Episode 51 || Live From eBay Open 2019

[doug@ebay]

This week's episode is all about eBay Open 2019! We speak with eBay executives about both the year to date for eBay and what’s coming for the second half of 2019, with details on the big announcements from eBay Open. We’ll also speak with one of this year’s Shine award winners, Nanette Zupon. In The Buzz we'll discuss a recent article on teaching coding written by Devin Wenig, and eBay's partnership with the TV show Grown-ish. To have your questions answered on eBay for Business, call us at 888 723-4630 or email us at podcast@ebay.com.

eBay for Business- Episode 51– Live From eBay Open 2019

This week's episode is all about eBay Open 2019! We speak with eBay executives about both the year to date for eBay and what’s coming for the second half of 2019, with details on the big announcements from eBay Open. We’ll also speak with one of this year’s Shine award winners, Nanette Zupon. In The Buzz we'll discuss a recent article on teaching coding written by Devin Wenig, and eBay's partnership with the TV show Grown-ish. To have your questions answered on eBay for Business, call us at 888 723-4630 or email us at podcast@ebay.com.

Links

#ebaypodcast
ebay.com/podcast
ebay.com/sellingonebay
#ebayopen2019
ebay.com/meetups
ebay.com/community
ebay.com/sellercenter
ebay.com/payments
ebay.com/communitychat
explore.ebay.com
ebayopen.com
ebayopen.com/shineawards/
fortune.com/2019/07/20/ebay-devin-wenig-coding/
freeform.go.com/shows/grown-ish

sweetheartdeals.com
terapeak.com

Hosts

Griff, Alan Aisbitt

Guests

Jay Hanson (eBay Staff), Harry Temkin (eBay Staff), Sankar Subramanyan (eBay Staff), Nanette Zupon (eBay Seller), William and Wendy Fortin (eBay Sellers)

Transcript

Hi, this is Griff.

This week we have a special edition of eBay for Business that was recorded live at our Annual eBay Open Seller Conference and Celebration that took place during the week of July 23rd at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. During the two and a half days of the conference, we were able to capture about 10 hours of interviews with countless eBay seller attendees and executives and there is so much great content that we could never fit it into one show, but not to worry. We'll be providing highlights of all of the interviews over the next few months in a weekly Live from eBay Open 2019 segment. We want to thank all of the seller attendees who entered our You Are The Voice Contest. So many excellent interviews. I don't know where to begin. It will be a real challenge for us on the team to pick a winner, but our podcast team will be reviewing all of them and we'll announce the $500 prize winner on episode 53 which drops on August 6th so stay tuned. We also want to thank all our sponsors for this year's eBay Open, but especially our title sponsorChubb and a special mention to Intuit who sponsored our Shine Award Program this year. Thank you to all who attended and made this year's event the best ever. So without further delay, let's start this week's episode from the Expo floor at eBay Open 2019.

I got my lanyard. You got your lanyard?

I got my lanyard.

You got your coffee?

I got my coffee.

People are starting to come in.

Oh here they are.

You can hear them in the background.

Look at this. Here they come.

We go our whole podcast set up here.

Look at us in the back corner.

I know, well at least we're somewhere, right?

We made it.

Three microphones and a mixing board. It's all it takes for us to do a podcast. This is the eBay for Business podcast. Your weekly source for the inspiration and information you need to start, grow and manage a business on eBay. Good morning, Alan, you're looking chipper.

Try My best. I got here in one pace and that's the main thing.

And you got some sleep last night.

Ready to rock and roll. So Griff.

Yeah? This week, the eBay for Business podcast team along with 1600 eBay sellers on an army of eBay employees is here in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and resort Conference Center for our Annual Seller Conference and Celebration.

Woo-hoo

Otherwise known as eBay Open.

Yes indeed. eBay Open is two and a half days and nights of workshops, announcements and networking and entertainment for our seller community.

Alan and I and the rest of the team are here on the floor of the expo hall where there are vendors and pop up events. And there is going to be networking corners. And over the next few days we'll be conversing with a lot of eBay sellers, in fact as many eBay sellers as possible. It looks to be a very busy week here. Indeed. And we'll also be speaking directly with many eBay Executives about both the year to date for eBay and eBay sellers and what's coming for the second half of 2019 so you're gonna want to stay tuned. Specifically, we're going to talk in more detail about the big announcements that are coming on Wednesday. And that's Wednesday mornings keynote. So Alan are you ready for the event?

Oh yeah. I can't wait to hear all of the exciting announcements. I can't wait to meet every single seller that's in attendance.

Wait, every single seller?

Every single one.

1600?

I'll meet them all.

And you remember their names?

I will spend an hour with each of them.

That's impossible.

But I'll see what I can do. I'm terrible at math.

I've been doing these events for 23 years. I think your enthusiasm is admirable, but a little unrealistic.

This, this is my fourth eBay Open. I've been to each one in Las Vegas and always a highlight of the year, getting to connect with our seller community and experience all the passion that they have here. They're wonderful stories about eBay and eBay powers their business and how they power eBay. Very win-win situation. And when they win, we win. So always good to hear what we're doing good, to hear what we can be doing better and take that back to San Jose and make improvements to the marketplaces.

So last night, Tuesday night, did you meet any of the sellers, you know, the pre event?

The pre event Tuesday night I actually met a lot of sellers that came up to me and were like, Hey, are you Alan from the podcast?

See you're getting famous.

Yeah. I was like, oh my God. I was blushing. And they were like, hey, we heard you had a baby. Show us photos of your baby. So that was really cool. And a number of them came up and said, yeah, we just want to thank you for the podcast. And we've got really great advice from the podcast, which has helped us grow our business. So that was wonderful to hear because I know we sit in a room and we make the podcast, we put it out there in the hopes that it might help somebody.

I'm a little perclempt. I feel like Margaret Channing and I created an Eve Harrington. You're off of the stage and on your own. Well Alan's going to help out with some of the interviews this week, so you'll hear both of us. And if we can grab him, where's Doug?

Doug is probably around with his Instagram followers. You know he's also famous too.

Doug's famous now?

Yeah, I went, I was like trying to go and get a coffee with him yesterday and literally I didn't make it to Starbucks. Like he kept high fiving people. People were calling his name, screaming his name, jumping in and getting selfies. So yeah, he has an entourage.

Well now his head will get as big as his hair.

We'll have trouble fitting him in the door. Yeah, we'll find him.

Remember you two are mates.

We're good friends.

Well we're all geared up and ready to go. So without further ado, let's get started. But first it's time for a special edition of The Buzz from eBay Open 2019.

