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doug@ebay
eBay Staff (Alumni)

This week on the Selling on eBay Podcast we discuss the 2019 Spring Seller Update with Jay Hanson VP and COO, eBay Americas, Harry Temkin VP of Seller Experience, Alyssa Cutright VP Global Payments, Kristi Diemoz Sr. Manager, Go To Market Strategy, and Gary Fullmer Sr. Director, Global Trust.
 
Selling On eBay - Episode 38 – 2019 Spring Seller Update

This week on the Selling on eBay Podcast we discuss the 2019 Spring Seller Update with Jay Hanson VP and COO, eBay Americas, Harry Temkin VP of Seller Experience, Alyssa Cutright VP Global Payments, Kristi Diemoz Sr. Manager, Go To Market Strategy, and Gary Fullmer Sr. Director, Global Trust.

Links

ebay.com/sellingonebay
ebay.com/meetups
ebay.com/community
ebay.com/sellercenter
ebay.com/payments
ebay.com/communitychat
ebay.com/sellerupdate
ebay.com/spring2019
pages.ebay.com/seller-center/seller-updates/2019-spring/index.html

Hosts

Griff, Kristi Diemoz

Guests

Jay Hanson (eBay Staff), Harry Temkin (eBay Staff), Alyssa Cutright (eBay Staff), Kristi Diemoz (eBay Staff), Gary Fullmer (eBay Staff)

Transcript

I'm Griff and this is Selling On eBay. Your weekly source for the information and inspiration you need to start run and grow a business on the world's most powerful marketplace. And today is Seller Update Day and joining us today is Kristi Diemoz. She's eBay's Senior Manager of Seller Operations and she's here with us now to talk about our 2019 Spring Seller Update. Welcome Kristi.

Thanks Griff. Great to be back.

Well, it's good to have you and by the way, we'll assume our listeners have already read the Spring Seller Update.

Well, of course.

Yeah, and they're familiar with the changes we announced, but if you haven't read it, we recommend you head over to ebay.com/sellerupdate before you listen to this episode. Now take your time. We won't go anywhere. You can hit the pause button and we'll be right back.

Okay. You can unpause now. It kind of feels like we just announced our last Seller Update, Kristi.

I know. Well it's been two whole months since we announced the Early Seller Update in February. You'll recall that we released our first Early Update to give sellers an opportunity to start taking advantage of some great new tools and features. Why wait?

Yeah, absolutely. And now we're on to our official Spring Seller Update. We move fast around here.

That's right. And we cover a lot of ground.

Indeed we do Kristi. So tell us about the Spring Seller Update.

Of course. In our latest Seller Update we're introducing new tools and features to streamline and simplify selling on eBay and creating more ways to help our sellers grow their business. Some of our key updates include new seller protections, expanded payment options for buyers, a good till cancelled billing update and new tools that will help our sellers drive buyer interests and conversion.

That's a lot of ground. Fortunately we have some eBay experts on hand and they'll give us some deeper insights into these updates and and how they may impact them.

Are listeners will also get to hear from two eBay leaders who are helping define our vision and longterm roadmap.

That's right, Kristi. We're delighted to be joined by Jay Hanson, Vice President and Chief Operations Officer for the Americas and Harry Temkin, Vice President of the eBay Seller Experience. Now, Jay and Harry are going to share some insights in a moment about current plans and maybe even give us a glimpse into the future at eBay. First I want to say thanks Kristi for leading us off with the Seller Update and we'll talk to you soon.

Awesome Griff. Thanks so much. Can't wait to hear from our awesome guests and we'll talk soon.

Joining us now is Jay Hanson. Jay is the Vice President of... Jay, why don't you just give us what your role is?

So I am the Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of eBay Americas.

So big time.

Yeah.

We're here to talk about Seller Update.

I'm thrilled to be here.

How about sharing? Some of the major goals were focused on on eBay, especially today as we're talking about Seller Update. Where are we today and where do we want to go?

