A Message from Bill Cobb
Hi...For a little over a year now, I've had the pleasure of being President of eBay North America. Through Town Hall events, eBay Live!, email, and countless board discussions, you've told me and my team what's important to you. Listening to our Community - and making sure eBay delivers maximum value to you - is my job. And I want you to know how much we appreciate your business.
I'd like to start the year by making some announcements and filling you in on exciting new developments at eBay. Thanks to the continuing input and innovations of our Community, the eBay marketplace keeps evolving -- creating new opportunities for buyers and sellers alike.
2006 Fee Adjustments
As you probably know, we periodically make changes to our fee structure. We'll be making some adjustments to our fees, and I want to highlight the most important ones. The following changes will go into effect on February 22, 2006:
• For core insertion fees for auction-style and Fixed Price listings on eBay.com, we're again lowering the lowest tranche fee (i.e. for items with a starting price of $0.01 to $0.99) - from a quarter to twenty cents.
• For feature fees --
• We're making Picture Show and Sales Reports Plus free for everyone.
• We're reducing the fees for the second and third tiers of Picture Manager and increasing the storage you get at these higher levels.
• And we're trying something that has worked well for us on eBay Motors. For the first time, we're offering two new Feature Packs of optional listing features that can save you up to 39% per listing. (Read here for details.)
• For final value fees for auction-style and Fixed Price listings on eBay.com, we are increasing one fee this year - the final value fee for the middle tranche, which will increase from 2.75 to 3%.
• There are no changes for eBay Stores fees.
I encourage you to take a moment to learn more about the upcoming fee adjustments here.
Investments in Advertising
We know that bringing high-quality buyers to your listings is a critical part of the value eBay provides. To make sure we keep delivering this traffic, we made significant investments in advertising in 2005 which will continue throughout this year. This past holiday season we debuted the "it" campaign, eBay's largest advertising investment to date. Through a fully integrated marketing campaign including television, print ads, internet marketing, catalogs, onsite merchandising, publicity and more, "it" spotlights the depth and breadth of products available on eBay. And the campaign is working. "It" was one of the most-recalled ad campaigns of the holiday season, according to Advertising Age magazine.
Also in 2005, with internet advertising costs spiraling, we put considerable effort behind developing new ways to bring more buyers to your listings who use search engines like Google and Yahoo. Behind the scenes, we've been optimizing our site content for this unpaid or "natural" search. We've encouraged the Community to use About Me pages and a few months ago, we launched Reviews & Guides. The content members create through these features not only makes the site a richer experience -- these pages get picked up by search engines. This means buyers searching the internet for product information or other keywords are naturally driven to eBay.
Product Innovations
Another important part of our job is staying in touch with your changing business needs and developing innovative products that meet them. Last year, we delivered some important improvements like the Best Offer feature, better shipping integration with U.S. Postal Service® and UPS®, cross-promotion enhancements to give sellers more visibility to your listings, and many new features you asked for in Want It Now.
This year, we'll continue to stay focused on products and features to help you grow your business and improve your buying experience. For instance, for eBay Stores, you've told us that 19 categories and only one level is not enough. So this spring, we'll be releasing a new structure that allows you to have up to 300 custom categories in three levels of categories and sub-categories.
I'm also pleased to tell you that we're soon introducing something many of you have wanted for a long time: At the end of any eBay search, all matching Store inventory listings will be displayed. For sellers, this means much more exposure for your eBay Stores and Store items - for buyers, every search will return many more qualified listings. It's a win/win for everyone.
You can read here for more details on the change to add Store Inventory items in Search which will launch in a few weeks.
Introducing eBay Express
Finally, I want to tell you about a new specialty site called eBay Express that will launch this spring. eBay Express will be an exciting new buying experience, offering items that are available for purchase right away. We think eBay Express will encourage more shopping among our existing buyers, who today may only buy on eBay for certain purposes or types of products. We also think it will attract new buyers to eBay who prefer a more conventional e-commerce shopping experience.
While eBay Express will be a specialty site, it'll be part of the eBay marketplace, so Store and Fixed Price listings that qualify will automatically appear on both eBay.com and eBay Express - at no additional cost. Many sellers will benefit from the additional exposure without having to list their inventory twice, or change the way they sell. eBay Express will offer quick and easy ways to search and browse, a shopping cart (yes, at last!), and payments via credit card or PayPal. And because payments are made at the point of purchase, sellers will not experience unpaid items.
We're consciously making the buying experience on eBay Express different. And to deliver that experience, we'll be opening eBay Express to sellers who have a positive track record on the site and who list items that are available for immediate purchase. Only sellers with 98 percent positive feedback or better - and a feedback score of at least 100 - will be eligible to sell on eBay Express. Sellers must also accept PayPal. There are a few other requirements for selling on eBay Express. To learn more now, please click here.
eBay Express is a complicated undertaking; we're now finalizing our planning and development work, and we'll have more details to share in the months ahead. At launch, eBay Express will be available only for US-based sellers, although we have plans to expand in the future to our international sellers on eBay.com.
I hope this gives you a sense of what we're focused on as we head into the new year. On behalf of everyone at eBay, thanks for being part of the eBay Community. As e-commerce continues to grow and evolve, we look forward to continuing to shape the future together.
Please join me for my first Town Hall event in 2006 next week - Thursday, January 26 at 2 pm Pacific time. My North American leadership team and I will be answering questions about whatever is on your mind. I always look forward to these sessions, and I hope you'll join us.
Sincerely,
Bill Cobb
President, eBay North America
Henry
The Poster Mint
