This week, Rebecca Michals speaks with Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, Sucharita Kodali about shopping trends for the holidays and beyond. eBay Trading Card Category Lead Bob Means has exciting news about a brand new shipping service for low value trading cards and Rebecca and Griff answer your questions.
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Episode 121 Links
Shipping Options
Forrester Research
USPS Informed Delivery
Recurring Links:
Hosts:
Griff, Rebecca Michaels
Guests:
Sucharita Kodali (VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester), Bob Means (eBay Trading Card Category Lead)
This week on the eBay For Business Podcast:
Brian Burke: This week on the eBay For Business Podcast:
This week on the eBay For Business Podcast:
"It's a service for cards that are under $20. And what's exciting about this is it'll be like using a stamp, but you'll get tracking. That means two really big things. One for the buyer obviously is they're getting a delivery notification. They're going to know where their card is, and they're going to get all the benefits of tracking. For our sellers. First-class mail can cost up to $3. 50 cents to sell a single card. And when you're selling a $5 card, there's not a lot of profit to be had when you're spending $3 and 50 cents to ship it. So this will allow people to save up to 66% on first-class mail, depending on what they're shipping."
"There's not going to be as much in the way of sales, post Holiday. And that could be to the advantage of eBay sellers. And the reason for that is that if there's less competition out there, that's a good thing for you because you would be able to jump on the consumers that are expecting sales or offers, and they're not finding them."
I'm Rebecca
I'm Griff and this is the eBay For Business Podcast, your weekly source for the information and inspiration to start, run, and grow a business on the world's most powerful marketplace. And this is episode 121. Hello, Rebecca.
Hey there. Griff. How are you this week?
I'm okay. I'm looking forward to the end of the year. And in fact, as I mentioned last week, this is our last episode for the year 2020.
Goodbye, 2020. We won't miss you.
We'll never forget you, but we won't miss you.
That's for sure. Are you doing anything interesting for the Holidays?
No, absolutely not. It's too risky. So we'll be staying home and watching episodes of our favorite shows.
I'm actually kind of looking forward to keeping it low key this year. I usually have a huge Christmas party every year, and of course that's not on. So I'm kind of excited to maybe decorate a little bit less, eat a little bit more food and just kind of take the day easier than we usually would.
Let me write this down. Remind Rebecca next year to send an invite to her so-called big party.
Absolutely, but I am surprised that it's the end of the year. It did feel like this year was taking forever and now all of a sudden it's over.
I know we were just talking before we started the recorder that this is 21 episodes since our 100th, which seems like it was just yesterday.
That was a big milestone. And that was about when I was still fairly new here at eBay. I remember what a big moment that was.
Yeah, you are all broke in now.
This is true. I think I've got my feet wet if you will.
Yes. Well, we look forward to 2021. It could never, no. I'm not going to say that. I was about to say it couldn't be worse than this year and that is just tempting the fates. So I'm just going to pull that back in. Oh, by the way, it's time for some seller news. What do you have for us this week?
Well, Griff, there's a lot of discussion right now amongst sellers about the service levels of all of the mail carriers and sellers are noticing some delays in delivery. We wanted to let everyone know that we're aware of your concerns and we are taking action to reduce your frustrations where we can. And while there is some unpredictability in delivery, reliability, most items actually are still arriving on time our data shows. But to allay the concerns of all sellers and we acknowledged that there really are some problems out there that sellers are reporting to us. We want everyone to know that we're managing estimated delivery dates, and we are also advising buyers to anticipate potential delays in a few different spots on the site. You can read more about all of that in our recent post, on the seller news announcement board at ebay.com/seller.
Yeah, and I have to say, Rebecca, I've been buying a lot right now on eBay. And interestingly enough, it's mostly for inventory in the future. In particular fragrances that I know are about to be discontinued or have been discontinued are going to rise in value in the next year. And I have to say all of my purchases so far, and there's been over 20 of them just this month are arriving on time or even earlier than promised. But of course now I realized that's just my experience. Now, if you, as a seller find that your shipped parcels are being delayed the best thing you can do is message those buyers and let them know well that you're aware of the carrier delays and you're monitoring the tracking and you want to thank them for their patients, just being aware of it and letting your buyers know that you're aware of it can go a long way to easing buyer concerns.
Yeah. The proactive messaging to buyers is a great point. Griff. I would also add, however, that sellers should be thoughtful before doing a return outside of the process, simply because if you do a voluntary return, you aren't necessarily going to be covered in any future protections or if the item shows up after all. It's a little bit of a mixed message because we want you to proactively help your buyers. But there also are systems in place that will protect sellers.
That's very wise advice. Rebecca, let the processes play out. Don't preemptively send a refund. So you'll cover yourself as well as your buyer by doing that. So any other news items, Rebecca?
We do have some more exciting news, but I'm going to let somebody else share that with us. Who would that be? In fact it is your first guest.
Oh, you mean eBay category lead for trading cards? Bob Means, yes! He's here this week with some interesting news.
