A glance back and look forward with our CEO
hey sellers thank you all for joining us today you know even though we're virtual i'm honored to be here with you today and i'm looking forward to the day when we can meet in person but until we can we'll continue to make the best of it you know i don't think any of us could have imagined the challenges we've faced over the last 16 plus months but even in a global pandemic that couldn't stop the magic of the ebay community a community that came together for buyers and each other during this extremely tough time what we've been able to accomplish together is a bold reminder of ebay's purpose empowering people to create economic opportunity for all from that very first day when you open your virtual doors on our platform we are there with you every step of the way we don't compete with you we partner with you we celebrate with you and we help you build brands to perfectly fit your unique personalities and inventory with our tools support advocacy and outreach everything we do is with you and mine when i first came back to ebay i set out to create a vision one that would enable our sellers to meaningfully grow in our marketplace one that would seamlessly connect you to our 187 million buyers globally and one where ebay is the best global marketplace to buy and sell to accomplish this vision we need to do things differently we need to have tighter feedback loops we want to hear your thoughts on what we're doing well we also want to hear where we need to improve and to better understand and focus on what you need to grow and succeed on ebay connecting better with sellers isn't just a company priority it's also a personal priority it's my goal to meet with as many sellers as i can this is a passion of mine and while the challenges of a global pandemic have posed an issue i'm grateful that we've still found ways to come together you know i've been lucky enough to meet with a number of you over the last year sellers like julie you she's a long time vintage fashion expert in toronto i was inspired to hear how her brick and mortar and online stores are fueling re-commerce and paving the way for a more sustainable future ebay pioneered recommerce and that foundation of sustainability helps to improve lives through partnerships and commitments of sellers like julie i've also had the pleasure to speak with up and running grant recipients like trading card seller victor rivera of orlando who's paying it forward to raise money for his community and sneaker and clothing seller yinka agusan lady of st louis who turned his love of fashion into a thriving ebay business while still working full-time as an attorney i love meeting with our sellers you inspire me and you remind me why we exist ebay connects people and communities around the world and together we're pushing the boundaries of innovation so that the experience of using ebay is not just convenient or seamless but meaningful every day ebay employees share a significant responsibility it's our role to help you increase your sales find support and community and become even more efficient on our marketplace no matter your location or size of your business as i mentioned earlier last year i outlined a new strategic multi-year vision for the company to become the best global marketplace for buyers and sellers powered by a tech-led re-imagination and our results to date are very encouraging our underlying growth is accelerating and we're making progress in our pursuit to be the best global marketplace to buy and sell simply put our strategy is working and we can overlook the importance of having a highly skilled team in place to make our strategy a reality we've brought several new incredibly talented leaders on board over the last year specifically i want to mention our new chief growth officer julie loger much of her focus will be on dedicating more attention and resources to attracting new buyers especially gen z and millennials to our marketplace looking ahead our next chapter is all about unlocking the full potential of our marketplace more than 25 years ago ebay was founded on a set of core values while the underlying technology has changed our founding principles economic empowerment and inclusive entrepreneurship remain the same our team is creating leading-edge new technology products and tools finding ways not just to delight our customers but also to provide next-gen experiences for e-commerce that will take our marketplace and the entire industry forward 25 years ago we revolutionized the internet with our founding vision and today we are ready to change the game again for global ecommerce as we look forward we know that there are things we still need to fix and we also know that listening to your feedback and ideas is instrumental to helping us evolve our platform some of the changes will take time to implement but we may remain committed to our strong partnership with you and we'll make sure to include your voices in this process to help guide us we want to help you further develop your own unique business personalities and brands on a global scale over the next few days you'll be hearing more about the tools we're creating to help you build your business and connect with customers one great example is coded coupons which you can print and personalize exactly to your needs we just launched coded coupons at the end of march where sellers like you can customize coupons for buyers and i'm thrilled to announce that already 1 million buyers have bought on ebay using this new capability our team has been listening carefully to our seller community about what needs to change and working hard to make improvements we know you've been disappointed by buyers who fail to pay well now that we're managing payments directly we're better positioned to make sure that you get paid and today i want to share news about the ways we're working to improve the protections we offer to you our sellers and this starts with a focus on addressing transactions with no payments made changes have already been implemented to fixed price sales where 99 of transactions are now paid up front and to help ensure that you get paid on best offer sales will soon start to ask buyers to provide a payment source at the time their offer is made and we're evaluating similar solutions for auctions in 2022 we're also going to extend protections when buyers misuse the returns process for instance will protect you from unfair feedback when you decline a remorse return outside of your return policy finally i want to acknowledge the journey you've been on as we transition to our payments experience based on your feedback we're implementing a number of changes to provide you with more flexibility and control these changes include options to get paid out faster more payout schedule choices and expanding the ways you can spend your balance for shipping labels and purchases on ebay you'll be hearing more from us about these changes over the coming weeks as the next phase in our history unfolds we will accelerate a tech-led reimagination of ebay claiming our place as the best global marketplace for