So Alan, any news from eBay Open?

Yeah, well eBay Open 2019 has been fabulous so far. Our sellers and employees are having an amazing time.

That's good. We've made some exciting announcements.

Yeah. Devon queued up announcements and handed off to various VPs to explain the details to attendees, but we announced our plan to launch Managed Delivery and then to end Fulfillment Service for eBay sellers through our partnership with third party logistics providers. Managed Delivery will provide sellers a cost effective fulfillment service that increases delivery speed and reliability on millions of popular products while reducing costs and complexity.

Yeah, for sellers, Manage Delivery will offer lower fulfillment costs, simplified and faster shipping, customer support and protections, increased sales and eBay branded packaging. For buyers, Managed Delivery will allow the buyer to get their orders faster and more reliably from eBay. I can't wait.

Me Too. We also launched significant new tools that will enable sellers to better manage and grow their business and announced a series of robust seller protections. This is part of our ongoing commitment to create the world's most powerful selling platform.

Alan, this is a good one because sellers have been asking this for this for years. We finally launched multi user account access. This is where sellers will be able to grant access to their Seller Hub in a more private and secure way. Now, sellers can add employees and they can, I guess it's now. Sellers now can add employees as of this moment as we speak, employees or delegates to perform seller activities on their behalf without giving full access to their eBay account.

Yea!

We're starting with the listing capability for eBay employees delegates with more permissions coming later this year. Now eBay is among the first ecommerce companies to enable this feature at scale beginning with the rollout in the US.

Next up is a Terapeak integration. Sellers with basic stores and above will now have free access to Tarapeaks pricing insights, and a new research tab within Seller Hub. Terapeak provides demand and pricing data to help e-commerce sellers know what their products are worth, what they should source if they're looking to expand on how to competitively price their listing. Terapeak also provides sellers with up to one year of pricing data. This is just the beginning of the integration and more insights will be added into the tool by the end of 2019.

And I've talked to a few sellers and they're just wild about this integration cause a lot of them have no experience with Terapeak and this is their first chance to see it. And they're amazed at how rich and deep the data goes.

And I've heard from sellers also really happy because they've been paying for Terapeak for so long and now they're getting it for free.

If you're a store subscriber, basic and above.

We're saving them some money.

Oh, Wait, there's more! Yay. So for top rated sellers located in the US who offer 30 day returns, eBay's introducing two new financial protections. First, eBay, will issue a seller invoice credit to cover return label costs if a buyer makes a false item not as described claim. Second, eBay will now allow these sellers to issue partial refunds for all items that are returned, damaged or not in the condition in which they were sent. These protections will be live in the US, now mark your calendars on October 1st, 2019.

Awesome. That's really exciting and great news for sellers. To learn more visit the Seller News Announcements at community.ebay.com.

I know it's a lot, but is there anything else in the news Alan?

Oh, I've got a love for you, Griff.

Oh good. Our CEO, Devin Wenig penned an article as well. He's been busy on mains tage and also penning articles for Fortune.com. The article is titled Why we should teach all students to code. And that's gotten some notice and I've heard some sellers talking about it Griff.

Yeah. You know it's always a great idea to empower the young ones because they're going to take the mantle from us curmudgeons I think a lot sooner than we might imagine.

They'll be taking over our podcast one day. Well, yeah, maybe me.

I've got a few years left in me Griff.

I do. You're still a millennial.

I am.

And that explains a lot. Oh, in the article Devin says everyone should learn to code. Some would argue that coding is not a necessary skill for people who are not working in an engineering related function, but digital technology now powers every industry, business and profession. Learning to write code, whether you want to be an engineer or not, gets you thinking a little bit differently about the world.

You know, I read the article cause I saw the link and what stood out for me was the eBay tie in by Devin because he says, and I'm going to quote it here so that I'm actually using his words, "the founding of eBay is a classic case study of all this coming together. It certainly took programming expertise to execute our founder, Pierre Omidyar, his vision to connect buyers and sellers around the world, but every line of code was also centered around bringing complete strangers together in mutual trust."

And Devin concludes it with, it's going to take philosophers, artists, mathematicians and technologists a like to help set the guard rails for the disruptive technology that we know is inevitable. Technologists will blaze a trail into the future, but artists will make the journey worthwhile. When we harness the creativity of both we will build amazing things.

Indeed Alan.

Indeed Griff.

Anything else, Alan?

Yeah, well you hear more about this soon, but Chicago sellers can gear up for the next eBay Upfront coming to Chicago in September.

Oooh. Keep an eye out at community.ebay.com for registration info and details. And then after that we'll be heading to New York City and then we'll be announcing more Upfronts for 2020.

Okay. That must be it. I can't imagine that you have anything else.

Oh, let me get that crowbar in. I want to wedge one more thing in here.

Be My guest.

It is something I love. Something I'm passionate about is TV. I'm watching lots of TV. One thing I noticed is that eBay partnered with Freeform TV and their show Grown-ish. eBay and Freeform demonstrated just how easy it is to sell fashion accessories and more on the eBay marketplace. The episode entitled good for what, aired on Wednesday, July 17 and featured a financially cut off Zoe looking for a new side hustle, leading her to turn to eBay. And I have a quote, "in the latest episode of Grown-ish, eBay's simple selling process comes to life in an entertaining way. We offer tools and a powerful buyer base that help everyone from seasoned sellers to millennial fashionistas get the biggest return while making a sale". Says Suzy Daring, Chief Marketing Officers for eBay Americas and our global brand Lee. Grown-ish and its fashionable characters were the perfect fit for this campaign, embodying young entrepreneurs that start businesses on eBay every day as a means to fund their passions. So if you want to watch this, you can check it out at freeform.co.com/shows/grownish and following the initial episode, subsequent spots detailing Zoe's eBay journey will air until the shows season finale on August 7th.

What a great tie in.

I love it.

And the fact that it's fashion. Do you know that the most of our sellers, 1600 sellers in attendance here sell some form of apparel or fashion used or pre-owned?

Yeah, that's one of the best things actually about eBay Open is seeing all the fashions on show.

There is a lot of it.

Our sellers really dress up and come fashion forward and put their closet on display. So fantastic tie in and it feels like a really good time. eBay Open is happening. We've got all our fashion sellers and we're on TV on. It's just a great time for eBay.

To quote one of our best friends here on the podcast. "All, right. Okay. I love it!"

All right, Alan.

All right Griff. Now let's hear from some of our sellers and our Execs here at eBay Open.

Welcome everyone. We're here at eBay Open 2019 at the beautiful Mandalay Bay resort convention center as we've been for the last two years, I believe. Joining us now is eBay VP and COO of America's Jay Hanson. Welcome Jay. You're our first guest.