Sure Griff. Let me start with our vision. This is really the playbook that guides the work of our thousands of talented and dedicated eBay employees around the world every day. In essence, we strive to create a stable platform, one that helps our sellers drive their sales velocity and provides a level playing field for all sellers with protections for both buyers and sellers as a part of that. We continually strive to deliver an efficient marketplace where buyers can find the items they're looking for quickly and easily. And of course sellers can sell them quickly and easily. Ultimately, we want to bring our buyers and sellers together so that they can do what they do best. We also have a commitment to drive traffic. So we invest in driving traffic and buyers to eBay, which helps our sellers succeed and prosper. It's really simple format, Griff. Ultimately, when our sellers, when we win, so we want our sellers to be successful so we can be successful.

It makes sense, but how are we delivering on sales velocity, for example?

Yeah, great example is managed payments Griff. Buyers have been telling us for a long time to give them more ways to pay on eBay. And we're doing just that. Manage Payments gives buyers more payment options and an easier way to pay at checkout so simplifying that process. Also helps our sellers manage their payments, information and operations all in one place on eBay. I'm super excited about Manage Payments. I'm sure our sellers are too.

You've talked about seller protections. What new measures are we taking to cover our sellers?

A great question Griff. So it's our obligation to protect sellers on our platform so they can confidently run their business without any surprises. To fulfill that obligation we are holding our buyers more responsible than ever for misbehavior on eBay. In our Spring Seller Update, we announced an enhanced report a buyer feature that helps us achieve exactly that goal. I can't stress enough the importance of this feature because it helps our sellers tell us what we need to know about the buyers who are misbehaving on our platform. So we can take the action we need to against those abusive buyers. So I want to thank all sellers in advance for using that feature so that we can get the information we need.

And the percentage of buyers who we might call abusive or misusing the privilege. It's very small, but they make an impact.

Exactly. Tiny, tiny amount, but we need to do what we need to do with with those folks. We also announced that we're taking action against sellers who violate our drop shipping policy and I know there's a little bit of confusion here about what that policy is.

Yeah, that's right Griff so let me be specific on this one. So sellers who use retailers or marketplaces to ship directly to buyers are in fact in violation of our drop shipping policy. When we find sellers who are doing that, we're going to lower them in search results, which will give sellers who own their own inventory or drop ship from wholesalers greater search visibility.

Sounds like eBay's really going to deliver on that vision. Sellers can find more examples of what we're doing in this particular area on the Spring Seller Update. What makes eBay so distinct and special? What differentiates eBay from other marketplaces?

Ooh. That is a fun question. I appreciate that one Griff. Look, several things I think make eBay distinct from all other marketplaces. First one is of course we don't compete with our sellers on eBay and we will never use our sellers data to undercut their businesses. Second, our marketplace is diverse on a global scale with 170 million registered buyers and over 180 countries around the world. I don't think any other marketplace offers that kind of reach and diversity in it's buyer base. The third is we're open and transparent. Sellers can compete for buyers however they want on our platform. And finally, look on a personal note. Our buyers are what I call uniquely eBay. eBay helps buyers express who they are as unique individuals, what they wear, what they drive, what they collect, whatever it may be, and what's uniquely eBay to one person is likely different for another. Great example Griff, my wife, she is in to Newfoundland dogs.

That's interesting. I was too at one point.

These are big huge dogs. My wife loves them. So when I shop on eBay for my wife, I can find the most amazing things related to Newfoundland dogs and that's what makes her unique. For me, it's about camping and ice hockey. And I dunno who else has that combination, but that's what makes me unique. And so when I shop I find amazing things related to those things.

I'm assuming you can camp and play hockey at the same time.

Pond hockey, so in remote parts of Canada, it's the most fun thing you can do.

Wow. It's things like that that really does make us unique. I think you've put your finger or all of your fingers, Jay, on all the things that make us special. Thanks for stopping by to share our vision with our sellers. Jay.

