Town Hall Recap - Is eBay Leadership Focused More on Buyers than Sellers?

If you've seen pictures of last week's Town Hall in progress, you'll have noticed that the latest members to join our Voices program were also present. Bill Cobb, President of eBay North America, and Rachel Makool, Senior Director of our very own Community Development group, both emphasized the importance of the Voices program to eBay, talking about how we often turn to Voices for input on new products or features that we're designing or policies we're contemplating. As Bill said, eBay talks to Voices "to stay focused on what the Community needs."

Jim Ambach, our VP of Seller Experience, also acknowledged the role of Voices in helping us design better features for the Community. Bill pointed out that showing work-in-progress products to Voices often helped us identify potential speed bumps before the feature launched. He joked, semi-seriously, "It's good to get those speed bumps early to avoid a crash later."

Before members' questions started coming in on the phone lines or via email, Rachel also spent some time talking about the key roles of the Community Development team: to help maintain a dialogue between the Community and eBay, and to facilitate interactions between Community members on the site through features like the discussion forums and eBay Groups, and communication vehicles like the announcement board and the Chatter Blog.

And then the questions started coming in thick and fast from our members. Since the recent switch to a radio talk show format, calling in questions on the phone seems to be getting more popular - it seemed to me that a majority of questions last week came in through our phone lines. Voices members attending the event also got an opportunity to ask their questions directly to our execs.

The new Sell Your Item form (also known as SYI 3.0) came in for a lot of questions from members, who wanted to know everything from when all the glitches would be fixed to why the review page didn't display the number of days an item was being listed for. On the Trust and Safety side, the questions directed at Matt Halprin, our VP of Global Marketplace Policy Management, included: "Why can't sellers block bidders with private Feedback?" and a request for an update on the impact of anonymizing bidders' IDs through the Safeguarding Member IDs (SMI) project. Matt shared that we were monitoring SMI very closely and that it was working really well, resulting in a 90% decrease in phishing attempts on items over $200. He admitted, though, that the look and feel of the bid history page could be improved, and said that teams were engaged in redesigning the page.

The Town Hall also saw more questions about excessive shipping - once again, some members asked for the option to be able to search listings by total cost (price + shipping).

To me, one of the most interesting questions was around a member's perception that eBay's leadership seems more focused more on buyers (who don't pay any fees to eBay) than on sellers (who do). Bill's response was measured but firm, and I could see some Voices members in the room nodding in vigorous agreement: "Ultimately our greatest response to sellers is to bring them buyers and generate demand."

You can hear Bill's detailed response by listening to the Town Hall audio archive - or read it in the transcript (which will be up on the Town Hall page in a couple of days).