As a number of large technology vendors race to create full-spectrum digital marketing suites and omnichannel customer experiences, one player is here to remind them that it knows a thing or two about commerce.
And, when it comes to its advertising and paid media play, eBay’s launch of eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions today has much to do with data and attribution, its point of competitive differentiation, as one eBay executive described it.
“I think when you talk about a ‘connected commerce’ technology stack, it really becomes, ‘What is the attribution set?’ and ‘What’s the right efficacy on the spend?’ to be able to drive the right results for the client,” Steve Denton, eBay Enterprise’s VP of marketing solutions, told AdExchanger.
“One of the things that’s really important about what we’re accomplishing here,” he said, “as we leverage our connected commerce marketing suite is we’re really threading it with two specific items – proprietary data and access to data that comes from our clients’ data. We also have the ability to marry it up with other data sources, including that from our parent company, and then, in addition, threading it with attribution.”
The debut of eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions (EEMS) represents a unifying of a broad composite of digital-marketing solutions and agency services, which include MBS, for database marketing; ClearSaleing, for attribution; PepperJam Exchange, for affiliate and paid search; M3 Mobile, for mobile messaging; GSI Media, for sell-side media; FetchBack, for display and retargeting; and E-Dialog, for email and agency services through True Action and Silverlign.
The amalgamation of solutions and services illustrates that clients are “looking for a one-stop shop to go from creative to store to service, and that’s what eBay’s going after,” said Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO of Constellation Research. “Long-term, end-to-end commerce marketing is one piece” of what eBay Enterprise consists of, he added, in addition to eBay Marketplace and PayPal.
E-commerce and interactive-marketing services provider GSI Commerce, which eBay acquired for $2.4 billion in 2011, became officially known as eBay Enterprise last month. The platform counts 1,000 brands and retailers as clients, and did $4 billion worth of e-commerce transactions last year.
“To be very specific,” Denton said, when asked whether eBay fits the bill of an Amazon or an Adobe, competitively, “we see ourselves as a digital-marketing services provider. We have commerce in our DNA. It’s what we do. When we talk about commerce marketing, we talk about focusing on a transaction. For some of our clients, a transaction might be a sale and, for some, it might be an application or signing up for something, like a credit card or someone requesting more information about a product. To us, a transaction is driving more engagement.”
