Seller Town Hall - where are the written responses?

[b86fiero]

So is Seller Town Hall only available on video?

Will we see a post with a compilation of the questions and eBay responses?

Last time around we got to read the responses.

Would greatly appreciate that opportunity this time too.

 Thanks for any info on when this will be available.

[tyler@ebay]

Hi @b86fiero - this is a great suggestion!

There is not a plan to do that with this Town Hall, but it will be something we take into consideration for future events. 

[coffeebean832]

I've been sick so I'm just starting to catch up on town hall, seller update, etc. I listened to the town hall last night and transcribed it. Hope this helps. tyler@ebay  @b86fiero 

Event: eBay Virtual Town Hall

Date: February 25, 2020

Attendees: Jordan Sweetnam - SVP and GM Americas Market, Marni Levine - VP Seller Operations and Engagement, and Harry Temkin - VP Seller Experience

LEVINE: Hello Sellers! And welcome to our first virtual town hall. I say first - it's amazing that after 25 years we're still doing firsts. We still have firsts, it's amazing. I'm Marni Levine and I head up the Seller Engagement and Operations here at eBay. I'm here today with Jordan Sweetnam who heads up North America. Welcome.

SWEETNAM: Good morning, thank you.

LEVINE: Thank you. And Harry Temkin who runs our product.

TEMKIN: Morning. Thank you. Hello sellers, great to be here.

LEVINE: Yes, we are so happy to be here. As I've mentioned, throughout this year so far we're trying to make it easier to connect with you. We want to be kind of in your homes, in your businesses. Hopefully that's where you are now - comfortable and settled in for the next forty minutes with us. And we want to be out there on the road. We're here in San Jose today, but as many of you know you'll be in Tampa?

TEMKIN: I will be.

LEVINE: On Thursday, exactly, for our first Up Front of the year. So we are thrilled to be here with you guys today. We want to know what's on your mind. You all submitted some very good questions. We appreciate them, we appreciate the engagement on the community, and we'll be addressing a lot of those questions and answers today as we go through the next few minutes.

So, I'll start with Jordan. I would like to hear, and hopefully you [sellers] would like to hear, a little bit about what's on your mind [Jordan]. It's almost March already so 2020 is well underway and I'd like to hear a little about the business and what you're thinking about.

SWEETNAM: Yeah, thanks Marni. So it's a great question. It's hard to believe for me that I've been back six or seven months - it goes really fast. Probably the first thing to address is that I get a lot of questions around business performance. "What's going on? Oh my goodness." And if you've taken any time to listen to our earnings call with Scott you'll hear talk about IST (internet sales tax), unhealthy marketing spend and things that eBay is doing that are short-term by nature and I think for many folks who I assume are connected - none of that comes as a huge surprise for you. What I've started to tell sellers in 101 is you take away these one-time things like internet sales tax which for most sellers hasn't had a big impact, but for some sellers whose business is really engaged in impact arbitrage has been tough - but if you take away these one-time events, eBay is not in bad shape, but we have a lot of work to do. And I also don't think that's a surprise to anyone. That was kind of what I fully expected coming back to eBay, so what does that mean? Why am I excited?

I'm excited for two reasons. One - we're going to talk a little about it today and you're going to hear a lot more from Harry and Marni as the year goes on about how we really start getting back to what is "authentically eBay" and where can we compete and have fun? I think there's a question coming up around "used" and these kinds of things - areas we haven't historically wanted to talk about where there's amazing part of our inventory. So these things really excite me.

And the second thing that excites me is, Marni - your role is new, but not new. It somehow disappeared for a bit while I was gone and I'm excited to have you back on the role. But how are you engaging with sellers? I've gotten a lot of conspiracy e-mails in the last couple of weeks like, "I heard you got rid of eBay Open," and I think we can touch on that later if you want, but the reality is this [Town Hall event] is one of many ways in which we're re-engaging with sellers and not just the three of us, but getting more eBay employees out to your place of operations and to local Community events. So, yes, there are some headwinds in the business, but there is a lot to be excited about and it's gonna take some time.

