After many slideware references, mocked-up screen shots, and a trial in China, eBay today announced the long-awaited launch of “SkypeMe” functionality in the US in 14 seller categories starting June 19. It is still billed as a “pilot program,” but this announcement represents the next major step in the march towards widespread adoption of “presence-awareness and instant communications” by publishers of online auction and classified sites.
ContactAtOnce! is the only solution purpose-built to help eBay’s competitors enable the same functionality on their sites, so this announcement should be good news for us!
The 14 eBay seller categories that will be enabled are:
- Automotive
- GPS devices
- Camera and photo lenses and filters
- Wired networking routers
- Skype devices
- VOIP / Internet telephony
- Diamond solitaire rings
- Real estate (residential, commercial)
- Manufacturing and metalworking
- Beds
- NBA basketball cards
- Silver coins
- Lost in Space collectibles [!How aboout that for a category!]
- Radio control toys
- Cars and trucks
Not surprisingly, “Cars and Trucks” and “Real Estate” are on the list. These are the two categories where ContactAtOnce! has seen great interest so far. But it makes sense that any category with high consideration products or services, where consumers might have the all-important one-or-two key questions to ask, would make the list.
Here’s a little bit more from the release:
Beginning June 19, sellers will have the option to add a “Skype Me” button to their item listings when completing the “Sell your Item” form. If the Skype option is selected by the seller, a “Skype Me” button will appear in a new “Ask a seller a question” section. By clicking on the button, buyers will be able to communicate with sellers using voice, text chat or both. Buyers can use Skype to instantly request more information about a specific item and interact with the seller in real-time. This functionality will be available at no cost to users.
For those that missed it, I previously posted about how ContactAtOnce! and Skype compare, and about how ContactAtOnce! complements the public IM/VoIP solutions (including Skype).
What the VoIP providers are missing…
As reported by Tom Keating in his blog, click-to-call provider eStara put their PR team to work yesterday in trying to spin the eBay/Skype announcement. Their spin, naturally, was VoIP-centric. In their press release, Joe Siegrist, Senior Vice President of Technology, is quoted as saying “Companies are beginning to realize the commercial uses of VoIP are huge”, and elsewhere in the release, “eBay has correctly seen the potential of the pay per call market.”
Of course VoIP is an important part of the story, and pay-per-call is an interesting topic (though it was not mentioned at all by eBay), but what’s missing entirely from eStara’s assessment is “presence”. Skype brings presence to eBay listings, and that’s powerful. VoIP is just a commodity, but being able to project visual cues that accurately reflect the availability of sellers to answeri potential buyers’ questions is not. Presence is, in my view, the real news.
There are many, many other posts on this blog espousing the value of presence in the context of online ads, listings, and landing pages so there’s no need to go back over them. Make no mistake, eBay’s integration of Skype is about a lot more than VoIP, it’s about the combination of presence and instant communications. eBay has placed a very large bet that the combination will accelerate their revenues and improve both the buying and selling experience for their users.
ContactAtOnce! delivers the same combination for publishers and individual advertisers, and our customers have already proven that eBay is right about the benefits. Soon, every online publisher will offer their advertisers/sellers the option of enabling presence and instant communications from within an ad or listing, and we plan to be the service provider for the most successful of those publishers!