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Posts relating to buying and selling on eBay, working at eBay, or other eBay related issues.

eBay, Garth Brooks, and Making Money On Inefficient Global Markets

/ Adam Nash / 3 Comments

(Part 1.  When finished, you should read Part 2.)

One of the reasons I love working for eBay is that I am constantly surrounded with interesting empirical evidence of how markets for physical goods behave. Today, I thought I’d share with you a single anecdotal example of how eBay creates opportunity from a very mundane retail product.

Yes, the product is a Garth Brooks DVD.

Well, to be more specific, it is the new, 2006, special-edition 5 DVD Garth Brooks “The Entertainer” set that comes in a collectible tin. It’s $19.96 at Wal-Mart, and there are two angles here. One, they are only going to make one million copies. Two, they are only available at Wal-Mart in the US.

There was a lot of press about this release, largely because I guess the 2005 edition had sold out quickly and led to a lot of pent-up demand for the product. On a lark, I dediced to order 10 copies from Walmart.com. Total cost, with tax & shipping was $238.77, so I was basically out $23.88 per DVD set.

When I placed this order, I had checked the completed auctions on eBay.com for “garth brooks the entertainer”, and I had seen sets going for as much as $39.99. So I figured I’d be able to make a few dollars selling these off.

However, by the time I received the DVDs, the average price on eBay.com had dropped to about $26, and I wasn’t sure I would make any money on these, after fees, with that type of price. After all, Walmart.com still hasn’t sold out, so I guess it is somewhat interesting that anyone was basically paying 30% over retail price for something that wasn’t in limited supply.

On a hunch, however, I decided to check out the completed auctions on some of eBay’s international sites. One of the amazing things about the eBay site is that it is integrated globally. With the same eBay account, I can log into any eBay site around the world and list an item. What I found was very interesting:

Now, these are live links, so what you see is going to be different than what I saw two weeks ago. But what I saw was this:

  • High volume in the US (over 50 listings), average price about $26
  • Medium volume in the UK (20 listings), average price about 35 pounds sterling.
  • Low volume in Germany (8 listings), average price about 50 Euro.
  • No volume in France. No one cares about Garth Brooks in France, I guess. 🙂

Wow. 35 pounds and 50 Euro are the equivalent of about $60 US. That’s a big difference, and a big markup over the cost of buying these at Wal-Mart.

So I did a little experiment. I put up a single, fixed-price listing with Best Offer on eBay UK for 9 of the DVD sets for 29.99 pounds with free shipping, and a put up a single auction in the US, starting at $0.99.

End Result: I sold all 9 of the sets in the UK in five days… I wish I had more. The US listing closed at $22.01, with $8.95 for shipping because the buyer ironically was from Canada.

Let’s look at the economics in more detail.

If I divide the costs across the 9 sets in the UK, my numbers are as follows:

Sales Revenue £29.99
Shipping Cost $15.75

eBay Fees $4.96
– Listing Fee $0.54
– Feature Fees $1.89
– Final Value Fees $2.53

PayPal Fees $2.52
– Transaction Fees £1.07
– Cross Border Fees £0.30

Pounds -> Dollars $1.8830
Currency Conversion Fee 2.50%

Total $ Revenue $55.06
Total $ Costs $47.10

Total $ Profit $7.95

Wow. Thats a 14.1% profit margin on the sale price. All for something anyone could have purchased on Walmart.com.

Just for completeness, here is the economics for the US sale:

Sales Revenue $30.96
Shipping Cost $6.00

eBay Fees $2.26
– Listing Fee $0.20
– Feature Fees $0.90
– Final Value Fees $1.16

PayPal Fees $1.51
– Transaction Fees $1.51
– Cross Border Fees $-

Total $ Revenue $30.96
Total $ Costs $33.65

Total $ Profit $(2.69)

Yes, that’s right. Lost money on the US sale.