LEVINE: Yeah, well I think "authentically eBay" certainly resonates with me and, Harry it resonates with you, and I know it resonates with our sellers so thank you for that. Part of empowering our sellers - you folks - is believing in the power of Community. So it's not just us getting out there, it's also sellers talking to other sellers, sellers training other sellers, there's so much power in the Community. But I mentioned we have our Up Fronts this year, we're not doing eBay Open, we're going to go on the road. And so much of that is not only us talking to sellers and sharing new experiences and new tools, but it's really sellers engaging with each other and sharing tips and tricks and all of that good stuff, so we are excited about that. And it seems like people are super excited for these Up Fronts - Tampa sold out in less than a week - so I'll do my first commercial - register at eBay.com/sellerevents if you want to head to one of our Up Fronts this year - they're going to be great.

So, with that, we always want to be as transparent as we can with our sellers - they're our partners. I want to really talk about one of the first questions and the most popular question, it got the most votes, and this is from seller my-cottage-books-and-anqitues. This was a commentary/question that really resonated and hit home with me so I'm going to somewhat read it verbatim so I don't misrepresent the question. It said:

"eBay is in a state of transition and listing market share. We've [eBay] said buyer expectations are changing - which they are - and eBay gave the new market a try." And I think they're referring to a lot of, you know - fast shipping, free returns on everything, right? "But the used market has been growing. We've seen an influx in competitors as of late, but eBay is still a major player. I think if eBay focused on the used market where buyers aren't obsessed with delivery speed, eBay could start to grow again, and eBay needs to support used sellers. Is eBay willing to work with us to rebuild eBay?" There's a lot of eBay in there.

SWEETNAM: Yeah. I love the question, and to answer it fully the 35 minutes and 27 seconds I have left wouldn't be enough time 'cause it really is one of the key reasons I came back. I so fundamentally believe in what is the opportunity of eBay and it isn't all the things we have been chasing in the past. And that doesn't mean eBay won't sell new - we've got tech accessories, that's awesome, we've got electronics, but one of the things we kind of confuse is there's actually a lot of new in places where we are amazing and we sell a lot of new collectibles, like a lot of limited releases and drops. But the trend around used isn't just eBay has it and we're awesome at it. The question sort of touched on all the demographic trends. Look at what goes on my daughter's age group and they shop at goodwill for retro and unique and I think we should be not avoiding it, but leaning into it and being proud of all this amazing selection. We talk about the eBay spectrum of value: used as a really simplified term captures that. But the question also touches on some other things around the range of the inventory that we have and in some parts of the business if that's what you want to sell the buyer expectation is two day shipping and next day shipping and perfect returns, but if you find the perfect 1932 Fortune Magazine, I don't think it really matters if it comes in two day shipping. You found the perfect product and you've been looking for it for months and months, or longer and I think that's where - I know, Marni, your team's busy working away at this - but, sellers will start to hear a lot more from us this year about how we're going to start to differentiate our experience across the different verticals to reflect what is appropriate in that space and I think 'used' is sort of like the starting point for that conversation and it's really the anchor point. So great question, I love it, and it's definitely the theme of where we're headed.

LEVINE: Yeah, this is great dialogue and we appreciate this. We absolutely take the input and the feedback - when you're [Harry] building your product, I know you're talking to sellers all the time.

TEMKIN: All the time.

LEVINE: We don't like to live in a bubble here and just create products and tools that we think will work. We know that sellers are key to the development and the future of eBay, for sure.

TEMKIN: I think I'm in eight different FaceBook groups. I read every e-mail that comes back in all the way so we take in customer feedback. I read it all, and so does the team.

LEVINE: Yes, that's great. I want to pivot. There were a lot of questions around Managed Payments, which is a big initiative for eBay. No surprise. I think with the roll out of Managed Payments last year, this was a great example of where we engaged with sellers. We chose sellers who actually wanted to be part of the pilot. Some sellers love being first and being guinea pigs and giving us feedback. And some sellers, it was just really appropriate for them. We had the capabilities to allow them into the program. Some [sellers] it wasn't for. But this year is a big year for us for managed payments, and more and more sellers will be adopted in. So, having said that, Jordan - one of the questions that got a lot of votes was around the 25 cent per item fee. Specifically asked [by seller somanypostcards] was:

"The $.25 per item listing fee in Managed Payments is an egregious fee increase that will eliminate many high volume, low cost sellers. Can eBay offer a reasonable fee in Managed Payments so that high volume, low cost sellers can remain and be profitable?" What say you [Jordan]?

