eBay chief executive officer Meg Whitman announced two new features at eBay Live recently in Las Vegas: eBay Wiki and Skype Me. Both are community-based features that will allow users to communicate and add content and communication to the site.
eBay said that sellers on its auction site will be able to add a link to their listings that will let potential buyers reach them through Skype, the Internet phone service.
The announcement came nine months after eBay raised eyebrows by spending $2.6 billion for Skype, a European start-up company that at the time had just $60 million in sales.
With a few clicks of the mouse, shoppers with Skype’s free software installed on their computers can then talk or send short messages to the sellers, ask for more information and, eBay hopes, buy more goods.
The Skype feature will be available soon to sellers advertising their products in 14 categories, including real estate, cars and trucks, silver coins and beds. eBay said it had chosen those categories because they included expensive items or complex products that could generate many questions.
EBay expects Skype to generate $200 million in sales this year.
We believe that Skype will enhance the way that people communicate and trade on eBay, especially in high-involvement and high-price categories, Bill Cobb, the president of eBay North America, said in a statement issued during a convention of eBay sellers in Las Vegas.
eBay Wiki is up and running in beta mode. SkypeMe, a pilot program, will allow a Skype button to be added to listings, so that buyers and sellers can communicate via voice or text.
eBay has always been about community from the beginning, whether it be sellers’ forums or the users conference, they make investments in the community, said Joe Kraus, co-founder and chief executive officer of JotSpot, the company that designed and implemented eBay Wiki. "They have a lot of Web 2.0 tools for their community and I think they just want to offer the next generation of tools to help enhance that community."
eBay Wiki is what Kraus called "a Wikipedia for eBay," allowing buyers and sellers to share user-generated information. The eBay Wiki will augment the user forums in a cleaner, more concise manner, he said.
Rather than reading back-and-forth communication about a particular topic, inquisitive eBayers can go to the wiki and read an aggregate definition. Although JotSpot will host the page, it will have the same look and feel of any other eBay page with the familiar logo and search functions, Kraus said.
It is a place to generate user content to enhance the site so that you get the most of the eBay functions, Kraus said. The thought was that we should not restrain the millions of experts we already have using eBay.
Skype represents a tremendous opportunity for our sellers to connect even more closely with their buyers, said Cobb in a statement. "We believe that Skype will enhance the way that people communicate and trade on eBay, especially in high-involvement and high-price categories. It will be exciting to watch Skype become a part of our marketplace."
eBay is testing the Skype Me function in 14 categories: automotive GPS devices, camera and photo lenses and filters, wired networking routers, Skype devices, VOIP/Internet telephony, diamond solitaire rings, real estate — residential and commercial, manufacturing and metalworking, beds, NBA basketball cards, silver coins, lost in space collectibles, radio control toys, and cars and trucks.
These categories were chosen because of their local component, such as items requiring local delivery or pick up, and those with a highly enthusiastic community, such as collectibles, the company said. eBay solicited user feedback before launching the program. More categories are expected to have the Skype Me function in coming months, although the company could not say when.
What we wanted to do was select a broad variety of categories that for different reasons we feel, and our users feel, could benefit from adding an easy way to communicate about the transaction process, said Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesperson. "These are categories that are as broad as cars and trucks and as narrow as the lost in space memorabilia."
Skype Me is free to both buyers and sellers, although Durzy said that eBay is exploring how to integrate Skype into their ecommerce offerings, such as the pay-per-call model that was discussed in the Yahoo! partnership announced in May. "That is another idea that is completely separate, and who knows how we will ultimately implement this?" Durzy said.
Lenn Pryor, Skype’s head of developer relations, said in a interview that the company has been testing Skype integration with eBay in five smaller country markets in Asia and Europe, including Belgium.
Tying together buyers and sellers via Skype was a move that was widely expected; both eBay’s Whitman and Pryor said that adding Skype to eBay’s auctions would be a likely outcome. Showing the online presence of either the buyer or seller is also a natural extension, Pryor said.
"The key markets will be coming online later," Pryor said, when asked about the time frame for embedding Skype features in the auctions business in its main markets of the United States, Germany and Britain.
Skype Me is eBay’s first pilot with the voice/text chat technology since eBay purchased Skype in October for $2.6 million. The program offers sellers the option to add a Skype Me button to their listings. Buyers who would like more information on a given product can click the button to be connected in real-time with the seller via Skype’s voice and/or text chat.