An eBay Powerseller is working on a project this summer and will share feedback from sellers with eBay management. The kicker: he’s a college student doing a summer internship at eBay.
Sam Straus has been selling online since he was 14, and he just finished his freshman year at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. Since his first eBay sale as a teen, he has generated over $300,000 in revenue through more than 15,000 transactions.
The young man was profiled on the eBay blog today in a post tiled, “Bringing a Seller’s Perspective to eBay’s Summer Internship.”
In the profile, he shared the project he’s working on as an eBay summer intern.
“My project on the Seller Community and Engagement team is to bridge the communication gap between eBay’s small-to-medium sellers and our vertical leaders. I am creating a “feedback loop” where we can pass on comments from these sellers about a variety of issues like category-specific website bugs and suggestions for improvements. This way, managers can make better informed decisions based on comprehensive seller data.”
Straus said he was very familiar with the seller community and, as a seller himself, he can better understand how specific issues are affecting sellers’ day-to-day business operations.
The profile confirms eBay has been taking a vertical approach, though it prioritizes some categories over others, particulary Luxury Watches, Trading Cards, and Sneakers, which are getting new features and category-specific policies.
It’s striking that Straus cited as examples of seller feedback, “category-specific website bugs and suggestions for improvements.”
It’s not clear how he is communicating with sellers, but if you make contact, what would you tell Straus to pass along to eBay management?
His mistake is he thinks that eBay cares. They don’t.
I’ve been on BBC eBay since 98 with over 1 million in sales – and they don’t listen to me ….
Good luck to him !
The biggest loss for eBay management on the platform is its determined effort to move away from consumer to consumer transactions. The best buyers were other sellers. That why feedback went both ways, their thought to stop negatives for buyers because other sites didn’t rate their buyers is foolish, eBay wasn’t rating buyers, other consumers were. When people sold on eBay, they had money to spend on eBay. It was a kind of closed market, except new people were joining all the time. But their push to invite big box stores lost their way. Sure Toys R Us sold a lot, but they never bought anything. Why not be the best consumer to consumer site, instead of the 5th or 6th best business to consumer site?
Ebay management has had PowerSellers and regular sellers informing them of issues long before Donohoe took control as CEO. They didn;t listen much back then and under Donohoe they finally did start listening to Sellers. The problem was they always did the opposite of what the Sellers told them was needed and it has been that way ever since. What makes anybody think that this person is going to have any more influence with Ebay than those that were invited for roundtable conferences way back when?
I wish this person nothing but the best, but have no faith in Ebay management doing anything that is going to be good for the Sellers unless it allows them to dig even deeper into their pocketbooks. I hope he does not drink to much of the kool aid during his internship.
“what would you tell Straus to pass along to eBay management?”
1) FIRE/LAY OFF %50 of the do nothing people in San Jose
2) Close Walkers West and divide the funds between all the sellers they stole from over the last year or so
3) Wake up SLEEPY GRIFF and remind him his title is SELLER PROTECTION and not SELLER DAMAGING
4) Find the 2 Walmart idiots and explain SELLING to them ….
Straus is wasting his time. Nothing good will come from his time wasted as no one at fleecebay care about doing things that help sellers.
I thought fleecebay dumped the powersllers, or is Straus the last one?
@RL15 I didn’t catch that til you pointed it out. Eight days after ending the powerseller program, eBay touted the program (“Sam’s connection to eBay is not limited to his summer internship. He is also a Power Seller himself,…”).