And then of course, I'll be back later with our other guest this week, Sucharita Kodali from Forester.
Rebecca, your first podcast interview. How exciting!
I know I'm all grown up.
What will you and Sucharita be discussing?
Sucharita is here to share her insights into this year's holiday selling season and then what she sees looking ahead to 2021.
That's excellent. Well, it's all laid out. Shall we begin?
Let's get to it.
We're taking some time at the end of the year to check in on specific categories. One of those is trading cards. It's been an interesting year for all the categories, including trading cards. And I thought if we're going to take a of what's going on, we should talk to somebody who actually knows. And that would be Bob Means. He's the category lead for trading cards here at eBay. Bob, I believe might have some news about a new service that I've got wind of, but we'll find out in a moment. Hey Bob, welcome to the podcast.
Hi Griff. Thanks for having me.
It's our pleasure. So what is the status of the trading card category at eBay?
Trading cards at eBay and in general have been really, really explosive this year. It's always been a super strong category for eBay and eBay has been the marketplace leader in trading cards for years, but this year has really been special for a couple of reasons. Really quick when I'm talking trading cards, you know, everyone thinks about sports cards. That's a big piece of the trading card business. Also in trading cards is what we call collectible card games, you'll hear me say it a CCG. That's a Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh all those games that are out there. They're like strategic card games. And then the third category that goes into this is what we call non-sports trading cards. The most famous of those would be the Star Wars trading cards or the Garbage Pail kids trading cards that are still kicking today. You know, whenever there's a new movie out or a, a new, a hit television series, they're still collectible cards that come out to support those launches.
All three of those categories have been incredibly strong for us this year. One of the things that probably impacted us dramatically here is COVID. With a lot of people staying at home, they started looking at their collections and they started to re engage with them and found that shoe box that's up in the attic and looked through it and found some valuable cards there. Another couple of things on the sad note, Kobe Bryants death really had a big impact on us. A lot of people started looking at Kobe merchandise and that included sports trading cards. And then the third big piece was the Michael Jordan documentary. The Last Dance, of course, Michael Jordan went nuts and a Michael Jordan rookie card is one of the Holy grails of sports trading cards.
I imagine it would be, yes.
But what was crazy is a Scottie Pippin would be a key person in one of the episodes. And suddenly we see interest in Scottie Pippin skyrocket. Or anyone down to John Sally or every player that got some sort of announcement on the episode would then spike on eBay the next day. I think what happened is no one forgets Michael Jordan, no one forgets Scottie Pippin, but we forget some of the battles that they had and the people that they played. Isaiah Thomas, is an example, was sort of the arch enemy of Michael Jordan, his card skyrocketed. The other thing that's been happening in sports trading cards specifically is basketball has become the number one sport for sports trading cards. We all probably think about baseball cards and baseball cards is still incredibly strong, but basketball players have become brands on to themselves. Michael Jordan started it with the shoes and the jerseys and everything, but we see people like Kobe again, rest his soul. But LeBron, Steph Curry, you know, these players are becoming brands and icons on the basketball floor and we're seeing that reciprocate in the value of their cards. And the last thing that's been fascinating to watch this year is a new rookie can come along and have an amazing game and you'll see his cards spike the next day. There's a guy out there who I've enjoyed watching play named Bobo, cause he's got the greatest name in basketball. As far as I'm concerned, he had a game where he put up, I don't remember 30 points or something, 12 rebounds. It was just, it was amazing game. And all of his cards spiked a hundred percent the next day. It was, it was really fascinating to watch.
These are like talismans of culture that people latch onto, whether it's in sports or even outside of sports, any sort of merchandise, there's been this enormous spike in chess sets ever since the Queens Gambit has become so popular on Netflix. So that E-bay connection with pop culture, icons and collectors is as strong as ever. And I was surprised I would have had no idea that in the sports arena of trading cars, that basketball would be bigger than any other sport, but there it is.
There's a sports card for every sport. We have cricket cards, pool cards. We have them all soccer, as you can imagine is probably the highest trajectory sport in America right now. And again, much smaller base than anything we do in baseball, football, hockey, but we've watched that skyrocket and we're seeing that business double year over year kind of thing, where as those players become more well known in the States, we see people actually importing cards from Europe to sell on eBay and they're doing great with it. Because there's a lot of interest in the European leagues and it will be fascinating to watch what happens in the next World Cup, for instance, because I think in the last world cup, there wasn't necessarily this large assortment of player cards, but by the time the next one rolls around, I think the manufacturers are going to be in position to take advantage of that, we've even seen some success in women's sports trading cards. In soccer, women's soccer in the U.S. is huge. And we see a lot of interest in those cards. The WNBA Sue Bird just has, you know, set every record you can imagine and there's interest in her card. So yeah, it's, it's a very democratic process and it's an amazing thing to watch the connection between things that are happening from a cultural perspective in any single moment and see that translate into what people are looking for.
