Former president and CEO of eBay, Meg Whitman, was thrust into the national spotlight once again after Republican presidential nominee John McCain dropped her name as possible Treasury Secretary at Tuesday night’s debate with Barack Obama. Judging from cofounder Pierre Omidyar’s Twitter account, he took issue with McCain’s assertions.
Shortly after Whitman left eBay in March of this year, she made the short list of possible McCain running mates. Perhaps she wasn’t “folksy” enough. McCain clearly hasn’t forgotten Whitman, mentioning her alongside Warren Buffett as possible Treasury Secretary to replace Henry “Fight Credit With Credit” Paulson. McCain also mentioned Whitman was CEO “of a company which started with 12 people.”
A real time reaction from Omidyar on Twitter shows Omidyar’s apparent objection. “Ahem. Started with 12 people?” he tweeted. A quick check of eBay’s own account of its beginning includes only Omidyar from his home computer in 1995. (Other accounts include a couple of others, though, including his PEZ dispenser collector of a girlfriend.) Whitman didn’t join eBay until 1998, after the company went public.
Omidyar’s clear dislike for McCain was evident in posts afterward, twice sarcastically referring to tax cuts McCain would allow him to keep instead of using that money to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Omidyar is worth about $10 billion, and clearly, like Buffett, feels he can spare a little.
One wonders if Whitman would also think so, also taking her place among the world’s richest. If so, it would be another way Whitman would find herself fairly alone among major Internet billionaires, who seem to lean Democrat. But when it comes to technology issues, Whitman has historically sided against Republicans. In the past, she’s been vocal about her support of Net Neutrality, and for consumer privacy protections, both issues McCain has erred on the side of deregulation and acquiescence to market forces.
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no more ebay
http://houstongoldandsilver.com/webstore/index.php
Successful eBay sellers are the people who have the skills necessary to be successful elsewhere and they are finding it more difficult to remain successful on eBay. These sellers are moving their inventory where they are making more margin for significantly less effort. For example, if we have an item with a Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) of $100, then we have on average a gross margin on our own website of $34, on Amazon the gross margin is $25, and on eBay the gross margin in $12. The Gross Margin is the Selling Price less the product costs (costs we pay to the manufacturer to obtain the product) and less the selling fees (including payment processing fees) we pay to Amazon or to eBay / Paypal. So to put it in a little different format: MSRP $100 item Gross margin - website $34 Gross margin - Amazon $25 Gross margin - eBay $12 The reason that eBay gross margin is so much lower is actually the function of two things - higher selling fees paid to eBay and lower average selling price. For an average item, the eBay buyer will not pay as much as the buyer who purchases from Amazon or directly through our website. In addition, we have to pay eBay an insertion fee per item as well as a final value fee per item which always comes out to a higher percentage than Amazon. So, in essence, we have to sell twice as much volume on eBay to make the same money as Amazon or three times as much volume on eBay to make the same money as our website. That, in and of itself, is a problem. However, the even bigger problem is that the amount of effort to make one sale on eBay is about 9 times more than the effort through the alternate channels. Communicating with eBay buyers is so labor intensive because they require so much more hand-holding and eBay actually encourages unnecessary communication and punishes sellers who do not do so (for example, in the recent Town Hall meeting, Stephanie suggested that sellers should email every buyer personally who pays with an echeck to explain the echeck process and let the buyer know that their item will be shipped when the echeck clears). If we adjust the gross margins based on the EFFORT we put forth to actually generate a sale and to follow through on that sale (including begging the buyer to finally pay for the item they purchased) and the after-care of the sale, our table would look like this: MSRP $100 item (adjusted for order generation and processing time) Gross margin - website $34 Gross margin - Amazon $25 Gross margin - eBay $1.33 Now, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that we should be continuing our efforts to move off eBay
Omidyar was founder but Whitman???
McCain needs to re-think Whitman. I generally like his platform but Meg Whitman???
Is she truly the best choice in the country for treasury secretary?? Attributing ALL of ebays success to Whitman ignores the early success that ebay had before Whitman. Ebays success was partially fueled by the participation of the small sellers that ebay is now throwing under the bus by the thousands.
She was also responsible for the ridiculous Skype acquisition. She also laid the groundwork for the complete dismantling of ebay as we know it. She also hand picked John Donahoe as her replacement. I think Skype was a brilliant decision compared to picking JD!
Re: Pierre Omidyar
If the Pez dispenser story is myth, it has been widely propagated by Omidyar himself in interviews and biographys and has been around since I first became aware of Ebay years ago.
Scary
I was hanging with McCain until that comment. The thought of Whitman as Treasury Secretary was too much. The problem I see with that logic is that she did not take a sinking ship and make is sail with ebay, so where are her credentials? She made a good thing better and then set it up to sink the main street folks. We need a rescue, not an improvement, and one that will HELP main street!
the fact is
Omidyar’s billion dollar fortune was made in large part by Whitman's efforts. I am not her biggest fan but eBay might have gone the way of many other tech companies of that era if it were not for her. For anyone that doubts that just look at the state of the once great eBay since she has left the company. It is now a sinking ship.
http://www.rexxsales.com
Alot of the changes were
Alot of the changes were already in the pipeline long before she left and she signed off on all that came down. It has gotten worse since she left but she was very aware of what was going to happen with dissruptive change that was implimented and she is as much to blame for eBays downfall.
Omidyar was founder, not
Omidyar was founder, not "cofounder". There was no cofounder. The Pez story is a myth (as in not true).
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