Ep 273 || End of the Year Seller Features Wrap Up

[podcast_team]

eBay Seller Advocates Chuck Van Pelt and Jonathan Chard check in for our last episode of 2023 to run through their list of seller tools and features enhancements implemented this year based on your input and feedback. Griff and Brian answer a seller question about who receives sent offers.

Episode Links:
Sending Best Offers
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Brian: I'm Brian.

Griff: Ho Ho.Ho. I'm Griff .

Brian: Ho. Ho. Ho!

Griff: Oh. And this is is the eBay for Business Podcast. Your source for the inspiration and the information to help you start and manage and grow a successful business on the world's most powerful marketplace. And this end of the year episode is episode 273. You've been very busy this week.

Brian: I have. And I'm also stressed 'cause there's a project I'm working on that I have to like get it finalized. When you have projects going on, you have to like break them down and like do little bits at a time, but it still just lingers. And even though you're making progress, it's on your mind constantly. You can't get rid of it.

Griff: Wait a minute, when are you going to be finished this project?

Brian: Tomorrow.

Griff: Tomorrow. You're cool for the rest of the year?

Brian: Well...

Griff: No, tell me there's not more.

Brian: Well there's always stuff to do at eBay.

Griff: Yeah, but are you not taking any time off at the end of of December here?

Brian: Well, I am taking a couple days off this week and any of our listeners who are in Honolulu come visit me. I'll be there for three days.

Griff: Oh, you're going to Hawaii?

Brian: I am.

Griff: Oh, lucky you.

Brian: I had some points so I can use it for a hotel and I had some points and I can use it for an air flight. So then I said to my wife, I said, do you want to go to Hawaii to watch a football game? And she looked at me like, no. So a good friend of mine from college is going to go and we're gonna go watch San Jose State play in the Honolulu Bowl. Last year I went to a bowl game in Boise Idaho and it was 10 degrees. This is gonna be much nicer.

Griff: You have to be made of stronger stuff to go.

Brian: Yeah. Californians aren't meant to be in 10 degrees. All our Midwest listeners are just laughing at me with that statement.

Griff: Yes, I think so.

Brian: But it's true. They would concur.

Griff: Yeah. I don't miss the cold, although I can stand it, but I don't miss it.

Brian: And it's been cold up here. We've been well into the thirties at night. Like getting into the car in the morning, come to work. It's still 38, 40 degrees, which is cold for us.

Griff: Yeah. Poor San Jose. What will they do? It's a disaster. A catastrophe.

Brian: Exactly. Well, speaking of getting out of the cold, who's waiting in the green room this week Griff?

Griff: Our guest for this, the last episode of 2023. I'll remind you have been on the podcast recently and I'm sure they'll be back many times in 2024, Chuck Van Pelt and Jonathan Chard of the Seller Advocacy Team here at eBay. We're gonna return with a end of the year rundown of all the new features and improvements to the selling experience here in eBay that have been implemented in the last 12 months. Just as a reminder, sort of like in case you missed it, here's some things that happened.

Brian: And two of my favorite eBay employees.

Griff: Well I have to agree, I've only got to know Jonathan recently and I've known Chuck for about a year. But we got to meet up in Las Vegas at Reseller Remix and I was really impressed with how extraordinarily dedicated they are to what they do. They're really serious and passionate about it and both of them sell.

Brian: They both sell. They both care about the seller experience. They both have the ability to influence that seller experience and they both love to engage with sellers. And Jonathan, ever since he's worked at eBay, he's always been engaged with sellers in some way trying to make the product better. Love it.

Griff: They're true seller advocates and I can't wait to talk to them. And before we do though, I'm hoping, and I think there is some news, maybe some headlines this week, Brian.

Brian: Yes. First up this week and it's official, our sellers probably have already seen it, but not a bad reminder. The Internal Revenue Service or the IRS announced another delay of the $600 reporting threshold for Form 1099 K. As a result for tax year 2023, only eBay sellers who exceed the current reporting threshold of $20,000 and 200 transactions or had backup withholding applied in 2023 or are residents of states that have a lower reporting threshold, will receive a form 1099 K for tax year 2024. The IRS announced plans for a $5,000 reporting threshold. We expect further guidance on the tax year 2024 and beyond in the coming months. And we'll keep you in the loop. One little note on this, sometimes our sellers think, oh, that means I don't have to file taxes if I did less than 20,000 and 200 transactions. No, it just means we're not sending you a 1099 K. Please confer with your tax expert.

Griff: So that's good news.

