"SO"
eBay is having a Town Hall broadcast today at 11:30 AM Pacific Time. They will no doubt be fielding questions on the Fixed-Price 30-Day listing format, the fact that Search is broken, eBay layoffs, and all the other stuff that has gone wrong lately.
There may not be any clear answers, and it will ultimately be frustrating to listen to. I have a little game I like to play during these Town Hall meetings. I keep a piece of paper handy, and I jot down each time an eBay staffer inappropriately starts a sentence or reply with the word "So."
Let me give you some examples from the August Town Hall transcript. It's stunning how the San Jose types fall into this mannerism. I've highlighted the obviously inappropriate and totally unnecessary occurrences, drop the "so" and see how much more clear their replies would be:
Let's start with the boss, Lorrie Norrington:
Lorrie: So let me cover two of the areas, which are Pricing and Finding. And then I’ll ask Steph to pickup on Shipping. So one of the items we’re most excited about is the changes we’re making to fees for fixed price listings. And we’re dramatically reducing the upfront cost for our sellers by lowering insertions fees. And then we’re adjusting or raising the success base final value fee on the back end for fixed price listings.
So what does this all mean? It means a thirty-five cent flat fee on all fixed price listings, regardless of item price, quantity listed, and it’s good for up to a thirty day duration. So this is a big change; one flat fee, thirty day duration. And you can list as many identical items as you want in a multi-quantity listing for the same low insertion fee. So we simplified insertion fees, we’ve lowered insertion fees, and we’ve extended duration and enabled multi-listing. So in addition to that, we have introduced a fifteen cent insertion fee for media items; which are books, movies, music and video games, and a five cent insertion fee starting on September 16th. And through the end of the year, when you sell media items using the prefilled item information or the catalog. So some big changes there.
Stephanie Tilenius is one of the worst offenders:
Stephanie: So buyers have told us time and time again, that shipping costs on eBay are just too high. In fact, excess shipping is the number one reason buyers say they’ve had a bad experience on eBay. So this is causing buyers to move to other channels and make their purchases elsewhere, which of course, ends up hurting our sellers. So we have decided we need to work with sellers to create a marketplace with free and reasonable shipping. So today, or Wednesday, we actually announced we were setting maximum shipping caps based on historical data of what buyers told us is reasonable shipping. And this will keep more buyers satisfied and help sellers drive more sales.
So let me explain what that means. We’re introducing limits on shipping and handling charges in media categories. So we’re starting with media, where items are generally more consistent in size and weight and where we believe the buyer expectations are particularly heightened for free and reasonable shipping. And we’re gonna learn a lot in the media category and then work to rollout reasonable shipping in other categories as we see fit and as we hear from buyers.
Jamie Iannone, VP of Buyer Experience loves the "so" word a lot, but for no apparent grammatical reason:
Griff: Thank you, Keith. Let’s take a question that came in earlier. This one is about best match and duplicate items. “Since eBay implemented the new search criteria, starting July 31st, limiting the display of duplicate items shown in search from the same seller, our sales have plummeted. Is eBay aware of what a drastic effect this has had on many sellers?” And Jamie, I think this one is for you.
Jamie: Sure. So let me backup and talk about why we did this and what we’re seeing. So the goal of this was about a month ago, we relaxed our 15 Item Rule, so sellers could actually list more on the site.
here's another:
Griff:Thank you. 877-474-3302. Let’s go back, this is a question I hear a lot too. You know, we talk about we want more buyers to come, and a lot of sellers are asking this very question, Jamie. “So your changes are well and good functionality wise but what exactly are you doing to bring buyers here? How will they know about this new buying experience?”
Jamie:Yeah, thanks Griff. So obviously, a key part is marketing to our buyers about a lot of the changes that are coming on the site today. So we have a pretty extensive product marketing plan to let buyers know about some of the exciting changes that they’ll see. Frankly, I think it’ll be pretty obvious to them when they come to the site hopefully, that there’s a lot more great inventory to shop through, etcetera. But over the course of you know, this month and the next few months, we’re continuing to put a lot of dollars to work out there on the web, buying traffic to bring buyers into the marketplace. And we’ll be doing a lot of product marketing around the new features that we have on the site. One of which that’s launching this week actually makes the product experience a lot easier when you’re buying a specific catalog item. So if you’re surfing the site today or probably starting tomorrow, you’ll actually see we have a new implementation of shipping via catalogs or products. That’s actually really great and much, much easier for buyers to use.
Here's Kristina Klausen, Dir. of Shipping
Griff: Um, actually, it does have it built in.
Kristina: So Frank, just to clarify. It’s Kristina, from the Shipping Team. Are you offering free shipping on, you want to offer it on all the items in your multiple item listing?
Caller: Yes, that’s what I’ve always been doing.
Kristina: Okay. So you can do that. Um, I’m just trying to understand what the problem is.
SO. Get the point? So while most people begin a sentence with "So" in response to a question, or to logically connect one thought to another, eBay people just use it instead of "ummm" to fill space.
Play the game! Make a mark every time the word is used inappropriately and let me know your counts! Listen to eBay's Town Hall meeting live today - or catch the archived version when you need some painful fun.
By the way, if you'd like to see the proper ways to use the word "so" in a sentence, check out the Merriam-Webster site at: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/so%5B1%5D
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Ah, ha ha hah :-D Naughty Steve.
“So” was a top-selling record by Peter Gabriel.
So thanks for pointing that out Phil.
haha.
I listened to the town hall and they say SO about 15,000 times!!
During last month’s Town Hall Meeting and Webinars I became frustrated at my continued focus on the number of times the word “so” was said. I couldn’t concentrate on what was being said because I was distracted.
In our office, we listened as a group and we all banged on the table every time we heard “so” and it became obnoxious after awhile.
Until your blog post, we thought we were the only ones who noticed and we are SO SO SO glad that we weren’t the only ones!