eBay VP on their new Fashion App & why people will buy cars on their phones & just what they're doing with AR

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If you thought it was hard to charge more than 59p for anything on a phone – you might be surprised to hear that we are already spending megabucks through mobile commerce – buying £50,000 cars on mobile phones for example. People are clearly willing to make massive transactions on their mobiles – and we’re only going to do it more in the future if Steve Yankovich VP of eBay mobile is right.

“People just see it as a continuation of normal eBay” he said of the eBay mobile app, pointing out how handy it is to be able to bid on an auction from your phone as opposed to being chained to your computer.

In light of the boom in mobile spending, eBay are providing some more shopping fronts on the iPhone with the launch of a new Fashion app and a Motoring app.
More than just a link to the relevant site sections, these provide the sort of customisation and personalisation that we’re very used to seeing on apps, applied to the shopping experience.

We were quite impressed.

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The fashion app will include fashion editorial – articles about trends and so on, but also – and this is the cool bit – a kind of create-your-own outfit place called The Closet where you can drag and drop items from around the site to create images of outfits. You can save your creations or share them by email or facebook. There are links back on individual items which will take you back to the Buy Product page. We really like this idea… it’s the sort of thing you could happily play around with for a few minutes, even if you don’t want to spend any money. And nothing like harnessing a bit of creativity.
Getting even more flashy, you can also superimpose this outfit collection on an image of yourself pulled in from your phone’s pictures or even live webcam. Intense.

There’s also going to be a very nifty price comparison tool in there – using the RedLaser bar code reading technology (eBay just bought them out) that will let you scan bar codes while you wander around real world shops and do a quick price comparison check for similar objects on eBay and indeed elsewhere on the internet.

That’s all the bells and whistles on the app, but add in eBay basics like searches by size and price range and the huge range of clothes listed on eBay (globally there are 20million fashion items listed at any given time) and this looks like it could be a winner.

eBay Fashion app is free on iTunes, though you need to register for an eBay account.

Anna Leach

2 comments

  • Fashion and a stylish app for the Windows Phone 7 won’t save eBay.

    eBay’s many ongoing Donahoe-introduced problems are hardly worth discussing any more. Clearly, the headless turkeys have taken over the eBay farmyard and, in particular since the sociopath (psychopath?) John Donahoe has been given a key to the larger “disabled” cubicle in the executive wash room, eBay is, in relative terms, every quarter being flushed further and further down the toilet.

    Since April Fools Day (how apt!) and the dumping of all “store” items into core, eBay’s new Utah data center appears (still) to be effectively crippled or, if it is functioning as planned, it’s a very strange plan. Regardless, it would appear that for many users the eBay whale is now high and dry on a beach somewhere, has died, and the putrefying carcass is now very much on the nose.

    I suspect that eBay must be by now obtaining most of their shrinking revenue stream from re-listing fees for items that remain unsold, FVFs from shill-bidding sellers buying their own stuff, and from advertising on sellers’ item pages that takes buyers away from the seller and even away from eBay, than from fees on any genuine sales.

    By the way, how can an established, publicly listed, for-profit commercial entity, that is supposedly making so much money, manage to never pay its stockholders a dividend? It appears that the only people that have ever had any benefit out of eBay’s stash of overseas cash are the senior managing executives, and even they have been recently selling their eBay stock: eBay’s Chief Headless Turkey and Bain & Co shill, John Donahoe, is dribbling out his eBay stock sales on a monthly basis, probably hoping that no one will notice.

    Methinks that this latter-day “Captain Queeg” and his fellow incompetents are provisioning their personal lifeboats for the inevitable announcement that the now completed three-year Donahoe “turn around” cruise is indeed still “spinning” around, and around, and around, and, as a result of Donahoe’s “destructive innovations”, the rusting old hulk “eBay” is now so low in the water, it is on the point of going submarine.

    Surely, the people currently making the decisions at eBay need to be psychologically appraised: I suspect that they are all insane (the Koolaid has obviously detrimentally affected them), and one has to wonder just how much longer the eBay board is going to let this destructive Bain & Co shill and his cretinous minions continue their destruction of this once unique and commercially most successful entity.

    Shill Bidding on eBay: Case Study #4
    This latest study provides an indication of eBay’s desperation to mitigate its lessening sales activity and very effectively demonstrates eBay’s effective aiding and abetting of criminal shill bidding “wire fraud” activity by unscrupulous professional sellers on unsuspecting buyers.

    eBay’s third quarter results are due in less than two weeks (20th); undoubtedly we will again be treated to another large stool of creative reporting from the bowels of the eBafia Don.

    eBay/PayPal/Donahoe: Dead Men Walking.

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