It's my pleasure, Griff.

Now let's turn to Harry Temkin, Vice President of Seller Experience here at eBay.

Welcome Harry.

Hey, thanks Griff. Really psyched to be here.

Harry, you just heard what Jay said. Would you like to add anything else?

Yeah, most definitely. Yeah. I think I want to speak a little bit to Jay's comments about creating an efficient marketplace. Where buyers can find items they're looking for quickly and easily and our sellers can list super easily. I mean, I think there's a couple of parts to this. First, we're continually investing in our infrastructure and our stability, right? I mean I think speed is incredibly important, particularly for a buyer. When buyers are searching for something, the last thing you want to do is be waiting for a website to come in because we're going to lose them. So we're always continuously investing in the infrastructure so that our, you know, the speed of our displays is incredibly fast. Buyers aren't waiting. They find things very, very quickly and efficiently when they're searching for things. And then of course on the seller side, we want to ensure that whether a seller is listing one item, 10,000 items or 100,000 items, you know, you have the confidence in our platform and the stability of the platform that you're going to be able to list all of those items incredibly efficiently and with a lot of speed. I also want to talk a little bit about efficiencies in terms of adding additional functionality to the platform. And again, particularly for our sellers. As our sellers will see as we go through these updates, we're continuously enhancing the capabilities that we provide so that sellers can maximize their efficiency and their profitability in helping getting their listings sold. One of those examples is the integration of Terapeak. So once a standalone product in this last iteration we made single sign on to Terapeak for anybody who has a store subscription and it's now free to those users. And as we move forward we'll actually fully integrate the capabilities of Terapeak directly into Seller Hub an again, Terapeak is a historical transaction database. It has a year's worth of all transactions. So it helps our sellers look at pricing information, helps them be more competitive with their listings and it provides other additional tools like a title optimizer and capabilities like that. We're also going to be adding more negotiation tools which we are going to talk about. We just in this release did more to seller initiated offers and more with best offers. And another really important piece is adding in now what we call self service tools so that our sellers can be more efficient when they're dealing with let's say, having to deal with an abusive buyer and they want to report that abusive buyer. We've made it so they can give us more detail than what we've had there before. Or they want to be able to issue partial refunds on items where they're providing a free refund. They want to be able to manage that themselves without calling, say Customer Service. So we want to continue to provide these tools. So really a seller can manage all of those things directly within the Seller Hub.

This is all excellent news, in fact, for sellers.

Oh really, really excellent news. I mean, as I said, as we mentioned with the self service tools, it's really about being more efficient and again, continuing to build out those capabilities is key to our plan over the course of the year.

And then the sellers don't have to rely on contacting eBay to get these certain tasks done.

No, exactly right.

So we also announced in the Update that the listing duration for all new fixed price listings on eBay will be good until canceled.

