eBay's John Donahoe on the Future of eCommerce & BTW, He Loves the iPad

eBay's John Donahoe was on the D Conference (D: All Things Digital) stage this past week....after the talk, a common thing I heard over and over again from attendees was that it has really become a site for sellers not buyers, or rather one that favors sellers over buyers.

In addition to learning what their core focus areas are today and where they're heading in the future (for example - who knew that fashion/retail/accessories was so big on eBay?), they spent a lot of time discussing the role of Paypal.

Walt Mossberg asks "why do you need them?" It was as if Donahoe was ready to pounce on the question, almost as if Paypal was his wife and another man had just attacked her. (at least that's how it seemed to me).

Most people I know avoid Paypal if they have an option for a number of reasons, including phishing. But, Donahoe says, "Phishing was a big issue for eBay and Paypal five years ago and we were the two sites that did a lot of money exchange at the time. We've come a long way and fraud is down 80% over the past five years. Anytime anyone reports something, we take the site down in 12 hours." When asked who their main competitor was today, John responds with Amazon, Walmart and Etsy in that order. He says, "We're an eCommerce site - that's WHAT we are."

He reminds that eCommerce is only 5% of all retail. Walmart is the largest discount retailer in the world and they're unstoppable. They have about 7% of online retail. Costco and Target compete in the same niche and both successfully. We're at the beginning. Each of us needs to focus on what we're all really good at."

In the future, more and more devices will be part of our online purchasing experience. He gives examples, i.e., "you can imagine someone walking into a store using a red laser from a mobile device and then buying it online from inside the store. People will use their iPads for browsing so they can look at a product's specs in details before they buy." Then he adds, "if you want to see the best eBay experience, go to our iPad app."

I thought - egads, if one more speaker touts how much they're in love with their iPad, I'm going to think that Jobs bribed everyone before they set foot on the stage - it's a beautiful device, but c'mon already.

"What makes the iPad different?" asks Walt. "Let's look at the core eBay website experience on a scale of 1 to 10," says John. "We've gone from a 2 to a 4 and we should be proud of the improvements we've made, but we need to make this a more compelling experience for those 90 million users around the world. The iPad has forced us to start over. You'll start to see vertical market apps, such as a fashion app. We can now serve just a segment of users in the way they want to shop. We're not trying to do it all from one browser."

On market segments, John says, "eBay is the largest seller of fashion, clothes and accessories online worldwide by far. eBay has a really loyal following; we're driving more tailored vertical market shopping online. Fashion is really high (clothing, shoes and accessories) which we call the Fashion Vault."

Think image search, i.e, I'm looking for a blue shirt and I want to see more blue shirts. You shop for clothing differently than you shop for a Blackberry.

Walt moves to Stubhub; here, there's a lot of controversy around this as a model where tickets can be resold, how they're resold and priced.

Says John in response, "Stubhub is a simply a marketplace. What Stubhub has done that scalpers have never done is make it totally transparent. Stubhub guarantees every purchase - and they provide complete transparency. At the end of the day, it should be the fan's choice to resell their ticket if they want to."