Inside Scoop: New Moves by eBay

Vegas, baby. I just spent the last two days there as a guest of eBay at their 4th annual Collectibles Industry Summit, where the company brought together a cabal of 40 top folks in the collecting world—experts and journos in areas covering a wide swath of items that regularly trade on the site: coins, stamps, antiques, sports memorabilia, comic books, pottery, glass and more. Some three billion dollars’ worth of collectible material traded hands on eBay in the last year, the vast majority of it in the $20 to $200 range. It is here that millions of Americans first scratch their collecting itch.

The theme for our meeting was “Collecting and the Social Web.” Translation: What can eBay learn from the runaway success of networking site MySpace? How can it educate and inspire the next generation of collectors? How can it reinvorgate the eBay collecting community, which currently uses its onsite message boards mostly to bitch and moan? And how, they asked, could they bring the fun back to the industry?

So here’s a quick report on some of the major new site features they came up with since last year’s summit. We were treated to a preview of two of them and asked to weigh in with feedback.

First up: a new content hub called Collector’s Corner, a place where people can come to educate themselves about their fave collectible, view examples, get inspired and, of course click through to auction links of related items. There will be editorial content from a wide variety of industry publications, buyer guides, along with links to eBay-hosted blogs and wikis. The buyer guides can be quite general (hey, they’re just getting ramped up; let’s give ‘em time). And I have concerns about the usefulness of their promised price trend information, since the data comes exclusively from within eBay sales universe, from a very narrow time window (initially just from the previous 30 days, eventually expanding to 60 and 90 days, they say.) But again, it’s a work in progress. If you go on the site and have suggestions, feel free to email me at missy@artmarketinsider.com and I’ll be happy to pass your feedback on to the eBay collectibles team. I found them to be a genuinely open-minded and responsive group.

It’s interesting: eBay is late to this educational game, always prefering to stay neutral, with content welling up from and amongst the community members themselves. But it’s finally taking a clue from successful sites like rei.com, which has some of the best buying guide content around. On a high-volume auction site where the mantra is “buyer beware,” a little education should go a long way toward giving buyers increased confidence—in particular, teaching them which questions to ask sellers BEFORE they bid or buy. I’d love to see some content on how to read between the lines on an eBay collectibles ad, with a list of misused and hot-button terms, like “original,” “vintage,” and “authentic.” Overall, Collectors Corner is a great, overdue idea, but one that will take serious editorial management to keep it from becoming too much of a mishmash. Stay tuned.

The other preview we got: a destination called MyCollectibles. The inspiration here: online set registries in areas like sports cards and coins. The idea is that some collectors like to show off their finds, to strut their stuff. So eBay decided to give collectors a “neighborhood” to hang out, upload photos and info about their collections and share them with like-minded folk, whether they’re interested in vintage cookie jars, Hallmark Christmas ornaments, Martin acoustic guitars or X-Men action figures.

Peers can view, review and comment on their favorite collections. Time will tell whether this process will encourage passionate dialogue or petty competitiveness a la what has sometimes happened in the feedback sphere. Already, in MyCollectibles’ earliest incarnation, it looks like quite a few sellers are using it to aggregate listings by theme, which may dilute the sense of unfettered sharing. It, too, will need some policing.

Both these initiatives are significant signs that eBay wants to grow beyond its profile as a “walled garden” and integrate more readily with the broader web. It’s an important move. —M.S.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 14th, 2006 at 12:26 am and is filed under Inside the Biz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.