That is correct. So let me take a little bit of time and talk about some of the reasons why we made this change. Because we've obviously received a lot of feedback and actually I've responded to a lot of that feedback with some additional changes that we've announced in this Update. But first of all, with respect to good till canceled, I think sellers should know that over 80% of fixed price listings are already good till cancelled on the system. So only a small percentage of listings were the short duration listings. And one of the things that we've seen in many of our sellers have told us as well is that duration certainly helps with conversion. So sometimes it takes a little longer than 30 days to convert a sale. And so by keeping it up on the platform, one thing that you get is SEO optimization because it retains the same item Id. So as far as being able to be found in many different search engines, that's a key benefit. Also asides that duration helping the sale, a big part of this was also quite frankly leveling the playing field. Making the marketplace more equivalent in terms of you know, how the listings are on the platform instead of having multiple different durations along with a large portion of them being good till cancel. We want it to ensure from a search perspective and capabilities that all listings were essentially equivalent on the platform. Now look, we haven't changed anything with regards to auctions, so we still provide short duration auctions and I want to remind sellers that, I mean those are very beneficial. Again, when you want to do say an of seven day duration and you can also use best offer and buy it now. So all of those capabilities exist with auctions and as I know I just want to, I want to reemphasize that we haven't eliminated the short durations on auctions at all. And we actually recommend for sellers who want short duration to use the auction style. Another thing that I want to make note of just so sellers understand, we recognize that buyers do search for items ending soonest. And even though a listing is good till cancel as it approaches its renewal date, it will appear in items ending soonest. so that feature has not gone away. It's just that it looks like a 30 day duration, but at the end of the 30 days it will automatically renew. And again, if the seller doesn't want it to renew, they can go in, they can use the bulk editor, they can select which listings they don't want to renew and simply end the listing. With regards to that, we obviously heard a lot of feedback about inventory management. We use the 30 day duration as an inventory management tool. What we wanted to do to help with that is we added into Seller Hub on the start date, and you can add that as a column. It will show the total number of days that a listing has been on the platform. So again, you can see how long your listing has been there. We also have a column that shows days till renewal, so you can rank on either one of those columns so that it makes it easy to bring all the listings to the top of the active listings page that are preparing to renew. And again, if you choose not to renew them, you can easily select them and d list them as you approach that date.

And Harry that's already available. Correct?

It was all available, yes. The one new element was the total number of days. We're actually doing that calculation now for the seller on the start date column, which was a big request of our sellers.

Now another big part of the Update was we announced we're changing the renewal schedule for a pricing consideration.

So again, based on feedback from our sellers, we're going to be implementing a change to the way that the renewal schedule happens for good till cancelled listings. Instead of relisting every 30 days, we're now going to go similar to the way even monthly subscriptions work or billing cycles and basically have it realist exactly on the same date the following month that you listed on this month. So for example, if I list on the fifth of the month, you will know that it will renew next month on the fifth. So again, from an inventory management perspective, we believe this change will be significantly beneficial because as you know, if I list on the first, it's not always going to relist on the first, depending upon the month. What this will also ensure, and this is very important, is that a seller will only ever be billed once per month with an insertion fee.

Yeah, I know that was a big concern among a lot of sellers.

Absolutely. And it was never the intent to have good till cancels in some cases, bill twice in a month. And this change will absolutely ensure that that does not happen. So if you leave a listing up for an entire year, you will be billed only 12 times. And that's regardless of what day it listed on. We believe this also is a significant help from an inventory management perspective because as I said it is now very consistent in how it works. If I list on the first you renew on the first. There are cases obviously where some months like February is 28 or 29 days in a leap year. Other months have 30 and 31 days so the system knows that if I were to list on the 30th of the month, let's say in January, then February it would relist on the 28th, but then the following month in March would again realists on the 30th. You are getting a full month every single time, but that's keeps it consistent and an exactly the way a monthly billing subscription would work. We think this will be a very positive change again across the board, not just from how we bill our customers but also in making it easier to know when your listings are going to renew in the following month.

Part of the announcement also was we announced a volume pricing update. Sellers can now incentivize buyers to purchase more than just one item. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Volume pricing has really taken off. I mean we have had incredibly positive feedback from the new capability and essentially as its name suggests it is for a particular item. It enables you to add volume discounting. So if I buy more than one, you want to offer a discount of that same product. It's significantly enhanced the way that we display that to our buyers. In the view item page. We actually made these really cool little buttons that stand out that show the seller is offering volume discounting basically on that item. And as I said, we've seen tremendous uptake of it. I would highly recommend it to our sellers. Certainly buyers love the fact that they can get a discount when they're buying more than one. I think that's sort of an expectation of many buyers and we've made that, again, very, very easy to implement during the listing flow and throughout Seller Hub. We display it very prominently to sellers when they're looking at the view item.

It sounds like some really great things are in store for volume pricing. I know. I'm excited as a buyer, I've already used it.

Yeah, I use it as well on a bunch of my items that I list.

