I have just returned from our annual Catalyst UK conference in London and similar to Catalyst U.S. in Pinehurst it was a marvelous event (we should all be saying marvelous more often). and a great opportunity to meet online retailers, partners and solution providers (photos will be available shortly).

First of all, kudos go out to the City of London, the spectacular weather, the Royal Horseguard hotel (the venue for the event) and of course our marketing team in the UK. If you want to work with kick-***, gung-ho, we-leave-no-stone-unturned people check out the five openings available in our Richmond office. Wait — there’s even a job right on the marketing team!

Scot posted some great impressions and key take-aways, but here are a few of my own thoughts:

– Google Checkout is going international and had its first public presentation of Google Checkout in the UK at the Catalyst conference, reviewing both the mechanics and business benefits of this third-party checkout solution (a lot of which was covered during our joint webinar with Google yesterday - a recording should be available shortly). Should you do it? Read Scot’s posts from June last year for some good insights (Google Checkout is Live!, Why Should Consumers Care?).

(more…)

Share This

On Tuesday we posted some comments from large UK media sellers on the recent changes in the eBay fee structure in certain media-related categories.

Today we turn to a large UK seller in the consumer electronics category for their reaction.

Luzern Solutions, based out of Dublin, uses ChannelAdvisor Merchant to sell refurbished and new PDAs, printers, projectors and other high ticket item consumer electronics on eBay UK (seller id luzerntech), France, Spain, Germany, Ireland and Italy (phew, did I miss any!) - as well as on Amazon and through their own ChannelAdvisor-powered website - www.luzernsolutions.com.

The man in charge of their eBay operations, Pat Sherlock, was overall in favour of the changes, although he felt there was still more to be done.

The reduction in the fees for computers and consumer electronics categories is certainly welcome news for LuzernTech. Coupled with the T&S initiatives this will allow large sellers like ourselves the opportunity to have more confidence and sell more products in the eBay marketplace as opposed to having to resort to other, less costly, channels. We obviously believe that as large high quality sellers we enhance eBay’s reputation every time we complete a sale on eBay. We still feel that the inflexibility of the fee structure and resulting inability for high volumes seller to achieve economies of scale for this area of costs is still a problem that eBay needs to address.

I agree with Pat - the recent T&S initiatives have been another big step in the right direction. But I’m interested to hear what blog readers think about Pat’s suggestion of discounts for higher volume sellers. It happens in every other area of business but eBay has always dismissed the concept - saying it upsets its ‘level playing field’ philosophy. What do you think?

Share This

Skype went through a major reorganization this morning. A bunch of senior executives were invited to the Skype London office (just next door to us here at ChannelAdvisor UK) and told they were being let go - ouch.

In total about 14 people are leaving the company, many of them pre-merger employees. Many of them have till end of the year to finish their duties at the company.

You can read more details here.

Share This