Brian: It is. Well, and lastly for the news in 2023, a reminder since we kind of pre announced it already here on the podcast a few weeks ago, but if you are currently enrolled in eBay International Shipping, Combined Shipping is here and there's nothing you need to do to benefit from this new feature, yay. Your eligible listings will be updated automatically and combined shipment orders will display like they do for any other domestic order, simply combine and ship to the domestic eBay international shipping hub and you're done.

Griff: And I think it's probably a good point that we should mention, and I'm just gonna always assume that anyone who's smart enough to download and listen to this podcast is already fully enrolled in international shipping. But if you're new and you're not currently enrolled, you want to remember the benefits of selling around the globe to millions of buyers with international shipping and these particular points. It's really easy. You just, if you were familiar with the old Global Shipping Program, you're just gonna ship to a domestic hub. It happens to be located right now in Illinois. And we, unlike global shipping, the Global Shipping Program, eBay manages and pays for any and all returns for any reason whatsoever. You never have to take a return for an international sale. You never have to worry about the onus of doing anything or refunding and there's no impact on your seller metrics.

Brian: Huge benefit.

Griff: It's a huge, that's, I mean, that alone should get you to enroll and there's, unlike Global Shipping Program or shipping internationally without using eBay International Shipping, there's no international selling fees.

Brian: Another good benefit.

Griff: Alright, well without further ado, let's go talk to our seller advocates.

Brian: Sounds good.

Griff: eBay implemented a lot of changes this year, all for the benefit of sellers. Looking way back to the beginning of the year, January 1st, I was really surprised at how many things we rolled out that have had a really positive impact for sellers. And many of these rollouts are actually due to direct responses to seller feedback and recommendations. So thank you sellers. I thought at the end of the year it would be a good thing to go over these. So joining me to go over all of the rollouts we've done for 2023 are the two seller advocates from our seller experience team, both have been on this program before. Chuck Van Pelt and Jonathan Chard. Welcome gentlemen.

Chuck: Hi Griff. Thanks for having me back.

Jonathan: Hi Griff, excited to talk about this stuff.

Griff: I thought we'd recap some of the great features that eBay made available to sellers in 2023 because you know, we don't crow enough about this stuff.

Chuck: I agree. Yeah. In fact, when I put this list together, I was thinking how long it got very quickly and some of the amazing things we did, and we don't really get an opportunity to detail them out for everyone.

Griff: I thought we'd start right off with a topic that's really popular with eBay sellers and Chuck, can you lead us through the unpaid item updates for 2023?

Chuck: In 2023, we made a lot of improvements to reduce unpaid item incidents for our Buy It Now and Best Offer sales. So in the US and UK, a buyer has to now provide a payment method at the time they make an offer to a seller. And if the seller accepts, the buyer gets automatically charged.

Griff: I've noticed that.

Chuck: Yeah, that's happening today. The next one is, our fixed price or Buy It Now items. Most of those go directly now to checkout as soon as they're purchased. And another thing that we've implemented is stricter policies up to and including account suspension for users who repeatedly win auctions or make a best offer on items, but then fail to complete the purchase. So what's left? Well, we're down to auctions and seller initiated offers. Those are the main areas where we're still plugging away on UPI and I'm happy to share that we are tackling this. We're currently testing in the US to require payment for seller initiated offers and auctions.

Griff: Yay .

Chuck: I know, I figured everyone would be happy to hear that we're making progress there.

Griff: I'd use auctions more often if I knew that uh, there wasn't gonna be that pesky. Well, now you have to pay me stuff.

Chuck: I think so too. For sure. Jonathan, what else do we have?

Jonathan: Well, another thing we focus on in the year is like how, how can we save sellers time? We rolled out this, AI description writer on the mobile apps earlier in the year. We found it is saving people time. When you're typing on that phone and you're getting typos or maybe you might even have writer's block and this sort of like gives you a jumpstart on the description. You want to read it, you'll probably want to edit it a little bit, but at least gives you, it's there, it's a starting point. You don't have to use it, but it is another tool in your toolbox.

Griff: And that tool's available on mobile. I've actually used it. Is it available on desktop as well?

Jonathan: Yeah, just recently we rolled it out on our, our Advanced Listening Tool. So if you're using that tool, you'll, you'll see the button there and you know, it is optional but it's, you should try it out.

Griff: Excellent.

Chuck: I love these features that help you shorten the time it takes to list something. And writing descriptions for me is something where I always struggle with where to start. So for me it's nice to at least have a starting point.

Jonathan: Yeah. And I'll take these descriptions even and I'll use the add description, but then I'll put some spaces and put maybe some very important details at the top if I have measurements or condition. I just wanna make sure those are seen first. But it's, it's been helpful.

