eBay CEO Jamie Iannone celebrated Pierre Omidyar’s founding of the company 25 years ago with a post on the eBay Blog.
Iannone reviewed some of eBay’s highlights, writing, “Our marketplace is filled with storied firsts — from helping catapult the Beanie Babies craze in 1997 to being one of the first companies to launch an iPhone ecommerce app in 2008; hosting a record-setting charity auction for a power lunch with Warren Buffet that went for $3.46 million in 2012 to enabling shoppers to search by image in 2017.”
And he said the company was focused on where it’s headed next. “eBay is ready to embrace all the challenges and opportunities of the new decade and beyond. We are keenly focused on our future because of our history as pioneers, forging our own path. Looking ahead, our next chapter is all about unlocking the untapped potential of eBay’s core marketplace while keeping our core values intact — and propel our customers toward even greater success.”
To usher in that future, Iannone said he will accelerate a tech-led reimagination of eBay, claiming its place as the best global marketplace for buyers and sellers. “We will focus on defending our core — embracing the roots of our marketplace — and building modern and compelling experiences for current and future generations of customers.”
And he described how he will go about doing so. “We aspire to be the partner of choice for sellers, simplifying and upleveling the selling experience for small businesses and entrepreneurs while advocating on their behalf and still delivering on their needs. We’ll double down on evolving our shopping experience so it is fresher, more enriched and simpler to not only attract and retain buyers but to cultivate life-long, trusted relationships with them.”
You can read the full post on the eBay blog.
Blah Blah Blah
This garbage is what you get when you need to put out Wall Street fluff.
eBay 24/7/365 is at war with its sellers – for the San Jose Mafia – its ALWAYS Defcon 5.
If you want to work with sellers – then get good CS help and listen to them. When they are wrong then they are wrong – but when they arent – dont try to TOS them into oblivion just because “you can”.
First off, is it really a blog if no one can respond to it? That’s just an announcement page.
Secondly, “while keeping our core values intact “, does eBay have any values? Unless their core value is to stick their hand in the seller’s pocket at every opportunity.
Shanna 🙂
eBays “core values” are theft, deception and coercion – at every turn – so eBay is indeed keeping its 25 year “tradition” alive.
They DID give me $25 though ……… I suppose its nice – but it doesnt do anything to offset the losses by their crooked buyers nor the amount of time/money spent on lawyers to try and just get “whats rightfully mine”.
I find it very interesting that they reference Pierre Omidyar and eBay’s “core values” in this statement – very clearly meant to subtly link the “core values” that eBay was founded on to whatever passes for “core values” at eBay today.
I honestly believe if 1995 Pierre Omidyar could have looked into a crystal ball to see what eBay would be like at 25, he would not recognize or approve of the “values” on display on a daily basis.
Just more lip service coming out of the CEO’s mouth. Ebay does not have the talent to be able to fix their platform nor are they interested in spending the money it will take to fix it. This CEO is no different from what Wenig was in my opinion and based on how long it is taking Ebay to rewrite the back side software for Mangled Payments, I doubt very much that they will be doing anything worthwhile to help Sellers. All ‘ebay is interested in doing is digging deeper and deeper into the Sellers they have left so they can continue to make the large salaries upper management makes and manage to keep their bonus structure up in the clouds.
Ebay has not spent any time correcting any of the glitches that Sellers keep finding because they were put in their intentionally to generate additional necessary revenue for Ebay because the site just cannot produce growth any other way because of the poorly written software that Sellers are being forced to use so that Ebay can control their businesses to their advantage. Ebay still does not Beta Test their changes to the platform because they feel that is our job as their so called partners. The only partners Ebay really cares about are the Chinese who they have actual partnership agreements with. Everybody else is just another bank account for Ebay to try and tap into and steal from with their shoddily written, untested software.
The current CEO is no different than the last two. He is lying every time his lips move and is now praying that Sellers will once again believe their lies as they have done in the past. It is going to be interesting to see how Ebay deals with being a smaller company and how their main product manages to capture any of the new business that the pandemic has pushed into the marketplace. I have a feeling that once again Ebay is going to be well below the other sites when it comes to showing growth, even with the the growth the internet has shown this year due to the pandemic. They raved about their May 23% increase in revenues, but that was a drop in the bucket compared to what the other sites wound up showing as gains at that time. I have not heard much more out of them since that time, probably because they are pushing more and more business to their competitors with a shoddy platform and the new pushing of Sellers into their Mangled Payments program that they are still trying to fix after having had 5 years to prepare for this move. I wonder if they have finally reached 100,000 accounts processing through Mangled Payments out of the millions they should have had moved in July per their PayPal agreement.
Its going to take a lot more than lip service to convince me that Ebay really wants us as partners.
FORGET IT !
Not my partner, they aren’t.
HaHa, I thought a partnership work together. They can’t even keep a clean working site, just screwed up the shipping program again. Mangle payments been running almost 2 years and they don’t even have a simple financial summary page per month, pretty sure ebay doesn’t care because I can’t see no one has brought it up in 2 yrs.
“CEO Aspires to Make eBay the Partner of Choice for Sellers”
hahahaha. aspire all you want. until you end the war against sellers, learn how to tell the truth, and get some ethics fleecebay will never be a partner of choice for sellers.
Question — If you had the choice, would you prefer to sell on eBay’s platform from 2008 or today’s version?
I would take the 2008 product in a heartbeat.
Why? Because it was simple, fun, and less hassle. And I could make a decent living.
Then eBay didn’t monkey with the search results, or expect to be bribed to shill product that the buyer never asked to see, or insert themselves in all aspects of the transaction. They just offered the buyer what they asked to see and let the seller get on with it. Decent listings stood out from the pack and so I could make a little more on my stuff than others were getting.
So a strategy that says that eBay will develop its way out of its problems I think may not be the right answer. And it will take a long time to see any results (one way or the other).
As a seller I want less complexity, less friction, less interference, and lower added cost. I just want a clean shop window from which I can tell my story. I don’t want a ton of extraneous clutter on the page. I don’t want a bunch of other people’s stuff constantly being rotated through the window that I’m renting for top dollar. I want a objective and relevant measurement system that clearly allows me to show that my service level is differentiated and worth the premium that I’m asking.
This does *not* require development. I actually want eBay to turn off all that stuff they added in the misguided view that they could outgun Amazon. They could make those changes in days, not years.
If they went back to simple text match in search and put in place a feedback system that actually meant something, sellers would quickly come back.
Not everything has been a waste of effort. Guaranteed Delivery and Catalog I think are good ideas. GCX is much better too. But all the interference is unnecessary and just makes selling on eBay a chore. And most of their developments seemed geared towards accelerating the race to the bottom on price.
Jamie seems like a decent guy (not that sellers have had much chance to hear him speak yet). And certainly he understands the platform better than any of his predecessors. But I think he may actually be too close to the product.
Every Product Manager will tell you that you need more Product Managers and a bigger development budget, and that if you’re willing to wait a couple of years they’ll build you a world-beating mousetrap that will steam-roller the competition. But sometimes the correct answer is that less is more, and the KISS principle has a lot of advantages.
So if Jamie is looking to be my partner of choice, then I think that the answer may be found by remembering what made eBay great in the past and doing more of that and not being distracted by the pursuit of technology for its own sake.
Ebay needs to Onboard Stripe Payments before I would waste a brain cell reconsidering coming back to Ebay.
That Ebay has separated from PayPal is a lie.
Ebay is a hot mess right now.
Radioactive…..
I want STRIPE ONLY….I never ever use PayPal.
No masking of buyers.
Stay OUT of my business.
Just be a venue.