I’m sure you’ve read about the conference by now, but here are some quick thoughts in respect to eBay, ecommerce, and comparison engines.
ProStores is part of eBay’s effort to assist sellers increase sales and reach new customers beyond eBay (WSJ article). ProStores is similar to Yahoo! Store, cityMax, Homestead, and many other website hosting and building solutions. The big difference is the integration with eBay (ProStore users can easily post their products on eBay) and the fact that ProStores is an official eBay service which gives it free access to the eBay community. ProStores also allows for automated feed submission to 4 shopping comparison engines: Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and Froogle.
I informally talked to around 40 eBay sellers – small and large (including a couple Power Sellers). What amazed me was the fact that people in the eBay community know relatively little about marketing beyond eBay. I’d say that about 70% of the people I spoke to didn’t have a stand alone website and knew nothing about shopping comparison engines (or PPC marketing, SEO, Affiliate Programs, etc.). We’ll have to wait and see how eBay integrates Shopping.com into the eBay world, but there is clearly a a huge opportunity here for the eBay community to extend it’s ecommerce reach.
While sellers who have new products can easily mesh with the Shopping.com listings, I think there is an even larger opportunity for eBay sellers of used products to gain sales through Shopping.com. This could be similar to the used product listing integration on Amazon (see example). Yahoo Shopping already has this type of offering, but I don’t feel that the intergration properly promotes the sellers of used or refurbished products (or auctions for that matter). In this search for a Sony Vaio Laptop, you can see a link for ‘Used & Refurbished’ under the product image. Hopefully you’re still with me and starting to see the possibilities. eBay is already an ecommerce behemoth, but pushing into shopping comparison engines, storefronts, etc. opens up a whole new world.
OK, enough gushing.
