eBay
EBay To Cut Jobs and Restructure
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 20, 2008 | Share This
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Reuters reports today that eBay will be cutting some staff in what a company spokesperson calls a “globalization and centralization effort.” The number to be cut is less than 1% of eBay’s workforce, the spokesperson said, which could be as many as 150 people, as eBay has around 15,500 employees, according to Portfolio.com. With recent news that eBay dumped its partner ValueClick in favor of handling its affiliate network in-house, it looks like eBay is focused on making a lot of improvements in advance of its Q1 earnings call in April.
Despite a seller’s strike over increases in fee listings, Wired reports that eBay’s doing very well, though Don Reisinger at CNET’s News Blog argues that’s because eBay’s got no competition. Reisinger writes that eBay’s decisions over the last few years have made the company forget its core service as an auction site:
eBay is an auction site much like Christies is an auction house. Do you see “Buy it Now” features promoted at the Christies auction? Can people attending the auction make VoIP calls during it? Do they really want buying advice?
eBay has lost its way and the only reason it’s able to enjoy these profits is because there’s no company out there that’s willing to compete on such a grand scale. But why not? eBay is obviously worried about the future and auctions are still a viable way to buy products. If a company came along that finally revolutionized online auctions, the entire landscape of the business could be changed forever and eBay would be long forgotten.
EBay’s CEO Meg Whitman is leaving at the end of this month, and with eBay’s new focus reportedly being on platforms and distributing its content, I think that might be the revolutionary push the company needs to restore its past glory.
Proximic Adds eBay, Yahoo Auction Listings to Contextual Network
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 16, 2008 | Share This
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German contextual advertising startup Proximic has signed deals with Yahoo Shopping and eBay-owned Shopping.com to start serving auction listings on its network, reports VentureBeat. Proximic is comparable to Google’s AdSense, but its technology relies on something called proximity matching–deciphering text patterns and word shapes on a webpage–rather than AdSense’s keyword matching, and thus delivers more relevant ads, according to MarketingVOX. Proximic serves ads via a widget that publishers can add to their sites, and also via a Firefox browser plug-in.
Should Google be worried? Probably. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld notes that click-through rates for Proximic ads are as high as 1.5%, much higher than those of AdSense, and that Proximic is creating a hybrid contextual search and affiliate marketing model, with 70% of revenue going to publishers after Yahoo and eBay take their cut. Also, the deals give Proximic a massive inventory of 50 million ads; according to Mashable, the company says Google AdSense only has 1 million ads in its inventory.
Proximic sounds like the kind of company that Google should think about buying, if only for the proximity matching. But perhaps Yahoo, having signed an ad deal, has its eye on Proximic now. Either way, the technology and all the ad inventory would be a boon for either Google or Yahoo.
Ebay Creates “Neighborhoods”
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | October 10, 2007 | Share This
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Auction giant eBay has added “Neighborhoods,” or social networks organized around product and interest categories (eg., jewelry, foodies, iPhones), to its site in what appears to be a huge overhaul of the once-bare user interface. Each neighborhood functions as a hub for reviews, guides, user blog posts, a discussion board, and photos of related products you can buy on eBay.
The new functionality feels like a Facebook group on steroids, though unlike most Facebook groups, Ebay’s neighborhoods are actually quite useful. I think they’ve done a really good job with this redesign, though Eric Schonfeld of TechCrunch makes a good point about what’s missing:
Still, what these neighborhoods are lacking is access to the outside world. What would really be smart would be if eBay allowed anyone to easily take any module on a neighborhood page—the reviews, the visual product search, the discussions, or the eBay blog posts—and embed them on other Web pages like Facebook, MySpace, or their blogs. People who are really into modern furniture might put that particular product-search module on their blog, for instance, just because it surfaces cool-looking Eames chairs and retro clocks available on eBay Making such widgets available would help draw more traffic into these shopping neighborhoods. And if eBay tied them into its affiliate-fee program that pays for each referral that results in a sale, you’d have these widgets all over the place.
eBay takes on Google
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Written By Mohammad Usman | July 9, 2007 | Share This
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In the ongoing battle between Google Checkout and Paypal, eBay recently delivered another blow by publicly denouncing Google Checkout’s performance. On Friday, Bloomberg published an article quoting eBay CEO Meg Whitman, in which she calls attention to both Google’s poor user ratings and PayPal’s revenue contribution. From Bloomberg,
“In recent surveys, the world’s largest auctioneer found that less than one out of five users of Google’s Checkout online payment service was happy with it. At EBay’s PayPal, the figure was more than double that. Meanwhile, PayPal, bought by EBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, has widened its lead over Checkout since the holiday season.”
Granted, eBay owns PayPal - it’s no wonder they support their own online payment service.
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