ComparisonEngines

Quick Notes…semi-live blogging…expect typos and worse!

Meg Whitman – This is a celecration of all things eBay. A reminder of how special the eBay commnity is.

-Attendance record this year. First year the conference sold out. More than 15,000 people. People from Malta, Estonia, and Thailand.
-Meg goes through the merchants who have high feedback scores; there are a still people left standing with feedback scores of over 50,000.
-The number of eBay sellers who make their living through selling on eBay recently surpassed 1.3m
-This past week eBay passed 200m registered members
-720 eBay, Skype and Paypal employees at the conference
-Year in review – Skype acquired. More Paypal account holders than Amex and Discover combined. But where is all of this going. The power of three – eBay, Paypal, and Skype. Powerful on their own, but together, the three businesses can make even greater things happen. Integrating Paypal into eBay made payments faster and easier for everyone. In Skype, we saw great potential to benefit the other groups. Just as Paypal fascilitated payments, Skype can fascilitate communication. Skype brings a community of over 100m members without much overlap. Skpye can fascilitate transactions especially on high ticket items.
-Testing SkypeMe buttons on listings starting next week.. Sellers who want to try just have to opt-in.
-A frew weeks ago we announced a major partnership with Yahoo!. eBay and Yahoo! will increase the relevancy of search results on eBay. Yahoo! will also manage the ads and Paypal will be highly visible across Yahoo!. We’ll test different approaches and consult the eBay community.
-Paypal mobile – send money, txt to buy, etc. Doesn’t cost anything to activate phone.
-eBay is first and foremost about people. Virtual connections become more tangible when a transaction is completed.
-Shipping completes the circle of trust between buyers and sellers. People of the USPS are the unsung heroes of the eBay community.
-Post Master General of the US, Jack Potter. “We at the postal service love you! Online intternet shipping solution. Free shipping supplies. Co-branded eBay boxes. Flat rate co-branded boxes. No zones, no scales. Just flat price. People are selling a lot of shoes…we created a new co-branded, priority mail shoe-box.”

-Bill Cobb, President of eBay North America
-Listenting more to the community – town hall meetings across the country
-Reviews and Guides launched this past fall
-Blogs – now coming to eBay. eBay Blogs launched.
-Wikis – now coming to eBay. The eBay Wiki.
-People and their collections are still the core of eBay. Introducing a new way for collectors to share their passion with the eBay community: MyCollectibles. Launched with Kaboodle [by the way, I'm sitting next to the Kaboodle guys]. MyCollectibles will strengthen the connections.
-Last year the eBay community generated over $20m for charity (Giving Works)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Comparison Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.