eBay! Sellers! Voice! Concerns! About! eBay Express!

[iron_chick]

I requested they post a screen shot of the shopping cart.

They've ignored that.

What do you want to bet that they can't because there is NO screen shot because there is NO shopping cart up and running yet? 

[amy]

Another  answer from a pink to the big question:

The most common question is why eBay is forcing sellers to give up their PayPal Seller Protection in order to participate in this little venture.

one payment is processed per seller, with rare exceptions.

A definition of  "rare exceptions" would be helpful

Edited: rare exceptions now defined

"Rare Exceptions" in the case of grouping payments actually has to do with the shipping options sellers provide to buyers.

For example, let's say you sell books that offer both Media Mail and Priority Mail shipping. A buyer might decide to buy two books from you, but choose Media Mail for one and Priority Mail for the other.

In this case, which will be rare, we will actually treat the two purchases as a separate "bucket", and will show up as a separate transaction.

[iron_chick]

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?m...2001050438�

So, it appears that I am not only invisible to pinks on the Stores Board, I am also invisible to pinks on the Seller Central board. 

[amy]

You're invisible. 

This post made me laugh

The reason we have made it a specialty site is specifically so that we would not change what buyers and sellers love about eBay itself.

yes, I LOVE that the shipping calculator on my auction has not worked for over 6 hours now.

[iron_chick]

OMG.  I got a response.  Chung  must have missed the pink memo to put me on ignore.

[maggie777]

I don't see any benefit to using Xpress for me.  Sometimes I use eBay auctions for advertising and putting stuff in Xpress would be like competing against my website for retail traffic from Google.

[bargainbloodhound]

Another pink just contradicted the other 2 pink responses

Isn't that normal? Ask 3 ebay employees a question, receive 3 different answers. 

However, eBay Express is a brand new site, and we fully expect to learn a lot from buyers and sellers once the site is launched.

If you thought the glitches on eBay.com were bad, just wait until you experience the glitches on the new site.  :

putting stuff in Xpress would be like competing against my website for retail traffic from Google.

The inability to have buyers pay through my merchant account is the main reason I'm not planning on using it.  PayPal's track record is another: I'll trust Amazon to collect all of my payments on a venue, but not PayPal.

[mandy]

eBay Express will use Shopping.com's catalog technology:

According to eBay CEO Meg Whitman in an earnings conference call on Wednesday afternoon, eBay Express leverages Shopping.com's catalog technology. She said it offers buyers a quick and easy way to search and purchase fixed-price items and uses "Magellan" search technology. This technology was tested on eBay.com in May during an alpha test called "New Way to Shop on eBay." It utilized Item Specifics, eBay's term for product attributes, to help shoppers find what they are looking for by making keyword searches more intuitive and providing ways to narrow listings results according to size, color, type, brand, or even a combination of attributes.

full article: http://auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m01/i19/s01

According to an Auctionbytes survey of 2 ebay users  ;D , 100% of ebay users are excited about the new site.  No mention was made about concerns regarding PayPal's Seller Protection Policy.
Any article by AuctionBytes should be taken with a grain of salt due to what many perceive to be a tendency to give favorable editorial coverage to advertisers and the editor's fellow PeSA members.

From Channel Advisor CEO Scott Wingo's Blog:

Some of the challenges we hear from buyers that want to purchase on eBay are:

    * Auctions are time consuming
    * eBay’s zillions of listings are hard to navigate
    * Given the breadth of listings, it’s hard for eBay to cross-promote and do some basic merchandising things like personal recommendations, etc.
    * If I want to buy from 2 sellers, that’s two transactions
    * It’s hard to tell which sellers are high/medium/low quality
    * Why do I have to register with ebay AND paypal
    * Etc.

For sellers the eBay environment has these challenges:

    * Dead-beats/non-paid-items, etc. (this is caused by the separation of the closing/paying loop)
    * Decreasing ASPs (especially in the auction side)
    * Perpetual desire for more buyers!
    * Limited merchandising options

eBay Express could fix all of this

full article: http://ebaystrategies.blogs.com/ebay_str...ss_a_.html

From BusinessWeek:

In other words, it's an acknowledgment that eBay's just not reaching a significant swath of online buyers who don't want to deal with buying at auctions from individuals whose reputation is far from certain. Its success will depend almost entirely on how well it's executed, naturally--and I think it may require marketing that's fairly distinct from eBay, whose brand can't (and shouldn't) shake the wide-open, flea-market nature of the core marketplace....

full article: http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/t...press.html

[Kristijntje]

Who said history never repeats itself?  :twistedevil:

Internet auctioneer eBay Inc. agreed Tuesday to buy Half.com, a privately held online seller of used books and music, for more than $300 million in stock.  "Half.com's fixed-price format complements eBay's current business by giving our existing users new choices for trading," said Meg Whitman, eBay chief executive.

http://money.cnn.com/2000/06/13/deals/ebay/

[bargainbloodhound]

[quote author=Kristijntje link=topic=2247.msg8050#msg8050 date=1137763134]
Who said history never repeats itself?  :twistedevil:

Internet auctioneer eBay Inc. agreed Tuesday to buy Half.com, a privately held online seller of used books and music, for more than $300 million in stock.  "Half.com's fixed-price format complements eBay's current business by giving our existing users new choices for trading," said Meg Whitman, eBay chief executive.

http://money.cnn.com/2000/06/13/deals/ebay/[/quote]

Perfect timing Christine, a pinkie said the word Half.com on the eBay boards. 

My post from the eBay board:

You are correct. eBay is fortunate enough to have had a few years to learn from Half.com how to best present a multi-item, multi-seller shopping cart to buyers,

eBay has had 5 years to learn from its $300+ million purchase of Half.com and both retail analysts and stock market analysts are in nearly 100% agreement that eBay's acquisition of Half.com has been a complete failure. In both 2002 and 2004 eBay came close to shutting the site down.

The rollout of new features on Half.com last October was marked by huge glitches, difficulties in sellers receiving payments, etc.

Based on the performance of Half.com under eBay ownership, the question is what exactly has been learned and why should sellers believe that eBay Express will not also be marked by the same problems and lack of success?

EDITED to add: Substitute the words eBay Express for Half.com in that 5 year-old Meg Whitman quote and it sounds EXACTLY like what eBay is telling its sellers now