The eBay President in Charge of Breaking Patterns
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John Donahoe tries to make eBay easier to use for its shoppers and sellers â and more attractive to investors.
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SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Meg Whitman, the Web-pioneering chief executive of eBay Inc., is preparing to retire after a decade at the helm of the online auctioneer, according to a published report.
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EBay CEO Meg Whitman is planning to step down from the company she has led for the past 10 years, The Wall Street Journal said Tuesday.
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[Business India]: The arrest of Avnish Bajaj, CEO of eBay&#39;s Indian subsidiary Baazee.com, is a compelling example of overreaction both by the Indian police and the US State Department.
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EBay Inc., the world's largest online auction company, will upgrade its website to placate sellers and revitalize the company's slumping sales growth, chief executive Meg Whitman said.
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EBay&#39;s online payment service PayPal has suffered intermittent glitches since late last week, locking some users out of their accounts for long stretches and making
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EBay Inc  announced on  Wednesday the planned departure of long-serving Chief Executive  Meg Whitman as it warned that revenue for the first quarter and  2008 would fall below Wall Street expectations, despite strong  2007 year-end results.
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Online auction website eBay said Wednesday chief executive Meg Whitman will step down in March, handing the company's reins to its marketplace unit head John Donahoe.
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EBay CEO Meg Whitman is planning to step down from the company she has led for the past 10 years, The Wall Street Journal said Tuesday.Whitman has been delegating more tasks to deputies over the last few months and is expected to decide on her retirement in the coming weeks, the newspaper said quoting &quot;people familiar with the matter.&quot; John Donahue, who leads the company&#39;s auction business, is the leading candidate to succeed her, according to the newspaper.EBay, which also operates the PayPal payment system and Skype Internet telephony service, is due to report earnings for the fourth quarter Wednesday. The quarter includes the traditionally strong year-end holiday period and estimates see eBay reporting earnings per share of $0.38.The company reported a net profit of $1.1 billion in 2006 on the back of $6 billion in revenue. For 2007 eBay expects revenue to jump to $7.6 billion.
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The significant&#160;changes that eBay announced last week&#160;have merchants abuzz as they analyze and react to the impact that the restructured fees, modification of the search and feedback functions, and other changes will have on their sales and profits.Of particular interest have been the proposed changes to fees, which involve lowering the cost of listing items and increasing the commission eBay gets when products are sold. There has also been much discussion in blogs and discussion forums of eBay&#39;s plan to forbid sellers from leaving negative feedback for buyers.While merchants are split on the potential benefits and disadvantages of the changes, there seems to be a general consensus that, whether one supports them or not, the changes represent a major attempt on eBay&#39;s part to alter the way that the marketplace works.&quot;It&#39;s clear eBay is taking it really seriously that they have to improve the buyer experience, and they&#39;re laying the groundwork for getting aggressive about doing it,&quot; said Jonathan Garriss, executive director of the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA), a group of large sellers that has often been highly critical of eBay.Garriss, also CEO of Gotham City Online, an apparel store on eBay that also has its own site, hopes that the proposed changes will be a first step of others that eBay will take to fix what PESA considers key problems with the marketplace, such as making the buyer experience more convenient and streamlined.To that end, Garriss is encouraged by the proposed incentives to reward merchants who provide superior customer service by giving all qualifying merchants preferred placement in search engine results and offering PowerSellers additional fee discounts based on their customer ratings.