I recently read that eBay Bans Google Checkout. I don’t think that was smart.

You’d think that such a large, progressive company would learn from the mistakes of so many other companies who have built silos around themselves. Apple wouldn’t allow the creation of “Apple compatible” hardware, and now it’s computer systems and software have 2.5% market share and they have started offering their competitors’ processors! Music producers didn’t embrace digital music for a long time— they stubbornly focused on CDs, and they missed the revenue they could have had but instead lost to illegal downloading. The Soviet Union cut itself off from the democratic world, and it eventually crumbled due to social and economic pressures.

eBay Isn’t Invincible

eBay just happens to have the largest, most established marketplace. But that won’t stop people from leaving like rats fleeing from a sinking ship. If another firm comes along and makes it easier to carry out an auction and make a transaction, then eBay will start losing ground to them.

The winner in the auction game will be the player who makes it easy and secure.

A huge part of easy is offering different payment methods. The site that wins will accept VISA, Mastercard, Discover, American Express, checks, money orders, PayPal, Google Checkout, bank transfers, and many other methods, in every world currency. Maybe they will even allow bartering—I’ll trade you my Elvis CD for your used bicycle!

PayPal Isn’t What Makes You Special

Remember, eBay, Paypal isn’t what makes you special. People don’t visit eBay.com for PayPal. They visit because there are a lot of people selling stuff and it is reasonably easy to carry out an acceptably secure transaction. As soon as someone does it better, perhaps by offering PayPal AND Google Checkout, you will start to lose this game.

Focus on Your Core Competency

Working with people to fill their core needs is the best strategy for a company to pursue. Be open and willing to work with lots of people and systems. Products and services like Amazon and Google Maps have been enormously successful because they have opened their APIs to allow others to work with them. eBay should allow people to pay however they want to—its focus is the auction itself.

At this point, I should put on a lab coat and shout, “It’s Alive! IT’S ALIVE! Hahahahaha!” Bringing stuff back from the dead will do that to you.

I’ve been working with some clients lately who have asked us to “bring back” some dead sites—sites that are not ranked for any terms in search engines and which get few visitors.

Learning Experiences

Two of these sites in particular were learning experiences. My coworkers at Sebo Marketing and I went through our typical site (re)building process—we made a list of keywords, we had a graphic designer come up with something contemporary and professional, we coded the site in standards-compliant code, we optimized our pages for search engines, and we provided plenty of what we like to call “spider food”—lots of pages with good link structure and content that spiders love.

And then we waited.

We’re still waiting, more than 6 months later.

External Links

One of the main weaknesses of these two sites is that our external linking campaigns were weak. They were the kind of sites that people wouldn’t mind visiting but weren’t likely to link to, even if you asked them nicely.

Spider Visit Frequency

Our biggest mistake by far was that we didn’t find out when search engine spiders visited the sites last. As it turns out, both sites had been dead and not visited by search engine spiders for over a year. The content hadn’t been updated and the sites had sucked for so long that the spiders haven’t been back and haven’t seen the wonderful redesign we did.

Let this be a lesson to all of you excited site renovators out there—if the site hasn’t been visited by a spider in a long time, and if an external linking campaign promises to be difficult, please proceed with caution, or at least a LOT of patience.

It may be better to start over on a new server (update the domain name to point at the new server) and get sandboxed by Google and then get out—six months in the sandbox is better than a year between spider visits!