PodSession: eBay shopping for partners

According to The Wall Street Journal eBay is talking to Microsoft and Yahoo! about partnerships that could help the auction giant better compete against Google and its expanding offerings. EBay is a large advertising spender but sees Google’s moves into e-commerce as a threat to its main businesses in auctions, PayPal, and Skype. Should eBay and other companies be afraid of Google as the search company expands to new areas? Is it fair to eBay sellers to exclude a large referral source such as Google?

I think eBay is just asserting itself in the marketplace and shopping around for some better deals with large ad accounts. Executives from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! will visit eBay to try and calm them down with some strategic partnerships and eBay might realize it paid McKinsey & Co a little too much.

Om and I talked about products we would love to see eBay build and we think they have the unique assets to make it happen. I’d love to see eBay develop better tools for shareware developers to easily list their software on Shopping.com or within eBay auctions, and handle software sales through PayPal. I’d also like to see eBay offer software such as Intuit QuickBooks Online to its power sellers.

Om and I discuss these issues and more in this week’s PodSession, eBay shopping for partners. The podcast is 20 minutes in length, a 9 MB download.