Question
While many might want to be totally free of eBay in any off site websites the potential for integration of listings and inventory is interesting.
If they accepted the same fees and standards as the industry, then using their subsidiary as web store provider could have significant advantages.
The change in how buyers find items is also interesting.
The comment about how, since she didn't get the Disney job, she really is happy to be at eBay, is nice.
There might be a few investors who recently loss 30 Billion dollars in total stock value and more than a few eBay customers who wish she did get the job.
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eBay CEO Speaks at Goldman Sachs Sixth Annual Internet Conference
By Ina Steiner
AuctionBytes.com
May 27, 2005
eBay CEO Meg Whitman answered analyst questions at the Goldman Sachs Sixth Annual Internet Conference on May 25, 2005, along with eBay CFO Rajiv Dutta. Some highlights of the interview and interesting bits of data that emerged from the interview follow, the entire audio Webcast can be heard online.
Whitman talked about the eBay acquisition of Kurant (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m01/i14/s01), technology for hosting ecommerce websites. She said sellers who have an eBay Store can use the Kurant technology to build a store on the web and use the same backend (inventory system) to send items to either their eBay Store or their own ecommerce website.
This would be a huge shift in eBay's approach to its eBay sellers and may be recognition that eBay sellers are creating their own sites now without eBay's assistance. While she made it sound like the service was currently available, as far as AuctionBytes knows it is not yet available to eBay Store owners. Whitman did not say when it would be available.
One of the most interesting parts of the interview was when Whitman answered a question about her job interview with Disney (http://auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m03/i16/s02). She said doesn't regret it on a personal level, she explored something and came back knowing eBay is the place she needed to be. However, she said she completely underestimated the leak would be as big as it was, and that there would be as much attention on this issue. She sounded genuinely amazed that so much attention was paid to her consideration of the position as head of Disney. "Net-net, I don't regret it, the publicity was a little more intense than I had anticipated,…" but, she said, it reaffirmed her commitment to eBay.
Whitman discussed the investment in online classifieds and said it opens up new areas like jobs, housing and rentals. Whitman called it "an interesting business" and said she will have more to report on at the end of the year.
Whitman discussed "New Way to Shop on eBay," a beta project reported in AuctionBytes on May 5 (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m05/i05/s01).
Rajiv Dutta indicated cross merchandising is important - letting sellers show buyers other items as they are shopping and checking out.
There was a discussion of eBay international sites, specifically Germany, Korea, China. There was a discussion of how visitors to eBay used the site to find items - by searching or browsing. Whitman said in 1998, there were 8 browsers for every searcher, and now there are more searchers than browsers.
http://customer.talkpoint.com/GOLD00...?day=Wednesday
Answer
There might be a few investors who recently loss 30 Billion dollars in total stock value and more than a few eBay customers who wish she did get the job.
Ray,
Do you feel that the market wouldn't have corrected, or needed to correct, the share valuation, even if Meg was not at the helm of eBay?
At what point should stock market growth expectations be considered unrealistic? I personally feel that a correction in the valuation should have been made more than a couple of years ago.
Kind Regards, Kevin
Answer
Kevin
Meg was in charge and received the credit for the years of rapid growth and the blame for the recent severe price drop in eBay stock.
How much she directly contributed to either is a fair question but she is the face of management and, under our system, is the one mostly directly held responsible.
Were there unrealistic stock market expectations, and if so, were they based on the specific representations of nearly unlimited potential still remaining in the core markets that she made coupled with supporting data and the previous company performance?
I think she hyped the potential in core markets, which I believe exists, then oversaw contortion of the eBay venue to such a degree that it frustrated both sellers and buyer, resulting in lower growth for eBay as a share of the general marketplace expansion.
She then recently reported earning numbers that missed their mark and more importantly, in my opinion, that the core markets were reaching saturation and the future was in China which would require huge investments and years to develop.
The promise and performance of rapid immediate growth were gone and the stock market reacted.
Another question that might be asked is "Was there a Golden Goose and did she, as head of the management team that imposed the policies and procedures that are strangling eBay, kill it?"
Answer
It makes sense for eBay to bring in Kurant. But in the long-term they are helping to dilute their brand (which has been occurring), but capture more income by helping eBay sellers open their "own web stores". I hope they allow us to link to our own web stores once Kurant is fully implemented.