SWEETNAM: Yes. I laugh and hesitate a little bit. This was also the top question that came up on my December AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the Community boards. I don't think this is a surprise to the Community. There are a lot of different business models on eBay and when you intersect that with Payments, which is probably one of the hardest things we've ever done as a company, there are places that it's going to take us time to get it right, but I see no reason why we'd be ramping Payments without having a solution in place for sellers that are selling multiple items in an order. Yes, there is a cost to serve, that's inherent in running the platform, but I don't think that cost to serve scales if you're selling ten stamps, or ten baseball or hockey cards in an envelope that we need to charge you a fee per [item]. I can't tell you today what the solution is specifically because the short answer is we don't know, but I've definitely heard the feedback and it's not an area where I think it makes any sense for us to be increasing fees or certainly not putting sellers out of business. That makes no sense.

LEVINE: And then a follow up was a couple of questions around categories that are not included [with Managed Payments] so far, like coins, tickets, gift cards. Those will all be included, this will be 100% rolled out over time, so anything that's not included currently will be included.

SWEETNAM: Yeah, and I know there were some rumors swirling last week on some of the Community discussion boards around, "Oh, does this mean eBay's going to get out of bullion or travel or timeshares?" I think was one of the categories, and the answer is definitely no. There's just, as you can probably appreciate, across all of these different categories there are different regulations and rules in place and so we're working on all of the payments requirements. These categories, cross-border trade scenarios - it all takes time, but there's no incentive for us, there's no reason as part of Payments for us to not support all of these businesses.

LEVINE: Great. Alright, Harry, you've been quiet, which is not like you. [laughing] But thank you.

TEMKIN: In fact, I could use all thirty minutes.

LEVINE: I know, we know, we love that about you. And you flew here from New York and now you're heading out to Tampa tomorrow to the Up Front, so you'll be seeing a lot of the sellers.

TEMKIN: I can't wait.

LEVINE: So I'd love to hear from both of you a little bit about - and I can chime in as well, because Harry, you and I have worked closely together - how you're both partnering together through this journey, right? Kind of one hand, you guys work in tandem, right? And so love to hear a little about this product relationship/partnership, what we're building together and how it works.

[coffeebean832]

SWEETNAM: Sure, so for me, you [Harry] can give the deep thoughtful answer. What I shared with Marni last night was you are, Harry, you make it so easy because probably even before I can send you an e-mail, you're sending me, "Hey, this came up on FaceBook, and this customer reached out to me." Marni, you said earlier we're not sitting here trying to build products in a vacuum, but it's tricky you have new employees who may not have met sellers and eBay's a complicated business. When I look for having an awesome technology partner, it's Harry, you and your team getting out and getting to know sellers and, man, talk about you leading the charge and leading the way. You make my job extremely easy on that front. So you probably have a more detailed, in-depth answer.

TEMKIN: Well, yeah, in all of my career I've probably spent 50% of my time with customers. That's really important to me - connecting with all of you [sellers] and I've tried to do that big time here at eBay. Being at Up Fronts, being at eBay Open, listening to your feedback through FaceBook and e-mails. I literally, I say that sincerely. I read everything that comes back, as does my team, and I try to get my team out in the field as much as possible and working along side with your [Jordan's] team. I think what really impresses me is you're [Jordan] in the same FaceBook rooms as I am. You take a very customer-centric focus and I think that's really important because we share a lot of the ideas. We take the feedback - how are we going to go tackle that? What's the best way to go work with that? And I think that's what makes the relationship really special is that we both have that very, very customer-centric view and we care deeply about listening to what our customers [sellers] have to say and then employing that in our products.

LEVINE: Great, thank you both. So, Harry, we had a big year last year.

TEMKIN: We did have a big year last year.

LEVINE: We launched some great products. So remind our sellers of some of the product milestones for last year and then fast forward and what's the focus for 2020?