The fact that I lost money on the US sale isn’t surprising… eBay is a pretty efficient market, and the idea that you could make money buying a product at retail and selling it on eBay is dubious at best, and given that the retailer is the biggest retailer in the US, it’s nearly impossible.

However, I’m amazed at how much money was available to be made selling globally. And eBay makes this so incredibly easy:

  • Listing. I basically just went to the eBay UK website, clicked Sell, and used exactly the same form that is available in the US to list. Incredibly easy.
  • Pricing. The exact same completed auctions functionality is available for the UK site as the US site. Easy.
  • Shipping. I just priced out the shipping via USPS Global Priority mail on the usps.com website. $15.75. Easy.
  • Payment. PayPal is absolutely amazing. Not only could UK buyers pay me in pounds sterling, but I discovered that PayPal will actually let you maintain an account balance in 19 different currencies! They charge a flat 2.5% to convert the payment to dollars, but you can leave your money in pounds sterling and still earn interest on it! (Not a bad feature financially if you believe in diversifying your currency exposure…)
  • Managing your Listings. The UK listing showed up in My eBay and all of my eBay tools the same way every other listing did. Seamless. Painless. Amazing.

I have a few takeaways from this experiment. No, I am not planning to quit my day job to be an import/export eBay seller. But, I do think this example points to some key truths about global e-commerce today:

  • Global markets for retail product are very inefficient. This Garth Brooks DVD was only released in the US. Why? Wal-Mart has a presence in other countries. Maybe it wasn’t worth the logistics for relatively low demand in other countries. Maybe there was limited supply, and they figured the US market was sufficient. Who knows. The point is, there are clearly buyers in other countries who were being underserved here, and it also looks like not enough sellers were stepping into the void to help them.
  • eBay helps make inefficient markets efficient. Meg & Pierre have been talking about this effect for many years, but this is a direct example of it. eBay significantly lowers the barriers to trade globally, and as a result an individual like myself can quickly step in and create value. That 14.1% profit is value, and it doesn’t even count the additional value that was realized by eBay & PayPal through their fees.
  • PayPal is a game changer for international commerce. I knew this academically before doing this experiment, but now I can really feel it viscerally. Being able to handle foreign currency is not something that most businesses, let alone individuals, can handle. But PayPal makes it seamless. Unbelievable. It’s also worth noting that PayPal made a pretty penny here too. My fees on an average UK sale to eBay were about 8.8% of the sale price. The PayPal fees, including currency conversion, were 7%.

As the internet continues to grow, more and more online retailers are going to wake up to the international opportunity. Leveraging PayPal, any webfront store could likely easily collect sales globally (although not with the demand generation of eBay).

To continue the experiment, I’ve ordered 10 more DVD sets… I’m going to try to sell these in Germany, to see if I can overcome the language barrier. To date, I have sold items on eBay to buyers in over 30 different countries, so I’m optimistic that it will work. I’ll post the results to this experiment as well, if people are interested.

P.S. If you are wondering why I take the time to do things like this in my spare time, the answer is pretty simple. I’m a big believer that in technology you have to use your own product, so that you can better understand the experiences of your users. At eBay, it is even more important than at a typical technology company, because the product isn’t just a list of features – it’s the basis for running a business online.

Also, I tend to shop on eBay quite a bit, so making money through selling on eBay helps “fund my habit”, so to speak.

(Please check out Part 2 of this article.)

Nostalgia on the Auction Block: Super Nintendo (SNES)

/ Adam Nash

A little trip down memory lane today.

I’ve finally dusted off, organized, and listed my old Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) on eBay. My parents found these in their garage when they cleaned it out last year for remodeling. Five listings actually:

  1. SNES Console, with Super Mario World
  2. 33 SNES Games
  3. ASCiiPAD Turbo Controller
  4. SNES Game Genie
  5. Extra AC Adapter

I searched the completed auctions for prices, and it seems like the SNES is actually worth more than a Gamecube these days. I guess nostalgia is worth a lot. I have to admit, when I plugged it into my TV today and got to play a little Super Mario World, all those memories came back to me.