Thrilled to be here. Always good to be here in Vegas with our eBay community. It's good to see you here. And the show hasn't quite started. We're actually recording this just before all the sellers come in for the big opening party that happens at five o'clock. So we have a few moments of relative peace to conduct an interview.

It's going to be crazy shortly.

I love the craziness.

It's halfway through the year at eBay. How are we doing going against our goals that we set at the beginning of the year?

Yeah. Well Griff, we've made a lot of progress on growing our buyer base because ultimately that's what we owe to our sellers is to deliver them buyers and sales. And so we have accelerated buyer growth on our platform by making it simpler for buyers to get on eBay and to find what they're looking for and to buy it.

As a buyer, I can tell you that's true.

Yeah, we've done a lot to just use seller attributes and aspects to simplify how our buyers search for what they're looking for because ultimately we want the buyer and the seller to make that connection as quickly as possible.

So how about a little details about some of these achievements so far? What are the ones in your mind that we've made great strides in achieving?

Yeah, so a couple of them, Griff, I'll talk about number one, Payments. So we have made it easier for many of our buyers to pay. We've seen an incredible adoption of things like Google Pay and Apple Pay, where we've got sellers in our Managed Payments program.

We have also as many of our sellers know through volume pricing and offers to watchers just created more vibrant methods for our buyers and sellers to strike the right kind of deal that makes both of them happy. Because ultimately we want a seller to make a sale that makes them happy and a buyer to get what they're looking for at the price they're looking for.

Yeah, the sellers I've talked to both here and in different venues, just love volume pricing. If they sell multiple quantities, fixed price listings, this has made a big difference in the velocity of their sales.

And it's all about efficiency for the seller too, right? The more you can put in a box, the more items you can put in a given transaction. It just means more sales, but also more profitability.

And you can make a little profit on shipping as well.

That's right.

Especially if you're doing free shipping. We're here at the event, it's about to get started. People will start coming into, we're in the expo hall for the next two days. I know from sellers, they tell me how much they love this event and how much they look forward to it. What do you love most about this event? It's a different take because we're not, the attendees were actually the hosts. What do you like about eBay Open?

I mean the most important thing here is the sellers that we meet in the flesh. Right? Griff, you and I both know that we have a lot of data about sellers. We do surveys, we do research. We bring sellers in and talk to them. But nowhere is there an environment like this with as many sellers who make it real, who put the human in our business and ultimately that's why we're here. And so I just love being able to meet them and, and hear their feedback and hear their encouragement and then hear their feedback some more.

Right. You're going to hear a lot of feedback. There's one thing about passionate sellers, they don't hold back.

But that's what makes us better Griff. I think you're right. Yeah. I wanted to ask you, what are we doing for the rest of the year in the way of say, marketing and advertising? That's another question we hear all the time.

So in addition to new tools and seller protections and other things that we're announcing here at eBay open, we're going to continue to have a strong brand beat out there. I'm sure many of our sellers have seen billboards and videos and TV commercials and alike and hopefully they've enjoyed and liked some of them. My personal favorite is the Alexa video.

You remember that?

Wasn't that the best? Yes.

She's always listening, right?

It was a little, it was great sarcasm and snark. I loved it.

Look, we're just trying to have fun, but we're also trying to get the message across about who we are as a company and I thought that did it well. But we're always looking to stretch the marketing dollars. We know these marketing dollars come from our sellers and we have an obligation to use them as efficiently as possible so that we can bring more buyers to our platform that drive more sales for our sellers.

We talked about the first half of the year and what we've accomplished, what's the focus for the rest of the year?

So the focus for the rest of the year is to grow and scale these programs that we're announcing here at eBay Open. Those being mostly new tools that Harry Temkin is going to talk about. Seller protections that I think sellers will be very excited about. The first implementation of multi-user account access.

That has been an ask for years.

It is, and we're getting that thing done. We're getting it going and it's starting to come along, which is fantastic. Continuing to leverage the tools that we've already talked about, the volume pricing, the offers to watchers and then also as we've talked about many times on your podcast, getting listing quality, including aspect adoptions so that our buyers can find what they're looking for and just doing more to simplify the connection between buyers and sellers so they can do what they do best on eBay.

You seem excited.

Very excited Griff. Very excited.

It's an eBay Open with good news.

Exactly. Exactly.

What's your message to sellers this year? My message to sellers is the same message I always have, which is we don't have a business without you, so thank you for what you do. We're only successful when you're successful and so I wish you nothing but success in the second half of this year.

Jay, thank you so much.

It's always a pleasure. Griff.

We've been speaking with Jay Hanson, he's the VP and COO of Americas and we're here at the Mandalay Bay at eBay Open. We'll have a lot more interviews coming up, so stay tuned.

Okay. We're a fresh new day and we've got a new seller. Our first seller of the day that we're interviewing here at eBay Open at the Mandalay Bay 2019 eBay Open in Las Vegas. We're all excited and energized. We all had a good nights sleep. Nanette, Did you have a good night's sleep?

I had a good nights sleep, but I woke up super early and then I was so nervous and jazzed that I just stayed up.

Well, it's our eBay Shine Award day.

That's right, yes, yes, I am excited to see that.

Yeah. Excited to finish the process.

Well, we're here with Nanette Zupon. Her user id or businesses, American Artifacts and you are one of our Shine Award Winners?

I'm one of the eight winners.

Oh, terrific. So welcome and congratulations.

Oh, thanks very much.

And what is American Artifacts?

American Artifacts is my eBay store. I came up with the name because I like to sell antique items and I feel like they're little sort of pieces of our American culture or our history.

Sure. Yeah. How long have you been selling on eBay?

Well, I've been a member of eBay since 1997. I started out as a buyer. I think I started selling around 2000 and then around 2002 I quit the day job and became sort of a full time eBay seller.

Nanette, I am not worthy. I am not worthy. You are a longtime eBay seller. You could teach me some things.

I doubt that Griff.

I'm sure you could. I used to be an antique dealer a long time ago, so maybe we have a little connection there.

I bet we do.

Is this your entire income right now? Is this, the only thing you do is eBay?

It is the only thing I do. I've been married for a long time too and it's a little easier. I will say if you have a spouse with a regular job, because we get health insurance that way. He's had some sort of periods where he's transitioned and I've done the whole thing. But adding in the insurance is it makes everything very, uh, you have to measure everything.

It's a lot less stress if you have a partner who is providing some of the income or some of the help as well. Does your husband at all help with the business?

