Why Consumer Expectations are Changing | eBay Merch & Seller Partnership Lead, Sam Bright

So let's transition a little bit from marketplaces and eBay to talk about consumers, because part of the evolution that we've discussed about eBay is driven in part by our belief in how consumers are changing and our need to stay relevant and in tune with what's most likely to meet their needs, right? So For us, I think a lot of people had seen or had the perspective in the past that there was sort of a separation between offline commerce or bricks-and-mortar commerce, you go into a physical retail store and you purchase an item, versus online commerce where you just log on to the internet, go to a website, and you purchase an item. We believe that consumers are changing. Consumers don't really care where they get the item. They just want to have the opportunity to purchase what they want, when they want, how they want it. They reward simplicity. They reward trust. We see it in Airbnb. We see it in other marketplaces. We obviously see it in our own business because we've been in the business for a long time where trust is important. It's us being able to believe that the items that I purchase what I'm looking for, I can get and not worry about any hassles, fraud, or risk, or anything like that, because there is a platform standing behind it that I can rely on. They expect great value and great selection. So we want to be able to— sometimes we're more price sensitive than others for certain items. And so we want to be able to find the items with the lowest price for the criteria or features that we want. And great selection is where I talk about the long tail, right? We want to be able to see, hey, do I want that item in red? Do I want it in a large? Do I want it in a medium? How many do I want to get? And eBay provides that opportunity for you to see, for you to basically customize based on your needs. And finally, they're expecting free or at least reasonable shipping costs, right? So that means getting the items as quickly as possible and for as cheap as possible. And I think there's been a lot of innovation in e-commerce, a lot of startups recently who have focused a lot on simplifying the shipping process, whether that be through local delivery or that be through couriers or other means to get items to consumers faster. So we believe there's a, there's a new type of consumer emerging. Really, that consumer is young. There are many of you. They're millennials. They're very values-oriented. They're very focused on their interests and their likes, and they don't want to be constrained by borders of technology. They don't want to be constrained by even international borders. They want to be able to purchase what they like or find what they like Whether it's in their country, whether it's in another country, whether it's on the web, whether it's offline. They want to be able to find what they like. And our challenge as a company that has been around for a while is to constantly innovate in order to meet that demand and in order to anticipate what the customer wants now as opposed to what the customer may have wanted in the past. Your challenge as you build your businesses is to not only identify who all your customers are, you may have multiple customers like eBay does. We have buyers and sellers. If you're building a marketplace, chances are you have multiple customers, at least 2. But also to understand how those needs evolve, right? We could have stayed focused solely on auctions, which is still an amazing and important category for us. And missed out on the increasing emphasis that consumers are placing on fixed price. We could have stayed focused on— and we'll talk about this a little bit later— on just desktop, where we had our initial success, and missed out on the increasing willingness of consumers to purchase across multiple screens and multiple media. And so it's important for you as you build your businesses and as you think about your ideas, to not only understand where your customers are, how you're going to engage them, and then make sure you keep your finger on the pulse of them. Because even though you may experience rapid growth and scale, like we've been fortunate to experience, what keeps us continuing to grow and scale is staying in tune with what our sellers and our buyers want. And so this is where we see We see multi-screen engagement, right? We see customers, customers wanting to start a purchase on their desktop, do some research, and then complete it on their iPhone. We see customers wanting to follow an auction that they've bid on on their eBay app on their Apple Watch. We see customers wanting to see sort of a seamless seamless commerce experience. So whether or not they're in the living room on their, on their laptop, or they're in bed on their mobile phone, they're able to transact as seamlessly and easily as possible. And so this has implications for you, because as consumers— and it depends on what type of business you're trying to build— but as consumers are, are looking to be able to engage and transact, across multiple media, and you as an entrepreneur have limited resources as you're trying to scale your business. How do you prioritize which media you focus on first? How do you determine, should I— I have limited engineering capacity, should I focus on a mobile app? Which platform should I focus on? Should I focus on an Android, on an iPhone? Do I do tablet? Do I— Do I do the desktop? I mean, what are the trade-offs that I need? And so if you don't invest early on in thinking about who your customers are, where they're most likely to engage with you, and then what's the vision of how you want that to evolve, you can spend a lot of dev cycles and product manager cycles building products that aren't where your customers are. Or missing out on trends that are important to your customers, but they— you're just, you're just not able to capitalize on them. And so one of the things that I think we've been fortunate and have, have been very thoughtful about is understanding how customer needs are changing and then trying to adapt how we engage with our customers in order to meet those needs. And I think that's reflected in the success we've had in our mobile business. So a lot of people don't think about eBay as a strong mobile player, but we made some very significant investments in mobile early on before— everyone knows now, hey, you should invest in mobile. But before that was conventional wisdom, And those investments have paid off for us. You know, if you don't have the eBay app, you should certainly look into downloading it. I'm saying that selfishly as a shareholder. But also, I think you should look into downloading it because it's— there's some really exciting things we've done in terms of mobile innovation. You know, we've had over 280 million app downloads. A lot of our GMV, that $80 billion number that I mentioned earlier, is touched by mobile. Either people do research on mobile platforms and then come buy on desktops, or about $30 billion actually occurred on mobile platforms. And then there's some, you know, exciting statistics about how frequently items are purchased on eBay. So every 40 seconds, a tablet is purchased via mobile, or a lady's handbag is purchased via mobile on eBay. Again, a lot of people don't know that eBay is a big fashion destination, but from used handbags to brand new handbags, all types of clothing, basically anything you're trying to find— I promise this isn't just an infomercial for eBay— But anything you're trying to find is is available on eBay and certainly is easy to purchase via our mobile capabilities. And so it's not just purchasing. It's also for sellers. It's easy to add items on eBay, right? So for me, I go through periods where I play way too many video games. And so I want to sell those video games to purchase the next type of— the next one in the series. So I'll sell Assassin's Creed 2 on eBay. There's a very healthy market for video games on eBay. And then I'll use the funds from that sale to then purchase the next one as it comes out. And I found it's easier to just list, given the catalog of photos or item descriptions, just list via mobile. So that's how mobile benefits both customer segments for us.