Classic Original eBay shunted to a sub-site, future plans hint?
By Ed | February 9th, 2009 | Category: Opinion | 2 comments
Once upon a time, when a user logged into any eBay site and began browsing items, they’d be shown availability from all sellers in all countries.
It’s a couple of years now (at least) since that was a true condition. BuildaSkill is heavily on record regarding the trans-Atlantic visibility debacle of early 2007, and as the news-breaker of the unannounced introduction of fees for International Site Visibility (early 2008).
Last week, Justin Marcucci of eBay’s Global Buying Hub team made an announcement on the main dot com announcement board that seems to have flown under most observers’ radars.
Once again, it is the topic of international visibility, this time supported by the subject of automatic currency (price and shipping) conversion, that looks like it is up for a “revamp” across the wider eBay platform … but none of the bloggosphere seems to have picked up the connotations in the announcement.
Side note – eBay are getting good at doing this, they seem to have conditioned eBay commentators to now watch the eBayInkBlog and discussion boards for truly earth-shattering announcements, and the primary communications channel of the Announcements Board for the mundane and routine, leaving eBay able to say, “but we did tell you” when the news is overlooked.
I know there will be eBayphiles who read this that think the announcement contains only good news, but I am seriously concerned about the way in which the relevance for sellers is consigned to an afterthought-style footnote. The information supplied for buyers states -
How does the Global Buying Hub work for buyers?
Just go to http://global.ebay.com, designate your home country, and select one of 13 supported languages. The Global Buying Hub interface appears in your language, with your country’s currency and time zone. When you search, you’ll see relevant products listed on any eBay site from sellers who’ve indicated they’ll ship to your country.The eBay Global Buying Hub is especially helpful when:
* You live in a country without its own eBay site. No need to search each eBay site individually. Now you can find the best deals all in one place.
* You are looking for a rare product from another country. The Global Buying Hub will allow you to find products quickly from any eBay seller anywhere in the world.
* You want to take advantage of cost savings with currency fluctuations.
The Global Buying Hub can help you find timely deals based on swings in currency values.
That first paragraph, particularly the statement I’ve underlined, is worrying to those of us who remember the good old days when eBay was a viable venue for cross-border trade. That particular function is supposed to be a core function of the main site in eBay’s (retired) claim of being “the world’s global marketplace“, which has now been downgraded to being just “the world’s marketplace“. It is indicative that the future eBay core will be a group of isolated and introspective single-country sites, with an external function for international sales and purchases.
How does the Global Buying Hub work for sellers?
When you create your listings on eBay.com, just specify that you’ll ship worldwide or choose specific countries or regions. Your listings will automatically be included in Global Buy Hub search results—at no extra cost.
Again, this element of the announcement is disingenuous – it smacks of expectation setting for new sellers who never saw the global-reaching old functions of classic eBay. The fact this element is also relegated to a footnote reveals a subconscious (or conscious) effort to mask the news for sellers behind the news for buyers. The entire statement is exactly what used to happen within core eBay, but now appears to be heading for the wastelands of a sub-site that the overwhelming majority of users have never heard of, and which appears to be available only on the dot com site. Remember what happened to eBay Express, and ask yourself if the Global Buying Hub will go the same way.
Another way to read the hidden message in the announcement is that the main core sites are going to lose all browse and search filtering for international visibility, leaving only the filters for domestic search by distance/state/city etc. and that only sellers registered on a particular country-site will have their products visible on that country-site.
By implication this means that if an overseas seller lists on any eBay site other than their own, their listing will not show on that other site, except via the Global Buying Hub. This is a serious breach of functional trust that paying customers have in eBay as a sales channel. It was not what was intended when Pierre Omidyar built the platform, nor was it implied in his original core precepts regarding members.
For example on the US dot com site – it could be coming that only products from sellers located in the US and registered on the US site, will show on the eBay US core browse and search results. Products from any other country will be shunted to visibility through the Global Buying Hub only. If this is going ahead, and it is an “if” right now, then this is further evidencing of eBay moving to an Amazon style seller-management policy.
Further hints of this direction lie in the unlikely location of eBay’s affiliate management program, the eBay Partner Network (ePN), which after withdrawing from Commission Junction (CJ) last year, now segregates affiliate opportunities by eBay marketplace (AU, UK, US, etc.) whereas the CJ program offered global programming.
In particular this is causing massive distress to professional affiliates, whereby, as an example, if an affiliate runs a site dealing with marine leisure craft, in the past they could obtain a single set of search results from eBay worldwide to display as a “catalogue” of boats for sale. Now, they have to obtain separate results from each eBay site and display them on separate lists or pages. This causes a massive increase in effort when site or dynamic-catalogue building.
This in turn confuses and frustrates browsers who have many more pages and layers to navigate, and are likely to give up before they click through to an eBay listing. Will we see the Global Buying Hub get an ePN program of its own? I doubt it – that would make life far too easy for the webmasters who make a living by promoting eBay and eBay sellers’ listings.