He does help in some ways, but I think he leaves it to me. But we have three children and especially the college age ones have both worked in the business. My 19 year old son is my shipper this summer and my nephew who's 20 is working. And then we have another best friend of my daughter is the listener.

So while you're here at Open, then they're helping keep the business going.

Theoretically, Griff.

We'll find out when you get home. Right?

Right. Every Shine Award nominee and then eventual winner has a story that they tell and that's how they get nominated. What was your story?

I think I was chosen because I've been doing the same thing forever. Which is going to estate sales, thrift stores, auctions, flea markets and sort of saving items that I think need a new life and picking them and listing them on eBay and getting them into a new home. And for me this is just a thing to do, but I think it's becoming more timely that people are much more aware of the excess in the world and the climate issues and people are being a little bit more sensitive to, we don't need to buy everything new. We can repurpose items.

Now do you find in your field that there are new collectors coming up all the time?

There are, which is really interesting for me because it's been quite an arc. When I first started in the 90s some of these collectible markets were really vibrant and really high and they've dipped and there've been the peaks in the valleys. But I find new collectors now, if you go on Instagram, some of the things that I was first attracted to in the 90s are finding just a new generation of collectors. And it's so satisfying for me.

We hear that a lot of people, for example, young people and Millennials aren't interested in the stuff that their parents or grandparents have collected over the years. And they're saying, no, I don't want that. You know, you can just give it away.

I think that's very true. I feel like that at estate sales, sometimes the brown furniture, they call it the traditional wooden furniture is really hard to move. But mid century stuff, people are going crazy for so.

So it's all a matter of what's hot at the moment and being able to stay on top of it so that you can make sure you have a market?

Right and the global reach of eBay really helps some of the things like traditional for whatever reason, English china, Porcelain tea ware is super hot in Korea and China now.

Wow. I never knew that. So not necessarily in Britain or America.

Right.

But really hot in the Pacific rim. Yes. And if you go on Instagram, for example, people do these sort of flat laid beautiful photography, still life pieces with the tea wear and flowers and macaroon cookies and they get a lot of followers.

Wow. I see, I didn't know this. I'm going to go and look for some teapots. No, I don't have time. But you do and you find them and you know where your market is.

Yes.

You've pick a lot of expertise along the way. Say, I'm a new seller, just getting started and now I want to dip my toe in eBay. What would you be your advice?

I would say first I think great advice is start with something you already own so you're not investing time or money into sourcing right away. Just get familiar with that. But then think what interests you? Like I sell in many, many categories and there are certain things like with the Apollo anniversary, I always liked the space program as a child. So I look for NASA Memorabilia in my travels, it's one of maybe you know, a hundred categories I have going. But if you like baseball cards, if you like Scifi take something that you have some personal connection with expertise and it's easier and then you could start studying what's listed, what's sold, what's the pricing, are prices going up or down? Is this a big market? Is this a thin market? And I would say just do category by category, sort of build from there. And your knowledge will only build.

Should I be concerned as a new seller? If I'm not so successful at my first listing, convince me that I shouldn't give up.

Don't give up Griff. You'll get better. First of all, the process is getting a lot easier. So the form is easier and you might not like your first listing. The pictures might not be quite so, but you'll get better.

Nanette, you've inspired me to go home and list and I've been on eBay for years.

We all have things we need to list though.

Oh, you should see my garage.

Nanette, thank you so much for taking the time and stopping and talking with us. We have another full day of classes. I'm sure you're very busy.

Yes. I can't wait to get to my next class.

And let me know how it goes. Stop by and tell me how your day went.

I will.

Thanks Nanette. We've been talking to Nanette Zupon. She's one of our Shine Award Winners this year. We'll learn more about Shine Awards as the day progresses.

Here at eBay Open we have lots of sellers as you know and we're interviewing them as they wait in line for their turn here on the podcast. But we are making special exemptions in the line for some of our eBay Execs here at eBay Open enjoying the meeting with the sellers explaining what they do, but mostly a lot of them have had great news to announce here at the general session that took place today and we have our first eBay executive who's going to talk about Seller Protections, Sankar Subramanyan and welcome to the podcast. Now, can you give us a little insight into what was announced today about Seller Protections?

Absolutely. First off, I'm super excited to talk about Seller Protections. Something I'm very passionate about. The protections we announced is threefold. It starts with an acknowledgement and a deep understanding of buyer abuse. And that is something that a lot of sellers have talked to us about in the past and we've had programs in the past to address it, but we are going to go one level further now. And we are using some advanced machine learning models in order to better detect abuse before they happen and we are going to automatically track in remove defects and feedback from those abusive transactions for sellers even before they have to pick up the phone and call us and ask us to remove the feedback.

Are we outlining how we define buyer abuse?

There is a very detailed set of things we look for when we think about abuse. It goes everything from continuously harassing sellers and asking for more than what was listed in the item to only trying to claim an item as not as described to trying to make unreasonable return claims too many times. And there are shades of gray in between that, right? So what we look for is just like we have ways to measure performance of sellers. We have a way to measure performance of buyers. Are there outlier buyers who are for a simple transaction when a hundred of their peers are not claiming a SNAD, why is this buyer claiming a SNAD every single time? So we have a way to know if a buyer is being an outlier, abusive buyer. And we used those signals. And by the way, we also get a lot of signals from sellers, the reporter buyer signals is a very important signal to use. If multiple good sellers report a buyer to be abusive, that's a strong signal.

So are we changing that process at all? Because it's still a little bit behind the, you know, hard to find sometimes.

We are making it much more prominent. We've already revamped, the reason codes we put in the reported buyer, but we are embedding that more centrally in places where sellers will want to report a buyer. And in about a month and a half we will embed that into the returns law. So at the time of accepting a return and when sellers are getting ready to refund, they will be able to report a buyer with specific reasons. If they feel there was abuse. Either the item was damaged when they got it back or if the claim was a false SNAD, right? So we're going to make it easier and clearer for sellers to report abuse and we will ingest those signals along with other analytics signals we see to be able to spot outlier buyers. And when we do that, we are going to automatically make them go through a consequence path. Where buyers will say, look, if you're a buyer that is constantly engaging in abusive behavior, will start warning you. And if you still don't change your behavior, we will block you from opening a return. We will block you from opening a claim and eventually we will also block you from engaging with the seller. And if you continue down the path, the next step in the consequences, you will be suspended.

Should buyers be concerned who have legitimate reasons? For example, for returning an item, I'll use myself an example that maybe I'm being tracked and there may be consequences that I have legitimate reasons for wanting to return.