TEMKIN: Sure. You know what? I was so proud of the team last year. I was super excited. I've only been with eBay for - it's hard to believe - a year and a half already, and I got to do eBay Open 9 months into [my tenure at] eBay and it was one of the most exciting things that I've ever done. Item Specifics was the big thing last year and it's gonna be a big thing this year. Remember, item specifics are what further index your listing in search. It's what helps describe the item in more detail. One of the things that's really important to understand is that a lot of you [sellers] have believed that title was the most important thing. The reality is it's about title and your item specifics because if you don't give us the item specifics, you actually don't get returned in a lot of various ways that buyers are searching on the platform - for example, left hand navigation. So it's really critical to give us the item specifics and that's why we went and actually redesigned the entire workflow. So we made it easier for you to know which ones were the most important to buyers, and we actually for the first time ever started to give you the data. We showed you how many times a buyer is searching for that specific item specific over the last 30 days so that the listing flow would be more efficient for you. Instead of having to worry about 50 item specifics, hey, these are the most critical ones. We'll talk a little bit more about what we're going to do in 2020 with that, as well.

When we talk about authentically eBay or uniquely eBay, offers to buyers was huge last year. We're doing over a -- actually you [sellers] are doing over a million offers a day, which is incredible. It's the fastest growing product that we have in Selling, and remember that's the ability for you to send a personalized discount effectively to watchers of your listings.

LEVINE: I want to say, today on one of the FaceBook groups that I'm in, somebody said, "I made an offer weeks ago," and suddenly, they had forgotten about it, it converted. Right?

[coffeebean832]

TEMKIN: Exactly. And I'm going to get into a little more about how we're unhooking that even more to take advantage of this amazing capability. So then we also launched MUAA (multi user account access) which is huge for our larger businesses in which you have employees that you need to give access to manage creation of listings and the like. And also we announce the integration of Terapeak into Seller Hub and I'll get a little more into that. That's our historical transactional analysis platform. A bunch of other cool things like Buy Again and Volume Discount, but it was an amazing year.

Now, with respect to 2020... The way that I like to think about selling, the way that I organize our products is really around three main themes: efficiency, conversion and profitability. When you think about efficiency it's how do I help you manage your business or your listings better? And, again, this is going to be about item specifics so this year you're going to see us allow you to edit the item specifics in bulk directly from Active listings [in Seller Hub]. And we're going to show you which listings are missing the required and recommended aspects so, again, calling attention to the actions you need to take to, again, improve the quality of the listing.

When it comes to conversion, again, all of the functionality of Terapeak is now going to be natively embedded in Seller Hub so we're going to turn off the old Terapeak.com platform, and it's actually going to be enhanced even further because Terapeak not only will search on title, but it's also going to search on those really important item specifics now.

Something we launched this week that we're super proud of on iOS and Android is image cleanup.

LEVINE: My favorite.

TEMKIN: I'll talk a little bit more when we get to the sneak peek on the Seller Update, and how important that is. And then, finally, just on profitability, you're going to see us again enhance Seller Hub significantly this year, particularly in the Active listings capability. Again, all of the next seller actions showing you how to improve the quality of your listing to help get it converted. And particularly also with MUAA, we're going to add a lot more capabilities, and I'll talk about when we give the sneak peek on the Seller Update. So, a lot to look forward to here in 2020.

LEVINE: Yes, so let me go back to one of the questions. With all of those great milestones there was definitely some challenges, as well. And there was a lot of questions around site experience issues. Item specifics in fashion, which I know you've [Harry] talked about extensively. You've been at the forefront of communicating with sellers on that. A little bit of noise around unusable or invalid shipping addresses, which is key for shipping and EDDs (estimated delivery dates). And then a little bit of noise around people creating multiple accounts. So, you know, the question is what more can we [eBay] do? We've kind of come out and said we're doing our best. We know you're [Harry] not afraid of transparency, we know you talk to our sellers, you get face to face with them, you'll be, again, in Tampa. You're not hiding behind your desk. But, a little bit about the kind of issues that happened and what we're going to do going forward differently.

