eBay and Mobile: Big Time Sales

Did you know that eBay generated $8.7 billion in sales last year?

Did you know that eBay generated $0.6 billion in mobile sales last year?

Did you know that eBay is expecting to generate $1.5 billion in mobile sales this year (see Get Elastic and eBay).

Hint: You are beaten over the head by Social Media, a craft that, outside of personal brands, has a hard time demonstrating that even 1% of sales can be tracked to it. You're being told that "print isn't dead", even though print-based sales have been in decline for a decade. And then there is mobile, which gets talked about a lot in the tech world but not much in marketing circles. And you can generate sales, easily measured sales.

My job, of course, is to measure whether mobile sales are incremental, or whether they cannibalize traditional e-commerce. That's fun stuff, because $1.5 billion in measured sales can be $0.2 billion in incremental sales --- nobody talks about that, or the ramifications of outcomes like that.

Regardless whether the sales are incremental or cannibalized, it's obvious that every company I work with needs a mobile strategy.