eBay Open 2024

[wastingtime101]

Keynote starts at 9am PT, noon ET. If you haven't registered and want to attend, you can do that here.

This year's Expo booths shown below. Different product teams participate each year (and different sponsors). If you have questions or feedback for eBay on any of the following topics, you can ask them on the Q&A tab for that booth, or use the chat tab while a booth is live.

Hey @pjcdn2005 @sin-n-dex @marnotom! - there's an eBay Canada booth this year. That's new. Nice to see our neighbors to the north getting some recognition.

Edit: never mind. There was an eBay Canada booth last year, too - so that's not new. It's early and my brain's not at full function yet. 😂

[wastingtime101]

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

OFFERS

Buyers providing payment method upfront (for auto-pay) before submitting offers will soon be required and roll out site wide. I do not know if that means eBay will remove that option on the seller's buyer management page.

He also said "new" consequences will be coming for non-payers, but did not elaborate.

BUYING/SEARCH

Reimagined search with more visually rich design. Includes higher res and larger photos.

Also includes "simplified menu" which basically means eBay's going to follow every other retailer and hide that left side search filter panel under a couple buttons with 50,000 clicks needed to apply filters - just as they recently did with Seller Hub active listing navigation.

AI

As expected, lots of discussion about AI for both buying and selling. Nothing new mentioned.

[wastingtime101]

Dawn Block said:

"During tomorrow's keynote, Laurie Wong will join the eBay security director of trust for some talk about the challenges that impact sellers. Things like VeRO, unpaid items, abusive buyer behavior, and negative feedback."

"By narrowing our focus, we are raising the bar for buying and selling in specific categories on the site. We start with trust to build category specific experiences our enthusiast buyers love. Then we are scaling the most impactful categories enhancements to benefit buyers and sellers across even more categories."

I'm just posting snippets on topics I've seen brought up on this forum a lot. You can either attend the event live or watch videos after the fact if you want all the info.

[gurlcat]

I registered for the first time ever.  I was watching it a while then needed to pause for a moment.  When I unpaused, it said "RESTRICTED" and how I wasn't authorized to view it.  -Over on the chat feed, tons of other people were saying the same thing.   A glitch?  ON EBAY?  NO!  

All I had heard up to that point was the typical vague and boastful business lingo, so I guess I'm not missing out on anything that matters.  Even looking at the schedule, I don't see anything that appears to be new or useful information.  

[wastingtime101]

I don't know about that - I'm not having issues. I'd suggest using a different browser to sign in, or clear info on your current browser and log in again.

Here's some tech stuff from the event's home page:

For the best viewing experience, it is recommended that you join this event from Chrome or Firefox on desktop and disable VPN. If you experience any technical difficulties, you can reference this guide, search this troubleshooting directory, test your streaming setup, or contact RingCentral support.  

Also - it's not a glitch on eBay. Event is hosted on a 3rd party platform so any issues are between your system and Ring Central - this year's host.

[gurlcat]

Thank you but it was clearly happening to tons of people suddenly, not just me.  And for me it was kind of a relief, like when there's a fire alarm when you're at a horrible work meeting.  🤣

[wastingtime101]

I realize it wasn't just you. Last year there was a large group of people that had issues, too.

At the beginning I had a log in issue which was resolved by using a private browsing window, then I was later able to switch to a regular browsing window.

Platforms like this sometimes have issues, but that doesn't mean it can't be resolved by just trying again or trying a different way. But no need to try again since you're obviously not interested in attending.

[wastingtime101]

I don't know if this will help anybody, but I noticed the last few years the wide spread tech issues, like the one  you mentioned gurlcat, often happen when you sign in close to the event start time. I think it has to do with the volume hitting the system all at once (and yes, these platforms should be able to handle that without issue).

I typically sign in early, during the first hour when they run ads from sponsors, and just leave it on the event home page and minimize the browser window until it's time to start. I found that produces the least amount of issues.

[wastingtime101]

Has anybody ever noticed how things like the Keynote that talk about general overviews move sloooow and you want them to move faster, but the break-out sessions that discuss specific changes are fast-paced and you want them to move slower and allow a longer window for Q&A?

[valueaddedresource]

@wastingtime101 my favorite part so far has been that Jamie has apparently *finally* gotten the message to stop using that old line about eBay not competing with sellers. 😂

It's arguably been questionable for years but is definitely not true now that eBay is selling on their own site under their owned-subsidiary TCGPlayer brand in direct competition with third party collectible trading card game sellers...and I suspect recent FTC interest in that whole situation might have been a contributing factor when carefully crafting Jamie's script. 😉

[wastingtime101]

WOW eBay got this WRONG:

Xiaodi: I would be remiss not to mention shipping today. First, we are simplifying shipping related decisions for you during the listing flow. We are pre-selecting the best options for your items so you can list without having to worry about shipping options. Our goal is to reduce the number of clicks as much as possible in order for you to list even faster.

Hi Xiaodi - sellers want less clicks, correct. But you're doing it in the wrong area!! When it comes to setting up shipping I hear from numerous sellers about how eBay's prefilled estimates are costing them money because the estimates are not good enough to accommodate the items they're selling. There is no substitute or shortcut for a seller entering actual weight/dimensions when they are new to shipping and don't know what they're doing!

Less clicks in Seller Hub, please - the new overview menu is awful because it takes 6 clicks just to filter by 1 single sub-category.

🤦

[wastingtime101]

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@gurlcat wrote:

I registered for the first time ever.  I was watching it a while then needed to pause for a moment.  When I unpaused, it said "RESTRICTED" and how I wasn't authorized to view it.  

---

OK I just got the "this is a restricted stage" message when I toggled to the reception page then back to the stage. I refreshed the window and it resolved the problem.

Hope that helps others that might run into this error.

[a_c_green]

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

Has anybody ever noticed how things like the Keynote that talk about general overviews move sloooow and you want them to move faster, but the break-out sessions that discuss specific changes are fast-paced and you want them to move slower and allow a longer window for Q&A?

---

I'm finding so much of the talk to be... vapid. The side pane of chat is flying by so fast, with so many participants, that real conversation back and forth is nonexistent; it's more like a parade of one-liners. It is what it is... 

Waiting for the "Creating a compelling listing" presentation to start. If they start telling us to use AI for our descriptions... well, let's not go there... 😄

[valueaddedresource]

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@wastingtime101 wrote:

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@gurlcat wrote:

I registered for the first time ever.  I was watching it a while then needed to pause for a moment.  When I unpaused, it said "RESTRICTED" and how I wasn't authorized to view it.  

---

OK I just got the "this is a restricted stage" message when I toggled to the reception page then back to the stage. I refreshed the window and it resolved the problem.

Hope that helps others that might run into this error.

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@wastingtime101 I  got that message as well and refreshing window solved it for me too.

[wastingtime101]

I don't do that chat window on the main stage @a_c_green - way too chaotic. I don't know how anybody follows it.

Rebecca essentially confirmed what I said above by acknowledging at the end that the Keynote is an overview for all sellers (read: those that do not keep up with changes throughout the year so experienced sellers like myself can skip it and not miss anything).

The break out sessions are for experienced sellers, and unfortunately those are sometimes too condensed for the topic with only 5 min for Q&A when there should be much more Q&A time factored in.