But before eBay can get the integration of inventory on eBay and off-eBay, they need to figure out a way to store the "product content" separately from the template. It'll be interesting to see how eBay does this. One way would be to change the SYI form so bits would fit in different fields (i.e. header HTML, description, footer HTML). Or eBay could progmatically figure it out, but I don't know how feasible it is.
The other issue is pricing. Since eBay has bigger overhead when it comes to listing fees, optional features, and final value fees, separate pricing from web store would be necessary. A simple mark-up function like add 10% to buy it now price would be sufficient for me to cover costs. The 10% would be derived from overall eBay fees divided by the number of products sold.
Answer
G'day Ray,
I realise that this has nothing to do with eBay, and is innappropriate in this forum, but I just felt like typing it. This was a brief article in the "In the City" section of Private Eye (UK) in March 2005 (it takes a couple of months for my issue to get to me) :
The expectation that both Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom and Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth may testify in their fraud trials is likely to see them point the fingers of blame for huge accounting frauds not just at their internal beancounters but also at Wall Street.
The constant refrain from both men, according to their underlings who are testifying against them, is that every quarter the companies had to "make the numbers" - hit the ever rising earnings per share figures predicted/demanded by analysts pushing the shares.
The role of such short-termism among brokers and bankers in crashes such as Enron, WorldCom and HealthSouth has often been overlooked when it comes to apportioning blame. "Making the numbers" lies behind every case of accountancy fraud which has been exposed since the stock market tide went out in 2000. "Making the numbers" drove the share price upwards which made ever larger takeovers possible which also added up to more millions for executives with their lavish share options. Yet five years on the same motivation is still at work on Wall Street and in the City.
I am not suggesting that there is any accounting fraud in eBay. However "short termism" by both management and the stock market has led to the interference of this entire market place for the sake of short term gains and alleged growth, instead of considering the long term health and outlook for the company (and marketplace). In my view the stockmarket has been as irresponsible with it's valuation as the management has been with the entire running of the company. However, it is chicken and egg stuff as to who is the more responsible or initially led to the situation. eBay was wildly over valued from the moment it was floated, but the evolution of corporate law has meant that a CEO's legal responsibility lies with protecting the interests of the stockholder (and not the clientelle or marketplace) and the share price is an essential element of that.
I am not saying that Meg has no responsibility for the situation, nor for the interference to the marketplace itself (I think that she has most of the responsibility for the latter, in spite of the pressure that the stockmarket itself places her under), but I do feel that the stock price seriously needed a readjustment to something realistic (and it is probably not there yet) - and that that readjustment would have happened as growth slowed whether she or anyone else was at the helm - and the stock market, it's analysts, and pure selfish short term greed are responsible for the overvaluation of eBay stocks through out it's short life so far.
In my opinion corporate law, and the responsibilities of corporations and their management to society and their own long term health need an urgent shake up (and have needed it for some time). eBay is a classic symptom of the laws as they stand - but I do hold the market itself as responsible for much of the situation as I do Meg and the rest of the management team. Meg and her management are responsible for the day to day running of the marketplace itself, but the "short termism" of the market is at least as responsible for the wider implications (and the serious change in stock values) as Meg is, and possibly much more.
With the current governments across the western world though, these issues will not be addressed, and the points that I am trying to make are moot.
Kind Regards, Kevin
Answer
But before eBay can get the integration of inventory on eBay and off-eBay, they need to figure out a way to store the "product content" separately from the template. It'll be interesting to see how eBay does this. One way would be to change the SYI form so bits would fit in different fields (i.e. header HTML, description, footer HTML). Or eBay could progmatically figure it out, but I don't know how feasible it is.
And eBay is working hard on this. That's what all the "search helping" classifications are about. It's a way to isolate the important bits of data from the description. As for breaking the SYI form into different fields, eBay has always done that. There's no need to save the stuff that's standard: headers, footers, etc. The stuff needed to serve up (or match up) to an off-ebay website would be the description, price, shipping, forms of payment. All that stuff is already isolated in it's own database field. An auction page isn't a one-item thing that's stored whole and served up in one gulp. It's built on the fly from bits and pieces of data (gathered from different databases, and, I suspect, even different servers) as the viewer requests the page.