I’ve dedicated the auctions to a good cause… I’m going to use the money to get a Nintendo Wii for Jacob. Yes, I know Jacob is two years old. But he’s incredibly facile already, and I think within the next year he’ll be able to enjoy it with me.

Anyway, here is the link to my SNES auctions on eBay. I’ll post next week with how the pricing worked out.

For more fun, I also have my original Nintendo and Atari 2600 with games to auction off. Nostalgia city!

Bix.com is Bought by Yahoo

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

One of the great things about working for eBay has been all of the great people that you meet and work with. Leonard Speiser was one of the great product managers I had a chance to learn from at eBay, and now his company, Bix.com, has been acquired by Yahoo.

Here is the note on the Bix website from Michael Speiser, who I think does a nice job explaining why they are excited about the deal.

If you haven’t tried Bix.com, it’s a fun site where anyone can set up contests that people vote on. It makes it fairly easy for people to create profiles, and then upload video or pictures related to the contest. It’s like American Idol for everyone. A relatively simple idea, but executed well, and no doubt a very addictive application to add to the Yahoo family. Contests are a great excitement driver, and there is no doubt that Yahoo will try to leverage Bix with large clients who are looking to generate buzz.

One of the most interesting things about working in Silicon Valley is how quickly people can move around and do new and wonderful things. It’s part of the culture – the assumption that everything and everyone will keep moving and changing.

It doesn’t feel like that long ago that I joined eBay, and that I stopped by for some advice and help from Leonard, one of the Senior Product Managers. It doesn’t feel like that long ago that after five years, Leonard decided to go off an pursue a startup.

As a funny anecdote, we had a roast for Leonard at his going away party.  Everyone had these masks made of Leonard’s face, propped up on rulers.  I actually auctioned one off on eBay.com, got it to be the “Most Watched” item on all of eBay, and ended up making $400 from Golden Palace Casino to fund a going away present for Leonard (an engraved iPod).

It’s also a great feeling to see friends go off and be successful like this. There is no better way to start the day than to open the newspaper and see good news like this.

So, congratulations to Leonard and the Bix.com team.

iSale 3.3 Adds Support for eBay Express

/ Adam Nash

I normally don’t highlight every application that supports eBay Express, but I thought this one deserved a note for a few reasons:

  1. iSale is a great eBay listing tool. It has a very intuitive user interface, and they have really gone out of their way to design a beautiful and easy-to-use application.
  2. iSale is built for Mac OS X. One of the most common questions I get at eBay Live every year is about listing tools for the Mac. There are two that I love: iSale and GarageSale. So I love to see great news about either product.
  3. eBay Express integration. eBay built eBay Express to be backwards compatible with eBay.com. As a result, all qualifying eBay sellers & listings will appear on eBay Express with no additional effort. However, iSale has really thought hard about additional features that sellers will want on eBay Express, and they integrated them into their application.

The webpage outlining the new features in version 3.3 is live. In particular, I’m very excited about their support for:

  • All global eBay Express sites: US, Germany, and United Kingdom.
  • The ability to list items that only appear on eBay Express (Germany & UK only)
  • The ability to preview any listing in the eBay Express look & feel.

So, kudos to the equinux team. If you are a Mac user and you sell on eBay, you should definitely check out the new iSale. They offer a free trial where you can use the software free for up to three listings.

Please note, this is my personal blog, so the above post represents my opinion only. It does not represent any official endorsement of this product by my employer, eBay.

Insights on Design: Marissa Mayer & Google Search Results

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

I picked up this snippet from John Battelle’s Searchblog yesterday:

Marissa Mayer, at Web 2.0 today, shared insights into some lessons Google has learned in trying to serve users. The take-away is that Speed is just about the most important concern of users—more than the ability to get a longer list of results, and more valuable than highly interactive ajax features.