In summarising, if my predictions from the announcement come to pass, then it will demonstrate that eBay management have truly forgotten that they operate on the world wide web. This is already apparent in that eBay are increasingly dropping the “www” prefix from most announced or published URLs, although it is often still there in embedded and encoded URLs, showing that at least the techies still understand their operations arena.
When a solely Internet-based company forgets that fact, then shareholders must act and remove the management. Perhaps, given the size of eBay as a micro-economy and it’s effect on the world’s netizens, it is time for the US government to step in, and for President Obama to live up to his pre-inauguration statements about being a friend of the self-employed and small businesses?
Ed
Will you continue using eBay if it breaks with its roots and shunts global trading out to a sub-site? Or have you done so already for other reasons? Post a comment and let us know.
Hi Ed,
I really *hope* that you are being paranoid and reading too much into the announcement. No offence meant, and I suspect that you hope the same thing.
If this simple prediction turns out to be correct my Ebay business would be routed instantly :
Quote: “By implication this means that if an overseas seller lists on any eBay site other than their own, their listing will not show on that other site, except via the Global Buying Hub. “
While I don’t believe that that will happen, I am certainly not discounting your reading of the situation. Ebay, in my opinion, has not been comfortable with the “World Wide” aspect of the World Wide Web since the time that they floated as a public company. All sorts of things have been done to discourage sellers from listing beyond national borders, some by design, some because Ebay does not understand their own marketplace.
At the current time, in spite of the global financial meltdown, my sales on Ebay are booming worldwide. Both my clearance rates and some of my prices currently reflect the strongest of times since I have been on Ebay. I list on three Ebay sites, the Australian, British and American sites. Everything is listed as worldwide, and the items that I list on the US site use the International site visiblity that gives them a boost into the UK market (and also assists some Europeans finding items). At the current time, while the population and economy of Australia is relatively small, our economy and banking system is relatively healthy. When I list items for the international marketplace in US dollars, people here in Australia that search for Australian listings only will see those items, and I often get increased competition from people that do not look at the wider scope of Ebay sites where the same items may be more common and selling cheaper (the same applies to the UK visibility – as much as I resented the idea of paying extra for using the World Wide part of the World Wide Web, the advantage of added competition from UK residents who do not see similar items listed on the American site, make this a very cost effective and profitable tool within the Ebay marketplace).
Further fragementing the ways that items are found though, will reduce competition and prices. Auctions are reliant on competition to work, and the broader the exposure the better they will work – it is a basic principle of auctions that has been true for a few hundred years. Ebay’s big advantage was that it stepped up auction competition from being either local or National, to being accessable internationally by anyone who had an internet competition. Prior to that it was only the elite (auctioneers, items or people) that really participated in International auctions. Thus bringing an auction system where the vendor had complete control over their minimum price for even minor items, suddenly meant that all levels of players could participate from anywhere worldwide, and resulted in the growth of Ebay that can only be described as a phenomenom.
Since going public though, Ebay has constantly tried to reinvent the wheel, ideally being able to charge extra for each spoke that they can add. In the process they have alienated many users, lost their growth and much goodwill, and subsequently panicked, while they are basically a very profitable low overhead high cashflow business. It is sad and frustrating. Instead of fragmenting the International marketplace, they should be embracing it, as it stands to make their business much more recession proof. The fact is, if you can target your items to countries or economies that want the items and/or have more available disposable money, you can play the differences in the market to the advantage of everyone involved in the transaction. Ebay fails to recognise this and it is but one aspect of their management that stunts their growth.
Kind Regards, Kevin
Hi Kevin,
Like you, I too hope that I am only being paranoid.
Three years ago I would not even have spotted the “hint” despite already being long in the eBay-tooth even then. However, intense micro-examination of all announcements, forum comments, and the like from eBay staff, for the last three years, has left me apparently knowing their psyche better than my own – and able to predict where they are going from the words between the lines. I’m not always right of course, but I have an impressive record of pre-guessing them (even if I say so myself – I’m in one of those moods today
so be warned).
In this case, the clues are there, in the same way that the clues were in place for the genocide of SIF listings on UK after the testing done in Italy and Germany, and, though I completely missed it, also for the exclusion of foreign store subscribers from the fee reductions the UK now gives to it’s resident and blackmailed shopkeepers.
I took a digital tongue-lashing from several eBay big names between late-September and early December, last year, for my constant “harping on” about increasing xenophobia, protectionism, and nationalist (nazi-like) exclusionary policy-creepage (particularly from the UK site). I stand by those accusations and the allegations I made.
eBay, I feel, is going the way of McDonald’s, KFC, and all the other global franchise operations – one global brand, but localised products and policies, with “local-quality” customer service and pricing, and each marketplace isolated from each other territory under the brand. Although I fully expect, I sincerely do not want, eBay to be pre-empting a major monopolies / anti-trust action of the type that caused Microsoft to be court-ordered to fragment at the start of this decade. The last 18 months certainly feels as if they are attempting avoidance of such a court battle.
eBay’s value as a marketplace, and as a stockholder-investment, relies entirely on a unified marketplace, and I believe the stock’s price this last 14 months fully reflects that the franchise consultant in charge at San Jose has made a complete and utter cardboard-burger out of a prime rump steak.
Ed