Mobile is such a massively popular buzzword right now in the loyalty marketing arena. And eBay hopes to enhance its mobile customer engagement.
During Wednesday’s fiscal fourth quarter conference call, eBay CEO Devin N. Wenig talked about his company’s pursuit of the mobile customer.
“Another key area of focus for us is mobile,” Wenig said, according to Seeking Alpha. “While reviews of the mobile experience we launched in September have significantly improved, it’s not yet delivering results on par with the prior version. We’re aggressively iterating it to enhance the user experience and to drive adoption and usage, and our
new platform is enabling us to get new releases in front of our users more rapidly and efficiently than we have in the past. Despite those challenges, we still grew mobile GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) 21% on a year-over-year basis.”
Six months ago, eBay launched a series of platform, inventory, and policy changes, “which we believe are critical to make our business more competitive over the long term,” Wenig said. “While we’re making steady progress on these strategic initiatives, we don’t expect to see material benefit from them for some time to come.”
What’s more, eBay has started using its data to enable price trending and comparisons as well as better merchandising capabilities.
“Early results show we’re picking up conversion rate improvements, which is a clear signal that we’re on the right track here,” Wening said. “Finally, we continue to make progress in other areas such as social and promoted listings. Our social traffic continues to grow at strong double digits driven by our presence now across 14 key channels. And with promoted listings, we open the service to all store subscribers and we expanded placements into many new categories in Q4.”
Wening believes that StubHub and Classifieds are important complements to eBay.
“And we continue to see strong overlap across each user base,” he explained. “Over the past six months, many of you have indicated that you’d like to better understand the scale of these platforms relative to our Marketplace platform. In an effort to increase transparency and disclosure across our portfolio, we will disclose volume and revenue for StubHub and revenue for Classifieds moving forward, which mirrors how we manage them internally. Our StubHub platform continues to be a strong partner to sports leagues, teams, and artists. We saw significant growth acceleration in the quarter driven by the product changes we made in August and aided by a strong sports landscape and high demand for concert tickets. And our Classifieds platform saw particular strength on eBay Kleinanzeigen in Germany along with Gumtree in the UK, resulting in accelerating year-over-year growth. We also continue to grow our U.S. Classifieds presence via our Close5 mobile app, where total downloads approach six million, more than doubling where we ended Q3.”