CEO Meg Whitman admitted this week that eBay Inc. hasn’t kept up with changes in e-commerce and plans a big push into social networking with “eBay To Go”–a service that lets registered users place eBay.com content in online social networks and blogs.
“EBay To Go is exactly the kind of product we think demonstrates the innovation we’re putting against our goals of reengaging our users and making the auction experience fun,” Whitman said in a conference call with analysts this week. With large numbers of consumers using social networking sites and blogs, she added, eBay wants to make it easy for them to take content from eBay, including product listings and other material, and place it on MySpace.com, personal blogs and other sites to generate more traffic back to eBay.com.
EBay is beginning to test eBay To Go, which users can try out at ToGo.eBay.com. Within about two minutes, eBay To Go users can create a widget with Flash technology to drop content into other web sites, a spokesman says.
Whitman says eBay To Go will coincide with other improvements to eBay.com this year intended to make the site easier for users to shop and add their own content. “We’ll see more changes over the next several months than have taken place over the last several years,” Whitman said in the conference call.
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