What was most interesting to me, however, was the comments below about how the most effective results from testing were the opposite of what users believed they preferred:

…they didn’t learn that from asking users, just the opposite. The ideal number of results on the first page was an area where self-reported user interests were at odds with their ultimate desires. Though they did want more results, they weren’t willing to pay the price for the trade, the extra time in receiving and reviewing the data. In experiments, each run for about 8 weeks, results pages with 30 (rather than 10) results lowered search traffic (and proportionally ad revenues) by 20 percent.

The reason I wanted to highlight this insight here is that it offers up perhaps one of the greatest challenges across any design practice that tries to focus on the customer experience: what people say they want, and what actually performs best are not necessarily the same. In fact, I would argue that they are different in most cases.

This challenge is not a surprise for professionals in marketing, politics or finance. These fields have long recognized that there is a large difference in what people say they will support vs. what they actually do support. However, it’s a particular challenge in product design because so many people want to “provide the best possible user experience”.

At every company I have worked for, there has always been a large debate about how to do the best product design. Do you reach out, through focus groups and customer visits, and ask your best customers what new improvements they would like to see? Or do you quietly observe, through testing and product metrics, and then use inspired design professionals to produce the great advance in usability?

As a product professional, I truly believe that the answer is to do both. There is no doubt that listening to your customers directly can give you great insight into their experience and their prioritization of problems. This insight is the key to customer empathy, which I believe is the key to customer-centric design in any field.

At the same time, it is extremely important to recognize that the rationalization that many people give when making choices may not be fully informed. They likely do not realize all of the options available to them, or the options that are available technically. They are likely not experts trained in design, finance, marketing, technology, or psychology. Observation, whether direct or indirect, is they key for more informed experts to help produce solutions that the customer may not understand are possible. Customers will ask you for a candle, when what they really want is portable light. They will ask you for a VCR with fast rewind, instead of a DVD player.

So, in this case, to borrow the corporate-speak, you need to embrace the AND. Listen to your customers, empathize with them, know them as they know themselves. But measure and observe, review the data, and leverage the professional expertise of the product team to delight your customer with solutions that they didn’t even realize were possible. Once you have those designs, you have to test and tune them. You’ll know when you are on the right track when you find yourself surprised and delighted by your customer insights and design results.

My First eBay Guide: US 50 State Quarter Program

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

Instead of writing a blog post on this topic, I decided to use the new eBay Reviews & Guides feature to write a new “eBay Guide” on the topic of the US State Quarter Program:

Collecting State Quarters: Which Will Gain in Value?

Read it and let me know what you think. If you like it, and you are an eBay member, please vote for the guide as useful.

The fundamental theory is that by looking at the total mintage of a state quarter, and comparing it to the population of the state, you can partially predict where supply & demand will be out of balance in the future. This is because demand is skewed by the population of a state, but the US Treasury mints quarters purely based on macroeconomic conditions at the time.

I continue to be a fairly avid coin collector, and I thought it would be nice to try and “give back” to the eBay coin community by putting together a guide. I’m interested to see what feedback I get from posting in that forum.

eBay Reputation, Shipping Prices & Ending Times

/ Adam Nash

A big thank you to one of the great product managers at eBay, Rebecca Nathenson, for forwarding me this German study on eBay economics. (I would link to her blog, but she is hiding it from me…)

The Effect of Reputation on Selling Prices in Auctions (PDF)
by Oliver Gürtler & Christian Grund

As I mentioned in my previous post about starting prices, I have a strong interest in academic studies on the economics of eBay, the largest online marketplace globally. I am convinced that our level of understanding of the economics of marketplaces like eBay are still in their infancy.

As someone who has been selling on eBay since 1998, this study covers three topics that are easily familiar: reputation, shipping prices, and ending times. The study is from May 2006, and it is based on the eBay Germany site, but their is no reason to believe that they are country specific.

