Hi Mopo,
I'm home sick so of course something weird happens on ebay. Just got an
email from Ellen from NY in response to a billing I sent last night. The
notice I
got from ebay about the sale said the buyer was named Andrew from Vermont.
The ebay ad itself indicates that the buyer in in FL. All have the same ebay
id and email addr. All this on a $10 Jean Simmons photo. I suggested to Ellen
that she needs to look into this anomaly with Ebay. Anyone else ever
experience this kind of problem?
tia Michael, Cinecityposters
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just more claptrap from ebay..
the only thing I will guarantee is that prices
will continue to fall for 95% of all items sold
and fees will continue to rise.. squeezing even
further what has continually become a profit
margin for sellers that has become so thin that
the value of eBay to your total overall
income will fade into nothingness.. if it hasn't already
need I mention that at MoviePosterBid.com there
are NO LISTING FEES?? Just a thought
Rich===============
At 12:40 PM 2/21/2007, Rubenstein, Ira wrote:
Since Ebay is such a topic on MOPO - here is
a story from the NY times today about the "successor" to Meg, John Donahoe.
Ira
Stirring Up the Cubicles at eBay The New York
Times<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns =
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/brad_stone/index.html?inline=nyt-per>BRAD
STONE
SAN JOSE, Calif. By the end of February, most
of the employees at
<http://www.nytimes.com/mem/MWredirect.html?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=EBAY>eBays
San Jose headquarters will collect their
possessions, wave a final goodbye to their
landline telephones and change cubicles.
But what John Donahoe, president of one of
eBays most important divisions, really wants is
for his colleagues to change the way they work.
Im a big fan of breaking patterns, he said.
Mr. Donahoe, 46, is a deputy to eBays chief
executive, Meg Whitman, 50, and, many people in
the industry say, her likely successor when she
ultimately steps down. In his two years as head
of eBay Marketplaces a division responsible
for 70 percent of the companys revenues and an
even greater percentage of its profits he has
set out to change the companys colors substantially.
Mr. Donahoe has led the acquisition of companies
like the ticket exchange StubHub, helping eBay
morph from a single auction-oriented marketplace
into a portfolio of retail sites. This year,
revenue-sharing deals brokered by Mr. Donahoe
with
<http://www.nytimes.com/mem/MWredirect.html?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=YHOO>Yahoo
and
<http://www.nytimes.com/mem/MWredirect.html?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=GOOG>Google
will bring online advertisements to the auction
site on a large scale for the first time.
His newest move, the cubicle swap, is intended
to bring together the engineers and the
businesspeople who work on specific projects,
while weaning employees off their landline
telephones and getting them to use the Internet
calling service Skype, which eBay acquired for $2.6 billion in 2005.
Whether or not these initiatives work may
determine whether eBay can build on a healthy
holiday season and combat competitive threats
like Googles recent inroads into e-commerce.
All our businesses need to do well, but Johns
success and the success of Marketplaces is
absolutely essential to the company, said Ms.
Whitman, who met Mr. Donahoe when they were
consultants working in the <?xml:namespace
prefix = st1 ns =
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"
/>San Francisco office of Bain & Company in the early 1980s.
Mr. Donahoe joined eBay at the end of 2004 from
Bain, where he had risen through the ranks over
two decades to become its chief executive. At 6
feet 5 inches, he towers over colleagues while
wooing them with a friendly, accessible demeanor.
Thomas Tierney, an eBay director who is also a
Bain alumnus, said Mr. Donahoe had an uncanny
ability to connect with everyone from receptionists to chief executives.
Mr. Donahoe, the father of four, is known at
eBay for his boundless energy, waking every
morning at 4:30 a.m., often appearing in the
eBay gym before 7 and working 70-hour weeks.
But he will need more than energy to reinflate
eBays stagnant stock price. Despite a recent
boost from strong fourth-quarter earnings, eBay
stock has dropped by half from an early 2005
high, on concerns that the company has stopped
growing as Internet users are enticed by buying
opportunities elsewhere on the Web.
His division is posing the largest problems.
Since he arrived, the rate of new users joining
eBay has fallen. Subtract the eBay autos
business, analysts say, and the average selling
price of goods on the service has been stagnant
at best, even as eBay increases the amount it
charges sellers to list items on the site.
A result has been greater discord than usual
among large sellers who use eBay to run their
businesses and who feel as if their profit
margins are getting steadily squeezed. Steve
Grossberg, who sells video games on eBay, met
Mr. Donahoe at the companys eCommerce Forum in
January and told him he was looking to sites
like
<http://www.nytimes.com/mem/MWredirect.html?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=AMZN>Amazon.com
and Google to expand his business.
He said he was buoyed by Mr. Donahoes response.
I got the sense from him that anything goes and
nothing is sacred, Mr. Grossberg said. Hes
determined to fix it. Hes the only one at the
company who gets it, because hes not entrenched in eBay culture.
