John Donahoe Is Not Giving Much Hype About eBay’s Sales Data
On Monday, John Donahoe the CEO of eBay declined to give out much information on eBay sales for the holiday season. At the investors conference, Donahoe was giving most of the hype to PayPal which has seemed to be the song and dance of 2009. You talk about the moving ball to keep all eyes off the one that is sitting and not moving. I have noticed this a lot from the CEO in his most recent appearances, eBay does seem to be second to PayPal on the hype meter right now.
Donahoe is quoted in a Wall Street Journal article saying, “There’s no killer item this year. There’s no Xbox or item that’s out of stock that everyone has to have,” he said. Zhu Zhu pets, the stuffed hamsters that have become intensely popular in recent months, are an exception and are doing brisk business on the site.
We do know that Amazon reportedly topping the list as the most visited retail website on Cyber Monday, seeing a 44% increase in visits compared to 2008. Amazon received 15.53% of the visits among the top 500 online retail sites.
On the flip side, eBay released a eBay “heat map” for Black Friday on its website and that caused many to ask well how much was sold for real? The visuals are cute and all, but why all the techno crap? What were the NUMBERS? That was my question.
With Donahoe’s continued interest in luxury brands and the new out-of-season mentality of eBay 2009, I want to know if it is WORKING? Do the numbers show that eBay is more successful than in the past? Is the number moving the needle to the left or right? Guess we will not know?!?
However on Monday, Scot Wingo (CEO, ChannelAdvisor.com) decided to break out a calculator and do some "Fun eBay Math" and concluded that…
If that math is correct, Black Friday’s 1m transactions were actually 25% below average and Cyber Monday was a paltry 3% above average. Of course our assumptions could be off here, but they’d have to be off pretty significantly to change these results. Also they are based off of real-world data points so they are far from guesses.
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