The Last Town Hall of 2006
Posted by Ninad on December 01, 2006 at 06:21 PM in General | Permalink
Yesterday's Town Hall was the last of 2006, but the first for a different reason - it marked a switch to the radio format. For the first time, members could phone in their questions live during the event. Griff, with his years as host of eBay Radio, was naturally in his element as emcee. Bill Cobb, President of eBay was the host, supported by the usual posse of eBay experts - Matt Halprin (our Trust & Safety guru), Leigh Goldstein (Shipping), Chris Tsakalakis (our authority on eBay Stores), Jim Ambach from Product Development, Jeff Clementz from PayPal, Wendy Jones from Customer Support, and Garry Briggs, our Chief Marketing Officer.
Bill's opening remarks dwelt on eBay's marketing and advertising efforts during the holiday season. He mentioned that eBay was the most visited e-commerce site on what the media have taken to calling "cyber-Monday" (the Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend) - with 12 million unique visitors! He also talked about Holiday Dreams how our other ongoing marketing campaigns would reach 85% of our target audience an average of 13 times.
And then it was time for the questions.
Internet fraud and scams have been getting a lot of media attention lately (see Jon Stewart's comment on what comes after cyber-Monday), so it wasn't surprising that a great many questions in this Town Hall were about Trust and Safety on eBay. Matt Halprin, our TnS guru, was quite busy answering questions throughout the Town Hall, fortifying himself with the occasional banana for sustenance (see picture). Matt and Wendy Jones gave listeners an idea of the scale of eBay's Trust and Safety operation - we have over 2000 people around the world dedicated to spotting the bad guys and their scams on eBay, in addition to an array of software tools that alert us to potentially fraudulent behavior on the site. Matt also talked about how eBay's Global Law Enforcement team (which includes four former Federal prosecutors, including Matt's boss, Rob Chesnut) works with law enforcement agencies around the world to pursue and prosecute the "bad guys."
Shipping was another area of focus for members' questions. Leigh Goldstein weighed in with several updates about how eBay has become more aggressive in policing the site for excessive shipping, especially in categories like video games and cell phones, which see high volume during the holiday season. He also talked about some "product solves" that we have in the pipeline for 2007, which are designed to address the problem of excessive shipping.
More product roadmap updates also came from Jim Ambach, including an answer to a Half.com seller's question on why the ISBN database seems slow to update (apparently it doesn't have information for some recent bestsellers that the seller wanted to list on Half.com). Jim explained that we work with one of the most up-to-date ISBN database providers on the market, and that it updates every two weeks. One of the exciting ideas we're exploring is opening up the database like a wiki, so that sellers would themselves be able to send updated ISBN information to the system.
Jeff Clementz answered a PayPal related question that, I hope, will finally put to rest the theory that PayPal deliberately makes money by deliberately delaying the transfer of funds from a member's PayPal account to their bank account. The member asking the question said: "There is a 3-4 business day delay in executing a funds transfer. The message on PayPal blames the delay on the banks receiving the funds. In today's world of instant electronic funds transfers, we all know this is simply untrue. In point of fact, PayPal is just utilizing 3-4 days of float to collect additional interest on the funds without compensating the account holder." Jeff explained that the process of transferring money among banks is controlled by the National Banking Network, and after PayPal sends the money to the network (which happens 3 or 4 times a day), it's out of our hands.
There were many other questions, but it would take too long to blog about all of them. Do listen to the audio archive of yesterday's event when we put it up on the Town Hall page next week (or read the transcript), but I'll leave you with what I thought was the most intriguing question of all. Griff also remarked that this question was beginning to "have a life of its own" among some conspiracy theorists on our forums. "I've noticed that some listings have serial numbers beginning in the 1500's but others have listing numbers beginning in the 3200s. Does eBay give favored treatment to one set of listing numbers?"
Well, the answer is NO. Jim Ambach explained that the process for assigning listing numbers (which were unique identifiers for each listing) was based on where in our systems a seller's information is stored in our systems. "People shouldn't read anything beyond this," laughed Jim, adding that the numbers were quite random.
Sorry conspiracy theorists, there are no black helicopters hovering over your listings. :)
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