Mr. Donahoes plan for eBay began,
paradoxically, with getting certain products off
its main auction site. When he joined the
company, he said, sellers put anything and
everything on the service, which is best suited
for the sale of used items at bargain prices.
Selling newer products on eBay didnt make any
sense, he said. It watered the experience down.
Much of his effort over the last two years has
focused on creating what he calls with a
consultants zeal for sloganeering tailored
shopping experiences. Aside from Shopping.com,
which eBay bought in 2005 to allow shoppers to
search for newer, in-season items, Mr. Donahoe
led the acquisition of StubHub in January for
$307 million. Last year, he rolled out eBay
Express, a site for buying new products more
efficiently, which many analysts say does not
yet have much traction. He also has helped eBay
either create or buy a worldwide network of
local online classified advertising sites
similar to Craigslist in the United States.
That was the first step. Now, Mr. Donahoe hopes
to reverse trends like declining member growth
by improving the overall experience of shopping
on the site. I think when we are really
objective with ourselves, we have to admit our
user experience has not kept up with other
e-commerce sites all around us, he said.
Last year, he cited fraud and abuse on eBay as
major problems an overdue admission, in the
view of many company critics who contend that
eBay tends to sweep such problems under the rug.
In one of several recent moves to address fraud,
the company introduced an expanded feedback
system in January, allowing buyers to rank the
performance of sellers more comprehensively after a transaction.
Mr. Donahoe is also planning other ways to
improve the user experience on the site, like
paring down eBays notoriously cluttered pages
and rebuilding its search engine.
On a rainy morning in February, he received
additional confirmation that such an overhaul
was needed. He accompanied two members of eBays
research group to the San Jose apartment of
Kanvasi Tejasen, a 30-year-old Lockheed Martin
engineer who had agreed to have her online
buying habits studied by the company in exchange for $200.
With Mr. Donahoe (who makes $800,000 a year and
has received around $10 million worth of eBay
stock) sitting on her sofa taking notes, Ms.
Tejasen shopped for a TV tuner and visited rival
sites like Amazon and Google. In one crucial
moment, she plugged the term 4G
<http://tech2.nytimes.com/gst/technology/techsearch.html?st=p&cat=&query=ipod&inline=nyt-classifier>iPod
Nano into the eBay search engine and received
1,700 results, which she said she found
confusing. That set Mr. Donahoe scribbling furiously.
We have to do a better job getting her what she
wants, he said afterward. If we improve search
efficiency even 1 percent, its worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
To make those changes, Mr. Donahoe recently
hired Matt Carey, the former chief technology
officer of
<http://www.nytimes.com/mem/MWredirect.html?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=WMT>Wal-Mart
Stores. Mr. Carey, who spent more than 20 years
at Wal-Mart, said he was working on building
computer systems that could look at customers
past purchases and make educated assumptions
about what they might be looking for.
Mr. Carey is also working on another initiative
what Mr. Donahoe calls bringing eBay to the Web.
Today, Web publishers can put eBay listings on
their pages only by using a set of relatively
complex software tools, called the eBay editor
kit. Mr. Donahoe wants to streamline that
process, making it easier for, say, fans of the
New York Mets pitcher Pedro Martinez to put eBay
and Shopping.com listings of Martinez-related
items right on their Web pages. John and I talk
about this every time were together, Mr. Carey said.
They are also working on ways to let large
organizations create their own eBay-style
marketplaces. Last year, for example, the
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/association_of_national_advertisers/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Association
of National Advertisers, a trade group, began
testing such an auction service (letting
advertisers buy and resell air time). But the
largest customer is soon likely to be the social networking leader MySpace.
For the last six months, people close to the
conversations in both companies say, eBay and
MySpace have talked about letting MySpace users
put eBay and Shopping.com listings on their
pages. The partnership would expose eBay to a
younger audience that came to the Web after eBay burst onto the scene.
Ms. Whitman and Mr. Donahoe declined to comment
on any MySpace negotiations, but said bringing
eBay listings to other Web sites was a priority.
If people dont come to eBay, we will bring eBay to them, Ms. Whitman said.
In the meantime, Mr. Donahoe has other targets
for his energies. He says he is thinking about
ways to assist sellers further in buying
advertising keywords on the Webs search
engines, and about finding ways to help eBay
exploit the Skype software, which has been downloaded 140 million times.
Sometimes I wish we could make things happen
faster than we can, he said. But one thing
Ive learned is that you dont do anything sudden on the eBay ecosystem.
He is not eager to rush, however, when it comes
to addressing the delicate question of who will
succeed his boss. Ms. Whitman says she has no
plans to retire and regrets making a statement
eight years ago that she foresaw staying at eBay for 8 to 10 years.
Mr. Donahoe says he does not think about it. I
have an awful lot of work on my hands just
running the marketplace business, he said.
Plus, I love working with Meg and Im learning a lot.
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___________________________________________________________________
How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List
Send a message addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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The author of this message is solely responsible for its content.
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___________________________________________________________________
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The author of this message is solely responsible for its content.
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