Conclusions: eBay Connect 2019

mario · Site Admin Joined: 03 Oct 2006 Posts: 7201

Last week (June 25-26) eBay connect 2019 was held in San Jose, and I was there to listen to what is new and ask questions. eBay was a fantastic host. I wish all users had the opportunity to interact with eBay engineers and executives, and not just customer support.

For Gixen, the most important question I had was how to raise reliability of bids even further. For example, if there is an account problem or a shipping location restriction, Gixen will not find out about it until it tries to submit the bid at the very last moment. In some cases, an ahead-of-time dry-fire test would provide an important feedback to Gixen users to avoid bids from being blocked. Users typically blame Gixen when this happens, so I will be advocating strongly with eBay for this kind of functionality.

In order to achieve this, Gixen will have to migrate to working with a different (new) eBay interface. This will be a significant work that will be done starting in September, benefit of which will not be obvious to most users, but it is nevertheless very important to do. In addition, this will open a door to adding additional functionality, e.g. buyer analytics.

Another requirement will be GDPR. For those who do not know this, this is a regulation by EU on data protection and privacy of all EU citizens. I intend to fullfil GDPR requirements for all Gixen users, not just EU citizens.

As for PBSE (product based shopping experience), while shopping will continue to move in that direction, eBay learned that most sellers were not dilligent when it comes to giving specifics of items they sell, and that an additional effort will have to be made by eBay to make the catalog better.

Another big issue of this year was eBay managed payments. There is a sizable number of sellers who already opted in, and besides simplifying things, eBay showed numbers that demonstrate this is really saving sellers money. It will, however, trigger a lot of changes in practically all eBay APIs that deal with payments. This will mostly affect providers of seller management and inventory tools, not Gixen.

Fuzzbean · Guest

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mivona · Guest

Thanks for your approach to data privacy. I appreciate that you are extending it to all.

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Deepblue · Guest

The website may not be flashy HTML5, but it's form over function which is good. Good luck with the API changes, I know how time consuming it all is. Offering a limited service for free is really appreciated. I hope you get paid well for this, you deserve it.