eBay aims to transform shopping experience to compete with online giants Alibaba, Amazon

TORONTO – EBay, regarded in the early days as an endless repository for Beanie babies and baseball trading cards, has transformed beyond as being a reliable place for collectables and used goods.

But though 80 percent of what’s sold nowadays on eBay Canada is totally new, its relationship using the remaining 20 per cent is what makes the website special, according to Andrea Stairs, eBay Canada’s managing director. It also presents one of the online marketplace’s more bedeviling sticking points.

“The inventory on eBay covers a spectrum of value, everything from new and in-season to end-of-runs, used, refurbished or vintage,” Stairs said inside a recent interview in the company’s Toronto headquarters. “That mix – that is exactly eBay’s secret sauce. That’s the reason consumers arrived at eBay.”

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Open for 16 years, eBay is an e-commerce grandparent in Canada, where it has long capitalized on the reluctance from the country’s biggest retailers to get into digital retail. As such, Canada continues to be one of eBay’s best global markets, with Canadians spending more than $1 billion buying goods from the site each year, no. 2 online retailer in Canada behind Amazon.

But critics note eBay can continue to present a frustrating user experience for people because they wade through disparate listings on the website searching for deals or discrete pieces of out-of-season merchandise. As well as in a digitally-driven shopping universe by which consumers frequently use Google first to locate links to sites selling the merchandise they need, eBay’s search results in many cases are pushed down below those of Amazon, to detriment from the business.



Making listings more uniform and Google-friendly belongs to a multi-year project for eBay, Stairs said, but it is a process of some complexity considering that eBay’s sellers – from single consumers to the little retailers who use eBay as an online selling channel – produce the listings themselves.

A pair of identical Gascan model sunglasses from Oakley, for example, may be listed a large number of times on the site diversely: some pairs may be listed as simply “Oakley sunglasses” yet others might have “Gascan” like a product descriptor, while still other listings will go into great detail, providing the model name, the manufacturer’s item number and multiple other attributes. Their pictures might look alike – or not.

“The hardest part of e-commerce is dealing with the tremendous amount of SKUs (stock-keeping units, a product-identifying number generated through the manufacturer) and pictures and costs,” said Alex Arifuzzaman, someone in the Toronto-based retail and property specialists InterStratics Consultants.

“Consumers are kind of accustomed to that inconsistency with eBay, but if they are able to improve it, a lot the greater.”

After the worldwide operation this past year spun off PayPal, its powerhouse secure payments processing business, eBay continues to be looking at methods to increase the performance of their marketplace as it faces Amazon, Alibaba and the ever-growing web operations of traditional retailers such as Wal-Mart and Costco.

Revenue for that fourth quarter, reported in January, was US$2.32 billion, flat on a year-over-year basis, and a forecast for the current quarter of US$2.05 billion to US$2.1 billion fell substandard analyst revenue estimates of US$2.16 billion.



“It’s not just about facing Amazon, it’s about Alibaba, which is much like eBay and it is going everywhere,” Alan Middleton, an advertising and marketing professor at York University, said from the Chinese e-commerce giant, that has annual revenue of approximately US$12.5 billion and has been expanding into the U.S. and Europe.

“Unlike Amazon and far like eBay, Alibaba doesn’t have inventory or warehouses to support, and it does not compete with its merchants,” Middleton said, noting the latter businesses take advantage of avoiding those overhead and supply-chain costs. “But Alibaba is still a menace to eBay, because unlike eBay, it offers a financing option for clients who want to buy but don’t really have the money.”

Small town retailers find big success on eBay

TORONTO In the middle of the current recession in 2010, Home Hardware dealer Michel Robidoux was near to personal bankruptcy, his small Sainte-Julie, Que.-based retail business unable to pay the bills.
He were able to prop up the business by liquidating some items on the internet and he opened his own website selling fireplaces plus some hardware items 2011.

But it had not been until he started selling his goods on eBay the year after that his business really became popular, both online and at his bricks and mortar store.

“That was life-saving for me,” Robidoux said of opening his business, Le Monde du Foyer, on eBay in 2012. “The traffic in the store was increasing, although not by a large amount, so I was looking for new ways online to try and build up sales. It had been a user-friendly platform for someone like me, with no lot of internet experience.”

Robidoux belongs to an increasing niche of eBay Canada’s offline success stories – small businesses in small towns who’ve built up a healthy international business by selling on eBay.

Since the proceed to eBay, Robidoux’s sales go up by about 50 per cent per year, with eBay sales comprising over fifty percent of his online business.