Absolutely not. This program and this exercise is not meant to impact in any way the 99 plus percent buyers. Majority of our buyers are good buyers. None of those buyers have to worry about it at all. But there will always gonna be some small number of buyers who take advantage of the system who try to abuse and we will track and in those instances we will put them through the consequence path, one block and suspend. So, so to go back to your first question, what should sellers be aware off? There are three things I wanted to say. One is this whole ticking buyer abuse tracking and enforcing that to a whole new level, right? That's the first thing we just talked about.

Using machine learning, machine learning models, input from sellers and ongoing monitoring. The second thing that sellers should be aware of is the type of protections we're going to give them is going to go beyond what we had in the past. It's going to include financial protections.

Oh, can you elaborate about that?

Yes. The financial protection has two components. One is a return label subsidy to the seller when we get a signal from the seller that it was a false SNAD. Yeah, and once we ingest that signal and we identify it as a false SNAD we will pay that money back to the seller as an invoice credit.

Oh, good. Okay.

At the end of the site billing cycle, right, and it'll show clearly in the invoice. You received x number of return labels subsidy for these many dollars. That's the first financial perfection. The second financial protection, is if you think about partial refund tool today, sellers who offer free returns can use it. We're going to open it up to all those protected sellers, the top rated sellers who are deemed protected. Anytime they receive a return and they feel it's been damaged or used, they can now use the partial refund tool and give up to 50% partial refund.

And to reiterate, as we'd done in the past with this partial refund, eBay backs up the seller in that case…

Correct. 100 percent.

So if the buyer appeals, there's no consequence to the seller.

So eBay backs the seller in the following ways. First, if there is any negative feedback that's taken care of. No defects from those transactions. And if the buyer, as you said, decides to claim the partial amount they didn't get, eBay will deal with the buyer. The seller is completely out of that picture. Right? So those two financial protections, which is the two most common types of returns abused, we hear from sellers. We are going to put some money behind it, we're going to put some product solutions behind it and give sellers real protection against those financial losses.

Did you announce or have we announced any sort of general timeline for expectations?

Good question. So this will be launched to sellers in the US on October 1st.

Oh good. That's very specific.

Very specific and every cycle after that they will see their protection summary come through in the form of an email. And it'll be a fixed date post the monthly assessment cycle when they will receive an email that summarizes in the last month and in the last 12 months how many feedbacks were removed, how many defects were removed, what was the dollar amount of return labels subsidy they received, and how many dollars where they partial refund, where they able to give. That summary will be sent to sellers every month in an email format to begin with. Over time we will try to bake it into the Seller Hub.

Oh, perfect. Right. But for now we will start with an email summary and I want to also clarify, these. Protections are for any top rated seller in good standing that offers 30 day returns for their transactions.

They don't have to be free.

It doesn't have to be free. That's very important. As long as you just offer a 30 day returns.

Seems reasonable.

All those transactions are eligible for this protection.

And it's transaction based.

Correct.

As we've talked about before, you don't have to have all of your listings on one policy.

Correct. So this is great news and I'm sure sellers are going to be very appreciative, but sellers are hungry for more news. Is there any future look ahead with more enhancements to eat?

No details. If you, if you can't get into, is there anything you can share about what the trust team is looking at?

Yeah, so benign to go and trust, last year my goal was to address in trenches all of the various pain points sellers have, and we started with the two most pressing ones, which were around returns abuse and general, buyer abuse, and the ability to automatically remove feedbacks and defects because of that. But the next traunch we understand sellers have many more pain points around bid retractions and cancellations and whatnot. And so we're going to look into all of those trenches of pain points sellers have and protections what may be relevant for those in the future. But for now we want to focus on this. Make sure we can give meaningful protection to sellers on these. Get feedback from sellers. We absolutely want feedback and see what we can improve on these before we go onto the next launch.

Will there be a feedback link?

There will be feedback. We will collect in multiple ways and over time as we scale this more broadly, we will try to refine the ways in which we are protecting these abuse cases and then we'll get to the next levels.

Sankar I want to thank you so much. This is great news. Are you enjoying the event?

Absolutely. It is one of the best events for me at eBay every year. I love coming here.

How many of you have been to so far? This is my second.

Oh good. Okay. Have you learned anything?

I learned one big thing, which is it is far more valuable to directly talk to sellers and listen to them. Then being in any number of meetings and discussions broadly just to understand seller pain points, right? Because sellers are willing to talk to us. Sellers are always open to tell us what's in their mind and what we can do to improve and many of those our genuine improvement opportunities for us.

And I get inspired by talking to sellers, hearing their pain points and some of what we have announced today. Honestly, last year was my first open when I first took on this role. I was sitting right here talking to sellers and they were talking about false SNAD.

And there you go.

A lot. So to me, learning directly from the sellers is very inspiring way of learning as well as making sure we can implement those into solutions that tell us value.

It's an ongoing process, but we've made progress.

Absolutely. Thank you.

Thanks Sankar. Alright.

Sellers, sellers and more sellers. They're lined up to come on the podcast. Anyone who knows me or knows my story with eBay knows that I haven't talked about it in a long time, but eBay saved my life and we won't get into my story. But that's the topic of our next guest interview here. We're here with Wendy and William Fortin. William claims that...

eBay saved my life.

William, tell us what you mean.

Okay. So in my musical career, I've been in music my whole life and that's what we primary sell.

Well, stop for a minute. What did you do? Oh, I played bands my whole life.

On what instrument?

I play acoustic guitar and also bass, mainly bass in the rock bands in the 80s with the big hair, the whole bit.

Really?

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, and throughout my musical career, i went to college and then I got out of college and I stopped playing in bands primarily from what I do every day. I went into the manufacturing side of things. Worked my way up after many, many years as the national sales manager for a company that manufacturers musical equipment. And basically when I joined them, they had nine brands and I was in charge of the sales team in Canada, in the United States, and a little bit of Mexico for all the brands.

What are some of the brands?

Okay. Alesis, Newmark, the Kai professional den on Pro Morantz, Pro Alto professional m-audio. I was responsible for the sales of that big giant company, about $400 million a year and in 2014 make a short story long, they laid me off. And I'm over 50 so to get back into the level that I was at, being over 50 wasn't happening. I applied everywhere, all the competitors, they just didn't want somebody my age in that role, in that capacity.

What a mistake.

You know, what are you gonna say man.

We could do a whole show on ages.

And so needless to say, I was totally devastated. I mean going through my whole life, working really hard and I was down in the dumps. So my lovely wife, Wendy here, had an eBay store since 99 the store has been active since 99.

That's 20 years.

I know.

It's a long time Wendy.