Chuck: You know, another tool that we improved that helps you list faster is the Background Image Removal Tool. And I don't know if you guys have tried this lately. The tools updated both on web and the mobile app. The old tool would sometimes struggle like finding the edges of items and identifying what is a shadow and what is the item. So now the tool uses machine learning to actually understand what is in the image and then accurately removing that background.

Griff: I've noticed a huge improvement from how it worked last year to the way it works now and I'm really, really impressed with that.

Chuck: Yeah. And if the more people use it, the more it learns more about the images and it's gonna get better and better. So, you know, I'd like to see what's happening by even the end of next year.

Jonathan: There are different schools of thought on the image background removal, but I really do feel like for that first image that shows up on your listing, it really can pop if you take that background off, make it white.

Griff: Sometimes it may be the perfect option for making your item picture, like you said pop and sometimes maybe it's fine the way it is. So it's, it's another option that sellers can use to improve their photo or photos.

Chuck: Absolutely. So Jonathan, what else do we have?

Jonathan: All right, another time saver and something we heard from sellers, we've enabled the ability to do bulk seller initiate offers from the phone. You can now do up to 50 at a time. It's super simple. Open the app, go to the selling section, go to your active listings and at the top they'll just be a filter. You tap that filter, select the listings and you can send this offer. You know, it's like I'll be sitting around watching TV and just be like, oh I should, you know, check if I maybe get some sales, I'll just fire this off. You can do it like while you're in line at Starbucks, you know, just like anytime you have a minute, why not mess with your listings and try to get a sale?

Chuck: It's really helped me continue to run my business when I'm out away from home. If I'm outsourcing or wherever I see, oh I can send 10 offers right now and I'll just quickly do it from wherever I'm standing. It's really helped me out a lot.

Griff: I like to have my phone with me like when I'm watching television and we watch a lot of Dateline and I can tell you the plot of those just when they start. And the only reason I watch it is 'cause I love Keith Morrison, but I'm sitting there thinking, I know who did this murder, so I'm just gonna go look at my listings. It's a lot easier now to send those offers.

Chuck: Yeah, I think that's a trend that you're gonna see more and more with eBay is uh, equating the web and the mobile platforms with various features.

Griff: Yeah, that's great. That's a great move.

Jonathan: Hey Chuck, what else have we got going this year?

Chuck: I love a sale and I use the markdown tool a lot on my store and I don't know if we've done a good job of communicating that now you can actually select specific listings in your store on the active listing screen and then add them to a new sale. Why is this useful? The active listing screen actually has way more powerful filtering capabilities that allow you to choose really specific subsets of your inventory to add to a sale. And it makes it really quick. For example, you can pick all the listings in your, uh, inventory that contain the word camera in select them all and then instantly start a sale to do what? You just filter the items you want, check the boxes next to those items, and then there's an actions menu at the top. You just pick create sale event and you're off and running.

Griff: You know what I would use this for?

Chuck: What's that?

Griff: So my filter would be start date. I'd look for those listings that I've had that are the oldest listings, I'd filter them so the oldest by start date would show up top and then I can select from there which ones I, I gotta get rid of. Those are gonna get in a sales event with a drastic markdown.

Chuck: That is a really powerful way to run sales. And I was even thinking like, what if I wanted to put everything in one bin of my inventory on sale? I would just sort by a custom SKU and then put 'em all on sale.

Griff: Or store a category.

Jonathan: That's such a good idea. Say you have your holiday stuff in one category, how simple is that Is to put all your Christmas stuff, our holiday stuff on sale.

Griff: And you know, it's a funny thing because I don't think this is something that sellers would think about right off if they found it, but it really does cut down a lot of work. I love this one.

Chuck: Jonathan, so what do we have next?

Jonathan: Well this is another, a really good one. Another time saver. Imagine that we found out a lot of sellers are using their device to go, you know, pick their inventory on on their sold orders and we never had the custom SKU in there and it was an aha moment like, oh my gosh, why don't we have the custom SKU? So if we got the custom SKU in there, we have, I think now that the buyer name and now you can sort by custom SKU, we group the buyers together so you can see one order and already hearing great great feedback from sellers about this. Some people would print out pieces of paper or run back and forth from their desktop to their warehouse or bins and now it's like you could just literally walk around like you're just picking your stuff. It's great.

