EBay Executives Announce Brief Relief for Seller Fees at EBay Live 2007 in Boston

eBay executives addressed attendees of the company's annual gathering, eBay Live 2007, this week in Boston. The nearly 10,000 strong attending the full event were invited to hear about upcoming changes and enhancements to the site from eBay CEO Meg Whitman, eBay North America President Bill Cobb, and Paypal (an eBay company) President Rajiv Dutta.

Whitman was head cheerleader for the event, covering more fluffy topics while leaving the updates and changes to her charges. She shared the news of eBay's Webby Award, sometimes described as an Internet Oscar known for the mandatory five word acceptance speech. eBay's acceptance speech was, "Bidding Starts at 99 Cents." Meg also introduced Kristin Cunningham, director of the company's Giving Works program who spoke about the money raised thorough eBay auctions.

Dutta drilled down into the changes in store for the eBay community during his turn at the podium. He acknowledged the recent Paypal outage, and said they were working to continue to upgrade. In addition, Paypal will be pulling the Security Key out of beta. The Security Key is a device that is designed with security in mind. Every 30 seconds a new code is generated that is used along with username and password for logging in to the site. The Security Key is now available to an US Paypal account holder. Two more security initiatives were announced including a payment review that will hold questionable transactions until they can be cleared, and a promise from Paypal to work towards the goal of having every address on Paypal confirmed. Confirmed addresses are important to eBay sellers because only packages sent to a confirmed address are covered by Paypal's Seller Protection policy.

Cobb rounded out the executive speeches and got a nice response when he announced that eBay would be temporarily lowering it's base final value fee from 5.25% to 4.5% on the first $25. The decreased fee structure will be in effect between June 19, 2007 and August 5, 2007. The summer is a notoriously slow time for eBay, but most sellers seemed to be happy for what Cobb described as "summer relief." Cobb also mentioned the success of eBay Express, a site where buyers can purchase items from multiple buyers in one shopping cart. Cobb said that on eBay Express an item is put in a cart every 4 seconds, and every 60 seconds a clothing item sells.

Referencing last year's fee increase just weeks after nothing of the sort being mentioned at the 2006 eBay Live in Las Vegas, Cobb promised no new fees this July. In addition, he mentioned the possibility of powersellers (eBay sellers averaging at least $1000/month) being given preferential treatment in search results. Nothing is definite yet but there was a promise to keep the eBay Community updated.