The first keynote of the day at Internet Retailer today was by Christopher Payne, head of Ebay North America. As you may know, Ebay has been on an acquisition spree of late, so I was especially curious to hear about their future plans for the Ebay platform.
Some really amazing stats about Ebay:
- $62 billion volume sold in 2010
- 60% from Buy It Now
- 40% from auctions
- Every 1.6 minutes a car is sold on Ebay.
- Every 5 seconds a GPS device is sold on Ebay.
- Every 3 seconds a pair of shoes is sold on Ebay.
- 25M sellers
- 200M items listed
- 95M active buyers
- 45M downloads of the Ebay mobile app, which launched in 2008
- $2 billion in mobile sales in 2010
- On track to recognize $4 billion in mobile sales in 2011
- 2.29 billion search queries across 50,000 categories in just 4Q2010.
Ebay’s mission has always been to connect buyers with sellers. And at Ebay, they feel shopping is innately social. Later this year, they will be adding a great new toolbar to the bottom of Ebay where you can drag and drop several items for consideration, then share them with your friends via Facebook, where friends can take a poll to share their opinions with you.
Will Ebay Challenge Google Shopping and Bing Shopping?
As many know, Ebay has been on an acquisition spree of late. Recently they purchased RedLaser, which allows phones to scan bar codes, then Milo, a directory of local store inventory, and then Where.com, a personalized, hyperlocal ad platform. All of this combined to provide localized inventory searches. However, most local retailers don’t have a backend database to store inventory, so how could Ebay get the inventory data uploaded and in real time from retailers? They are launching today a new plugin for Quickbooks Point of Sale (POS) called Fetch. It is free for merchants during the beta and will help upload offline inventory to appear online in Milo.
While Milo alone with its new plugin sounds like a great move, Ebay also announced X.commerce, its new division that will combine two other recent acquisitions of GSI Commerce and Magento. The idea is to create a cloud-based ecommerce system for all sizes of company — Ebay for the sole proprietor, Magento for the small to mid-sized business, and GSI Commerce for the enterprise level business. They also plan to be an end-to-end solution, from listings to marketing to fulfillment.
All of this makes you wonder how shopping sites like Google and Bing might compete with Ebay moving forward. And Milo’s new capabilities of local inventory have huge potential. I can’t wait to see how all of this turns out…