Yeah. And it's the desire not only to have something to connect with, but people are not fools. They know that there's the potential for what they're buying increasing in value. So like you said about rookies, if somebody's new on the scene and they are suddenly making a big splash, it makes sense that people are going to be looking for trading cards for that particular person so that they can get into the action before the price spikes
You do. You absolutely have the, you know, the, what we call the investor or the flipper, the person who's looking for that card for that player who might take off and be a future Hall of Famer. And so there is kind of an investment aspect to it. Then you've also got the more casual investor who maybe just loves the Warriors. Some of those cards might cost you 50 cents and a Steph Curry might cost you $5, but you're not necessarily thinking about the investment quality because it has an emotional connection to you. And then from a gift buying perspective, my kids know who my heroes were when I was a kid. And so there's that nostalgia piece too.
Who were your heroes Bob?
Willie McCovey the San Francisco Giants. He was, he was my hero growing up and I'm probably aging or dating myself right now, but that's all right. For me, the Will Clarks of the world and the Kevin Mitchell's all the Giants that I grew up on. And unfortunately I probably shredded those cards. Making motorcycles sounds on my bike when I was a kid. But you know, my kids know that I love that stuff and they go out and they find it. And a lot of those players, again, hall of Famers and whatnot, and their cards might be worth a couple bucks. And so it's a, it's a purchase that my kids like to make for me. And it's a very thoughtful gift. So I appreciate it too.
Especially this time of year. So overall trading card category on eBay is doing okay.
Yeah. Well the other one, that's kind of amazing. It's doing great. We were talking about CCG a little bit. And the thing that's been fascinating about CCG collectible card games is with COVID people aren't playing the games socially like they normally would. Magic the Gathering usually has something called Friday Night Magic, where people go to a local game store, they bring their collection with you. They bring these decks that they've built and they play against, you know, sometimes random strangers or people that they know who congregate there on Friday night. That's not happening right now. People have figured out how to do it over Twitch and over webcams and Zoom and all that kind of stuff. But the interest hasn't died. People are still buying those cards so that they can build these powerful decks and they can be competitive. And it hasn't even slowed down even though in, I think the case of Magic the Gathering and Pokemon there's online versions of the game, but that hasn't stopped people from wanting to have the physical, tangible card in their hands. And the interesting thing about collectible card games is that's very similar to sports cards is you have cards that are 25 years old that are worth thousands of dollars. And you have cards that are still being released and freshly manufactured that are worth nickels of dollars. But people need there's people that need both. So that business has really been strong. The sports card business has been incredibly strong and non-sports trading card seems to be like the third place where people are now getting that nostalgia kick and finding the cards that either they remember as kids or they're finding out that there's a brand new collection of Garbage Pail Kids and they get them for their kids and their kids laugh at them too. eBay also has had some wonderful opportunities to have a couple of exclusives. We had an exclusive set of Garbage Pail Kids that were all connected to eBay.
When was that? That was a couple months back.
I missed it.
I'll see if I can find you a set Griff. Please! That would be great. One of the cards was Sniper Sam. And it was a picture of her Garbage Pail Kids there with his, you know, ready to hit the enter button on an auction. All these great tied into the eBay culture. It was a lot of fun. And we just recently also did an exclusive for the Mandalorian huge show on Disney Plus. And we just finished doing an exclusive Mandalorian card through tops that you could only get on eBay. And it was, I think our best performing card that we've ever sold in the non-sports trading card. The number of units that we sold was the best single listing we've ever had. So in that category, and that was a lot of fun to see.
So the word of advice here is you're a seller and you're sourcing anything, keep an eye out for any trading card right now they're potentially worth reselling. Maybe not always for tens or hundreds of dollars, but you never know what you're going to stumble across. I just saw it in the garage. About five years ago at a thrift store, I bought a white binder. That's filled with Magic the Gathering cards. And I thought, Oh, this might be worth something. And I put it aside. I should take that out.
No, you should send that over to me as a holiday gift. There's probably no value in it. You've got other things to do.
You sound like every antique dealer I used to know. This is not worth anything.
You know what that reminds me of is when I talk to people about this category. So many people had them when they were kids. And so many people have that same story of, I wonder if it's in my attic. I wonder if my mom's still holding onto this. Those kinds of stories are always a lot of fun. And I always tell people, yeah, go find them and go look and see if you've got something you can use eBay as a price guide reference and do the old trick of looking at the sold listings and see if you've got some value there. That's always very heartening. So thanks for that update. Now I got to put you on the spot here because I was talking to a colleague on Slack and she happened to mention there's this new service coming up and she wouldn't share a lot of the details, but she said, if you talked to Bob, he may share them for the podcast. So I'm going to put you on the spot. Bob, what is this new service? I have no idea what it is.
