Von Schirmeister has announced that the company is no longer made up of individual channels.
According to Alexander von Schirmeister, the eBay Europe vice president of marketing, operations, and advertising, the role of the company in retail is no longer defined by channels such as mobile commerce or online shopping, but is instead an overall shopping experience.
Von Schirmeister said that “eBay is not m-commerce or e-commerce, it’s commerce period.”
This announcement was made at the most recent IAB Mobile Engage conference, at which von Schirmeister was a speaker and spoke of the way in which eBay is an element of the global commerce economy, which is currently estimated to be worth approximately $10 trillion. His statement falls in line with the strategies that many experts have been recommending for some time, in which the line dividing the channels – such as e- and mobile commerce – should be eliminated as much as possible.
It is this type of online and mobile commerce turn that has now been taken by eBay.
Von Schirmeister explained that “eBay is no longer a standalone outlet, it fits into the way people shop. They research on their mobiles or laptops and purchase in store or vice versa, they make the final purchase online, and the catalyst behind this is mobile and how it’s really changed ecosystem of retail.” He also pointed out that mobile commerce has, in essence, given an entirely new and enhanced experience to physical retail, and that the commerce landscape has “fundamentally changed” as a result of it.
For this reason, he feels that retailers no longer have the luxury of choosing whether or not they will participate in online and mobile commerce because they are “obliged to have an online presence.”
He stated that eBay and technology have jointly reinvented the way that physical store locations must operate. Consumers will now go to a brick and mortar shop where an item is available after having already researched that item over mobile commerce or standard online channels, using a laptop, smartphone, or tablet, and then purchase the item at the store that they found in their research. This adds a new level of convenience to the shopping experience because it fuses the ease of online shopping with the instant gratification of obtaining the item offline.
