When Pierre Omidyar founded eBay 12 years ago, he wanted to build the world's most efficient marketplace. At the very least, he launched the most comprehensive one. Today eBay Inc is a conglomeration of Web sites where people sell everything from car parts to carp arts.
But with US$60 billion in goods changing hands on eBay's worldwide sites this year, all that stuff has a downside: It can be a drag to pick something to buy. If you were browsing for a video game system, how would you begin to choose among the 1,342 Nintendo Wiis listed on eBay one day last week?
And so with eBay entering something resembling middle age, with growth slowing and the stock price in a funk, the company is undertaking a crucial overhaul. The goal is to make buying things easier, more entertaining and more like shopping in the physical world -- three counts on which the company has fallen behind.
PHOTO: AP
"Our user experience has always been fantastic, but it didn't keep up, in my view, as well as it should have," CEO Meg Whitman said in an interview on Friday on the sidelines of the "eBay Live" user celebration in Boston. "You will see more changes to eBay's buyer experience in the next 12 months than you probably have seen in the past three or four years."
For example, to reduce buyers' skittishness about sellers they do not know, eBay has broadened the feedback criteria that can be left for vendors, and it has tried new strategies for reducing fraud. The company is also trying to make vendors' shipping costs more transparent so that fewer buyers feel sandbagged by hidden charges.
EBay just added a "bid assistant" program that lets people put multiple items on a wish list. If shoppers fail to win an auction for one of the products, the software enters them in another. That tackles a longtime eBay bugaboo, because it raises shoppers' chances of actually winning an auction without increasing the prospect of busting their budget by winning more than one.
Other moves make eBay more like typical e-commerce sites, such as last year's birth of eBay Express, where customers can load fixed-price merchandise from several sellers into one shopping cart and check out at once.
Perhaps most dramatically, eBay is crafting a more social experience, so people browsing from isolated computers feel at least somewhat like they're going to the mall with a pack of buddies.
That is why the company is extending its buying-and-selling platform so it can run on mobile devices, blogs, networking sites like Facebook and little "widgets" that live outside a Web browser on computer desktops. That same motive prompted eBay's 2005 purchase of Skype, an Internet calling service, for US$4.1 billion -- a figure that still boggles some analysts. It also explains eBay's new game with tenuous ties to commerce, called Match Ups, which solicits votes on whether people prefer one random thing over another.
The buying process could get even slicker in the next few years. EBay is exploring improvements to its search engine and might add product-recommendation systems that can analyze buyer preferences. The company also bought some ideas in this direction last month, when it spent US$75 million for StumbleUpon, a Web site that lets people rate and share information online.
Here's the challenge: While the new lures for buyers are designed to help vendors move more products, eBay has to be careful not to upset its treasured community of sellers who earn serious bucks on the site and can be prickly about changes.
"The more buyers they can bring in, we're going to cheer that," said Linda Hartman, a longtime eBay "PowerSeller" who offers dinnerware from Bristol, Wisconsin, and worries that a glut of sellers will hurt her business.
But she added that eBay might be banking too much on fancy Web adornments that will have little overall effect.
"The enhancements are great for techies," she said. "But my average buyer is probably a little old lady in Des Moines."
EBay has rarely required such reformations. After Omidyar set eBay loose in 1995, it ballooned with little corporate effort, a rare example of a cool new thing that could not exist before the Internet.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the