PESA Executive Director Jonathan Garriss sat down with AuctionBytes' Ina Steiner at eBay's recent conference and discussed a statement released by PESA on June 14th called, "Unhealthy eBay Marketplace Dynamics: Is it the finding (search), or is it buyer confidence?" in which the group characterizes the state of the eBay marketplace as unhealthy.

In the interview, Garriss also commented on announcements made during the eBay Live keynote address, such as eBay's decision to advantage PowerSeller listings in Best Match searches and the new price-plus-shipping sort option.

Garriss said the issues identified in PESA's statement (http://tinyurl.com/353lrn) would not come as a surprise to eBay because they have had an ongoing dialog with the company. "We agree on a lot of the issues. We want the implementation to be faster."

Garriss called eBay's decision to advantage "quality" listings in search results "a good start," but indicated that he doesn't think the testing of this new search feature goes far enough, since it is limited to a pull-down option in search results called Best Match.

Garriss believes eBay's new Price-plus-Shipping Sort feature is a good thing for buyers. "By and large, I think that's positive because buyers want to have some certainty as to how much is their purchase going to cost them." He agreed that the new feature could present challenges for sellers of certain items in which shipping varies depending on which part of the country they are being shipped.

Garriss said PESA released the statement because, "We want the marketplace get back to the vibrancy it once had."

Garriss will be speaking at Bear Stearns Internet Conference Call on June 21, 2007, called "eBay Live Thoughts & PESA's Letter to the Community." Replay of the session will be available through June 28: 877-519-4471 (domestic); +1-973-341-3080 (outside US); Replay Pin: 8942269

http://auctionbytes.tv/cgi-bin/video-manager/frame.pl?features&06172007e