TEMKIN: That's a lot of questions there, but I think, look, it's our 25th year anniversary. We have a huge technology platform. We have a lot of newer technology and we have some older technology and we're committed to migrating off the older technology. Whenever you have older technology, on occasion you're going to have issues that you're going to address. We are very, very focused on that. Having 100% up time is critical to us, it's critical to your [sellers] business. We obviously are keenly aware to that, and something that we're doing differently this year, is actually dedicating resource to something we call Fix the Essentials. We take your feedback very seriously. We get a lot of it, and as an example, one of the things is vacation settings. We know that it's really an out of office assistant, it's not updating EDD correctly. That is a major thing that we want to solve and are going to solve this year, and that's something we call Fix the Essentials.

Another example might be that BEAR (bulk edit and replace tool) is limited to 500 listings at a time and so we know that's hard to use when you're managing thousands of listings and you want to edit them in bulk. That's another thing that we call Fix the Essentials. These are things that are long-standing, they work, but they haven't worked to the best of their ability, and so this year we want to actually carve out resource, dedicate resource to solve a lot of those FTEs (fix the essentials). And you'll see that over the course of the year, just like we built new things like Seller Initiated Offers.

With respect to item specifics, we have thousands, and thousands of categories. Certainly we define the aspects in those categories, but also we've made it so you can define them as well. You give us custom values. These are open-ended fields in terms of the aspect names and the values. Over time it's become an incredibly large set of values. We're working very hard and diligently to clean them - to go through each category and reorganize them. That was part of what we were doing, again with the item specifics program of showing a required section and then a recommended section when you're going through the listing flows. And that honestly just takes time to go through every one of those categories, but a lot of it is to partner with you [sellers]. We actually have created an e-mail address called sdsupport@ebay.com where we encourage you to send us -- you're the real experts actually, right? Tell us what we should change when it comes to aspect values. I actually was talking with Dorothy who came - a seller on the eBay Community boards - in Home & Garden about pots and pans of all things. And we had all of these weird values, she's like, "These don't make sense." We got them back to Structured Data and within a week we got them cleaned up. It's the same thing with the [women's clothing] plus sizes - we missed on that one, we've just added them into the system. We don't get it right all the time, we get it right most of the time, and so we learn from that, we get better at it, but with partnering with you [sellers], and you helping us through the process, we will make it better as we go through.

Now with respect to checkout and invalid addresses, we operate in 190 countries, with 183 million buyers, and so inevitably, we get all kinds of formats with addresses. We do our best to work through that when they're not accurate, but I want to reassure you that sellers can cancel those transactions without any impact to your seller performance, and an incorrect buyer address is not considered a defect. So you're not going to be impacted by that if you can't solve for that. Obviously we're going to do everything we can to get those addresses right, but ultimately you're not going to be penalized for that.

LEVINE: Thank you, I know there was a lot in there.

TEMKIN: Did I miss anything, or did I get it?

LEVINE: I think you covered most of it. I'm sure there'll be plenty of questions and comments that you will read all of, as you do.

TEMKIN: Absolutely.

[coffeebean832]

LEVINE: So, Jordan, I'm going to take it back to you. A lot of chatter, a hot topic around Seller Protections. It's something we announced last year and we keep iterating on it, evolving it. Just the name alone, Seller Protections, is important to us because we do want to protect our sellers. We want to create a marketplace that is sustainable and healthy. So there was a specific question around SNADs, or significantly not as described claims, and a seller asked, "Is it possible to make buyers provide substantial proof, such as photos? Many sellers can't afford to offer free returns, buyers get around this by clicking SNAD even when that is not the case. It takes time to fight these for sellers and for eBay. And there's risk of negative feedback," which we know is a big concern for all of you out there. So, any updates on these claims and Seller Protections that you can share?