Chuck: You know, I use this myself. I pick with my mobile device out of my inventory every day when I ship and I will sort by buyer name just to see if I have two packages or more. Going to the same buyer helps me bundle those together. And I'll also sort by custom SKU and that way I can go to like bin A and then get everything from bin A in one shot and then bin B all in one shot. It's really sped up my inventory picking game for sure.

Griff: I have to confess that I don't have that much inventory that I would use this for picking, but as my inventory grows again, I'm sure this will be a helpful tool.

Chuck: The cool thing about a feature like this, this is it just gives the seller the flexibility to use it however they want. And then sort by that.

Jonathan: And Chuck, you have another thing to share.

Chuck: You know, way back in January we launched a new capability and that is that when you enter a title for your listing, the listing form will automatically try to determine the appropriate category for your item and pre-fill it. If you don't get the perfect hit on the first try, the category isn't quite the one you wanted, you can actually just click on the category selector and usually the right category is right at the top of the list. The, uh, machine learning will build a list of secondary categories and, and it's really good at helping you find the one you want. And it's a big time saver.

Griff: Yeah. It's a lot faster than having to do it the old way, which is you, you were forced through the category hierarchy and I think not only was that more time, but sometimes it was confusing, is it still the right category Because you know, there are those items like for example, a camera, a film camera, there's more than one place you can put that on eBay and this makes it a lot easier. At least see the, if not the one that's selected, at least the one that's close to it so that it's much faster I find.

Chuck: Exactly. Yeah. I almost forgot how challenging it could be to dive down through the hierarchy of categories to find the right one because you know, this has been out since January and I've been using it since then and now it's just so natural for me to look at the category and it's generally already picked for me. Alright, so Jonathan, I think you have an update for us on Member To Member Messaging.

Jonathan: Yes, yes. Member To Member Messaging. This one's been out for the full year and maybe even a little bit beyond, but it's now fully out on, on the apps and a little bit on the desktop. It's the chat-based messaging. We used to have those big emails with like a copy of the thread. That's how it was, that's how email worked. But now it's sort of, everyone's more used to this sort of text-based, like you're chatting with someone and it makes it feel like a conversation. If they have more questions you can add photos right there. You can even respond to best offers from there. We're still improving it. We've heard from sellers you want to be able to mark as unread flag for later and those are all coming very soon.

Chuck: It seems like such a small thing, but being able to see that message history and the context of the conversation that such a helpful thing.

Griff: Yeah. Email's so last century.

Jonathan: Yeah. I feel like this is like truly makes eBay feel like it's a modern platform, having this, this text style and Okay,Chuck, you have some more for us of course.

Chuck: Yeah. I wanted to talk about our Order Details Page seems like a simple thing but uh, we did make significant changes. Order details is the screen that represents a sold listing. Now all the information about your order is organized in a much more readable way on this form. It's much easier to manage and fulfill your orders. It's much easier to purchase and manage shipping labels now. And it also links off to relevant information on costs or fees as well as back to the original listing.

Jonathan: That's great because I use the app often to print my shipping labels and you know, I've messed up a couple times and I was like, like how I can't avoid this, I can't reprint it. And now it's like, oh, I can now just do this right from the app and it's okay great. This is how I want it to work.

Griff: That was a big deficit I think in the, uh, app. Not enough support for shipping beyond just print label. And sometimes as you say, we have multiple labels to print or we have information that we need to know or be able to edit and it's a much nicer layout now.

Jonathan: Or I'll like build my package, print the label and realize, oh shoot, I messed up. I have to tear it off and now I can just like reprint the label again. It's not a big deal.

Chuck: Hey guys, I wanted to share that I recently started diving into the wild and wonderful world of Instagram.

Griff: Better late than never.

Chuck: I know, you know, I'm definitely a late adopter, but I've been having a lot of fun with it and using it for my eBay business. And Jonathan, didn't we do some new things around social sharing?

Jonathan: Yeah, social sharing, Chuck. I'm actually, I might get my Instagram account going again because of your amazing reels. I've seen 'em, I hear people talking about them.

Griff: People are talking about them?

Jonathan: Yeah, I've heard like some chatter about, oh, did you see Chuck's reel? And like he's, he's killing it.

Chuck: I'm just trying to share the knowledge guys.

Griff: You're gonna be an influencer on Instagram. I don't know about that with a million followers.

Jonathan: So yeah, so we've made it easier to connect your eBay account to Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, which allows you to send listings to one of those social networks. And you can also control the link back so it can go to your profile or your store, go to a store category or even just go back to the items you've shared. You know, this, this really helps drive traffic back to your store. Let's eBay show up where customers are hanging out and you know, get eBay top of mind to everybody and get them over to buy your stuff.

