Ebay Scales Back Emr Counterfeit Reporting Program

This and a related article just appeared in eCommerceBytes:

http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/a.../m12/i16/s01

http://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/blo...8696758.html

Read the first article carefully. It raises more questions than answers. Although some posts in this forum have suggested that the EMR program for stamps may have been dismantled, ebay has never officially commented.

Clark

Very interesting articles!

" ebay spokesman Ryan Moore declined to comment on the rationale for winding down the EMR program, but said the company has been taking "steps toward a more formal process for reporting and removing bad activity and items in various categories."

"We've also broadened our internal team's expertise ... in an effort to detect and investigate bad activity in a more streamlined manner," Moore added, noting that the EMR program does still remain active "in a few categories."

If that is true, that is news to me. What sense would it make to dismantle the EMR Program piecemeal? So I doubt it.

If I remember correctly, the same spokesman (Ryan Moore - if that is truly the name of a real person....) gave similar statements to the writer of the Linn's story about this subject. My efforts to contact him about this after he gave the author the statements were not returned (surprise!). Most of the comments received by readers are spot on. Bottom line is that ebay no longer wants to be involved in anti-fraud work - at least as it pertains to 3rd party advice or help, and I agree with those who believe that they only care about profits. For years they had a "concience" (which was forced on them by bad publicity in mainstream press back in c.2003) and at least gave the appearance of caring, by forming the various "Community Watch" programs and then the EMR Program. Those days are gone.

The "no comment" period may have represented a period of A/B testing where they disabled the program, and then observed the impact on sales velocity. My guess is that the number of transactions relating to valuable collectibles is now so high that they determined that continuing the costs of the program had no material effect on transactions. In other words, the market communicated that this program was not important to a significant number of buyers. The disabling also coincided, I believe, with at least one quarter of poorer total sales volume and therefore they have been motivated to eliminate any program that would negatively affect quarter-over-quarter sales growth and thus their performance on Wall Street.

It is probably unrealistic to ever expect this particular fox to diligently monitor the hen house. The alternative for fraud-sensitive buyers is to abandon the Bay for other channels or to support a third party service like Stamp Smarter.

I agree with cj that ebay is steered by the 'bottom line'. Frankly, their first responsibility is to shareholders and stock prices. But in my opinion this issue has to been viewed from the top down rather than singling out the issue and trying to make sense of just it.

ebay has obvious been pursuing a ' Amazon type' model over the last few years. They slowly evolved their terms and conditions to discourage auctions and auctions sales and replace them with 'buy it now' (BIN) type sales. By tweaking the way they charge sellers they began funneling more and more transactions into the BIN method. Virtual every term and condition is now set towards this bias including the shipping policies.

The reasoning seems pretty clear, it is far more costly to operationally support auction type sales. A simple, clean BIN sale is far less costly then supporting an auction negotiation. Additionally, the total sales of new merchandise far exceeds that of 'used' merchandise. ebay was not going to ignore this market while others like Amazon were cashing in.

In most companies there are two functions which are critical but do not have a direct line to profit/loss; quality assurance and IS/IT. The best run companies understand the need for these to be in place and working properly. (Just ask Sony.) In my opinion ebay decided to cut costs by dismantling a QA program (EMR) and replace it with the ineffective automated reporting feature. Short-term this will indeed save a few bucks, long term the jury is still out on how this decision will impact the company. The marketplace will eventually judge this decision. Either third party entities will fill the void (like Stamp Smarter) or at some point someone will come along with a competing model.