&quot;We don&#39;t want to lose sight of the health of the marketplace, and the changes eBay is making are absolutely in the right direction,&quot; Garriss said in a phone interview.While he supports the concept of lowering insertion fees and shifting them to the commission, he recognizes that, as proposed, the fee restructuring will greatly hurt some merchants, particularly, in his view, those that sell lower-priced items in high volume via auctions. Garriss hopes that eBay will take this into consideration and possibly adjust the fee changes before rolling them out in a few weeks in the U.S.Lisa Witt, an eBay PowerSeller for eight years, says the fee changes will not have much of an impact on her bottom line. A seller of fine jewelry, Witt says the listing fees will remain too high even under the new fee structure.&quot;They need to dramatically change the fee structure if they expect seller growth on the site. eBay should have a flat rate listing fee and it should be the same amount across the board for everyone, and that listing fee should be low,&quot; she wrote in an e-mail interview. &quot;A monthly fee for unlimited listings on eBay would work well too.&quot;Witt is against the plan to forbid sellers from leaving negative feedback about buyers. This change may lead to buyers using the threat of negative feedback as an extortion tactic to get extras, she said. Buyers may also be disinclined to contact sellers if a disagreement arises, resorting simply to leaving negative feedback, she added. &quot;Feedback is voluntary and should be able to be left by either party as they see fit,&quot; Witt said.Meanwhile, John Lawson, another PowerSeller and owner of 3rd Power Outlet, is generally positive about the proposed changes. &quot;There&#39;ll be some bumpy roads, but they&#39;re on a path to make this marketplace more vibrant,&quot; Lawson said in a phone interview.3rd Power Outlet , which sells urban wear and accessories and makes about 80 percent of its sales via eBay, will save about 50 percent in listing fees and, factoring in the increased commission, will have net savings in eBay costs of about 30 percent, Lawson said.&quot;It&#39;ll have a nice impact on our eBay costs. It&#39;s extra money in our pockets,&quot; Lawson said. While not a major windfall, the savings will allow him to add more listings and do more auctions, he said.Forbidding sellers from leaving negative feedback about buyers is a good move because, as eBay officials have argued, some sellers have used negative feedback to retaliate against buyers, he said. &quot;A seller doesn&#39;t have to leave any comment about buyers at all,&quot; Lawson said. &quot;The buyer has to be satisfied and must have the ability to leave a true comment.&quot;Still, he&#39;s not crazy about new proposed fee discounts to PowerSellers based on them attaining certain levels of DSR (Detailed Seller Rating). For example, he finds that it&#39;s off the mark for eBay to have a specific DSR category for shipping and handling, because, as a rule, no one likes to pay for this portion of the transaction. Merchants like himself, who sell to buyers overseas, are in particular disadvantage, because many buyers abroad don&#39;t have a clear understanding of shipping costs from the U.S. to international locations, he said.For others like Witt, DSR-based fee discounts are welcome. &quot;It&#39;s fine to offer incentives to sellers who strive for excellence. That was a good idea and they should expand on it. Offering rewards has always worked better than punishments,&quot; she said.These and other differing viewpoints about the plans reflect the ripple effect that eBay changes inevitably have, since there is such a wide variety of merchants on its platform. It remains to be seen whether eBay will want, and be able to refine further, its planned changes to achieve -- as much as possible -- a happy medium across its vast community of sellers.&#160;
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(InfoWorld) - A massive computing grid helps eBayÂ make changes to its auction Web site on the fly while maintaining a 99.94 percent up time, said Paul Strong, a distinguished research scientist there. While eBay designed most of its grid infrastructure, the company also wants to participate in standards-setting communities to bring more improvements to computer grid technology, Strong said Tuesday during the GridWorld conference in Washington, D.C. EBay's core business is hosting Web-based auctions, not in creating new grid technologies, he said. "We don't see ourselves as an IT development shop for development tools," he said. By working together on grid standards, participants can help "transitions be less painful," he added. On Monday, the Open Grid Forum standards body officially opened for business, delivering on its commitment made in June to detail its goals during GridWorld. EBay has made great strides in its back-end technology since the late '90s, but the company still wants more improvements, including the ability to change the site's code nearly instantaneously, Strong said. Right now, the company, with more than 15,000 servers in its production environment, distributes new application code to its Web site every two weeks, he said. EBay developers write about 100,000 lines of code each week, and using a traditional grid made up of about 350 