Griff: Yeah, that's a good one. That's something I would use. Not that I'm a social media maven, I hardly use it except for the podcast. But yeah, great tool.

Jonathan: Yeah, for sure. And, we're not done. And Chuck, you have some more good news of a common thing we had heard from sellers.

Chuck: I do. Yeah. There's so many things that we have in 2023. One thing that I didn't realize is how much our sellers depend on save draft listings to manage their business. Now I use some too, but I have fewer kinds of items. I've heard from some sellers that they're indispensable for their business. Now Griff, you use them, right?

Griff: Oh, I use them a lot. I just used them in a big way when I moved in May because I knew I wasn't gonna be able to fulfill anything. I was beyond store vacation. I just wanted to end a bunch of listings and save them as drafts so I could put them up later. And that was a lifesaver for me because it cut down on a lot of work. I didn't have thousands of listings, but I did have at the time I think I had over a hundred and even that would've been a lot of work recreating. But ending them and then moving them to drafts because I didn't know when I was gonna be able to re-list them, was a lifesaver for me.

Chuck: That's one way definitely. I've heard that sellers are using the tool, but what I also heard was that they need more time for their saved draft listings before they time out. Yeah. Uh, some people were feeling like they were losing work and not understanding why we heard that. And as a result, we recently made some changes to the draft listing retention process that draft listings will now last for 75 days until they expire. Secondly, sellers will receive a warning seven days before they expire. Any change you make to a draft will automatically reset that retention timer back to 75 days. So you can keep them indefinitely if you just make changes to them within that 75 day window.

Griff: That's pretty Cool.

Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. That resetting of the, the expiration date, that's great. You're not feeling the pressure of the 75 days. You can just go in, edit a title and be done with it.

Chuck: Yeah, for sure. And this is one of those ways where we've been hearing seller's voices. We've been really trying to understand what the pain points are, what's working, what isn't, and then applying those to make changes. And this is one thing that specifically came from seller feedback.

Griff: I love that seven day warning. That's actually really helpful in case you've forgotten.

Chuck: It is. Absolutely. Let's switch channels and uh, Jonathan, don't you have some info on trading card updates?

Jonathan: Yep, yep, yep, yep. You know, trading cards is, is a huge category. Millions of them on eBay and some are professionally graded, some are ungraded and we made a more structured way to add the grading. As it shows up, you can say yes, it's graded. You select your professional grader and you've set at the grade. If it's ungraded you, then will include the details on the card condition. It's definitely good for buyers they're able to like really able to split between like a graded or ungraded card.

Chuck: Yeah, I think we're recognizing the nuances now of the sports trading card and trading card game. Sometimes cards are graded and slabbed and sometimes cards are not. But then if they're not, we still need a way to characterize the condition of those cards and this new system is designed to accommodate that.

Griff: Isn't it a matter of value? There are some cards that are popular but they're just not worth the going through the process of having them graded yet.

Chuck: Yeah, you know, I'm not a big trading card person, but I do understand that there are many segments and peers to the trading card marketplace and sometimes I think there's a certain bar that a card can reach and then it makes it worthwhile to do that grading process. Other people like to sell them ungraded, even cards that are worthy of grading, they'll sell ungraded so that then the buyer can decide how they want to handle it.

Griff: It's more options and that's always a good thing.

Jonathan: I almost feel like that's almost maybe fun for a buyer to, to like speculate like, oh this, I think this thing is gonna be this grade, I'm gonna buy it at this good deal, get it graded higher, resell it or add it to my collection. You know, it's like it's a whole other way of buying a card and it's good not just to have new and used, you know, what is a used card mean? Now it actually has graded or ungraded, which is proper for cards. I know Chuck, you're not a sports card person, but I do know you have a storefront and you like to run sales and so you might have some information on this.

Chuck: I do. I love sales. Prior to now, the way buyers would find out about your sales typically was on our search results page or on your listings, they would see, oh, if I buy three I get one free or that kind of thing, or their coupon. But now for store subscribers coming to their storefront is a new sales tab. So you'll see a little tab at the top, it says sales and it's a single place where buyers can find all of your current sales. Now this tab is actually live right now for 50% of our store subscribers with the rest coming soon.

Griff: I don't know if I'm in that. I'd like, let me figure it out. I'm gonna go visit my store right now. Am I in the 50%? It looks like I'm not in the 50%.

Chuck: Sorry Griff. Well you'll get there soon enough. The reason we do that, we, we ramp things up at a regular rate just to make sure everything's going okay. We look at how the experience is for people that are aren't in the test group and people that are and we compare and just make sure things are moving in the right direction before we go all the way. So, I also wanted to talk about some updates we made in the area of shipping.

