that we anticipate on the site. For example, it is likely that category changes due to Item Specifics being introduced in other categories such as collectibles, sporting goods, apparel, jewelry will be more mild if they occur at all."

The recent changes to the way buyers and sellers search and sell in media categories may have something to do with eBay's plans to do away with its Half.com site, which will be gone in less than 3 months. Half.com specialized in selling books and media under a different model than eBay.com.

When one user asked a specific question about why there was no "musicals" genre for DVDs, Dearing started to explain how that former subcategory could now be found as an attribute in Item Specifics. But when he went to look it up, he found there was no such attribute for musicals. "Values for attributes in Item Specifics will evolve much like the category structure evolved, and your input is critical to that process,…We will investigate why musicals was left off the list and get back to you."

Dearing fielded other questions from eBay members who were concerned about the changes and the transition period, and he promised to put the transcripts of the meeting online this week at the following URL:

http://pages.ebay.com/event/categorystrategy/index.htm