Windows, Linux and Solaris computers, the site takes about 20 minutes to update with the new features, Strong said. With 104 million items listed for auction on eBay every day, the company needs to keep the site running while those changes are happening, he added. "We can't afford to take the site down," he said. "It's like changing the engines on a jumbo jet mid-flight." About $1,608 worth of merchandise sells on eBay every second, and a vehicle sells every two minutes on average, Strong said. A trading card sells every six seconds, and a pound of the Korean food kimchi sells every minute. The site has seen huge growth since the late '90s, he noted. Ebay.com has gone from 54 million page views a day in June 1999 to 874 million in December 2005, Strong said. The site sent out 35 million e-mail messages a day in December, compared to 1 million a day in June '99. And the site's up time went from about 97 percent to 99.94 percent in that time period. Still, the company would like more grid functionality, Strong said. EBay would like to get closer to that mythical 99.999 percent up time, he said. "We break almost anything we use," he said. "We're pretty much at the extreme limit of what you can do with off-the-shelf technology." And eBay doesn't want to wait to update the site every two weeks, he added. "We want to be faster; we want to be more agile," he said. "If someone comes up with a cool change that's not that big, I'd like to be able to roll it tomorrow." Improvements in grid computing is where community standards can help, he said. "We believe everyone has something to contribute," he said to the GridWorld audience. "We'd like to share ... with the community." GridWorld is organized by IDG, the parent company of IDG News Service.
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eBay has welcomed the release of its Indian CEO, Avnish Bajaj. Bajaj was arrested after his auction site Baazee dotcom hosted a sexually explicit picture message of two Delhi school students.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- EBay Inc.'s Skype division has let down eBay executives, but they're confident they can reorganize the troubled Internet phone unit and make it more useful to people outside of the online marketplace.
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Mega-auctioneer eBay could turn the business upside down.
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(InfoWorld) - When Sandy Scarce began selling apparel on eBay three years ago, she planned to use the company's marketplace as her only sales channel, but today, deeply discouraged, she is moving away from it. Upset at what she perceives as misdirected policies and clunky services from eBay, Scarce opened up her own online storeÂ this week. She's also moving inventory to a rival marketplace from Amazon.com, whose operation and sales climate she finds superior. "I'm transitioning away from eBay," said Scarce, ranked as an eBay Silver PowerSeller, which means her Sandy's Closet eBay store generates between $3,000 and $9,999 in average monthly sales and provides a high level of service. Among her chief complaints is an effort announced by eBay in July of last year to prioritize its core auction listings over its stores' inventory, which she said has hurt her sales. "If you're not an eBay auction seller, eBay doesn't want you on their site. eBay has disadvantaged store owners over the last year to drive them away," Scarce said. To boost traditional listings, eBay began marketing them more aggressively, increased their exposure on the eBay Express specialty site, and raised store listing fees. "As an eBay store owner, this hasn't been a good development for me," Scarce said. "They're hiding store owners and their merchandise, making it harder for buyers to find them." She is also disappointed with the tools and applications eBay provides to sellers, many of which she considers clunky, and with the performance of the site, which she finds has deteriorated in terms of response times and availability. Scarce is not alone. On Thursday, as eBay kicked off its annual eBay Live conference for merchants in Boston, the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA) posted a scathing paper on its Web site, blasting eBay for what the group considers a significant deterioration of the marketplace. "The eBay marketplace has continued to degrade, and the current state is unhealthy," reads the paper. In the document, PESA, which includes many large eBay merchants, says the buyer experience on eBay leaves a lot to be desired and blames eBay for failing to address this issue and make the necessary investments to fix the problems. PESA is concerned that the eBay marketplace will fall into "a permanent decline." PESA considers as major problems eBay's search functionality, which it rates as subpar, and a lack of incentives for merchants that provide superior service. PESA also faults eBay for failing to fully leverage for the marketplace companies it has acquired, such as Skype and Shopping.com. In