Let me go back a step. First. The other super interesting thing about sports trading cards is we've still six-figure trading cards, right? Hundreds of thousands of dollars for some of these super rare collectibles, we sell $1,000 cards. We sell $500 cards. We sell $50 cards and we sell a lot of cards that are under $20. Yeah, I joke sometimes that there's probably not a USPS mail truck driving on the road today that there's not a couple of cards from eBay on that truck, tremendous amount of transactions. And the great thing about under $20 is like I was saying, there's a lot of great cards out there that might have either that emotional impact that nostalgia impact for you or you're a gamer. And those are the cards that you're going to build your deck on. And we've been working hard to try to find new ways of supporting our sellers and giving our buyers great experience. It's actually getting announced later today at the sports card investor show. It's a service for cards that are under $20. And what's exciting about this is it'll be like using a stamp, but you'll get tracking. That means two really big things. One for the buyer obviously is they're getting a delivery notification. They're going to know where their card is and they're going to get all the benefits of tracking. For our sellers first-class mail can cost up to $3.50 cents to sell a single card. And when you're selling a $5 card, there's not a lot of profit to be had when you're spending $3.50 cents to ship it. So this will allow people to save up to 66% on first-class mail, depending on what they're shipping. And it effectively looks like a stamp. It costs about the same as a stamp. And it'll also allow sellers to work towards getting TRP status because as you know, to be TRP, have to ship everything with tracking.
And this has been a problem for us. We want the tracking service, but again, $3.50 cents on a card that weighs an ounce and might cost $5 or be sold for $5. You know, that's rough for someone to run a business on. And even though there's tremendous velocity opportunities out there, we still want to just to improve that capability for our sellers. And again, give buyers the better experience. I think there's always a bit of a nervousness if you use a stamp. So we have a lot of sellers out there that can't get TRP because they're using stamps because they need the profit margin that comes along.
Oh, yes. I've heard this for years from sellers of ephemera or postcards as well.
Sure, sure. And when you use a stamp, you just don't have quite that same security as when you're using something that provides tracking on both sides of the equation, right? The seller sees what's going on, the buyer sees what's going on and it's just a better selling and buying experience for everyone.
Well now how does this work, do you print the stamp or do you have to buy the stamps or can you actually print a stamp label on eBay when you go to ship the card? How will that work?
Yes so It's through the eBay label system, you sell a card, it's going to only be for cards.
That was my next question. Go on.
Yeah. Yeah. Cause you just said something about stamps and postcards and we realized there's a lot of things out there that could benefit from this. We understand that there's a lot of lightweight thin things that could use this service, but we need to learn about it. We need to shake the bugs out of the tree. Right? That's the wrong metaphor, but you know what I'm trying to say, we gotta do. We gotta, we gotta work the bugs out of the system. And the amount of velocity we do in trading cards makes it the perfect category to figure out how this is going to work and how well our buyers are going to react to it. But basically it's through the eBay label system. And so what's happening, If you're a seller and you sell something under $20 and it hits a couple other metrics. So I don't want to get too into the weeds.
No, no. Okay. That's fine. Yeah.
It's it has to be under a quarter inch. So you couldn't send a hundred nickel cards. It would be too thick, right. But you can send five, $2 cards cause that's a $10 purchase and you could use this eBay standard envelope. What's going to happen is you're going to get to the eBay label flow and you're going to see this opportunity because it's a card and it's under $20 and it's under three ounces and what's going to happen is then you're going to need to print out a label from your printer. And you are just going to apply that to a regular standard envelope or a hard pack envelope or whatever you want to use and you ship it.
That is amazing. This is something to look forward to. And like you said, this is being announced the day we're recording. Is that right?
That's right. It's being announced later today, at sports card investor show.
There's going to be a lot of news about this.
There will be a lot of news about this, and then it's going to be announced today. It's going to be rolled out in January.
Okay. Well that's coming up January is next month. So it's something to look forward to. A lot of our sellers are saying, this is great. I can hear them right now. They're in my head saying, this is great, but is there the chance that this would be expanded to other categories in the future?
Absolutely. but again, we, you know, whenever you do a new service, you have to figure out how it works and how it doesn't work. And there's some complexities around it Griff. Again, the main one is if the package is too heavy, it could get returned to the seller. If the package is a little too thick, it's got to go through the conveyor systems at the US postal service. So, you know, they've got some pretty sophisticated system to make sure that you don't try to send something too large. We had a lot of good conversations about, let's say a phone case, you know, for an Apple iPhone. They're pretty lightweight. Right. But they're going to always be too thick to use this service. So that wouldn't be something that doesn't work, but stamps coins, postcards, again, anything that's lightweight would potentially be an opportunity for us. It's the same idea. If we can give it to more sellers and we can provide as a service to more buyers, probably going to be the right thing to do, but we just have to see how it works in trading cards. And if it creates more headaches than we thought, or if buyers have an issue with like, I don't know, I personally, I think it's going to be amazing. I think it's going to be a game changer in the industry and it's for everybody who's selling trading cards and ultimately be tremendous for other categories. But right now we just have to give it a shot in trading cards, run it for how many months we don't know, find the bugs, figure out the system and then hopefully improve on it.