Griff: It was a big year.

Chuck: It was a big year for shipping. So many things changed. So the first thing is that we migrated from our Global Shipping Program to eBay International Shipping. On the surface they may seem very similar. Effectively you're sending your items to eBay and they are opening and and affirming that that item is what it was supposed to be. And then they're sending it on to the international destination. But there's actually a pretty big change happening under the covers there. Basically sellers ship their items to eBay's Transfer Center. eBay picks it up once the package shows it's arrived at the shipping center, then sold is sold. At that point, eBay will handle any further issues that come up with the sale. And this is kind of a revolutionary thing and and I love to get eBay International shipping sales because I feel so much more confident. I know I can get that package to the transfer center and once that's done my worries are over. If the person wants to return in or it doesn't fit or there are any issues like that, eBay actually steps in, gives that customer a good experience and handles the return in. I don't even really have to get involved.

Griff: It's very popular.

Jonathan: Even today. I literally, right before we started recording this podcast, I was checking my eBay inbox and it says I have been opted into this combined eBay International hipping. You can now combine orders that are gonna go through the eBay International Shipping Program. That's huge to me.

Griff: Sellers have been asking for that since Global Shipping Program started.

Chuck: Yeah, that's been a huge limitation of the program, the single item sale. And it's really great that we're moving forward with combined shipping. I have one more shipping update to share and in 2023 sellers can now use their eBay funds to purchase FedEx and UPS labels on the eBay Shipping Label Platform. So this is the funds that you are sort of sitting in your eBay account when you sell something and we've traditionally allowed you to use those for USPS, US Postal Service label purchase. And now you can do that also for FedEx and UPS labels. And another nice thing about FedEx and UPS is a lot of times those are the best shipping method for larger items, shipping those golf clubs across the country. That's definitely a UPS right there. We're down to the last, uh, the last thing here. Now this isn't an exhaustive list, Griff, but um, we do have one more thing to talk about and that is pricing research and our tools for doing pricing research. Jonathan, you wanna tell us about what we've done there?

Jonathan: One of the top things you would hear at eBay open or any, any sort of seller events that we would visit is like, please let us go further back. Maybe they're selling like a more, a rare item that does get listed all the time or they just want to get more data on how this thing sells. So Terapeak will now go back three years. It's an improvement from what it was. And we're also filtering out, you know, if there was an item that did wasn't, it was a maybe unpaid item or a cancellation, those are not included in Terapeak. So you're actually getting the true value of these sold listings, which before it was they were included and you had to kind of figure out what was going on with that. That's the improvement there.

Chuck: Yeah, I think that's been one of the biggest complaints I've heard on Terapeak. It would tend to pull in some items that weren't exactly the item that you were doing the search on and that would skew the average or median sale price. And so the tool's only gotten better at finding irrelevant items and also removing items that weren't actually resulting in sales to give you a more accurate assessment of that median sale price.

Griff: I love Terapeak.

Chuck: I do too. I use it a lot both out in the field and at home. You know, I like to do all buy it now listings, I'm, I'm not a big auction guy in my store so I do like to be able to zero in on that going rate and I try to stick right around there. And so the, these tools, uh, tools like Terapeak really helped me do that.

Griff: Lots of work was done in 2023.

Jonathan: This is a pretty big list but there's also tons of other small improvements we've done. I think you get a lot of feedback. We get a lot of feedback. We want to try to get somewhere better to like share these improvements as they're happening. So everyone doesn't have to dial into the podcast every once in a while to hear that.

Griff: Jonathan, there's nothing wrong with the podcast being point of contact, so please keep coming.

Jonathan: . Oh yeah, no, please do come to the podcast!

Chuck: We love to come here Griff.

Jonathan: Listen to the podcast. We'll come on the podcast. We'll share these things on the podcast. Griff will keep doing the podcast, but we wanna actually put this other places too.

Griff: Obviously. It's good for reference.

Chuck: This also works in the other direction. We are definitely listening to sellers. We expect to roll out some really great capabilities coming up here in 2024. But we want to hear the voices of the sellers. My message to them is, please continue to keep that great feedback coming in 2024. One easy way to do that is on your mobile device. I don't know if you know you can do this, but if you shake your mobile device while you're in the eBay app, you can quickly report an issue or just share your thoughts on the platform. It'll tell us what screen you were on when you did it, and tell us who you are and you're able to give us that feedback really quickly. And that's just one way.

Griff: I see a whole marketing campaign around shake.