you and for your customers we will focus on growing our core embracing the roots of our marketplace and building modern and compelling experiences for current and future generations of customers we aspire to be your partner of choice simplifying and up leveling the selling experience for small businesses and entrepreneurs while advocating on behalf of you and your businesses and still delivering on your needs we will continue to modernize and simplify the shopping experience for your buyers with technology to help you generate higher traffic and sales i want to close by saying thank you over the past year i've had the chance to connect with and hear from many of you you've openly shared your successes challenges and opportunities and for that i can't thank you enough we are here because of you we're grateful for you and i continue to be inspired by all that you do next i'm happy to share my recent chat with seller liz o'kane where she turned the tables and interviewed me liz runs her store colorado reward as well as the colorado springs meetup group and her own podcast we had a great conversation then we'll also share a few highlights from some of my other seller conversations i look forward to talking with more of you in the coming months and hopefully really hopefully getting to meet in person again soon i think i think it's going to be a wonderful year ahead as we work and innovate together thank you well liz i'm excited to uh get to spend some time talking to you today thank you uh me also i appreciate the time and i do have some questions for you if you don't mind me asking sure fire away so jamie what was your what is your favorite ebay purchase god well that's hard because there's lots and lots of stories i could tell uh maybe the one i would pick is because this has a special memory now that i'm the ceo of ebay is i was here um working in the product organization we launched fixed price back in the early 2000s and i bought the very first item sold on ebay.com uh in in a fixed price format uh and i said no matter what it is i'm gonna buy it because this is so uh such a key time and it was a pair of burger king sunglasses and it was about it was about one in the morning because we we tend to roll out these new code and features in the middle of the night to hopefully mitigate any issues but it's really special for me because you know i was asked to come back to the company having spent eight years here and be the ceo i have this great kind of momentous purchase from uh from my early days here i i bet you still wear those burger king sunglasses yeah they're a little bit small but i still have that it's a special treat so i'm sure you've sold a thing or two on ebay what's been your favorite sale well um so i also had the privilege of working in ebay for charity uh and i helped start that program uh earlier you know almost 20 years ago and my wife was telling me i should get rid of these old computer bags that i had in a closet because they were just taking up space and so i put them on ebay and i put 100 of the proceeds to uh to a non-profit and i sold them to uh to a gentleman on the east coast and it got bit up to 55 and i wrote him and i said hey these are fake leather and they're used like these are not worth 55 and he goes that's okay i need a computer bag just like that and the money's going for charity so go ahead and send it and you know what really spoke to the humanity of ebay right like that's what ebay is all about is connecting people uh with the with this kind of great purpose of of the mission of what we're after and so that one that one has a really special place uh for me and also that you know now for ebay for charity we've done over a billion dollars since we started that so long ago uh just makes me really proud of what our community has done with that platform so what sellers have you already met with this past year and what's been the feedback that you're receiving from sellers well you know like a huge part of the reason that i came back to ebay and why i love this place is because of our sellers and you know over my eight years here before i've met so many sellers and it's really the magic and power of ebay and i've been able to hire people into ebay because i tell them about how great our seller community is and how much they're going to enjoy meeting them what's been frustrating is i've only been able to do it virtually for the most part because of covid but it's still been fantastic you know i learn something every time i meet with a seller and i usually bring that back to our organization and say hey how do we work on this so i'll give an example a lot of our sellers work with us with washington on you know the needs of small business and what do we need to do to make sure that ebay stays this amazing open marketplace so i was meeting with a group of about 12 of our sellers through that program and they were just firing off ideas which was really interesting you know and one said one said you know what'd be great is when i get a best offer why don't you tell me if the buyer has been someone that i've that i've worked with before and transacted with before and i thought well that's a great idea uh and so i brought that back to the team and so uh you know they're they're figuring out how to do it hopefully by by the end of this year we'll be able to give some kind of signal because i was like it's a brilliant idea it's a very simple thing to to do but when we talked about earlier about connecting buyers and sellers in this this magic that's that's part of it for me so i love meeting with sellers i've done a couple of seller spotlights recently to spotlight some of our great sellers on the platform and what i love most is hearing their story you know just like your story of starting with us in 2002 on the platform and now doing it full time that's what brings me joy is the opportunity that we've been able to create for for sellers on ebay i have enjoyed watching all of those seller stories those have been amazing uh one thing that i do also on top of watching those seller stories is i do keep up with ebay news and one thing that's really stuck out to me is i know ebay is the pioneer of re-commerce so in the last uh re-commerce report it seems like more people are buying used what is ebay doing to lift up this market of this core re-commerce seller well look i think it's an important part of ebay it always has been kind of my story about the you know the used computer bag going to to another buyer instead of going to a landfill and i think it's always been a core part of ebay but even more so now especially with our younger customers with gen z how important sustainability is to them and and the idea that pre-love is actually an amazing asset because of what you're doing for the planet so you know we're really leaning in helping create a platform where it's easy to list those things get them onto the site and and move them forward and so we're going to continue to push forward you know the kobe time period has been an interesting time for ebay because part of that recommends report showed that 84 of people