I spoke to executives from three long-time auction-management services last week to get their take on eBay Express. All three were positive about the new site and all believe it will bring in more buyers because of the different shopping experience eBay Express delivers.
eBay announced the new service last Wednesday. eBay Express, to be launched this Spring, will contain Store and fixed-price listings from U.S.-based sellers on eBay.com that can be purchased right away. eBay Express will contain a shopping cart. Only sellers with a 98 percent positive feedback score of at least 100 will be eligible to sell on eBay Express, and they are required to accept PayPal.
Marketworks Chief Marketing Office Paul Lundy said eBay Express "is a great move to attract new and different kind of buyers," and said it expands the eBay footprint. The focus of the new site is on new goods, he said, though sellers are allowed to sell refurbished and used goods. The eBay Express checkout is fully API enabled and will pass data from the eBay Express checkout to the auction-management services.
I asked ChannelAdvisor President and CEO Scot Wingo if he felt the new site would bring in new sellers. He doesn't think so, because it's "kind of complicated," but believes it will bring in more buyers because the buying process is simplified. "It's more of an Amazon kind of shopping experience with the shopping cart and with no bidding." Wingo said eBay Express brings back search results sorted by relevance, not time ending, and can be sorted by different criteria.
eBay CEO Meg Whitman said in a conference call last week that eBay Express leverages Shopping.com's catalog technology. eBay acquired Shopping.com last year, and it allows a great deal of flexibility in sorting and filtering search results, and may indicate how eBay Express might look. The difference of course is that shoppers can actually purchase items on eBay Express. On Shopping.com, users are taken to the merchant's own website to buy the item.
I asked Vendio's Executive Vice President for Sales Management Mike Effle whether sellers would still need storefront services if they choose to sell items on eBay Express. He said sellers are unable to cross-sell and upsell on eBay Express. With Storefronts like Vendio's, buyers are taken to a checkout system where sellers can promote additional items to buyers as they complete the transaction. For example, a seller might display camera cases to buyers who are purchasing digital cameras. With eBay Express, buyers select items from multiple sellers, and are taken to an eBay Express checkout. eBay itself may be able to cross-promote additional items, but from across all eBay Express sellers.
Effle also said the PayPal team has done work related to expanding the confirmed addresses in its system, which may help ease sellers' concern over having to ship to unconfirmed addresses.
The good news with eBay Express is that sellers can still offer combined shipping - items on the eBay Express checkout are grouped by seller.
Items found on eBay Express are a subset of eBay.com. Those items continue to show up on fixed-price searches of eBay.com and eBay Stores. That may present sellers with the biggest challenge - there's no way for them to have different policies for eBay Express items than for eBay Store and fixed-price items. But if the auction-management services are correct, many eBay sellers will be up for the challenge if it means more sales.
http://pages.ebay.com/sell/announcement/overview/express.html