I think this is very exciting. And it's understandable. You want to test this out with a single category. I think it's going to work though. I gotta tell ya. Hey, I gotta ask you a question. Bob. Were you one of the people that negotiated with USPS on this? Cause I know this could not have been an easy thing to get them to agree to.
I wasn't, I was sort of behind the scenes cheering our guys on while they did it. You know, I think there's a very interesting side component of this and this is one of those things that we're not openly sharing. So I don't know if I should be putting on a podcast.
Don't put yourself in jeopardy, but give us what you can.
The US Postal Service has something called informed delivery. And I don't know if you use it, but you can sign up through your email account to get informed delivery from the US Postal Service. And what's interesting about this is if you use informed delivery, you'll get an extra notification that your card's getting there. You'll actually get a little scan of the card coming to you.
I've heard of this. I've never used it, but I think I have a friend who uses it. I think it's, it uses it through his iPhone.
Right. You know, so it's not necessarily part of the service that we're advertising, but it's out there. I mean, I think I know the US Postal Service, the upside to them is that more people start using their informed delivery and they would love to use that. So that was part of the negotiation process. And it's going to be a part of the system and people are going to see it if they have informed delivery. So it's going to be out there in the wild. So I think it's okay to talk about it. It just, it's not necessarily something that we are expressively telling anyone about.
I understand of course. Does this service have a name?
Right now. It's sort of tenderly called eBay Standard Envelope For Trading Cards.
ESET.
Yeah, It's, you know, we love to have easy acronyms and that's not necessarily the easiest one, but yeah. So right now we're calling it eBay Standard Envelope for Trading Cards and which leads to eventually, maybe it's eBay Standard envelope for stamps, eBay standard envelope for stationary, whatever the other sources are. The other categories are that we eventually move into, but it helps us make it easily scalable.
Bob I want to thank you. This is great news. Great to hear about the trading card category doing so well. I'm going to check out in my garage and see if I still have that white binder. It was there yesterday. I hope it's still there today. And thanks for this news about this new service. This is really great news. We'll all be following it. And if you ever have any updates, we'd love for you to come back on the podcast and talk about it. I would love to come back to the podcast to talk about anything Griff. This is always, always fun.
You seem like you have a lot of passion. You'd be a good guest on a regular basis.
We feel our sellers and our buyers passion. But when you work for eBay and you get to work for a category like trading cards and you get to interface with our customers and you just see how much they love this stuff, it fills you with that energy to try to find better solves for them. And so, and I do, I think this is going to be a successful. I think this is going to be very well received. I think it's going to be a great tool for our sellers. I think it's going to be a great experience for our buyers and I think it's gonna really help eBay further themselves in this category as the major place to buy and sell all trading cards on eBay, regardless of the price point.
Well, Bob, thanks so much for taking time out of your day. We always appreciate it when one of our colleagues can come on the podcast. Absolutely Griff. Thank you very much.
Bob means is the category lead for trading cards at eBay We've been talking about the trading card category health, and we also found out about a new service. I'll put a link to the trading card category in our transcript. And if we have one, I'll put a link to the news about the new service eBay Standard Envelope For Trading Cards.
Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Sucharita Kodali is a leading expert on e-commerce multichannel retail, consumer behavior and trends in the online shopping space. In her research Sucharita covers such consumer oriented topics as e-commerce forecasting and trends, merchandising, best practices, conversion optimization, and social computing in the retail world. Suture Rita joins us now to share her insights about this holiday retail shopping season. Welcome suture Sucharita.
Thanks for having me, Rebecca. It's great to be here.
We're really thrilled to have you, and we're excited that we can bring you and your insights and the information that you have to sellers to help them anticipate what's happened this year and what's up next for 2021. I have to admit that I definitely shopped early this year and pretty much bought everything online.
Yeah, yeah. It's funny that you say that. I think that a lot of retailers and merchants may have hoped that October would have been stronger. Unfortunately many shoppers were still holding off and they continued to hold off. And in spite of even all of the shipping delays, all of the media reports about the challenges with shipping, I think that consumers are still a little behind relative to where we would expect them to be at this point in the holiday shopping cycle.
Hmm, interesting. So we know that e-commerce was essential throughout the pandemic and retailers, small businesses had to quickly adapt. Ca.n you tell us some of the top trends you've seen in the evolution of e-commerce and online retail experiences this year? And I think we're also really interested in what product lines shoppers are buying online, things that normally people would have gone to brick and mortar retailers, but they're now buying online.
One of the biggest things that we've of course seen is that shift to digital and in particular, I mean, eBay has been really great about being ahead of that curve and enabling a lot of the small local merchants with up and coming. And a lot of the programs that have really been about supporting those local businesses because those companies have been the hardest hit and need to pivot the hardest and the fastest. Some of that of course is digital. Some of it is just enabling things like curbside pickup, wherever possible, digital payments. If you happen to have that physical infrastructure, those are important. And that's been a big change and a big shift. And I think that that's reflected in some of that Cyber Five data that we saw earlier is that the marketplaces have gained disproportionately. I think part of that has been because the consumer expects choice and they do expect the selection when they can't find it elsewhere. That's what's top of mind, it's been top of mind for a while, and it's certainly top of mind during the pandemic, as well, as far as categories are concerned, electronics and some of those categories about keeping families busy. The other categories that I would say that we're seeing, certainly anything that supports warmth, fleece is doing very well right now. We're seeing socks and PJ's and anything that is about comfort, like blankets, those seem to be doing well, anything that's outdoor, do it yourself, home. We're still seeing things like heat, lamps and fire pits being sold out. And we still see a huge uptake on anything that's workout related. So exercise related, you know, leggings, at home exercise equipment. So from a sub category standpoint, those are some of the small trends too.
