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Coming on the heels of earnings reports yesterday, eBay is holding a Town Hall meeting
today at 4 p.m. PST. Bill Cobb, president of eBay Marketplaces North
America, will lead a panel of eBay executives in answering questions
submitted by users on the Town Hall forum. In addition, you can call in
to ask questions by dialing 877-474-3302. Meanwhile, eBay surprised Wall Street yesterday as Internetnews.com reported :
"The
online auction giant posted a profit of $346 million, up by 24 percent
from its year-ago quarterly profit of $279 million. Revenues jumped by
29 percent to $1.7 billion compared to the same, year-ago quarter of
$1.3 billion. Shares were up by 12 percent to $33.70 in after-hours
trading following the results. For the full year, eBay raked in $6
billion in sales, a growth of 31 percent compared to 2005 when it took
in $4.6 billion." In other e-commerce news, the battle between Google Base-Checkout and eBay-PayPal is heating up. Site traffic analyst company Hitwise USA
is predicting that in the future the combination of Google Base and
Google Checkout will be stiff competition for the PayPal-eBay market. Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise,
posted the following at his blog: "It's interesting to note that Google
Base is the number three upstream provider to Google Checkout. The
combination of the two may eventually become a competitive substitute
to eBay/PayPal, even though at this point PayPal's market share is over
60 times that of Google Checkout." PayPal Trumps Checkout
According to a recent JP Morgan survey,
however, Checkout has a long way to go in catching up to PayPal. Only
19 percent rated Google's Checkout service as either "very good" or
"good," while the rest rated it "average," "poor," or "fair." PayPal
fared much better. Nearly 45 percent said PayPal was "good" or "very
good," according to the survey. Other key findings of the report include:
- Checkout users skew male, affluent and young: Google
Checkout penetration rates are two times higher among men. Further, a
hefty 34 percent of Checkout users have incomes over $75,000 (compared
to 25 percent for PayPal and 20 percent for all online shoppers).
Finally, Checkout users are substantially younger (57 percent under 35
years old) than either PayPal (36 percent) or credit card users (35
percent).
- PayPal rules brand awareness: Forty-three percent of
respondents indicated that they would continue to prefer PayPal over
Google Checkout, compared to only 2 percent that reported the inverse.
More than 56 percent of the respondents reported having no familiarity
with Google Checkout.
Though the survey did not detail specifically what aspects of
Checkout were unsatisfactory, a look at the Checkout discussion forum
shows that some users are confused by the interface and how, exactly,
Checkout works, and there were some reports of e-tailers complaining
that transactions were prematurely aborted when the service first
launched.
Still, the report said, with 6 percent of the market in its
first year, Checkout, once it works out some kinks, could be an
influential force in the e-commerce arena. You Earned What Using Google Base?
In regard to
Google Base, at least one e-tailer, however, is happy with the
performance. Brian Mark is a speaker at Search Engine Strategies, who
has worked at ToolBarn.com since 1999, taking the online retailer of
power tools from a few orders per week to an Internet Retailer Top 500
company. In his recent post at OneBoxer.com he says that the company garnered $1 million in sales from Google Base.
"Yes, we did indeed get over $1M in sales from our Base feed in
2006. What might be even more impressive is that Base resulted in over
100,000 visitors during that same timespan to one site, and those
converted to sales at above a 5 percent rate," writes Mark. "In the
power tool industry, that's pretty high." Mark goes on to say that in comparison to SEO, Base is a
better way to go because it takes less maintenance. "SEO is a hands-on,
continual type of work. Feed optimization, since most people haven't
started that, is pretty much a one time per month at the most type of a
deal. No links are necessary, just type some keywords in the listing
and get sales in the bank."
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