The first piece of the study looks at the effect of feedback on final selling prices on eBay. They confirm the obvious – reputation does impact final selling price positively. What’s interesting here is that it seems that the overall number of negatives did not have a measurable effect on final selling price. However, the percentage of negatives did. This result verifies anecdotal experience from many eBay buyers and sellers who will tell you that the “percent positive” is their primary measure of eBay reputation, once feedback scores rise beyond an initial threshold.

The second interesting tidbit from this study is their study of shipping prices. Once again, it confirms the obvious – higher shipping prices lower final sale prices. However, the interesting tidbit here is the fact that one dollar of increased shipping led to less than one dollar in reduced final sales price. This means that sellers may be better off charging a fair cost for shipping & handling, rather than assuming that if they offer low shipping that the cost will be made up in the auction price.

When I first started selling computer components in bulk, I experimented with different combinations of price and shipping cost. In one experiment, I took the exact same listing & description, and set different prices for the item & shipping, but left the total the same. They ranged from $15.99 with free shipping all the way to $0.99 with $15 shipping.

The result – the best selling item, measured in page views and conversion rate, was the $9.99 price with $6.00 shipping.

My theory at the time was that two human factors were occurring here. First, people see exorbitant shipping as dishonest. As a result, the listings with ultra high shipping looked dishonest, and it resulted in a lower purchase rate. At the same time, although buyers love free shipping, they were confronted with sticker shock from the high $15.99 price. Clearly, gas stations know what they are doing when they price gasoline to the 9/10 of a cent.

In their words:

The results with respect to the other variables indicate that postage affects sales revenue negatively, which was expected. However, an increase of postage in the amount of 1 € does decrease the price only by the amount of 5 per cent on average, which means by about 60 Cent at an averaged price of 12 €… In our case, however, it seems to be beneficial for sellers to segregate the total revenue into the two dimensions postage and selling price, because potential buyers concentrate on the main price during auctions and neglect the amount of the postage.

The last interesting insight from this research is their investigation of the effect of duration and ending time on the final selling price.  Interestingly, there is a surprise here, which they dub the eBay Evening Fallacy.  They claim that auctions that end in the evening perform worse than auctions that end earlier.  As an interesting side note, they also found no evidence that duration impacts the final selling price.

What’s interesting about this insight is that it doesn’t really explain why this fallacy exists.  One possibility is that historically, evening ending times did perform better than earlier times.  However, as this became known, supply overwhelmed demand as everyone piled onto the same popular times.

I think actually this is a nice place to end this review, because in the end, while fascinating, the last insight is a warning.  eBay is a dynamic marketplace, and as information flows through the market, the profitability of different strategies may change over time.  Everyone knows they vary by country, by category, and by season.  They also can vary based on what everyone else is doing.

In finance, there is a theory of efficient markets that posits that public information flows nearly instantaneously through the stock market.  As a result, all returns are merely compensation for risk. Part of the attraction of private equity is the fact that it operates in a world, by definition, of more limited information and more limited access.  That’s what yields those wonderful returns that Venture Capital has seen over time.

It’s interesting to think of eBay in that light.  Strategies are always evolving, as information is communicated about how to succeed on eBay.   Are proprietary access to inventory, or proprietary strategies the keys to outperformance?  Efficient market theory has a risk-free return built into its model.  Does eBay have the equivalent of a risk-free return, and if so, what is it?

That’s why I love research like this.  It goes beyond the anecdotal and makes you think.

Blogs I Read: Rogelio Choy

/ Adam Nash

Thought I’d give a quick shout out to another eBay-er who has a far more sophisticated and long-standing blog than myself.

Rogelio Choy

Ro spent a number of years managing market development for eBay’s developer program.  He now manages the Parts & Accessories business for eBay Motors, another one of eBay’s great tailored shopping experiences.

Ro often posts about startup activity, and hot water cooler news about web companies.

A sample of his most recent post (as of 10/22/2006) is here.