Interesting. I know I bought a tabletop patio heater this year myself.
Oh, good for you. Hopefully you got it ahead of the sellouts.
Never mind the toilet paper, bring us heaters. Right?
Right.
So this year there has been really noticeable change in shopper behavior. Let's talk about some of those behavioral changes, you know, like mobile payments or shopping or people at home with their desktops and shopping more on desktop, maybe they're on their phones. Tell us more about that.
Yeah. We see a tremendous amount of multi-device usage within households. So what that means is, you know, you, you will have the people who are on their Zoom calls, like shopping on the side, you know, but they're not shopping necessarily on the desktop it's, you know, on an iPad or it's on a, on a phone on the side. So there's definitely a lot of pre shopping, a lot of inventory checking or a lot of investigating who they're gonna, you know, kind of consider in the course of that transaction. That's definitely a big, big part of that experience now. So you just want to be conscious as a seller of things like, you know, making sure that the imagery that you portray is going to be reflected well on different device sizes. We are seeing a lot of video, customer service calls too. So just responding quickly to questions that consumers may have. That's an expectation of customers. We've seen video, certainly provide greater boosts to conversion. Whenever we see that offered, it's essentially an extension of imagery. So, and, and we know that the more images you share, the more likely that there is to be a sale ultimately.
That's a great reminder. And it certainly reflects what we see here at eBay as well. For Holiday, for many people, it's actually about those post Holiday sales that they get excited about. And whether you're a buyer or seller that last week of the year can be a big deal. Can you tell us what to anticipate this year with those post Holiday sales and what to look forward to?
I think the pandemic essentially forced a lot of companies to cut their orders pretty early and they didn't go back and revisit a lot of those cancellations. And what you had as a result is even through Thanksgiving weekend, you had less compelling offers like merchant to merchant than you did in the past. It was completely common in the past that you would on a Cyber Monday, have 40% off of everything on a website plus free shipping. And that was far less common this year. It was more likely that you would have 30% off of select items with a shipping threshold. Just the richness of those offers was substantially less than in years past. And part of the reason for that is that there just wasn't as much inventory that retailers had to discount. And they're trying to make that inventory that they have last as long as possible. What that potentially means is that there's not going to be as much in the way of sales post holiday. And that could be to the advantage of eBay sellers. And the reason for that is that if there's less competition out there, that's a good thing for you because you would be able to jump on the consumers that are expecting sales or offers. And they're not finding them. You want to be able to take advantage of that if possible. I mean, people will buy after Christmas, if there are sales, it's entirely promotionally driven. Like that's sort of the big driver of that between Christmas and New Year's rush, whether it's e-commerce or in stores, it's, you know, what's on sale. What can I get that didn't kind of get sold already that I may be able to take advantage of? And if there isn't going to be much of that, and we don't expect as much this year, if you have anything excess, you know, take advantage of that timeframe promote it and really kind of jump on anything that you can get your hands on.
It's a good time to move some of that inventory that's been hanging around for a lot of the year. So I hear that online shopping and COVID shopping habits are likely to continue post pandemic and throughout the year, what are those predictions you're looking for in the year to come?
The single biggest change I think is just the amount of internet research that has been happening. And certainly the pandemic has accelerated in every product category and where that makes a difference for sellers is that your ability to show up and be present when consumers are in that search process, because if their first touch point is digital, you know, and in the past, maybe their first touch point was Walmart stores. It just gives you more of an opportunity to be apparent in the course of that shopping funnel for all kinds of different categories that you may not have been considered for in the past. So that's definitely just something that's a subtle change, but it's an important one because it gives small merchants so much more opportunity than what they had in the past. We also expect to see more distributed commerce. It's been a term that's been around for a long time, but the idea of, you know, kind of completing transactions on social networks or completing transactions off a merchant site or enabling things like a shoppable video, that will be ways for emergent to connect directly to their audience. Like these are all things that we expect to continue to see. They have a tremendous amount of potential. I think a lot of the playbook in the US is still being shaped and formed, but we've known for decades that businesses like QVC and HSN are incredibly powerful and incredibly lucrative. And they resonate with so many people, their issues have always been that, you know, it's a medium, which is highly dependent on, you know, kind of television adjacencies and how low the channel number was and what they were next to. So people would just happen to stumble upon it. They're going to network and stop and watch it. And what's different and really powerful about shoppable video is there's a live component, which takes elements of that, of the QVC experience. But there's also the ability to have an on-demand experience too. And that expands the universe of who can be exposed to and who can be, I guess seduced by kind of great selling. So that's really some of the big change that we expect through 2021, especially if there is less of an opportunity to sell in the physical store. There's not the ability to touch and feel merchandise in a physical environment. If we have more lockdowns in the coming months, hopefully we won't because we'll be able to get vaccines. But if things even get harder in the next few months, something to offset that can be more video selling.
