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eBay launches ‘Neighborhoods’ feature

Hoping to woo shoppers who say eBay has lost its folksy appeal, the world’s largest online auction plans to launch its own version of a social networking service Wednesday and is promising other customer-friendly features by year’s end.

The “Neighborhoods” feature encourages users to post photos, product reviews, tips and responses — creating a far more visual and interactive experience than eBay’s text-based discussion forums.

The move is one result of a broad reorganization strategy started in late 2006, when the San Jose, California-based e-commerce leader’s scorching growth rate began to slow.

Individuals listed 480 million items on eBay in the second quarter, down 6% from the first quarter and down 2% from a year earlier. The number of listings by “power sellers” who operated eBay stores was 79.1 million — unchanged from the previous quarter but down 25% from a year earlier.

Many users complain that the site’s size — it listed 559.1 million items worth $14.46 billion (euro10.3 billion) in the second quarter — can make it tough to find and purchase a specific product quickly. Users are turning to rivals such as Seattle-based Amazon.com, Salt Lake City, Utah-based Overstock.com Inc. and Chicago-based uBid Inc.

“We knew we had to change things internally because we could not innovate with the effectiveness or speed we needed,” spokesman Hani Durzy said Tuesday.

Marketplaces President John Donahoe spearheaded a “philosophical shift” this year in which engineers, product managers, quality assurance representatives and other employees were regrouped from traditional function-based “silos” into two teams — a buyer experience team and a seller experience team.

Neighborhoods — which aggregates postings from eBay blogs, guides and reviews — was the brainchild of an “engagement” subgroup of the buyer-experience team.

Among the 600 new neighborhoods is “Shoe Heads,” intended as a haven for footwear fashionistas. Others range from Beyonce to Battlestar Galactica, and still more will be formed based on popularity of search terms and community feedback.

“People who are passionate about certain brands, trends, celebrities or products have been discovering and trading with one another for years,” said Jamie Iannone, an eBay vice president in charge of buyer experience. “Neighborhoods makes this even easier.”

Later this year eBay will roll out “One Click Bid,” which should boost a buyer’s chances of winning during the final 15 minutes. EBay also plans to streamline its “My eBay” service and speed its cumbersome checkout process.

And it is beta testing features called “Snapshot View,” the e-commerce equivalent of window shopping; “Best Match,” an automatic sorting option; and “Countdown,” which features improvements in real-time auction monitoring.

Building a sense of community should keep buyers and sellers at eBay longer, experts said Tuesday.

EBay building neighborhoods is the equivalent of Nordstrom or another brick-and-mortar retailer adding a cafe and lounge.

“The idea is this will provide more ‘stickiness’ so a user will come back more often, spend more time there and will more likely purchase items,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst at research firm IDC. “This should make consumers’ lives a whole lot easier.”

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Mystery eBay ‘hack’ exposes 1,200 accounts

eBay is one of the most successful Internet-only ventures of all time, so it’s not surprising that it has come under near-constant attack by fraudsters and hackers. In the latest attempt, a hacker logged on to the eBay Trust and Security forums and pretended to post as 1,200 separate users, making it appear as if he had actually logged in with each user’s account. The posts contained the users’ names, contact information, and credit card numbers.

That done, the hacker posted a video of his exploits on YouTube to celebrate his “achievement” (the video has subsequently been taken down). In response, eBay and LiveWorld—the third-party software firm that operates eBay’s web-based forums—took the entire Trust and Security forum offline while they looked into the problem. The forum was taken down 90 minutes after the posts first hit the Web and was put back online later that day.

eBay issued an official statement on its eBay Chatter forum, stating that while the posts appeared to contain credit card information, the posted numbers did not correspond to credit card information that eBay had on file for those users. Nevertheless, the user names and contact information were accurate, and eBay claims they are attempting to get in contact by phone with each of the 1,200 users to ensure that they can protect themselves from any attempts at hijacking their accounts. At this time, eBay is unclear as to whether or not the accounts have been fully compromised. It is also not certain that only these 1,200 accounts are affected.

While the original posts and the YouTube video showing the list of names have been removed from the Web, an eBay member has grabbed as many of the account names as possible and posted them on a personal web site so that people can easily check to see if their account was one of the original 1,200. So far, the operator of this list has not been asked by eBay to take it down.

While this particular attack may not have revealed customers’ credit card information, there are plenty of fraudsters about who are trying their hardest to scam people out of their money: a helpful eBay forum member even posted a list of an astonishing 36 common scams currently being perpetrated against eBay users. Most of these involve social manipulation and phishing scams rather than direct attack, but clearly they are effective: videos of hacked accounts posting over 60,000 items for bid show what the bad guys are likely to do once they have your account information. It’s always a good idea to practice skeptical computing, but eBay users should take even greater care to ensure that they are not taken in by any of these scams.

An eBay representative did not return our request for a comment in time for publication.

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