started listing on ebay you know something that they had at the house something that was pre-loved because either they needed the money or they lost their job and so what a great opportunity to be able to turn to ebay at times like that and so we're going to continue to lean in and make that even easier you've seen us launch a new program in trading cards we're using computer vision to make it really seamless and fast to list and we hope to continue to do that because that will bring more of those great items onto onto ebay you know the average uh customer has four thousand dollars of items in their household and only twenty percent of that is online and so thinking about you know how do you bring those those unwanted items or those things that they've loved but they no longer need and and put them in a place or a home where they could really be used as you reflect back on your first year as ceo what stands out to you and how things change since you've come back to ebay yeah so a couple things one is you know i've tried to make it very clear since the day that i started the sellers are our partners and sellers are incredibly important to this platform and so hopefully you're seeing a lot of things that we're doing to try and make the platform better for sellers as i was mentioning you know it's tougher for me because i i love getting out and seeing your places of business and learning and seeing the tools that you're using and how do we bring that back to to make this more seamless because ebay only succeeds when our sellers succeed and so you know that's been an important tenant for me from my whole time at the company and especially now that i'm ceo the second is we're trying to get a lot more customer feedback into the organization so we're spending time as a leadership team listening to calls coming into customer service and saying where are things breaking down and and how do we fix them and make them better like some of the things that that we'll talk about over the course of ebay open each person in the in the leadership team is is out spending time uh either on zooms or listening into calls or on the boards or or responding to emails and getting close to the customer is extremely important because i would say more than half of the ideas of things that we need to do like that example i mentioned of you know make it easy to show a repeat repeat buyer have come from from ideas like this we just launched some great new things in couponing and ebay stores and that all came back from feedback from sellers which is hey give us a way to reach out to buyers that have purchased to us and let us coupon to them let us do more with our storefronts so we're investing in areas like that based on the feedback so i hope to continue to be able to do that because i think ebay's best days are ahead of us i'm proud of the work that we've done over the last 25 years but i think we can really take this platform to new levels make a lot of innovations take friction out of the experience and that's why i think it's going to be it's going to be really fun to to be part of the ebay community over the next decade and couple of decades going forward so liz i usually uh in talking with sellers i usually end with asking them you know look you're talking to the ceo tell me the one thing we could do to make this platform better so what's your answer um so looking back one of my newer favorite features that ebay's rolled out the last couple years has been seller initiated offers um i think kind of the struggle that myself and other sellers are having is getting that immediate payment and i've heard ebace working on that um to get that expedited would be amazing yeah well that's a great question you know unpaid items i know has been a challenge for our sellers for a very very long time and you know when i came back i was like how can we really help our seller community with this big issue now that we're intermediating payments with payments managed by ebay we should be able to do so much more than we have in the past so i'm excited to talk about you know now we're actually starting with fixed price uh we've eliminated unpaid items so for like 99 of use cases we're not allowing a buyer to buy that item without the payment on file and we're looking at ways through the end of this year to actually do the same thing with best offer so that a buyer has to have a payment on file it's a good idea to make sure that covers seller-initiated offers as well so just know that we hear you we know about those problems and we're working on them to address them and i hope to have more good news beyond fixed price to announce uh sometime this year jamie thank you so much for your time today and i cannot wait to enter ebay open awesome thanks again for your time [Music] why don't you tell me a little bit about you my name is julie yoo and i'm the owner of i miss you vintage inc uh everything you can think of with women's jewelry accessories shoes belts clothing fashion related for women that is designer label branded and of course everything's pre-owned i was actually around like 13 14 years old and i started off selling on ebay um with my with my mom she helped me out and i was selling um like autographs that i got at golf tournaments um like old bobble heads when i used to go to orlando magic games i would sell those on ebay i did whatever i can to sell you know those items on ebay that's how i really got started but always been into fashion and sneakers sneakers one of my first purchases on ebay back in the early 2000s it's really popular now to have circular commerce sustainability really important especially to younger demographics really important to the planet we as shoppers have to change the way that we shop and that's where re-commerce and resale comes in i've been to the last three ebay open conferences and i think that's really where it resonated with me with entrepreneurship you kind of set the amount of work you put in is the amount of results that you're going to get and that just really resonated with me and i just love ebay as a platforming that there's no cap on how big or how great i can be on the platform i've just seen tremendous growth with my business throughout and because of that i wrote i wrote down something you said which i really liked there's no cap to how big or great you can be on ebay i really love that how does it differ kind of selling in retail out of your store versus selling on ebay one thing i really like about selling on ebay is that the store is always open 24 hours even when i'm sleeping the listings are working for me it's always quite exciting to go to bed wake up see what sold to who to where and for what i feel like ebay is an awesome um platform for people that not just can do it full-time studying on ebay but there's so many people that can also do this part-time um as a good way to make money that's why i love doing conversations like this is just hearing from you what's working what's not working how do we make ebay better and also just appreciating you for the for the business that you do with us on [Music] ebay
2021-08-09 04:11
