Thursday, July 20, 2006

Meg to Street: "What, me worry?"

eBay just announced their 2nd quarter earnings and CEO Meg Whitman stated she's confident in eBay's future growth prospects. Meg also announced yet another increase in seller fees, this time focused more narrowly on eBay Stores sellers. She says they've "dilluted the magic" of eBay and by "magic" I must assume she means profitability. Apparently, the feeling is that higher fees will cause sellers to move their listings from the stores back to the auction format. Of course, it could just represent the last straw for unhappy volume sellers.

Meg also commented on Google Checkout, stating that she's not concerned about the competition. "We are going to innovate as we always have," she said. Of course, if you ask most folks, eBay's innovation starts and ends with its creation. Since then innovation has come through acquisition or through its public API (and we at gumshoo are thankful for that API).

These are some tough times for eBay. Growth is slowing and they are facing ever-increasing competitive threats, especially from Google. Fortunately, the eBay Developers Program seems to be getting a lot of internal resources and attention since innovation is most likely to come from the developer community.

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Google Checkout's Impact Already Apparent

Analysts: EBay Faces Competitive Threat: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

In my last post I said it would be interesting to see what happens with Google Checkout in the next 6 months. But who needs to wait 6 months? The fallout from Google's Checkout announcement is already being felt over in eBay's world. eBay recently announced that Google Checkout was on its banned payment list due to a lack of "substantial historical track record". Yeah, right.

Today the president of PayPal announced that he would be stepping down and made the cliche statement that he wants to spend more time with the wife and kids. Again, yeah right. The question is, did he leave by choice or was he pushed out? Those rooting for eBay's future growth hope that he was pushed, because if he left on his own, that probably means he sees the writing on the wall with regard to Google Checkout and PayPal's ability to continue gaining market share. As I said in my last post, Google Checkout poses an immediate threat to one of PayPal's biggest growth areas: off-eBay tranactions. It's only a matter of time before it threatens the entire breadth and depth of the PayPal offering. At this rate, it will take far less than 6 months.