During earlier this Easter weekend, for example, the online merchant sold 50 outdoor gazebos, a unbelievable feat by the standards of his prior 20-year career as a general manager at Canadian Tire, which might have sold 10 in an entire season.

Retailers have been helped in recent years by the low Canadian dollar – eBay Canada has seen a double-digit increase in its in exports towards the U.S. and other international markets because the dollar’s decline.

“Sellers are scaling their businesses in reaction to increased demand south of the border, but Canadian sellers have always done well internationally, actually,” said Andrea Stairs, md of eBay Canada. “There is really a ‘brand Canada’ kind of halo effect they get once they sell to the U.S. in order to Europe, a trust bump.”

The rapid growth of Robidoux’s web business has allowed him to quadruple the sq footage of his store in St. Julie, and provide more competitive prices overall.

“I possess the power purchase on my small side,” he explained. “If I purchase 200 gazebos, I recieve a far greater price than should i be buying a couple of them. We sell a lot within the U.S. because the exchange rates are so great now, but we also have lots of customers in Ontario.”

Christine Deslauriers began selling skating gear and apparel on eBay eight years back when she lived within the northern Ontario community of Timmins. The company, Boutique Step-up, became such a success that they began selling items from her house and later opened a store in tiny Hamner, about 20 kilometres north of Sudbury, Ont.

“My daughters were into skating, and that i knew where to get a good price in Montreal, where (dresses and tights) are produced. I had been buying some items at overstock for $5 and that i could sell them for US$49 on the site.”

Today, she’s expanded the business into gymnastics and swimwear. Another of her sales visit U.S. customers and about 31 percent are in Canada, followed by Europe, Africa, Asia and South America.

“My business outgrew my house,” she chuckled. “I have sold to 60 countries in the last six years.”

Stairs said one of eBay’s biggest priorities is using structured data to maneuver from the listings-based Online business into one which looks and operates more like a catalogue.

“It will allow us to become more efficient at merchandising,” she said. “We can tell, ‘Here really are a countless the same laptops from the thousand different sellers,’ and (show buyers) a range of new to used, which generation it is, and at different price points. And that we can serve that up in a single box for buyers, instead of it being more up to and including buyer to figure out which (laptops) are the same through a search.”



But it is a challenge, a “massive undertaking,” to harmonize discrete, identical listings when in Canada alone, eBay presents 200 million ever-changing live listings at any time.

Still, this is an important transformation, not only for consumers searching on the site, but for eBay’s core business performance because it seeks for everyone up higher-ranked listings on the internet and additional differentiate itself from local online classified businesses such as Kijiji and Craigslist.

Studies show consumers tend to click the top few Search listings, with a negligible amount getting to lower links or even the second page of search engine results.

“Moving to more structured data allows us to place up countless pages that are product pages to connect buyers with actual listings from different sellers, but those is also product pages that Google can index,” Stairs said.

“The more that we can structure those 200 million listings right into a catalogue that’s usable for algorithms, the better we are able to do this.”

To remedy a number of its platform’s legacy issues, eBay has created the eBay Feed, a version of its webpage that shows returning consumers new inventory that corresponds with their interests.

It also began the eBay Collections program, internal and user-generated groupings of themed merchandise such as prom gowns, sports and electronics in order to help customers find sales deals and shopping ideas. eBay also markets goods in themed events tied to holidays, seasons, product categories or manufacturers for example Dyson, which utilizes eBay being an outlet site because of its prior season and returned inventory.

Stairs said the organization has gained traction from a deals hub it launched 3 years ago to group deals from highly trusted sellers in one place on the website. It seems sensible given that consumers make 85 per cent of purchases on eBay at a fixed price, using the “Buy it now” selector, rather than within an auction.

EBay has also worked to give users tips about product photos and listings information to enhance their listings because it moves towards looking like more of an online catalogue for consumers.

“We are managing an ecosystem,” she explained. “You always want to be careful by what you mandate versus that which you recommend (to sellers). You won’t want to make it so desperately for any consumer seller to market that they don’t want to arrived at eBay, because in fact that inventory is gold.”

Disorganized listings, while viewed by some as eBay’s Achilles’ heel, may not bother its regular users, said Jim Danahy, CEO at Toronto-based retail consultancy Customer Lab.

“People on eBay are searching for value, therefore it is about scoring that before other people does,” he explained.

“Even if eBay could group these things with heterogeneous identifiers, to some extent that undermines the treasure hunt component of (the website). They’d need to have very sophisticated category management. Replenishment isn’t their game – offering something unique every day is.”

hshaw@nationalpost.com