SWEETNAM: Sure. This is a funny answer to a tough question. One of the craziest things somebody asked me when I came back was, "OK, great, you're back now and you worked in Selling so does that mean you're going to go back now and sell for sellers as opposed to buyers?" That's unfortunately kind of what got us into this mess is when you run a marketplace it's really difficult and so the solution isn't going to be for us to put a whole bunch more burden on buyers, then lean into selling for a couple of years, then flip it back. That just doesn't work. I get so many examples of sellers were getting the wrong thing back, false claims, and it's heartbreaking, but I don't know the solution is for us to have more complexity for both parties. It actually - one of the areas I feel strongly about is what I touched on earlier, which is I think we've overcomplicated the process by trying to have a one size fits all solution in all categories. If you are selling a new in box 30" TV, you're going to have to have a retail center return policy. That is what the reality is in that space. Guess what? Walmart, Amazon, Target - buyers open those products and accidentally damage them in the process of opening them and the retailer has to take it back. It sucks and that's a tough product to sell. But the flip side is, if you're selling a second edition Spider Man comic and it's in mint condition and you send it to a buyer and they read it and get some Cheeto dust on it, take a selfie with it and then send it back to you, no, you shouldn't have to take that return. So I'm not necessarily a fan of trying to put more proof because the problem is - you can see on FaceBook, or maybe it was on Reddit, I saw someone say, "Well I know it wasn't damaged but I think they cut the pants to send them back to me." So, buyers can damage items.

If we're trying to adjudicate all of that it's hopeless, so one of the things you're going to hear a lot more about this year - and it's going to take us more than one year to get there - is how do we actually start to change _???_ requirements, return policies so that it actually reflects what is retail standard in that specific category for that product and that inventory condition? There's no perfect solution. Selling things is messy but if you're going to go back to the vast majority of people on the platform and you're going to do the right thing, how can we make sure then that we're not asking sellers to invest in parts of the business that don't matter? We're not having too generous return policies in one area or not aggressive enough in others. Again, to build on what Harry said, keep the feedback coming. You're going to hear changes from us. They're not going to be done to black box, they're going to be soliciting your input, and despite our best efforts we're bound to miss things. So don't assume if you see something that makes no sense that we did it on purpose. Let us know and provide feedback. There's a lot of complexity on this platform.

LEVINE: Great, well thank you for that good segue 'cause I'm on my next commercial break about feedback. Speaking of feedback... once we're done with our first ever Virtual Town Hall today, we do want you to take the survey. Tell us what you thought, what you liked, what you didn't like, was it time well spent? Please share. I know you're not afraid to share your thoughts, and we want to hear them. You can find the survey, it's streaming right now on eBay For Business on FaceBook, and of course on our Community. Please do that, we appreciate it, 'cause we want to get better at this every time.

So, Harry, tomorrow is Seller Update.

TEMKIN: It is.

LEVINE: I know, and I wanted to kind of hear from you what sellers can expect. There was a specific question around shipping and I know there's some news about shipping in Seller Update, so if you want to hit on that.

TEMKIN: We'll talk about it.

LEVINE: So tell us what sellers can expect tomorrow.

TEMKIN: Sure. You guys want a sneak peek? Alright. So, first, MUAA - we promised members at Open that the first release would be about editing or creating drafts of listings, and then we would continue to expand it to other capabilities. I'm pleased to announce 1) that we're going to the rest of the world with it, 2) that we're expanding it to [Seller Hub] Orders. So now employees will be able to see orders and do pick and pack essentially, write a note back to the employer saying they're ready to ship, and then labels can be printed. So labels will be secondary, that's also coming, but we're ready to release read-only order support in MUAA.

Terapeak. So, as I mentioned before, all of the functionality that was in stand-alone Terapeak will now be in Seller Hub and significantly improved now that it is in Seller Hub. So we're ready to turn off old Terapeak.com at the end of March. And, again, all of that functionality will be in Seller Hub.

Offers to buyers. Again, growing as fast as it is, we want to continue that trend and so we're actually going to unhook its' capabilities even more. Unleash it, if you will. When we originally launched it you could send up to 10 offers in the first launch. Now we're going to open that up to 40 so effectively capturing almost all of your watchers, for the most part. And we also added, recently, when something is in cart and you want to get the buyer over the line effectively, you can now send them an offer when it's in cart. And now we're adding something called heavy browse which means if a buyer has clicked on your item more than three times, it makes it eligible to send them that personalized discount, and that's been a huge feature and that's ramping.