Interesting. I'm sure the sellers out there listening to the Podcast that their minds are turning. We already touched on promotions, but let's talk about it more. What are discounts in marketing and promotions going to mean post Holiday?
The good thing about promotions is that they never lose their appeal. If you're able to offer something as a promotional discount, the consumer will always respond to that in some way, shape or form. The challenge for sellers is how do you sell without giving away too much of your margin? And that's particularly problematic if you're selling a commoditized good or one where it's broadly available online, that's always an issue. And typically the biggest promotions are going to be often in the most broadly available goods. The things that we recommend are authenticity guarantees or any type of post-transaction service levels that sellers are able to provide, you know, whether it's, you know, support with setup or kind of some sort of a guarantee, anything to layer on value to the customer beyond just discounting that good. And that is something that we are seeing a lot of brand manufacturers in particular leaning into when they don't want to engage in a lot of heavy discounting or high-low pricing, they'll offer some type of servicing on the back end, or they have a special 1-800 number for their buyers, or they may have certain content depending on the product category that can be relevant to that user. Even kind of engaging in events or other type of special meetups that they may do with other users, just to get people excited about a product. And the good thing about events these days is that they can all be done virtually and relatively inexpensively. Those are all things that we've seen as ways to engage customers to drive conversion, but without having to give away, you know, as much of your margin as we've seen in the past.
Okay. So I have a question that a seller sent to me and she would like to know what do buyers want right now? Do they want better answers, faster answers? Or is it more that they're looking for a personal touch like notes and cards in the packages?
It definitely can be very helpful to have an extra personal touch if you have the time and the resources, and it doesn't take away too much from your margin, absolutely highly, highly encourage doing anything that is high perceived value with a low marginal cost. Absolutely. But what you just described Rebecca were two different types of customer service. One is like the unboxing customer service experience. And the other is the post-transaction. If there is an issue with the product or some expectation around the product, you know, kind of that level of customer service. And you almost have to address them slightly separately, the unboxing experience, I mean, anything you can do to make things look better. I mean, to just make that unboxing experience look as good as like, if I were buying something from a luxury store, Lulu lemon or somewhere else. So if you can, and if you have the ability and the interest in doing that, there is usually no downside because it will usually help that seller score. Now, if there is an issue after the fact and what are people expecting from a customer service, like if something goes awry, if you don't want to give a complete refund, listening to the customer and acknowledging them, in many cases what we will see is that people just want to be heard and they want to recognize that you're going to go try to fix it for the future. You know, in many cases, these are also people who want their money back too. And in those cases, there's really probably, that's the only thing you can do to completely appease them. But short of that, it is a bit of an investment in time to make them feel heard. And, you know, you can do that by email, but in many cases, um, when there are the complaints, it's a phone call, which is expected, That personal touch, whether you're talking about the unboxing experience or following up with a buyer it's so important, what is a shopper's number one consideration when they're buying online? What's really that motivating factor?
Well, unfortunately the number one thing which we hear over and over again is the fully loaded price of that item. So if you're selling something that's broadly available and that's generally considered to be a commodity, you do have to be looking at what the comparable offer is elsewhere on the internet. And the offer is the price of the item. It could be the particular skew that you're selling. What is the shipping cost and how do you balance that with the shipping time as well? That always shows up on certain consumer surveys is number one. Number two is free shipping and consumers typically do want free shipping over fast shipping. If they're given the choice between the two, the nuance here in this pandemic age, in this Q4 age, where there are so many late shipments is to still be transparent where possible. And I know that the eBay team is working very hard to give that visibility to consumers, but you want to make sure that you haven't set up false expectations for customers on when they can expect a package to arrive and to manage to that as best as you can and if there are going to be delays that you make it transparent where a package is and how much longer it's going to be. And the more that you're able to share that upfront, the better. And then the third thing that we see is actually frictionless returns. That's one of the single biggest reasons that people who do not purchase online or who hesitate purchasing online, that's the reason they don't is because they don't want to have to deal with the hassle of returns. And some of that could be the fear that a merchant may give them a hard time about it. Some of it could be that the product information was not accurate or there wasn't enough product information online. So that's something that you can constantly be auditing your product descriptions to make sure that all of the information that you're presenting, A you have enough of it and B that it's actually accurate. Especially if it is like a color or a fabric. Those are things that tend to be subject to a lot of issues on the recipient side, because, you know, maybe a color swatch wasn't as it was portrayed on a particular browser, or you didn't completely accurately represent something. So those are probably some of the easier things to fix if you need to.