Playstation 3, Uncanny Valley & Product Design

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

Like most tech geeks, I’m excited about the new wave of video game consoles coming out this year.  Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii.  You name it, I want it.   This despite the fact that with work & a family I rarely have time to play video games anymore.

I came across a PS3 article yesterday that mentioned a term I had never heard before, but that I thought crystalized a phenomenon I’ve personally theorized over the years.  It’s called Uncanny Valley.

PS3 article here.  Wikipedia for Uncanny Valley here.

Uncanny Valley is a theory borrowed from robotics that says that when you have something relatively non-human like a puppy or a teddy bear, people will anthropomorphize it and like the “human-like” qualities of it.  However, if you make something too close to human, like a robot, people start to dislike it strongly as they focus on some key, missing detail.  Think about the uneasy feeling around corpses, zombies, or prosthetics.

The article makes the point about recent computer animated movies like Polar Express and the next generation consoles have run into this problem.  The computer animation is getting more realistic, but ironically people like it less than stylized, non-realistic graphics like The Incredibles.

I think this is a fantastic insight, and it goes beyond computer graphics and robotics.

As a software engineer and product manager, I have always been fascinated with the difficulty companies have migrating between major versions of platforms.  In most cases, no matter how good the new version is, a significant minority will hate it and complain ferociously about the disruption of the change.

Naturally, people have tried to solve this problem by trying to make the new version “feel” as close to the old version as possible.  Ironically, this seems to fan the flames even more as people focus even more on small differences.

Some of the most successful transitions, like Apple made from classic Mac OS to Mac OS X have been based on specifically not trying to make the new work the same as the old.  Sure, there are elements in common, but with Mac OS X Apple specifically did not replicate either the classic Mac OS Finder, or the NeXTStep browser.  They did borrow some of the better ideas from each.

I don’t want to turn this into a flame war about whether or not you like the UI decisions Apple made.   Instead, I just want to let this new insight flow around inside my head, and think about how it applies to various situations in life.

To my theory about people being “predictably irrational” – this seems like a truly generalized insight.  For human perception, sometimes being too close to something, without matching it, can be worse than establishing clear and thoughtful differentiation.

When I now look back on the product and design decisions we have made with eBay Express, I have new insights into the decisions we made.  We didn’t do it on purpose, but our rigorous focus on building the most convenient, multiple merchant, fixed-price shopping  experience has given the site an identity that is clearly differentiated and unique.  The site clearly evokes eBay, and many of the strengths of the eBay brand and community, but it offers a clearly differentiated experience through every page.

Fascinating.

Seema Shah has a Blahg

/ Adam Nash / 4 Comments

One of the fun things about having a blog is that you start discovering that many of your friends have blogs.  It’s interesting because somehow, before you start blogging, you are relatively unaware of these blogs.

I find that I learn so much from friend’s blogs, even when they are infrequently updated and silly.

Well, today I learned that Seema Shah, a fellow product manager at eBay, has a blog.  So much fun to read through these posts!

Seema is one of the rockstar product managers on next-generation search for eBay.  She was an invaluable contributor to the initial launch of eBay Express, and more importantly, a person who really champions innovation and actively blends customer insight with technical insight.

You might not get this all from reading her blog, however, which is why I’m calling it out here…

Austin, TX: America’s Most Impatient City

/ Adam Nash

This is a fun one, reported in Forbes today:

Column: Marketing, Games, Speedy Towns – Forbes.com

This data is courtesy of eBay Express, so of course, regular readers know my bias as a unwavering member of the eBay Express team.

I had the pleasure of living and working in Austin, TX during the summer of 1995. One of my good friends had been tapped, as part of “Trilogy University 1995” (the first) to help build a Human-Computer Interaction group at Trilogy Software. As an intern, between my Bachelors & Masters degrees in Computer Science, I was one of the lucky inaugural members.