Chuck: I know there's so many great song possibilities for a shake the app commercial. Right?

Jonathan: You know, I actually read ton of the shake feedback that comes in. I read a lot of our surveys and some I'll reply to reply to sellers sometimes too and be like, thanks for the shake. I like, I want to like promote the shake. No, we're listening to the shake. Tell us more. We want, we want to hear it.

Chuck: Yeah, we read it all. Absolutely.

Griff: Your shake brings all the sellers to your yard.

Chuck: Exactly. .

Griff: It can get really bad folks. Let's stop it. Before I get any worse on this one.

Chuck: I was thinking more of a shake it off by Taylor Swift. Maybe that's a good one.

Jonathan: I was thinking more of Outcast somehow. Like shake it like a Polaroid picture. They're all great possibilities.

Griff: Well guys, this is really good. Thank you so much for taking the time to go over this. I think it'll be benefit to sellers, to gear how many things were rolled out this year in the way of improvements and new features to help sellers sell more efficiently and hopefully more successfully.

Chuck: Thanks for having us, Griff. I really appreciate it. And you know, on behalf of all of the Seller Experience. Team because Jonathan and I are just part of the team. We're, we're the kind of the people you hear from the most. But there's so many people that really care about all these changes for sellers and on behalf of them. Thank you. And, and we hope everyone has great Q4 sales this year.

Jonathan: Yeah, thanks. This has been fun. Excited for the next one.

Griff: The next one will be coming, so stay tuned. We'll have another update in a few months. I'm sure both Chuck Van Pelt and Jonathan Chard work for eBay as seller advocates in our Seller Experience Team. And as I said, we'll have more updates during the year ahead 2024 guys have a safe holiday and we'll see you when the new year.

Chuck: Thanks Griff.

Jonathan: Thanks a lot. See you next year.

Brian: You got questions?

Griff: We got answers. Well, we got one answer Brian, because this week as an end of the year treat, there's only one question.

Brian: Only one?

Griff: Just one.

Brian: A special one.

Griff: It's a special one from somebody we know and I think you'll remember them But, why don't you read this one question, would you, this is the last question of 2023.

Brian: My gosh, I feel privileged.

Griff: So don't mess it up.

Brian: Okay, I'll try not to. Our first question and only question and last question of 2023 was sent to podcast@ebay.com by seller Gary who writes, Hey guys, love the podcast. From time to time I will get messages from buyers that they want to make an offer on their whole cart rather than the various individual items. To my knowledge as sellers, I don't think we have a way to see what is in their cart. Once a week or so, I will get a message from eBay stating that if I lower my price on a particular item by 5%, they will let the potential buyer know. And perhaps a deal can be struck, but I've never been able to peek inside a cart. Is there a way to do that? My understanding about the seller generated offers is that they are suggested for items that have been looked at by buyers. But I don't know if it just means they're looking at the item or have actually put it in their cart. Could you shed some more light on these two scenarios? Thanks Gary. User id, Fun America Comics. It's a good question.

Griff: Yeah, but we can address his first question right off the bat. No, Gary, there's no way for a seller to peek inside a buyer's shopping cart or what they have listed. The buyer may have more than just your items in their shopping cart. So that's why you can't peek at it. But there's no way for a seller to send a Best Offer or the buyer to send the best offer for the entire contents of their shopping cart. They can only do that individually and that's a good thing. Can you imagine how confusing it would be?

Brian: How would you guarantee shipment?

Griff: How would you know what you can accept? You'd have, you have to be able to do the items individually. Because each one was a different cost basis. So yeah, that's not possible.

Brian: Yeah, it's not like walking, you know, you can't peek into the cart. Kinda like, you know, at the grocery store when sometimes you might look over and look in someone's basket and go, oh, that looks good. I want to get one of those.

Griff: Or have comments about really should you be buying all this ice cream? I mean, look at you.

Brian: But it's interesting because we're a marketplace, it creates that little bit of an issue where a buyer can have multiple sellers items sitting in their cart and yet the offer's coming from just one of those sellers.

Griff: That's that question. Gary, I can understand why you would want to peak. I would want to peak too. Yes. But a peak is not available. Now when it comes to seller generated offers. I think you're getting the right idea here. There are three potential scenarios, and this is different. First, there's the seller initiated offer, but if you as a seller lower your price by 5% or more discount, then we'll let potential buyers know. And these potential buyers are people that have the item in their cart or who are watching it. And those buyers will get an alert saying, Hey, this price has just dropped by 5% or more. So that is true and that's what those messages are that you're getting from eBay. You'll also sometimes get messages that we'll encourage you to do so by saying, Hey, there's eyes on your items. If you lower the price, you may make a sale. So that means that somebody's either watching or has the item in their cart. But when it comes to sending seller generator offers, there's three situations where buyers will receive those offers. Do you know what they are? Brian?

