EBay launches service to assist large merchants

Nov 27,2008 00:00 by saroja

EBay quietly began offering a service Monday to help large merchants sell thousands of fixed-price products through eBay.

The new program, Large Merchant Services, is still in the beta stage, according to eBay. It "provides an efficient way to process large numbers of transactions within the eBay Trading Platform." It also offers inventory management based on SKU numbers.

The service competes with Amazon's professional merchant services.

EBay already sells branded fixed-price goods on eBay.com and on shopping.com. But this new service expands upon a concept started when eBay started the now defunct eBay Express.

"EBay is acknowledging the strength of Amazon's model, and clearly they're making changes to target the same enterprise branded-seller market upon which Amazon has built their third-party seller program," said Eric Best, chief executive officer of Mercent, a Seattle-based company that helps retailers take advantage of eBay's new service.

Ebay's Large Merchant Services is the first major competitive offering to Amazon's merchant services, Best said.

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