Any other new enhancements that are in the works for volume pricing?

Yet as we always do, we continue to enhance all the functionality on the platform and we will continue to do the same with volume discounting, particularly if it's a multi sku item, you'll be able to do that. Like if you have variations in colors, not just a single item, but a single item that has variations, you'll see that also be available for volume pricing as well.

When will these enhancements be available by the way?

You'll start to see them in the next couple of updates.

Wow, that's right around the corner given our cadence rate. But Harry, volume pricing isn't the only growth tool.

No, not at all. I think it's a good time to remind our sellers that we have a wide variety of tools in the toolbox so to speak when it comes to let's say, enticing buyers. And so whether it's volume pricing or order discount, so you want to provide a percentage discount or a dollar discount across an entire order. We provide that. We provide shipping discount, buying more than one item from the same seller. You offer a shipping discount cause you can combine them into say one package. Of course we have the markdown manager, if you want to run clearance sales or other types of sales opportunities. And then of course we have promoted listings which is obviously a huge feature. And then we have all the negotiation tools. Best offer, seller initiated offer, as we call offers to buyers. A wide set of tools that are all available to our sellers to take advantage of to help drive conversion.

Something that's new to me Harry, is this idea of inline editing. Can you talk a little bit about that?

We wanted a, and you'll see as we continue to enhance the active listings page in Seller Hub. We wanted to make it easier and faster for our sellers to be able to edit the most common things with respect to a listing. So particularly quantity and price are things that get edited the most. We enabled our sellers to actually edit those fields directly within active listings. Now that's not new, that wasn't this update and it's been out there for a while, but the change was, again based on customer feedback was that when you hit the inline edit, it was a blank box. It wasn't showing the original value so that it was a super easy edit, like you had to retype the whole number. I know this sounds kind of small, but I'll tell you what sellers like, hey, you're making it harder for me. I have to retype the whole number. Can you just leave the old number and let me edit it by one digit? So we did that in this release. Now you actually see the current value and it makes it easier to edit. But another really cool feature that we added to it as well is access to the competitive insight module. So directly from inline price edit, If it is a listing that is what we call a healthy hard good or in one of the top top products, which today is about 18% of GMV. I recognize it's a small percent, but it's on significant products. We will offer you access to a module that will show you up to 20 competitive listings. And it's pretty slick because it enables you to see listings that really tie or match up to your listing, not just from, you know, obviously the product perspective or from a price perspective, but also whether that listing is offering free shipping. Are they offering free returns? Are they offering returns at all? You can see what the quantity is that that other sellers selling. So it really is based on a whole series of additional factors, not just price. That enables you to understand whether your listing is competitively priced. And over the course of time as we integrate Terapeak, which brings a lot of that capability into the platform you'll see that functionality more and more enhanced and have more GMV coverage, so it'll cover more of the listings on the platform in terms of being able to provide competitive insight.

Harry, you and your team are so busy building these products out. I have to commend you. This is an amazing amount of work and it's all for the benefit of the marketplace. I know sellers are going to love this.

Oh, absolutely. I'd love to take a second and talk about what we're doing in the negotiation space because that's really, really important. In the last Seller Update, we made the announcement that we had in addition to best offered, launched what we call seller initiated offers or offers to buyers. This is basically the of best offer, right? Best offers is where a buyer can basically make an offer to a seller, and here now we're enabling sellers to make an offer to buyers who are watching their listings. What you're going to see is the last update unhooked it from having to have best offer on the listing. That was a real constraint for it. So now you don't need best offer on it. And we also unhooked it from single quantity listing. So now it also works with multi quantity listings. One thing I want to stress about this, I mean again, we've had very significant uptake of it. Our seller champions in particular have been really excited about it and telling us how it has been great for conversion for them. One of the interesting things that we heard back from them is that when they make the message personal, if you in Sio you can actually put a personalized message when you send out the offer. They have seen really, really good response to that in terms of conversion. You know, when you make the negotiation personal, it really, really has an impact with the buyer. So that's one thing that I would highly recommend when using SIO.

