Rudelle Blogging

Following the announcement of the partnership between eBay and Google at the end of last August, eBay stock has gained a steady 1.86%. However, on second thoughts, this giant deal seems rather surprising.
What is really behind this deal? As with Yahoo! for the United States, the king of auctions chose Google to fill its international sites with ads. This astonishing decision will create a new form of competition for all the small sellers on eBay. While seeking for a new revenue stream, eBay takes the risk to angry its most valuable asset: those thousands of small eBay sellers. It is likely that the recent pressure on eBay bottom line has push toward this delicate choice.
The other part of the agreement is also symptomatic. The deal consists in developing with Google a common click-to-call offer on its site, by leveraging on Skype. The trouble is that most click-to-call experts say that the vast majority of customers (almost 85%) prefer to use landlines rather than computers to call. Thus Skype ends up to be rather a barrier than anything else for the deal.
This seems to illustrate the difficult integration of Skype into eBay. Skype is a formidable telephone operator. Its economic model of voice over IP is very strong. On the other hand, synergies with eBay are far from obvious. That is for two reasons.
First able, a large part of Skype customer base is located in Brazil and India, that is to say very far from eBay customer base. The second reason is that allowing buyers to call sellers (which was the main rational of Skype takeover in the first place) was not welcome by those very precious sellers. Indeed, sellers are already having a hard time to cope with all the emails from buyers. The idea of having to answer buyer queries by phone gives them nightmares.
The future of eBay seems rather in pushing quickly towards Web 2.0 and smart collaborative filtering, as is doing Amazon. By offering a much more systematic usage of its fabulous “Long Tail”, eBay will greatly boost its powerful community of sellers. And as a result, securing its long term bottom line.