We talked about Image Cleanup so that is launching this week on iOS and Andriod. And remember the importance of image cleanup is, you take a photo and it creates a beautiful white, clean background. That's really important for search engine optimization, key for Google, but more importantly on-platform it is putting the best picture forward. It's the picture that shows up in SRP (Search Results Page), it's the first picture you see in View Item, and it also means that when buyers use the image search capability, they'll have a better match to that photo. It's super cool and I'm just gonna make a call out to Ralli Roots who's gonna be at Up Front Tampa. They did an amazing video showing nine ways they took a photo of a t-shirt on the floor, on the wall, on grass... and every one cleaned up automatically and it was awesome. I highly recommend checking it out if you wanna see how awesome this capability is. And again, that should make the ease of taking photos and listing much, much better.

We will have some updates on shipping. I'm going to leave that to the update itself, but I do want to call out a specific question that came in about estimated delivery dates with respect to weekends - delivery on Saturday and Sunday. That's something right now that we don't take into account. We understand that and one of the issues is we are a global platform. We operate in hundreds of countries - 190 marketplaces - and dealing with all of the different mechanisms of shipping in all of those places worldwide means we built a global capability to handle that. Getting down to the regional level is a challenge. I'm not saying we're not going to go look at what we can do to solve that problem, particularly if we look at FedEx or UPS and United States Postal Service, and look to see how we can get that as part of the EDD. We will certainly look at that based on your feedback. You can use the door-to-door rate table, which is a little bit more accurate in those cases, but certainly you've raised our awareness to it and it's something that we want to look at and see if we can tackle it. We'll check that out during the course of the year.

LEVINE: Great, so everyone will tune in tomorrow for Seller Update.

TEMKIN: Yes.

LEVINE: Alright. Let's see here. 'Tis the season - tax season, that is. Thank you to the sellers for sending in this question. Sellers are asking for annual reports for their filings rather than the past 90 days. Currently we have access to 90 days. What's the status of this request? I know it's come up a few times.

TEMKIN: That is a priority for us. That is something we are absolutely working on. That'll happen later this year. I understand that is a bit of a challenge right now. The way that you can get at the data today, particularly around IST, is we have a new download Orders report and in there it actually has all of the elements of your orders, it's very slick. But it does break out all of the internet sales tax and the ways that it was collected, whether we collected it and paid on your behalf or you collected and it had to be remitted to the state by the seller. All of that detail is in those reports and they can be downloaded up to 90 days. Although not the best - and we recognize that - and will have up to a full year so you can get all of the information at one time later in the year, at the moment you can schedule a download of that report every 30 days. Then you simply put those reports together and you can amass the data and look at it. We recognize that your 1099 is showing a total revenue and you need that sales tax to break out and do the math. So again, that's on its way, but in the interim you can automate a schedule to download all of the data that you need.

LEVINE: Great, thank you very much. Alright, so, Jordan, any closing comments before we wrap up for this first Town Hall?

SWEETNAM: No, I think you touched on earlier. Thank you. I appreciate you [sellers] taking the time to dial in today and let us know your feedback. You [Marni] kind of alluded on this in a post in the Community a couple of weeks ago, but this is one of many different ways we're getting out and engaging, so we want to hear if this is effective and if this is interesting. We need to cover more questions, we need more speakers, we need less questions, the tech didn't work, more eBay t-shirts, I don't know, less eBay t-shirts. Please just keep the feedback coming. I will tell you in all transparency, there were things that I learned as part of going through these questions. I can't emphasize enough, and Harry you touched on this a couple of times, 190 countries 100+ million buyers, there is so much complexity in the eBay ecosystem. It is easy for a small number of people here to miss situations and it kills me that missed decision here can result in somebody in the Community asking themselves, "Oh, well maybe eBay doesn't want my business." That's crazy, so please take the time to communicate with us, send us feedback. We're on lots of different channels - the eBay boards, the FaceBook groups, the eBay for Business - just keep the feedback coming and thank you. For people who've been sending e-mails directly I think one of the points they keep emphasizing is thank you for the feedback, we're working on fixing these fundamentals on this amazing partnership and product, but it's going to take time. It's our 25th anniversary, that is incredible. We are privileged to be here, we're privileged to have all of you take the time to run your business on the platform, but wow, there's a lot for us to do to get to the next 25 years and so I appreciate you taking the time and having the patience and just keep that feedback coming.