I remember a lot of fun things about that summer:

  • The amazing energy and camaraderie of the small (but growing) Trilogy team
  • Fun nights out at the Copper Tank, 4th Street, and who knows what else
  • The fun of spending a summer living in an apartment complex with a large number of other fun, energetic and brilliant software engineers from Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, and MIT.

The energy of the summer was contagious in the tech industry. SGI was hiring 5000 engineers. Netscape went public. Windows 95 was about to release. Yahoo was a real, growing entity. Amazon vs. Barnes & Noble was a real debate. I even remember a fun, passionate argument with CEO Joe Liemandt about the future of Apple Computer (in all fairness, Joe was one of those burned PowerBook 5300 series users…)

The collection of talent that Trilogy attracted between 1993 and 1998 is a really impressive in retrospect. Trilogy was a case study on the power of human capital in shaping a company. Joe really had a vision of the type of people, and the type of company he wanted to build. It permeated who he recruited, how he recruited, and what type of experiences he tried to provide for new hires at the company. It permeated the culture, the compensation, and the way the company designed and built product.

That generation of employees is dispersed now, but the amount of raw horsepower of that talent pool was amazing.

Austin, TX is a great city, and was a lot of fun. Although I am a native to the Bay Area in California, I found the city easy to love.

Hard to believe it was 11 years ago already.

Randy Smythe & Glacier Bay DVD (former eBay Powerseller)

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

Two eBay-related posts in as many days?  There goes that promise…

However, it is newsworthy to note that Randy Smythe, a former eBay Powerseller who achieved over 200,000 positive feedback, has started a column outlining his views on eBay.

Randy decided to leave the world of online selling in February 2006, and the radio silence since then has created quite a bit of chatter in the eBay community.

The introductory article is here:

What is the E! True Hollywood Story About eBay’s Former Top Seller Glacier Bay DVD? 

Interestingly, Randy is quite reticent about his own successes and failures in business, which to me is refreshing.  Running a small business is one of the most difficult challenges professionally, and running one online is no exception.  If Randy chooses to share his insights from this experience, it could benefit a lot of people.

I’ve commented on this blog that people are rarely rational with money, and surprisingly, this can even impact people when they run multi-million dollar businesses.  Like personal finance, I believe that entrepreneurs have the most to learn from each other – the good, the bad and the ugly.

To give some insight into Randy’s perspective, he linked to this article from The E-Commerce Guide on the challenges facing eBay.  It’s an interesting piece as well.  You can find it here:

eBay: Down But Not Out 

I am, of course, extremely optimistic about the future for eBay and for e-commerce in general.

Shameless Plug: A Great Search on eBay Express

/ Adam Nash

First and foremost, please remember, I am extremely biased.   As I have explained in previous posts, I run the Product Management team responsible for eBay’s newest specialty site:

eBay Express

But when you work harder than you ever have in your life on a new product, or in this case, a new website, it’s hard not to brag a little when you see something wonderful.

Last week, my wife was shopping for double strollers.  After researching the subject, she decided that she really like the “E3” brand of strollers.  She asks me, “Do you think there are E3 strollers on eBay Express?”

So she goes to the eBay Express homepage, and types “E3 Stroller” into the search box.  This is what she sees:

“E3 Stroller” on eBay Express

(10/22 Update: The liabilities of a dynamic marketplace… I’ve been alerted that there is no E3 Stroller inventory right now! I think you can see what I’m talking about just searching for Strollers in general).

Wow.  What a gorgeous page.  What a nice selection of colors and sizes.  Great prices and great brand-new products from great eBay sellers.

An amazing amount of incredible technology and innovation went into the new search engine for eBay Express.   But even though I know in detail how eBay Express managed to come up with that beautiful search result, it’s still wonderful to see it in action, on a query that I know we didn’t test specifically, and yet one that really mattered to my little family.

Just one anecdote, just one query out of millions.  But hey, here’s a quick shout out to the eBay Express search team – you are making magic happen every day.