eBay is reinvigorating its core market with a host of new experiments—many of them aimed at bringing in more goods for sale.
The latest, a program called Sell It Forward, literally has people mailing it in. Customers sign up on a website; have a bag with postage prepaid sent to them; and mail in clothes, shoes, and handbags. eBay's partner in the program, the San Francisco Bay Area branch of nonprofit Goodwill Industries, then will attempt to sell the goods.
eBay is debuting a new fee structure and incentives for sellers today in an effort to remain the most competitive commerce platform next to e-commerce marketplace Amazon. For the first time, eBay is launching free listings for both non-stores and stores on the platform, as well as simpler pricing.
Non-stores previously had fixed-price listings that charged $0.50 insertion fees, and then various “tranches,” or levels, of final value fees, depending on the amount of the item. Fixed-price, non-store, final-value fee tranches didn’t have a cap, either. Now, non-store pricing has one, flat final-value fee rate of 10 percent capped at $250. So the max that any non-store seller will pay is 10 percent of the transaction. Non-store consumer sellers are also allowed 50 free listings (no insertion fees) if they list auction-only or buy-it-now items. After 50 listings, sellers will be charged $0.30 per listings.
For merchants with storefronts on eBay, listing fees were previously required in addition to the monthly subscription charge. That’s changed with today’s announcement. Sellers get a discount for yearly subscriptions, and they also get up to 2,500 free listings per month with a choice of buy it now or auction depending on store level. Previously there were no free listings available to stores.
eBay is rolling out a new, personalized homepage to U.S. users tomorrow.
It is at once a major improvement to eBay's aging website, and a crushing disappointment—a glaring missed opportunity to take a more substantial leap forward and transform the eBay shopping experience.
eBay reported strong earnings today, thanks to growth in mobile adoption, as well as improved performance in the Marketplaces business. The company also released its mobile commerce numbers for the year, which blew past original estimates.
In 2013, eBay expects each to exceed a whopping $20 billion.
PayPal and eBay both expected $10 billion in sales/payments volume for the year, individually. However, eBay mobile finished the year with $13 billion in volume – more than double the prior year – and PayPal mobile handled almost $14 billion in payment volume, more than triple (250 percent exactly) the prior year.
Selling online is half art and half science. Experienced sellers know that in the world of cyber-clutter and short attention spans, it takes more than a great product to get buyers’ attention. After selling on eBay and other sites for nearly 15 years, I’ve learned a few hard lessons and refined my recipe for success down to seven key ingredients.
In case you missed it, Hunch is now part of eBay, and great things are coming to apply Hunch technology to help both buyers and sellers have an even better experience on eBay-owned sites.
We couldn’t help taking a deep dive into Hunch data to see what the differences are between people who have bought or sold on eBay, and those who haven’t yet. As always, our thanks to our design partner Column Five Media for the great infographic design.
Online commerce giant eBay this morning ran a Cyber Monday deal for a white Apple iPad 2 WiFi 16GB, selling the popular tablet for $449 or exactly $50 off the MSRP (+ free shipping). Turns out a lot of people figured that was a great deal.
Hunch, a New York City startup that offers a new technology for discovering and sharing product recommendations, has been acquired by eBay.
Michael Arrington, who first broke the news, cited the purchase price as around $80 million. The company had raised about $20 million in funding.
Specifically, eBay is integrating Facebook's new Open Graph 2.0 functionality into its global commerce systems, which come under the umbrella of a new business unit called X.commerce, and include eBay, PayPal, and Magento (which has built shopping sites for 100,000 merchants). The news was announced at Innovate, eBay's developer conference, being held today through Friday in San Francisco.
At its X.commerce conference this week, eBay will likely unveil its PayPal Access platform, allowing sites to use PayPal as their login credentials. A deal with Facebook is also rumored.
It’s a rare occasion, but eBay has made the news. The online commerce site, one of the Web’s oldest and most stable, is holding its X.commerce conference in San Francisco Oct 12-14. The company is set to announce a new PayPal service called “PayPal Access” and possibly a partnership with Facebook at the conference, Reuters and Bloomberg report.
Founded in 1995, eBay has become one of the premier Web destinations and one of the go-to places to buy and sell goods you can't get elsewhere; it's helped change the way people shop on the Internet. Along the way, people have gotten scammed and conned, but user confidence has also grown tremendously thanks to new buyer protection rules. Confidence has grown to the point where ballers now feel comfortable dropping stacks on stacks on stacks on whatever they're bidding on. Case in point: Celebrities and regular rich folk have dropped thousands—UK artist Tinie Tempah dropped $37,500(!)—to cop the limited-edition Nike Air Mags. The first 150 pairs of the show raised over $1 million, the profits from which went to the Michael J. Foxx Foundation for Parkinson's Research.
Sounds like a grip, right? It would if you had no idea how much money people have dropped on eBay over the years. From space rocks to private jets, these are the 10 Most Ridiculously Expensive Items Ever Sold On eBay. Happy bidding.
Some of the folks who received free Windows Developer tablets at Microsoft's Build conference last week are already trying to turn a tidy profit from them via eBay.
A quick search on the online auction site today for "Windows Developer tablet" scored four of the Samsung devices, each selling for a cool minimum of $2,000. Microsoft handed out the tablets as freebies last Tuesday to the more than 5,000 people who attended the developers conference at which the company demoed its upcoming OS.
US prosecutors are investigating whether eBay employees, including the company's founder, inappropriately used confidential Craigslist business data to help build a rival business.
Federal prosecutors in the United States have launched a criminal probe to discover whether eBay employees, including founder and Chairman Pierre Omidyar, used confidential information from classified ads giant Craigslist in an attempt to build its competing business, reports Reuters. The probe comes after years of legal battles in civil courts between the two companies over allegations that eBay purchased a stake in Craigslist for the sole purpose of poaching its private business data.
U.S. prosecutors have launched a criminal probe into whether eBay Inc employees misappropriated confidential information from classified ad service Craigslist, according to a copy of a grand jury subpoena obtained by Reuters.
The two companies have been feuding for years in civil court over allegations that online giant eBay used its Craigslist board seat to glean confidential information about the classified ad business as eBay prepared to launch a rival service.
In 2010, eBay's pre-tax profits totaled $848 million, according to research conducted by the Institute for Policy Studies.
Amount of taxes paid to the United States government: $0.
Not only that but eBay received more than $131 million in a refund.
CEO John Donahoe earned $12.4 million.
Amazon was the most visited retail site in June, according to new data out today from Comscore.
Compared with all other online retailers, Amazon.com grabbed more than 282 million visitors in June, reaching 20.4 percent of the entire Internet population around the world.
