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Last week, we unveiled a new and improved green.ebay.com that we hope will serve as a one-stop destination for all things green at eBay. With the re-launch of the site, we have introduced several new features: more and better social functionality so that buyers, sellers and employees can engage with us and with each other; more content from us and guest bloggers; and all the information our partners and stakeholders could need about what we are doing as a company to extend our green commitments.
But so what? New websites are a dime a dozen in Silicon Valley, and our community expects us to continually develop and roll out new features. What we haven't shared until now -- and what makes this so important to us on the eBay Green Team -- is that, with the help of our scrappy team of developers, we are continuing to use sustainability as a driver of innovation at eBay writ large.
Take, for instance, the social features we have just rolled out on green.ebay. Never before have eBay users been able to generate their own content and connect with each other like they are now able to do through our green hub -- by recommending greener alternatives, sharing their favorite green eBay picks in individually-designed eco-shopping lists, or suggesting tips and tricks that others can try. This functionality is first-of-its-kind for us and now something the rest of the company will be able to use, iterate and advance. Like the Instant Sale and Patagonia Common Threads initiatives that have come before it, the green.ebay re-design process has also demonstrated the power of green to drive innovation here at eBay -- with our community and partners, and in our business overall.
We have also learned throughout all our programs that our new ideas are only as good as the beta experiences we build prove them to be. Instead of begging the business for attention and resources like some corporate sustainability operations, we are instead leveraging eBay's entrepreneurial culture to create a "sustainability sandbox," or a space where we can develop and test new ideas that can actually drive business impact.
Our small but extremely talented team of engineers is able to build and roll out concepts quickly, and we continually rely on our highly engaged and active community of green buyers and sellers to collect feedback and help us evolve the experiences to their next phase. In fact, less than a week after relaunch, we are already in planning meetings for the next version of the green.ebay site.
The past year has been a transformative one for us at eBay, and last week's roll-out of the re-imagined green.ebay.com was the just the start of another exciting year. For us, green has been an engine for innovation: by continuing to develop new, green solutions, we have been able to drive better customer experiences and stronger business performance.
Our hope is that even more companies will recognize this idea and that eBay -- with all our successes and challenges -- can help others better understand the power of green and the importance of meaningfully engaging their customers and employees. Be sure to let us know what you think.
Ah, more disingenuous
Ah, more disingenuous nonsense from the eBay Dept of Spin …
“When Do We Start Calling eBay A Payments Company?”
http://www.businessinsider.com/ebays-transformation-when-do-we-start-cal...
A picture is worth a thousand words, so they say. This linked “Business Insider” article contains a graph of eBay revenues since 2003. It shows quite starkly how eBay’s Marketplace revenue has stagnated since 2008, about the time that the headless turkey from Bain & Co, John Donahoe, got hold of the tiller and started his “destructive renovations”. eBay’s share price has effectively moved little in the same period.
Conversely, Amazon’s marketplace has not stood still: it has consistently moved ahead in leaps and bounds; ergo the eBay Marketplace has effectively been in decline since 2008.
The graph also shows the eBay-underpinning increases in revenue eBay has received from PreyPal during the same period, that is, from roughly when the “eBafia Don” effectively mandated PreyPal’s use on the eBay Marketplace. Business Insider apparently thinks therefore that eBay’s future lays in PreyPal.
Well, if anyone thinks that the retail banks are going to let such a clunky, parasitic, flea-sized, upstart “merchant of sorts” such as PreyPal—who after all does no more than ride precariously on the back of those banks’ own payments processing systems—continue to nibble away at one of the banks’ principal areas of business for any length of time, all I can say is, dream on …
The aspect about PreyPal POS “mobile payments” that most worries me is, are people actually leaving their funds “on deposit” with this unlicensed, prudentially unregulated, clunky, PayPal “bank”, that is itself not even licensed to provide credit? Otherwise, how are the funds for such mobile payments being sourced from the user’s real bank?
And, unfortunately for eBay’s chief headless turkey, Visa’s professional online offering “V.me”, when it is up and running later this year, will put paid to whatever success that the clunky PreyPal has had with online merchants outside of its mandated use on the eBay Marketplace—and soon thereafter both these unscrupulous and clunky entities will commence their long-deserved journeys down the gurgler.
Scott Thompson saw the writing on the wall; John Donahoe remains delusional.
Scott Thompson abandons the struggling eBay for the struggling Yahoo
http://forums.auctionbytes.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=166803#post166803
PayPal claims PayPal not a debit card or payment network!
http://forums.auctionbytes.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=24148
eBay / PayPal / Donahoe: Dead Men Walking
As far as saving/buying on
As far as saving/buying on eBay goes:
If you send the seller a question about an item, find another of their listings, and send the question from that item page, rather than from the one that you actually want. This will add a little bit of work for the seller if they want to add the question/answer to the correct item description page.
If you see an item that you want listed in auction format, ask the seller if they will accept $x to end the auction early and sell the item to you. Maybe tell them that they would not have to wait as long to get their money (they would probably know that, but it still might help). If that does not work, use a sniping service such as Hidbid.com to bid for you. It'll bid in the last few seconds, helping you to save money and avoid shill bidding.
Use a site like Ebuyersedge.com to set up saved searches. You'd get an e-mail whenever a match is listed. Especially good for "Buy It Now"s that are priced right.
If the item that you are looking for is a long word or difficult to spell, try a misspelling search site like Typojoe.com to hopefully find some deals with items that have main keywords misspelled in the title. Other interested buyers might never see them. Then, if the item is listed an auction format, after a few days of no bids (hopefully anyway) send the seller an offer to end the auction early and sell the item to you. After a few days of no bids, they may worry that no one is interested, and take whatever they can get.
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