Local ads for local people
The premise for Pat Kolek, COO of eBay Classifieds Group, wanting to speak to us was, we were told, to discuss the growing trend of consumer to consumer selling on eBay. Isn't that what eBay has always done, we thought, well apparently not.
First, let's tackle the difference between normal eBay and Classifieds. The latter not only lacks the auction element, it's often free to the seller. The business model is more of a media than a retail one, with eBay looking to monetise the traffic generated from classified listings rather than from the listings themselves.
The other big difference is that classifieds are predominantly local ads for local people. This means they often serve merely as the introduction between the buyer and seller, with subsequent contact being offline, including collection of the often bulky item.
This embracing of the offline world seems to be a big thing for eBay right now. That might seem counter-intuitive for the company most strongly associated, alongside Amazon, with e-commerce, but eBay is not defined by the platform. "Our overarching philosophy is to connect buyers and sellers," said Kolek, who has been with eBay for seven years.
When we asked why eBay Classifieds isn't a bigger brand, Kolek explained it's more a collection of local sites, for example Gumtree in the UK. We compared that model to the Groupon one, and Kolek conceded that Groupon has done a good job of unlocking local services.
This model is described by eBay as ‘social selling', and a new report commissioned by the Classifieds Group dubbed ‘The Glocal Trade Study', (do you see what they did there?), takes a look at the phenomenon. Apparently a quarter of a billion people worldwide have taken part in consumer to consumer trading in the past year. This includes online and print classifieds, and things like car boot sales. eBay Classifieds itself saw a 22 percent increase in ads posted last year.
But probably the key finding of the report, at least as far as eBay Classifieds' marketing agenda is concerned, is that globally people throw away three billion products per year that they could resell. Obviously this is a reasonably arbitrary figure based on some pretty serious extrapolation, but it serves to demonstrate the scale of the market.
The reason this is significant is that eBay reckons Classifieds are the best place for people to go in order to make a few extra quid instead of just chucking stuff out due to the its being quicker, cheaper and easier to list stuff than on regular eBay. "We want to make it as easy to sell as it is to throw away," said Kolek.
Finally we spoke briefly about mobile. While the eBay mobile app has proven popular among buyers, Kolek pointed out that mobile significantly changes the experience for sellers. The main reason is the camera; once you're up and running on Classifieds, you can potentially go from deciding to flog something to getting it on eBay within a couple of minutes, merely by taking a photo and uploading it with a description and price.
And social technologies, which have really taken off on mobile, are coming to the fore too. The reason is much the same as many of us click on links from Facebook and Twitter now - there's just so much stuff out there that we've moved back to asking our mates for recommendations in a bid to sort the wheat from the chaff.
It seems that eBay's ‘adjacencies' category, which as you can see below is already a major part of its overall revenue, is designed to ensure eBay embraces developments in consumer and buyer behaviour. Not a bad idea in these fast-moving times, when Internet giants can be rendered irrelevant in just a few years.
