eBay's three top executives answered questions from buyers and sellers on Saturday morning, the third day of the eBay Live conference taking place in New Orleans. Jim "Griff" Griffith inroduced CEO Meg Whitman, COO Maynard Webb and Senior Vice President of North American Business Jeff Jordan to the audience at the 9am session.
Griff read aloud questions from eBay buyers and sellers. The topics ranged from concerns about large sellers taking business away from small sellers, to large-volume fee discounts, to global trading issues on the auction site.
One attendee wanted to know if Meg and Pierre buy on eBay. Meg said yes, she buys sporting goods for her kids, fishing equipment for herself, and her husband buys polo shirts. "We buy all the time," she said.
Another attendee wanted to know what eBay is doing about the problem of non-paying buyers. Maynard Webb explained eBay is introducing a new system next month (called Unpaid Items). He recommended strategies for minimizing the problem, including making sure to include shipping information in the description.
Another question was, "How much do you test features and functions before you roll them out? Sometimes I wonder,..."
Maynard Webb said, "A lot." He went on to explain that there are 400 QA folks, but any bug is a bad thing. In 1999, he said, there were under 1 million lines of code on the site and 2,500 bugs. Today there are 6 million lines of code and fewer than 300 bugs.
Griff opened the floor to questions from the audience. The first question was from a seller who said he pays a 35-cent listing fee for the first item he lists and the 6,000th item that he lists. He asked eBay executives if they had given any thought to scaling pricing. There was applause from the audience. When Whitman said eBay made a strategic decision to keep a "level playing field" and not have tiered pricing, there was more applause.
Many eBay sellers are divided over whether volume discounts would be beneficial to the site or would drive off smaller sellers.
Another attendee said sometimes non-paying buyers (NPBs) leave her a negative, even though they were at fault in the transaction failure (an issue of concern for many sellers). "Is there a way to prevent NPBs from leaving me negatives?" she asked.
"We continue to leave that ability because there are circumstances where it is appropriate - it needs further evaluation," said Maynard Webb. "But we have nothing to announce at this time."
When the chair Meg Whitman was sitting on broke in the middle of the Q&A session, she took it in stride and joked that she needed to lose weight. An audience member asked her what she thought the chair would bring if sold on eBay.
Whitman is known for her composure. Facing an audience of thousands of eBayers asking tough questions, it's a good thing.