And SIO , By the way, is?

Sorry, seller initiated offers. We get used to kind of throwing the acronyms around. My apologies. Over the course of this next month, you're going to see us now add in the bulk adoption capability into Seller Hub for both best offer and seller initiated offers. So now you'll be able to set on multiple listings at once the ability to mix up best offers or again, multiple listings at once, send out seller initiated offers. We are going to make that really, really easy to turn those on and edit and send those in bulk. Some really exciting things there. And then one of the big features we believe, again another enhancement as we go through this quarter, will be tying it to work with items that are in a buyer's cart. So not just items that are being watched, but now when an item is sitting in a cart, you'll be able to use offers to buyers to get them over the goal line.

You're going to empty my wallet as a buyer. I've already received two of those seller initiated offers and I took them. This must be working because I'm, I'm usually immune to that stuff, but it worked for me.

And you know what, I mean on my listings and my son is an avid seller of sneakers. He's quite frankly a sneaker trader. He goes to Sneaker Con and he's become a really, really a good seller on the platform. And I'll tell you what, without any of my assistance, he engages with best offer. He promotes his listings. He recently just sold, you know, a pair of sneakers. Literally, I don't know how many offers I got during the day. My phone was going crazy and it sold within a couple of hours. It goes to show you that even the younger generation understands the power of personalized negotiation as well as the use of, you know, being able to promote a listing. And it got his item sold very, very quickly.

Harry, this is fantastic. I want to thank you for joining us for this Seller Update and sharing your insights.

Well thank you very much. As you can tell. I'm really excited and I look forward to and so does the team continuing to bring more enhancements to the platform over the course of 2019.

We've been speaking with Harry Temkin, he's the Vice President of Seller Experience here at eBay.

And joining us now is Alyssa Cutright, our Vice President of Global Payments. Thanks for stopping by Alyssa.

Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here to share the news and our status on Manage Payments.

Now earlier last year we announced Manage payments and this is a multi year journey that will enable eBay sellers to manage their payments all in one place and give buyers more ways to pay at checkout. Where are we in that journey Alyssa?

It's pretty amazing. In just about eight months since we first rolled this out in September of 2018, we've already gained great traction. We've introduced some new payment types with Apple Pay and Google Pay. And we are starting to roll out PayPal as well and we're going to continue to share more updates as we move through the year and bring more features online.

So what's the latest and greatest given that this is the Seller Update?

Yeah, as I just noted, PayPal's probably the latest and greatest. Google Pay a little over a month ago or so and PayPal, we're starting small to make sure everything's working right and we're rolling it to more and more sellers every week. So we're super excited to have that on board and it's just going to bring more opportunity for our buyers that prefer to pay that way. Alyssa, there's some confusion among sellers about how PayPal, the experience will work in managed payments. I think a lot of sellers are used to how PayPal has worked for 15 years. Can you describe that difference?

PayPal on eBay and manage payments is going to work exactly how PayPal works for buyers but that prefer to use that form of payment on all other sites. So it's going to be a standard implementation for buyers that are used to that one touch experience with PayPal. It's going to be that same one touch experience here on eBay. So there will be a redirect to PayPal as it works on other sites. And we are moving to PayPal's best in class industry standard implementation so that we can continue to take advantage of all the upgrades and updates that PayPal does throughout time. In today's retail environment, shoppers expect to be able to use their preferred payment methods when they check out. And we're creating that modern marketplace by providing buyers with a full spectrum of payment options based on a number of factors. The countries they reside in, devices they shop from and items they purchase. As we expand to more markets will continue to add new forms of payment for our buyers and buyers will complete their entire transactions on eBay.

That's for the buyers, that's good news, they won't see a major change. But what about sellers?

