Email a copy of 'eBay Launches Ambitious Plan to Manage User Identities' to a friend
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Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.
Doomed for failure.
This is nothing more than a crafted recruiting device for eBay to have their talent acquisition teams float engineering applicants so it appears eBay’s actually working on something “cool” and not the “lame” reputation has in the tech sector.
Sometime in the not-too-distant future eBay will announce success by adopting (or copying) something that will be industry standard by that time (and send out another press release).
Which is precisely what just happened when they copied the now-common Spotify, Flipboard, etc interests “bubbles” and called it their own curated “interests” shopper innovation.
EBay can’t launch a simple gimmicky promo without their site glitching out. Their entire platform is rampant with glitchy problems of all magnitudes as anyone that keeps an eye on Technical Issues eBay community forum and the EKG and blog comments here at ECB is well aware.
As an example (since the Android app is mentioned in the blog post), eBay has struggled to fix their Android app in order to allow multiple picture background uploads, though they have been purportedly trying in vain since 2015 according to some of the community posts.
A value stream map of the Android listing workflow shows eBay could significantly increase productivity of sellers using the app.
I estimate a seller who can list 20 items a day with the app with 12 photos could list 50-60 items a day with an improved app with tweaked workflow and background image uploading capability.
Lofty tech goals make for great press releases and recruiting gimmicks, but the lack of basic blocking and tackling doesn’t give anyone confidence the platform is a reliable one to build such ambitious pursuits upon.
Expect the end result for this initiative to truly epitomize the “minimum” in “minimum viable product”.
Links:
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Mobile-App-Android/Upload-Multiple-Pictures-at-Once-on-App/td-p/27177616
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Technical-Issues/bd-p/technicalissues-db
Just seems like more opportunities for fraud to me.