@my-cottage-books-and-antiques wrote:I don't object to the basic premise of Focus Categories. Many of us have long said ebay needs to realize one size doesn't fit all, and Focus Categories are proof that we were right. The problem I have with Focus Categories is the execution of the strategy. It doesn't really work when you ignore most everything but the chosen few, and also when it takes so long to add Focus Categories. Within the last two years, ebay hasn't really added anything much since it added P&A---oh sure, ebay now authenticates baby sneakers as well as adult, and ebay recently added higher end "street wear" as a focus category, but even Jamie admitted this is basically a bolt on for sneaker buyers, who also buy a lot of street wear.
ebay touts the fact that people who spend "x" on , say, luxury watches, also spend "y" on other stuff on the site. But since ebay has been ignoring that other stuff, much of it has been going elsewhere, reducing the breadth of ebay's inventory...and many of the Focus Category buyers might be buying outside their focus category, but that doesn't mean they are buying in a wide variety of categories overall.
The company seems incapable of walking and chewing gum at the same time---but that's exactly what they need to do, or they will lose more and more of the non focus category sales to other sites.
I have some slight hope that ebay has started to realize this. I noticed yesterday that they are offering (out of ebay's pocket, at least in part, I'm guessing) 20% off coupons for "back to school"...while undoubtedly some of this stuff is in the Focus Categories, I don't think it all is. This leads me to believe that ebay has finally recognized that they can't completely ignore all the non-focus categories, because competitors are crushing them. (Couponing was something the current CEO called out as a mistake back when Wenig did it...but here we are....)
I got the impression from the Q2 conference call, despite all the talk about enthusiast buyers, that ebay was talking about doing more for the "horizontals" (that is, the rest of us, the site itself). This seems to me an admission that they know they've been neglecting us (except for the adsteam). If we actually see ebay run a Holiday Marketing campaign for the site this year, well, to me that will be confirmation that they know just how much trouble they've gotten themselves into by pretending the rest of the site really doesn't matter.
As i said, I have some slight hope about all this, but it's only slight.
@my-cottage-books-and-antiques to add on to this, while Jamie likes to talk about what the vertical focus and other strategies/programs are bringing in...they bury the costs involved deeper in the financial reports and don't talk about them in the press release. 😉
In Q2 alone, eBay reported a $27M increase in costs related to EIS and $15M increase related to expansion of authentication.
For 2023 so far, they've seen a a $39M increase due to EIS, $28M increase due to authentication, and $12M increase due to customer support (not exactly relevant to the vertical focus discussion but interesting and I suspect a good chunk of that may be in developing and deploying more AI chatbot and self help resources than highly trained human agents).
Keep in mind - that's not total spending, that's just the amount of increase over the same period of the previous year.
Also keep in mind, I'm not necessarily saying those costs alone make the strategy worthless or mean there's nothing positive about it - just that both costs and benefits should be part of the same conversation when analyzing the real value of these programs...and they very rarely are.