Yes, for the sellers, they're going to continue to get paid by eBay for all their proceeds, regardless of what the form of payment is. So they're kinda continue to have a simplified interface with eBay. One place to manage all their payments and all their business on eBay, irrespective on how a buyer chooses to pay.

Okay. Will this be available eventually to all sellers?

Eventually, yes. Today it's on an invitation only basis as we continue to ensure that the sellers we're bringing on board, it's the right fit. We're continuing to add more and more features as we move throughout this year and we'll continue to bring sellers on as we activate new features.

Now, how did you determine which sellers could be the early participants in the project?

So we looked at a number of features. First and foremost, we wanted to make sure this was a great fit for our sellers. But we looked at things like sales volume, the location, the percentage of their business domestically or international. Seasonality of sales, categories. Again, all with an eye towards making sure this was a great fit for our sellers and we wanted to make sure they'd have a good experience in manage payments as we continue to add new features over time. Now for those sellers who are interested, how can they, if they aren't a part of the program already join managed payments?

Yes, so sellers that aren't part of managed payments today but would like to join, should check out our Spring Seller Update for more information. We expect to transition the majority of our sellers to our new platform by the end of 2021. So everyone's going to be brought across in time.

We love to talk about what's coming. Are there any features or enhancements in managed payments that are in development that you can share with us?

This summer will introduce an order number format that's more user friendly than the one we use in our current APIs. Will attach to the updated order numbers to each transaction on eBay, which will follow the transaction through the entire lifecycle. Really simplifying reconciliation for our sellers. The updated order numbers will appear in the order details section of your view order details page, Seller Hub reports, emails, APIs, post transaction records, and other locations over time. So sellers can really efficiently track and manage their orders. We know simplifying this gives time back to our seller base to do what they came here to do, which is to sell more.

This is great news and I know it's going to provide a better, more consistent experience for both buyers and sellers. Alyssa, anything else on that front burner?

Yeah. Also starting in the summer, sellers will be able to issue partial refunds to buyers for percentage of the order or amount of the seller’s choices up to a hundred percent directly from Seller Hub or our APIs. That will give them the flexibility to manage refunds in addition to canceling orders or sending a partial refund through a return request. That's great news, Alyssa, especially for those sellers who like to issue partial refunds. I want to thank you for stopping by.

Thank you so much. It's been great having the opportunity to update you all on what we're up to.

We've been speaking with Alyssa Cutright from our Managed Payment team. Coming up next, we'll speak to Gary Fullmer about seller protections.

I'm joined now by Gary Fullmer, our Director of Trust And Safety in Salt Lake City. He's joining us via Skype. Welcome to our 2019 Spring Seller Update Gary.

Thanks Griff. Glad to be here.

As we've heard, Jay and Harry discuss, seller protection is a paramount concern to eBay sellers.

It's a paramount concern for us too, which is why we're improving the ways we protect sellers and when we find an abusive buyer we'll be taking action.

Please tell us about the new seller protections we've announced in our Spring Seller Update.

Yeah, I'm happy to. We just announced new measures to proactively identify and take action whenever we come across an abusive buyer.

And what sort of measures are these?

If a buyer doesn't appear to be acting in good faith, we'll stop them from opening a returns request and in serious cases we'll suspend them. When we find that the buyer has violated our policy, will remove any negative or neutral feedback that they leave and will protect the seller from any defects, including now removing open cases from their service metrics.

How do we determine if a buyer is violating eBay policy?

We have systems to monitor buyer activity and look for signs of suspected abuse. These systems look at a number of factors, but they're tuned to review transactions from buyers who had been reported to us by sellers. This is why we're making it easier for sellers to report buyers to us who may be violating our policy. Now, when you report a buyer, you'll be able to more clearly describe what the buyer's doing. And that's going to help us investigate potential policy violations and take actions to protect you. When we do this, we'll be looking at the severity, the frequency, and the intent of the buyer to determine whether or not they're violating the policy.

When should a seller report a buyer?

