Auctionbytes-NewsFlash, Number 1423 - December 01, 2006 - ISSN 1539-5065      Previous Story | | Next Story

By Ina Steiner
AuctionBytes.com
December 01, 2006
Reading AuctionBytes: eBay Holds Last Town Hall of the Year

Thursday's eBay Town Hall meeting took place in a new format: on the radio. eBay took its monthly virtual "meeting" with community members to WSradio, the online radio station that produces "eBay Radio" with eBay University Dean of Education Jim "Griff" Griffith. The new format allowed for quicker playback, and listeners were able to call in and ask questions over the phone.

Griff moderated the Town Hall panel that included eBay North America President Bill Cobb, eBay Trust & Safety's Matt Halpern, and executives from the product team, shipping, customer service, advanced selling solutions, marketing and PayPal.

eBay has been conducting Town Hall meetings since February 2005, Cobb said, and as usual, members asked compelling questions. Many revolved around trust & safety issues such as account takeovers, suspended accounts, the issue of excessive shipping charges, feedback ratings and online dispute resolution. One caller who had bid on Dell laptops had received three TKO notices in the four days. (eBay sends TKO notices to let bidders know that the seller of the item they have won has been suspended, sometimes due to an account hijacking. Fake TKO notices are also used by phishers to luring bidders into off-eBay transactions.)

Some interesting points coming out of the Town Hall Event include:

• eBay experienced traffic on Cyber Monday consisting of 12 million unique visitors.
• eBay receives 150,000 customer service inquires per day.
• eBay will introduce "Feedback 2.0" (no date was given) in which buyers will be able to rate sellers on shipping & handling.
• eBay is considering some type of pardon for negative feedback if left a long time ago if the member has shown good behavior since.
• eBay will introduce "total cost" search capability sometime over the winter months. Total cost includes the price of the item plus the shipping costs.
• eBay is working with its partner Pitney Bowes, which powers the USPS label printing on PayPal, to introduce scan form for USPS tracking. They are aiming for February. eBay is also working on a large shipping-tracking project to bring back tracking information into My eBay for buyers and sellers (no date was indicated). That would allow buyers to log into their eBay accounts and confirm that the seller shipped their package.
• Since Yahoo took over serving ads on eBay, there are no concrete plans to replace the discontinued eBay Keyword ad program, though they are looking at ways to offer sellers a way to advertise exclusively on eBay in the future.
• eBay is planning on investing heavily in search features and in search infrastructure throughout 2007, though they don't feel there is anything wrong with the current system.
• eBay said buyers don't follow through with payments (unpaid item, or UPI) about 1-2 percent of the time. eBay does not refund fees on optional features sellers have paid for in UPI circumstances.
• eBay said there is no significance to the new listing item numbers, despite what it called "conspiracy theories" about the numbers. The listing number is a unique number that used to get assigned by category, now it is based on seller account and where that seller's account is stored on the eBay servers.
• A caller suggested eBay leave Best Offer functionality for a period of time after a listing has ended. Bill Cobb seemed particularly taken with the idea, and said the team would give it serious consideration.

http://www.wsradio.com/internet-talk.cfm/radio/townhall-landing-page.html