What Happens in Vegas Keeps Us on eBay

Yesterday was the kickoff of eBay Live!, a three-day soiree that brings together more than 10,000 eBay buyers and sellers from around the world. The cost to attend the event is only $50, though I'm sure you can get a still better price somewhere on eBay. It's hard to imagine that an online garage sale has its own convention and 200 million members, isn't it?

The big announcement cast a ray of light on how Skype, the online telephony service that eBay accquired last October for billions (no exaggeration) of dollars, will be integrated into eBay.

During a rousing keynote speech, Meg Whitman explained that eBay sellers in certain categories will be able to opt in to a test and add Skype Me buttons to their listings. EBay is betting that Skype will improve communications between buyers and sellers—particularly in categories with complex transactions or where people want to connect with others who share their interests and passions. According to a Newsweek report issued just before the convention, those categories may include cars, real estate, and jewelry. The idea, says the article, is to make the eBay process more personal by adding an element of trust that has been lacking.

Needless to say, the eBay community is a vocal one when it comes to issues of trust, safety, and fraud. So there was big applause when Whitman said that beginning in mid-July, "if a seller resolves a dispute or wins a claim through PayPal Dispute Resolution, we'll protect them from the buyer filing a chargeback with their credit card company anyway (eliminating ‘double jeopardy' as we call it)." To learn more about the new buyer requirements for sellers, read Clayton Kunz's memo to the community on the topic. Whitman also touched on PayPal Mobile and eBay's major marketing partnership with Yahoo! to increase the presence of eBay items on Yahoo!

Other announcements included the start of eBay blogs and wikis and a new My Collectibles area where you can organize your treasures.

Other announcements from RedRoller and SageFire will let customers embed shipping and bookkeeping icons into their eBay pages to help them have smoother, more fluid transactions.