We're asking sellers to report buyers to us if they demand something that wasn't offered in the listing, if they make a false claim that the item wasn't delivered or it wasn't as described when that's not true, or if they returned something after they've opened or used it or damaged it, and you'd be able to see a full list of all the reasons to report buyers to us on the new abusive buyer policy page.

Now will eBay let the seller know if we've taken any actions against one of their buyers?

We will let the seller know when any actions we take affect them. Such as removing the buyer's feedback, but we can't always tell sellers about every action we take on the buyer's account because of privacy constraints.

We've also announced a new measure to address sellers who violate our drop shipping policy.

That's right. While drop shipping is allowed and a great way to source inventory, sellers who use retailers or marketplaces to ship items directly to buyers are in violation of our drop shipping policy. To discourage this, will reduce the visibility of sellers who do this in search results. This in turn is going to give that search visibility to sellers who own their own inventory or who drop ship from wholesalers.

For example, if it's another website and the items for sale, drop shipping from that website is a violation of the policy.

Yes, exactly.

But there are some forms of drop shipping which we consider legit and they are permitted.

Yeah, that's a good point. We do allow our sellers to fulfill orders directly from wholesale suppliers. Where they have an agreement in place to fulfill those orders on the seller's behalf. However, if you list an item on eBay and then purchase the item from another retailer marketplace after the purchase and have it shipped directly to the customer, that's not allowed.

That makes it a lot clearer. Gary, we also offer other protections, correct?

That's right, Griff. We offer a number of protections for when a seller does their part or when things happen outside of their control. For example, we'll remove any negative or neutral feedback or any defects when tracking shows that the item was delivered on time or it was delayed due to weather or carrier delays. Or for example, sellers can issue partial refunds through the returns flow for any item that comes back to them opened or used or damaged If they offer free returns on that transaction. And when they do this, they'll be protected from any claims or poor feedback that they might have received. And sellers can see the full list of protections outlined on the Seller Protections Policy page.

Is there anything in the seller protection pipeline that we can share with our sellers right now?

Yes, more protections are coming. We did announce in our Spring Seller Update that we're developing seller protections that are going to be based on a seller's track record and provide them, protect them when they provide great service.

That's great news and I just know our sellers will really appreciate that eBay has their back. Thanks for stopping by Gary.

Yeah, my pleasure, Griff. Thank you.

We've been speaking to Gary Fullmer, he's our Director of Trust and Safety and he's been talking about this 2019 Spring Seller Update, specifically our new seller protections.

Well Kristi, that was a lot of information for one single podcast episode.

Phew! No kidding. That was so much, but I hope it was helpful. It was so great to hear from all those awesome experts.

Well, I want to thank you personally for the great job you do in operations. Kristi's role among many things that she does at eBay is also helping to coordinate the entire Seller Update process. And I think you've done a wonderful job.

Oh, Griff. That's so kind. I really appreciate it. I hope it's good and I hope the sellers really walk away with a good understanding of some of these new great benefits.

Now can you tell us once again where they should go If they haven't yet, which I'd be surprised if they haven't.

Yup. ebay.com/sellerupdate. Please go check it out and we're on the boards today to answer any questions that you might have.

Kristi, thanks once again.

Kristi Diemoz, is the Senior Manager of Operations and she's intimately involved in getting everything wrapped up for the Seller Update. And that concludes our special 2019 Spring Seller Update edition. Be sure to read all of the details in our Spring Seller Update page.

Thanks for joining us and please do us a favor. If you like the show, give this podcast a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. You can download and listen every week to the Selling On eBay Podcast for the leg up your business needs to compete and prosper in the coming year. And we are always open to feedback so let us know how we can improve any topics you'd like to hear. You can send us a private email to our email address. It's sellingonebay@ebay.com.

I'm Griff, and we'll see you next week with a fresh new episode of Selling On eBay. Selling On eBay is produced and distributed by Libsyn and podCast411.

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