eBay's defense, eBay spokesman Hani Durzy said the company is in the midst of a "multiquarter" effort to improve the buyer experience on the marketplace. For example, eBay is actively laboring to improve its search capabilities with an effort it calls Finding 2.0. Some of those enhancements are already being tested with small groups of buyers and will be rolled out to all users progressively this year, he said. With Finding 2.0, eBay wants to improve the relevance of search results without sacrificing what Durzy calls "serendipity," which eBay considers a key ingredient of the eBay experience: Stumbling upon a product that happily surprises you. Another part of the buyer experience improvement effort is the continued reduction of fraud on the marketplace, in order to increase trust and safety. "We've always been good at this," he said. But as online crime becomes more sophisticated, eBay is stepping up its efforts, becoming more proactive in areas like detection of counterfeit products, he said. Regarding the gripes of store owners like Scarce, Durzy said that eBay in no way wants to get rid of those merchants. Instead, it just wants to "reignite" eBay's core auction activity, he said. Back in July, eBay officials explained that store listings take longer to sell and are more costly for eBay to host compared with traditional listings. Thus the reasoning behind the measures it has implemented to better balance auction and store listings. Still, the strategy makes little sense for those high-volume merchants that are distancing themselves from eBay. Designer Athletic generated about 80 percent of its sales from its eBay store a year ago, and today that is heading toward 50 percent, said George Trantas, president of the footwear and apparel vendor. "Our goal is to grow our off-eBay business," Trantas said. "eBay conversions aren't as great as they have been in the past." In addition to selling on eBay, where it is a PowerSeller, the company sells from its own Web site and from the Amazon Marketplace and others like it. Like Scarce, Trantas has found that the traditional eBay buyer requires a lot more customer service attention before a sale is closed when compared with sellers on the Amazon Marketplace and other venues. That adds to the cost of doing business on eBay, he said. Both Trantas and Scarce attribute the difference in buyers to the fact that customers generally feel safer on Amazon than on eBay, so they require less assurances from the seller. Adding to merchant concerns is the decision by eBay this week toÂ turn off all of its paid search ads on Google's U.S. ad network. One of the worried ones is Jonathan Garriss, PESA's executive director and CEO of Gotham City Online, an apparel store on eBay that also has its own site. "This is very concerning for me as a seller that eBay is willing to shut off a lot of traffic to its sellers and listings. This doesn't necessarily hurt eBay, which still collects its fees, but rather the merchants on its site," Garriss said, adding that eBay should reinstate these ads immediately. A source told IDG News Service on Wednesday that the decision was made to punish Google for planning to throw aÂ now-canceled party in BostonÂ for eBay Live attendees that want eBay to allow them to offer the Google Checkout online payment system to their buyers. Durzy said that the ad pullout remains in place as of Thursday afternoon. "I very much hope they work it out. Google and eBay have a lot to offer each other," said David Yaskulka, vice president of product marketing at Kompolt, an online auction agency. eBay says Google Checkout is too new, while Google says eBay is just trying to protect its own PayPal online payments system. Garriss, who is evaluating Checkout for his own site, believes eBay should reconsider its position. "Google has proven there's room for improvement on the online payment side, and if another option makes shoppers more comfortable, as a merchant, I'd like to add that option," Garriss said. Scarce, meanwhile, decided to stay home and not attend eBay Live. Today, her eBay inventory is down to half of what it was a year ago. After only six months, Amazon Marketplace already generates 25 percent of her sales. She'll maintain a minimal presence on eBay to drive traffic to her own store. "I see no reason to go to eBay Live. The events of this past year have made it painfully obvious that eBay isn't interested in what I do."
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U.S. tax experts are urging the Internal Revenue Service to take a stronger stance on tracking profits and sales from online auction sites such as eBay.
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Roswell, the Kennedys and a hacker named Vladuz Eagle-eyed conspiracy buffs have pounced on a recent rash of compromised eBay user accounts as proof of a mile-wide hole in the auctioneer's front lines, giving new life to a theory that could one day rival the intrigue surrounding Roswell UFO crashing and Kennedy assassinations.â¦