Brian: If it's in your cart, if they've watched it and I'm not sure the third.

Griff: If they viewed it recently.

Brian: That's right. Just recently viewed it.

Griff: You know why I know this is true.

Brian: Why?

Griff: Because I'm a shopper and even just this morning I looked at an item and I wasn't really, you know, I looked at it and I thought, nah, I don't really want it. But the seller sent an initiated offer and I got it. This is something you just looked at. The seller is now offering this. I don't find that annoying. I like getting those in case. What if I do want it?

Brian: Get it for a few percentage off.

Griff: You know, it's not how much you spend, it's how much you save.

Brian: Exactly. If you have a question like Gary about selling on eBay, we'd love the chance to answer it. Just call it in on (888) 723-4630.

Griff: Yeah. We love that phone number. Uh, we love your calls. (888) 723-4630. Maybe your question will be the first one we answer in 2024. How would that be? We can call that hotline anytime of the day. By the way, leave a question or comment and if it's appropriate, we'll put it on the air. Which begs the question when I say that because somebody asks, well, do you get inappropriate calls?

Brian: Oh, do you?

Griff: Well I do, but nothing that's nasty or mean. What we get is sometimes even though the voice message greeting says, Hey, we can't really handle account issues, people will still leave like, my account was suspended or, you know, my listings were ended. And like we've said since we've had the podcast, is we really can't address those publicly because it's a privacy issue. And plus we can't really do much about it. We're not customer support in that sense. If it's a question about running a business or selling or a seller tool or feature or something that, you know, you want to make sense of that way.

Brian: Or a best practice you wanna share.

Griff: A best practice. Exactly. So yeah, so that's what that means.

Brian: If you don't like phoning your in your question, no worries. You can email us at podcast@ebay.com. That's podcast@ebay.com.

Griff: We like those as well. And now it's time for your weekly three point podcast checklist. The last one for 2023.

Brian: Check the announcement board at ebay.com/announcements for UpToDate Seller news every day.

Griff: You don't need me to tell you this, but come on sellers. It's break time. You work yourselves into a frenzy. Now let's spend the last week of the year with your family and friends and have some food and share some laughs and drink too much eggnog and basically recharge for the new year ahead.

Brian: Do you like cold or hot eggnog Griff?

Griff: I don't like eggnog at all.

Brian: Oh, next year this time we're gonna do a survey with our listeners and find out they prefer hot, cold, or not at all.

Griff: You can drink eggnog hot?

Brian: Yeah. People, drink it warm.

Griff: Yuck!

Brian: There are people who swear by warm and swear by cold.

Griff: So this is an issue. Is this like, does the toilet paper go over or under the rules?

Brian: Yes. We could do a survey with our listeners on that one too.

Griff: And you drink enough of that eggnog war. I mean, you'll be sitting there wondering that same question!

Brian: We'll need to review anything in this episode? It's easy. Check the transcript for this and all episodes for follow up on what you've heard and to find the links we referenced during the episode.

Griff: And speaking of our next episode, the first episode of 2024, we're gonna talk about setting goals, not resolution. We're gonna talk about goals, setting them and achieving them. Resolutions are for masochists, goals are for businesses.

Brian: Yes. And goals around your selling on eBay?

Griff: Yeah. Not weight loss goals or, you know, yes. I'm gonna be a better person. We'll just assume you can pull that off.

Brian: You're assuming a lot for me.

Griff: I'm gonna grow my hair back. That's my goal for 2024.

Brian: If you figure it out, let me know. We'd like to again, thank our guests this week. eBay Seller Advocates, Jonathan Chard and Chuck Van Pelt. And from our team to yours. This is Brian.

Griff: This is Griff.

Brian: Wishing you all a merry holiday.

Griff: And a happy and very successful New Year. Thanks Brian.

Brian: Thanks Griff. It's been a wonderful year.

Griff: Yes, I think so. And thank you for making the podcast what it is. I wouldn't do this alone.

Brian: Yep. And I couldn't do it without you. And that's the truth.

Griff: Literally the truth. Well, you could learn how, but there'd be a learning curve.

Brian: There would be a massive learning curve.

Griff: The eBay For Business Podcast is produced and distributed by Libsyn and podCast411.. See you in 2024 Brian.

Brian: See ya Griff. Happy New Year.

Griff: Happy New Year.