She suggested, hey, why don't you open an eBay store? Because throughout my travels I would meet with a lot of eBay sellers who also had music stores who did very well on eBay. And she says, why don't you just open an eBay store? You know, all the manufacturers, you know, all the distributors, the wholesale suppliers. Why don't you to do that? And I'm like, what? An eBay store! Are you kidding? So needless to say, I put my nose down to the grindstone and our first year we did 6000. Second year we did over 300, almost 400,000. Third Year we did 1.1 million. In the last three years we've done well over $3 million in revenue.

Aren't you glad you listened to her?

I did!

So the bottom line is eBay saved my life and gave me a career where no one else would give me a career. Now we've been able to hire people who now work for our company. Sweetheart deals and little plug…

Oh no, please! Say it again. You did not say it loud enough.

*sweetheart deals*, It's asterisk sweetheart deals asterisk on eBay. That's our store. You can also go to sweetheartdeals.com and it points you to our store. So it's all the same. It saved our life. And now we give opportunity for other people to also make a living with our brand. It's been great.

By hiring people in your company.

Yes. I've hired people from my company.

Can I ask how many employees you have?

Well, right now we have four.

That's big.

I don't know if that's big enough. But we're going to actually, we're scaling this year so we're actually gonna go bigger.

Do you set goals for your business?

Oh yeah. We sell more every month. That's our goal.

Right. I don't want to give our audience the impression that hey, I had some connections and then the business just grew.

Fair enough.

I mean there's work involved.

Of course. Well you know, if you're not, you know, in that industry or any industry, it's important to get involved with the organizations that are part of the industry. So one of the things that helped us is becoming members of NAM, which is the National Association of Music Merchants. And for any industry out there, there are associations with that.

For every kind.

For everything. Doesn't matter if it's household goods or you know, whatever, be part of those communities so that you can go to their shows. There's two shows a year for us where we meet new manufacturers, we meet new suppliers and we bring in new products and we learn about the new things that are available. Like your Zoom mixer recorder over here.

I love the Zoom mixer. It's the L-12 by the way, if anyone's listening. Run out and buy it at sweetheart deals.

So if you're new to getting involved with any kind of sales, get involved with the communities that are surrounding those sales. So that helped us to kind of build our brand. So let's talk about sales goals. Of course part of having sales goals is you have to have more new products to offer your customers, right? So, and you want the newest stuff, you want stuff that's hot that the people are thinking, you know, they get introduced on the television or whatever, you know, magazine that they are involved with. Whatever their passion is. Getting involved in that and adding new brands are allowing us to sell more products, which increases our revenue, which gives us opportunities to hire people, which scales it even more. Because you know, part of getting big like that is you're overwhelmed, if you're just yourself, you have to do customer service, number one. You have to do tech support, especially in this kind of stuff that we sell, tech gear. And then you have to worry about, okay, what about the orders and shipping and all this stuff. So you got to hire people to help out. So either the guys that we have now just primarily list new products for us and manage our inventory, basically inventory levels and stuff like that.

But having product knowledge is king and that's really what sets eBay apart from other selling platforms. There are so many sellers that really know the details of the product and that's really what has contributed to the success is product knowledge.

So Wendy I'm assuming you have a role in sweetheart deals?

I help out.

I put you on the spot.

I help out listing. I wear a lot of hats.

She's actually, so she's an electrical engineer by the way.

Oh, see we didn't know this.

Yeah. So, and she's really good with fine details so she can look at a spreadsheet and really dissect things that are important and the metrics that eBay provides. I'm better at human interaction and kind of thinking about the bigger things that we need to do. It's really compliments, you know, that I have Wendy Lynn here to help me because she's really good at the analytics and I'm good at the overall big boom.

Yeah. I wouldn't have known that by talking to you, William at all. So it's not obvious, right. It comes from your performing days I hope.

That's right.

Yeah, exactly.

Do you miss that by the way?

Well, you know, I still perform. I actually do an acoustic solo thing and then she's a musician as well. So we we do like a duo.

Wendy, what do you?

I play violin and Viola and I do actually a lot of recording studio work where I record strings.

She just did a project for the tribute album for Dr Demento in New York and she was on a track with Fred Schneider from B52's.

Oh, that's amazing.

Her Discography is awesome.

You guys have an amazing story. So not only has eBay saved your life, but you, you had a life before eBay!

Yeah, that's right. And, and now it's involved with eBay because it's all about music, man.

It's very difficult isn't it? To have that many irons in the fire. I mean.

Yeah, of course, you know, but uh, you just gotta stay focused, you know, just make sure you keep your priorities in order and that's revenue on eBay and then we can do all the other stuff too.

William, Wendy, I want to thank you so much. This has been a great interview. I'm glad eBay saved your life. There's still a lot of living to do.

Yes sir.

And by the way, I didn't ask. Are you enjoying the event?

Oh I love it. Yeah man. What we heard this morning is going to totally change everything. It's really awesome.

Pick one thing you heard that you really love?

Background removal.

Well the background removal on photos.

This has been the big one. We never expected that was going to be the big one. It's the huge one everyone's talking about.

It's really awesome man. And also the seller protections and also the the seller help. I love that. Oh come on. It's so easy. Cause right now we have to call and all this stuff but now it's a couple clicks and we're all good.

So you're glad you came.

Love it!

We'll see you next year?

Yes sir. Griff.

William and Wendy Fortin Thank you for stopping by. It's sweetheart deals on eBay.

It's an honor to meet you finally Griff.

My honor as well. Thank you so much.

Take care. Thank you.

Over the years. I've watched many people come and go at eBay and I always like to get the seller reactions to folks and the upper echelons, our Exec staff when they come on board. Some people they're kind of quiet personalities and sometimes people are very technical. And then every now and then we're blessed with someone who comes into the company who's just a natural communicator. We actually have to work to keep him from going overboard because he just wants to get out there and talk to sellers.

I do!

Everyone knows you now, Harry Temkin.

Oh well I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. What a day. What a day.

And by the way, I want to remind you in case you didn't know who doesn't know, Harry's, the Vice President of Seller Experience and things that you're seeing happening right now are a direct result of Harry's team and the feedback he's pulling from sellers. Harry, this is your first eBay Open.

It is.

What do you think?

I gotta tell you, I am blown away. Blown away. It is been the most incredible experience. You know, look, I've done a lot of presentations but never like this. The response in the room, it was just incredible. It was very emotional actually I have to say…

Welcome to the eBay club.

It truly was a privilege to be able to present to everyone and show them all the amazing tools that we have delivered. Incredible. For the audience at home who may not have watched the stream or may not have been able to come to eBay Open, could we talk a little bit about what you announced?

