Three Ways Skype Could Have Been Integrated (and Monetized) Into eBay

One of the biggest and remarkable deals of the past years and “post” internet bubble was the acquisition of Skype by eBay for…a LOT of money!

That deal led to a lot of comments over the Internet (and offline, too), most of them highlighting reasonable concerns on how eBay could have leveraged Skype in order to get an “as quick as possible” return of investment.

After almost four years it is pretty clear to everyone that a deal like eBay-Skype was completely crazy and that eBay hasn’t, to date, shown a valuable way to monetize it and, eventually, integrate it into the eBay platform. The recent news coming from eBay confirm that the process to monetize it and integrate it into eBay will never really happen.

Given my experience with my company’s customer engagement service Sitofono, I know for sure that Skype hasn’t to be integrated into eBay as eBay did. Why? Here are three essential integration features which could have made the Skype acquisition worthwhile but that, unfortunately, never happened.

1) Tracking

Placing a Skype Call-Me button on an auction page is way far from the ideal approach. Each button should rather be related to that specific auction and all the traffic should be available to the seller from eBay’s web interface.

Each seller should be able to see who called, when and for what product. Moreover, if a transaction occurs thanks to a call, the seller (or the system, automatically) should be able to link the call to the sale and mark that call as “converted”.

2) Avoid disintermediation

All in (1) should also be helpful for eBay to track malicious behaviors by sellers, that is selling the product outside of eBay’s marketplace. An accurate tracking and monitoring should minimize this risk.

3) Give more value to the call

If a call leads to a sale, it means that call was VERY useful or, even better, it was fundamental for the positive conclusion of the online transaction. That call could be charged to the seller with an additional fee. If your sale was successful thanks to that call, you are more than happy to give that call the deserved value.

The three points above can be summarized as follows: Skype had to be declined specifically as a marketing tool rather than a VoIP service. A new service/product with a new name should have been launched (based on Skype), something specifically designed for the needs of people who sell something online through eBay.

For those people, especially for the PRO ones, it is very important to “convert” more visitors of their auctions into paying customers. Skype could have played a fundamental role to achieve this goal and to offer a very powerful tool to eBay’s clients. But, unfortunately, it failed.

Related articles by Zemanta

• eBay says Skype worth $2bn (theregister.co.uk)
• EBay plans to spin off Skype (money.cnn.com)
• What would you pay for Skype? (bizequity.com)
• Skype To Be Spun Off, Makes Plans for IPO (skypejournal.com)

Tagged as: Auction, EBay, luca filigheddu, Marketing, Shopping, sitofono, skype, Voice over Internet Protocol