And that reinforces what you said earlier about having more pictures and more information. It's really vital in your listings. And finally, let's talk about some of your key takeaways and some of those predictions for the future.
Yeah. The first thing from a product and assortment standpoint is just at a high level. You know, people continue to shelter at home right now. They're still continuing to work from home. We expect this work from home phenomenon to continue through probably summer of next year, at least, and possibly even longer than that. A number of companies have already announced that they're not even planning on bringing people back. So what that means is that those categories, the same categories that you've been seeing strength in through much of 2020, those should likely experience gains through 2021 as well. But at the first sign that you may start seeing softness or shifts, just be hyper alert and hyper aware because you don't want to be leaning too heavily into things like office equipment. If you know, people are then headed back to the office later on from a fulfillment standpoint, late deliveries are going to be the norm through much of Q4 and probably even into some of Q1 and any information that you're able to provide proactively. Particularly with respect to when packages are going to arrive or how long it's going to take the more power to you for, for doing that and if you can present as much of that early in the transaction process as possible, the better. Because then A, that sets the consumer's expectations, but B it probably also reduces a contact to you later on. And then from a marketing standpoint, there's a lot of browsing, of course, that is happening on eBay outside of your product categories. And that's where potentially things like sponsored ads could be useful. Videos on social networks, including attracting people if you have a relatively strong or growing social network presence, really to be pushing information and content through those channels. We've seen retailers have their own podcasts on content. If they're in the beauty space, you know, beauty, specific podcast, if they are in the home space, you know, home decor content only because they're relatively easy to do, they're turnkey and they can be fun to put together although somewhat time consuming. But these are just STEM ideas for marketing.
Well, you know, we're a fan of podcasts here. Anyway, it's really encouraging to hear you reinforce a lot of the things that we advise sellers to do already. And again, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. I think I speak on behalf of all of our listeners to say that these are the kinds of insights and predictions that really help as they grow and run their business. Sucharita thank you so much for your time.
My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Rebecca.
And now it's time for you have questions.
We have answers?
We don't sound so sure. Do we Griff.
Sorry. We have answers! How's that?
That's better. Thank you. So what do you have for us this week Griff?
Well, we had one call into our voice line at 888-723-4630. But it isn't a question so much as a suggestion. Let's listen.
"Hey guys, how we doing? My name is Kevin. I use the eBay name, Steel City Exchange. I am a big fan of numbers and metrics and data. With the seller metrics that are available through the Seller Hub, It does give you some, but it's kind of limited in the fact that like it's not across each category. So I know personally that I'm doing better with video games right now, but I would like to know what that is compared to what I was in a different category. Say, action figures, comic books, anything like that. Is there a way that we could possibly separate those? And is there a way to get more data? Also, thank you as always for the weekly updates and I hope you guys have a good Holiday."
Thanks Kevin, it's an interesting request, Rebecca, what do you think?
Yeah, thanks Kevin, for calling that one in and we will definitely send it on to Harry and his team for their consideration. And if anyone else out there has a question or suggestion for us here at the eBay For Business Podcast. Why not call it in also at 888-723-4630
In case you missed it, 888-723-4630. Call that hotline anytime of the day, any day of the week, leave a question or a comment and who knows we may just put it on the air.
And if you're not a call on the phone person, you can always email us at podcast@ebay.com that's podcast@ebay.com.
Well, we're almost finished the last episode of the year, but first don't forget your daily podcast to do list. First, always, always check that Seller News Announcement board for up-to-date seller news. Do it every morning. Do it every night, stay up to date and fully informed.
Yeah, and I have an odd one this week. I noticed this as a buyer, I get lots of packages with taped on labels. And they're from sellers who have lots of inventory. You sell regularly. I urge you to, and this is your second tip. The podcast list, purchase a thermal printer. I guarantee it will change your life.
Literally changed their lives.
Yes. Change your life. Absolutely.
If you say so mean it's just a printer
And a thermal printer will indeed make your selling life so much easier. So yes, it's a life changer and you can find really good deals on eBay.
We will take your word on that one Griff. If anyone else out there decides to buy a thermal printer and is happy about it, give us a call, let us know. And finally, always check out the transcript for this and all episodes for follow up on what you've heard and to see the links that we've referenced during the episode. We'd like to thank again, our guests this week Category Lead for Trading Cards, Bob Means and Vice pPresident and Principal analyst at Forrester Sucharita Kodali.
This is our last podcast episode for 2020. We'll be back on January 5th, 2021 with a brand new episode to start off the new selling year on eBay.
We want to thank everyone for making us a part of your eBay selling day this year. We look forward to bringing you more great guests and discussions in 2021, and we wish you and yours, the happiest and safest of Holidays.
Indeed. Happy Holidays to everyone. We'll see you in the new and we hope better, New Year. The eBay For Business Podcast is produced and distributed by Libsyn and podCast411.
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The eBay for Business podcast is published every Tuesday morning and is presented by eBay, Libsyn and Podcast411.