Absolutely, absolutely.

Where do you want to start?

Let's start with the theme. This year for seller was about three core themes. Ultimately, first about driving conversion, helping with efficiency and ultimately with profitability. And if you look at the things we talked about today, first with conversion, we launched a complete redesign of our listing flow with respect to item specifics. And item specifics are the most important part of a listing. It's what describes the listing, what further indexes it in search. And what we explained to sellers today is that, you know, we've done a lot of work on the buy side with query search and left hand navigation, a lot of enhancements. And the reality is that if you haven't given us all the relevant items specifics or what we call aspects, there are cases where when a buyer uses the new left hand navigation filter, your listings just simply won't show up because you haven't given us the right descriptors. So to help with that, we have a massive amount of data at eBay, which is incredible. And we've taken that data and now we're exposing it to our sellers. So we're showing our sellers the value of giving us item specifics. And the way that we do that is by showing them how many times a buyer has actually searched that aspect or that item specific in the last 30 days. That's one. But we've also completely reorganized the listing flow so that the item specifics that are most important to a buyer are at the top of the listing flow. Now they're actually ordered by the relevance to a buyer. And not only are we giving them all of that data and reorganizing the flow to make it incredibly efficient, but as they're giving us these items specifics, there is a new, what we call the lightning gauge. Which is showing you how many more searches your listing is now eligible to be seen in search. So for example, color, I think is worth 18,000 searches in fashion over the last 30 day. Look is worth 15,000 searches. So as you fill in those aspects, you're seeing this gauge increase in terms of the number of searches you're listing as eligible. So they now know the value of giving us these item specifics. It's super powerful. And then on top of that we also then updated what we call our aspect extraction service. I know that sounds kind of technical.

Yeah, I am confused. What does that mean?

Most of our sellers give us their item descriptors in the title. This service effectively extracts as many of those specifics as it can and automatically fills them in now in the listing flow in that section.

In the aspects?

Exactly right. So half the work is already done and then for the others, once again we're surfacing, we're in terms of the item specific, the values that can be placed in there. They also are now ordered by their relevance instead of old alphanumeric. When I talk about, we've completely redesigned the listing flow, we have made it probably a hundred times more efficient. We're showing the sellers the value in giving those items specific to us, literally the value to a buyer and ultimately it means their listing is going to have more visibility in search.

When will sellers see this happen?

This is launching in the next two weeks.

In the next two weeks?

Absolutely. Absolutely. So that was the big driver with respect to conversion. I think also in that conversion theme we announced that our first integration, our first phase of integration with Terapeak. Beginning of the year. We basically made Terapeak for free, gave it to all of our store subscribers, basic and above, and we gave them single sign on access, just a single click and you were over in terapeak.com. And of course Terapeak is this awesome analytic service that we acquired back in December of 17. It does title optimization functionality, price analytics, historical transaction analysis, and we are happy to announce today for all US sellers with a store subscription basic and above, we've natively integrated the historical transaction analysis directly into Seller Hub now.

So now you don't have to hunt for it. It's right there.

It's right there in the new research tab.

There's going to be a lot of people who've never used it before that now will find it easy to use.

Absolutely. And you know, so this tool basically does a couple of things. One is it helps you determine whether you want to source a product. Like what is going to be my profit margin, right? How's this product sold? The second is it helps you determine how to competitively price your listing. I gave two great examples today, my son has become quite a seller of sneakers and we literally use Terapeak to determine what we could sell our sneakers for. And it was a great lesson for him because one of those sneakers was ultra short supply and Terapeak showed us we could make at least $150, $130 profit, which we did.

Wow.

And then on another pair, which quite frankly had a lot more supply, it showed us the margin was much tighter. And so going forward, we know we probably wouldn't source those particular sets of sneakers just because again the profit margin is so tight.

So it's the great information tool for sellers before they go out and spend money on product.

Absolutely. And it also, I mean a couple of other things that it does, it enables you to determine whether you should include free shipping or not because it shows you the percentage of sellers that used free shipping on all the transactions. And it also can help you determine if you want to go with a fixed price format or an auction format.

That is helpful. Integrating Terapeak is long overdue. It's going to be so seamless and smooth. It's fantastic.

Absolutely.

Harry what else? What else?

A lot more to go. We're going to look at two more to go. So we also launched the Beta of Image Cleanup today, which I got to tell you the audience went absolutely berserk, we had 200 sellers in the line to sign up for it instantly. So let me tell you what's special about Image Cleanup. Three years ago we announced computer vision for our buyers. Image search and so we're super pumped to announce now we have it for our sellers as well. And I think everybody understands that high quality photos are really important to a listing, right? Buyers have trust from who they're buying from. They have a better visibility into the product that they're looking at. And that first photo is such a critical photo, the title photo, because that's the photo that appears in view item. It's the photo that appears in search results page. So what image cleanup does is it enables you to take a picture with whatever the backgrounds are. It goes through our own AI ML technology and it figures out the differential between the product and the background, comes up with a confidence score and if it's high enough it cleans the background automatically and that's what we showed today. And then that becomes your title photo. Now you have this high quality clean image of your product with a clean white background and that is what's going to be made available to SRP and view item. And also when buyers are using the image search functionality, that's the picture that it'll go against.

And also if it's a fixed price listing on other search engines like Google shopping, that's the image that you're going to be using.

Absolutely. It's critical for SEO benefits as well. So that plays into the conversion. The item specifics is actually a double play. It's, it's all of them, right? It's a play on conversion, a play on efficiency, which ultimately leads to profitability. The other big one that the audience just went crazy about is what we love to call MUA or multi user account accent. And I was super excited to be able to deliver on that promise.

That's amazing.

It's so important for our sellers, it will make them that much more efficient.

So explain what it is for people who don't know what we mean by multiple user access.

If you have an employee as an example and you want that employee to help create drafts for you. Okay. The only way that you could've done that before was by actually giving them your user id and your password. That's not very secure and it gave them full access to your account, everything payments. And that just wasn't a solution. And then they gave it to too many users multi, you know, MFA or multi factor authentication came into play. It just wasn't the right solution. So now this gives our sellers the employer in real time, the ability to manage which employees have access to their account and whether they can either just simply edit a listing or basically create a draft or give them full rights to be able to edit, create and publish a listing. And as I said, the great feature is that it can be done literally by the seller themselves. They can invite anyone on the platform and give them this access on their own. And at any point they can revoke the access as well. As I said, stage one enables either just a simple creation of a draft or full publishing rights. And over the course of the remainder of the year, we plan on adding messaging and order fulfillment or shipping as well as marketing support.