TEMKIN: Yeah, I'll just add on to say 25 years of all the things we've done - there's a lot of technology there. There's a lot of things that we're making better, we're building new, but it really is we're taking in your feedback. Please continue to reach out to us on all the FaceBook rooms, to the e-mail feedback, the Community board, and as you know a lot of us are in these FaceBook rooms. We can't be there all the time, we try to - sometimes on my weekends I'll have a bunch of hours and I'll just go into the FaceBook rooms and I try to respond to as many questions as I can, take the feedback and see if we can go implement the feedback. I just had a couple literally yesterday at the Canadian board that I'm tackling on some of the item specifics, and as I said, please utilize the e-mail address sdsupport@ebay.com to give us the feedback on item specifics. As I said, it is one of our top priorities this year to make the listing flows more efficient for you, and to clean up the data sets, make them more accurate. A lot of that is with your help.

LEVINE: Alright, well, thank you sellers. Thank you for your engagement and submitting all those questions. We'll see you out there. Happy selling and we'll see you on the road soon.

TEMKIN: sdsupport@ebay.com

[earlyant-77]

Thank you!

My favorite is this:

You all submitted some very good questions. We appreciate them, we appreciate the engagement on the community, and we'll be addressing a lot of those questions and answers today as we go through the next few minutes.

[dhbookds]

I actually was talking with Dorothy who came - a seller on the eBay Community boards - in Home & Garden about pots and pans of all things. And we had all of these weird values, she's like, "These don't make sense." We got them back to Structured Data and within a week we got them cleaned up.

just for info, the loaf pan category item specifics were NOT fixed, and have not been fixed (it may be in the que, according to Harry)........ I did point that out to Harry after the Townhall and he was going to check on it........haven't heard anything else. 

[comics-scifi-collectibles]

@coffeebean832  Thanks!  I can read faster than they talk. 😉 

Much appreciated for the hearing impaired too.  Ebay really should consider equal access to these types of events.

tyler@ebay 

[chapeau-noir]

---

@earlyant-77 wrote:

Thank you!

My favorite is this:

You all submitted some very good questions. We appreciate them, we appreciate the engagement on the community, and we'll be addressing a lot of those questions and answers today as we go through the next few minutes.

---

"A little bit" is also a favourite phrase.  Everything is discussed 'a little bit'.

[nc-daydreamer]

@coffeebean832 

NICE WORK!!

Thank you for this enormous effort! I am truly impressed and grateful. Do you this for a living? If not, maybe you should consider it - or maybe eBay should put you on the payroll!

[earlyant-77]

And at least he thanked everyone for 'dialing in' ...........

I've been working with computers since before the mid-70's, and I haven't said "dial in" for about 25 years. I've used 'connect' instead - way before it began to mean something else.

And I don't 'follow' sellers either - I have them bookmarked ever since they changed it from 'saved sellers'. I don't "follow" anyone. I lead.

[b86fiero]

A gazillion thank you's for taking the time to transcribe the Town Hall video and share it with us!!!

I'm sure everyone appreciates you!

[coffeebean832]

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@nc-daydreamer wrote:

@coffeebean832 

NICE WORK!!

Thank you for this enormous effort! I am truly impressed and grateful. Do you this for a living? If not, maybe you should consider it - or maybe eBay should put you on the payroll!

---

If eBay is reading this and wants to hire me to transcribe future events I will accept payment in the form of anchor store subscription fees being waived. 😉

I transcribed it for a friend that has difficulty hearing and posted it here because I figured there might be others in the same boat.

YouTube- where the video is hosted- actually provides a closed captioning option- but it's not completely accurate and it can be difficult to follow, especially when acronyms are used.

[coffeebean832]

There was a lot of good information in the town hall. I'm most looking forward to fixing the essentials, seller hub functionality updates, and a change to the 25 cent per listing fee. There was one part that I found confusing though.

LEVINE: I want to say, today on one of the FaceBook groups that I'm in, somebody said, "I made an offer weeks ago," and suddenly, they had forgotten about it, it converted. Right?

This was said in reference to seller initiated offers. It appears that she doesn't know SIO are only valid for 48 hours? How could it convert into a sale weeks later?