This is a big week in the world of e-commerce:
Between the two companies we'll get a feel for how e-commerce in 2011 is shaping up and how some global economic situations (UK austerity, Japan disaster) could adversely impact global e-commerce.
What Wall St is looking for from eBay in Q1 2011
Wall St primarily looks at two things with eBay:
Wall St. is very concerned about the impact of the UK economic slowdown and the Japan disaster. eBay has a lot of exposure in the UK and little/zero in Japan so I suspect a lot of the Q+A will be around PayPal and the UK situation.
What sellers are looking at from eBay's Q1
We have always encouraged sellers to look at eBay's earnings for a couple of reasons:
We encourage sellers to look at these metrics for benchmarking purposes and to help decide on the appropriate channel mix:
What ChannelAdvisor is seeing
Comscore is reporting 11% y/y growth in 2011 vs. 2010 and we're seeing similar numbers with the exception of March which seemed a little slow.
For eBay we saw ~5% growth y/y through Q1 from a same-store-sales perspective. We saw some UK SSS slowdown in March, but nothing alarming. Large brands continue to be attracted to eBay. However, not all successful. What works well is a strategy to leverage eBay as an outlet or liquidation center as illustrated by this recent Jockey case study featured in Internet Retailer.
Disclosure: I am long Google and Amazon. eBay is an investor at ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.
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