Wow, this is incredible. So we're finally starting this. And when does this launch? The first phase of it?

MUA is as of today, as of today, all of our US sellers can engage it today, sign up for it and start using it right now.

Where do they go to sign up?

Well actually I should back up, they don’t even have to sign up. It literally is in account preferences. There is now a section to work with multiple account access and they literally can invite, if you know your, you would know your employees email address and user id. It sends them an invitation. They accept that and they're controlling their authentications.

It is already available.

It's already available. Harry you are a genius.

Well it's not just me, it's my entire team.

The entire team are geniuses. This is great. I'm glad to hear that. So those are three huge, huge changes and additions.

That's four actually.

Oh four.

We have item specifics, we have price insights, we have image cleanup and we have multiple user account access.

I forgot the first one. It was so long ago.

I know it's a lot. I mean if you think about it, what made today so special was Mohan presented just some tremendous capabilities on the buy side. And what was amazing was its connectivity to what I showed as well. You know, as an example, Mohan presented the buy it again functionality and eventually that'll turn into subscription functionality. And this is exactly one of the reasons we went to fixed price to GTC, right? Because if you don't have a GTC listing, those features just simply don't work. Your listing goes away, you can't do it to buy it again. They're going to go to another seller.

What you mean by that is if you're in the habit of ending your good till cancelled listing and then relisting it thinking it's giving you a search boost, we already heard from Mohan, it isn't. And we're hearing from you that you're not going to get access to this special feature where you were your buyer can buy it again. You're basically telling your repeat buyers go away. I want you to buy from someone else.

Exactly right? I mean, you're losing the search benefits and you're losing those, that connection to these purchases, right? You want them to come back to you. I mean Devin likes to use that he buys dog food all the time, right? It's a recurring purchase and that's what this functionality is going to allow, right? All that, that connectivity you saw how the image search on Mohan side ties into what we're doing with image cleanup. It was just for me, for my first eBay Open, the amount of things. It was truly about sellers today. It really was.

It really was. Harry, I want to thank you. This is great news. You're going to get a lot of feedback in the next two days and I hope you're energized to go back and build some more new stuff.

We're not done yet. We got a lot more coming this year. Believe me a lot more.

Is there anyway that you can cheat and tell us or is it kind of secret?

You know, I'll cheat a little bit for you.

You know, Mohan showed you the volume price functionality.

Yeah, we love it here.

Right? Which is amazing. And I just want to reiterate to our sellers a couple of things. It's no joke that if you use volume pricing on a multi quantity listing, it drives conversion 10 to 15%. I mean that is just the data shows that. One of the things that we did earlier in the year was we literally added volume pricing directly into the advanced listing flow. We call it the cub flow at the bottom. So if you have a multi quantity listing you should turn that on and engage it. And then that started making us think about all of the other promotional tools that we have on the platform like order discount and shipping discount and markdown manager. I think our sellers would agree that they're kind of somewhat buried. There on the marketing tab, create promotion, small font and there's no real guidance when to use one over the other or to be able to easily work with those from your active listings page. For me, you know, a lot of sellers heard me talk about my trading background and everything that we do in trading is about proactive. In having the system inform the trader or the money manager of what's happening, and I want to bring that same type of thought process to selling. So that active listings isn't reactive, it's proactive, it's always engaging the seller with things that they should be doing with their listings. Whether it's aspect, you know, the item specific adoption or what have you. Just like we've added best offer and seller initiated offer, all those quick filters, those will be called the pills. We want to do the same thing with volume pricing and order discount. So right from active listings think about filtering by all of your multi quantity listings and one click. You can engage volume pricing against all of them, right from active listing. A lot of the things you'll see us do in the second half of the year is how do we really engage all of those promotional functions? We've already done that with promoted listings. That's right in inactive listings. Now. Let's bring the rest of it all in there as well.

Something to look forward to Harry.

Absolutely.

I have no doubt you'll deliver.

Well, thank you very much. This has been awesome. Thanks for having me.

It's been a pleasure Harry Temkin. He's the Vice President of Seller Experience. And sellers, we're in good hands.

Thanks. Cheers.

Oh, somebody wipe my brow. Ooh. Wow. That's our show from eBay Open 2019. What a wild and crazy week, Alan.

Oh yes, indeed. I'm nackered but also energized at the same time.

I know. It's that feeling you get when you're totally drained and totally excited to get home and start back in again.

I need all of the coffee, I am looking forward to hopping on the plane, going home, resting up for the weekend and back at it Monday morning bright and early.

Well, glad you're getting on the plane because it's time for me to pack up all our podcast equipment and load up the bus for the long drive home to our new studio on campus.

Yeah, new studio. Can't wait to see it.

Yeah, it's going to be great. It's going to be twice the size as our closet! But in the meantime, before we sign off, it's time for the, you know, the regular stuff, the podcast housekeeping. So if you want to join the fun here at eBay for Business in the future, you can always be a part of the show when you call us at (888) 723-4630. (888) 723-4630.

That's right. Call us at (888) 723-4630. You can call the hotline anytime of the day, any day the week. Leave a question or comment on, we might just put it on air.

And I know it's hard to believe, but we actually have our very own email address. It's podcast@ebay.com. podcast@ebay.com for those of you who don't want to call in. And go attend a local seller meetup, why don't ya? It's almost like eBay Open, but only a few hours long. At seller meetups, sellers, share tips, stories, insights, and a lot of news like what we learned this week at eBay Open, you can see meetups that are scheduled on our special eBay community page for meetups at www.ebay.com/meetups.

And don't forget to tune into our weekly live video stream on the eBay for Business Facebook page every Wednesday at 12:30 Pacific.

From our new studio.

Ooh, go to facebook.com/ebayforbusiness. Tune in to check out our new studio and then right after that make sure you jump over to the community chat from one to two Pacific. You can get to that at ebay.com/communitychat.

Hey Alan, it's time. Let's let the credits roll.

Certainly. Head of Community, Mr. Brian Burke. Executive Associated Segment Producer and totally absent right now. I have no idea where he is. Doug Smith.

Check the bar.

Yeah, probably.

Our wonderful Marketing Strategist, Liz Austin.

And my Cohost and rising star in the interwebs. Alan Aisbitt.

Editor in Chief and Host. Wonderful Griff.

Forgot my name! Well, the hotel had me as Griff James.

They had me as Aisbitt Alan. I like that. Right.

It's got a nice ring to it. From now on your Aisbitt Alan and I'm Griff James.

eBay for Business Podcast is produced and distributed by Libsyn and podCast411.

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