eBay Partners with Spring for Fashion
Spring is a top online retail destination for fashion items from well-known brands such as David Yurman, Rag & Bone, Mango and Chloe. The company was founded in 2013 in New York and has attracted almost 1500 top fashion brands.
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In some ways, it is a marketplace itself as it provides the technical infrastructure for brands to offer a direct to consumer sales channel.
On Wednesday, both companies announced they formed a partnership to provide about 300 top brands on the eBay platform. Many will be new to eBay and the companies hope this will benefit both online channels as more buyers learn about each other’s marketplaces.
“Spring’s mission is to bring top brands to consumers at a variety of tastes, style, and prices. Our new partnership with eBay helps further this mission and expand our reach. Both Spring and eBay are committed to offering unparalleled selection across the best brands – including the newest, hottest styles, sold-out or hard-to-find merchandise, and great deals for every price and style.”
Alan Tisch, Founder & CEO of Spring
EBAY PUSH FOR FASHION
Spring has about 160,000 items for sale right now on eBay. Surprisingly, to date, the company’s feedback has not been very good. So it seems eBay may be helping them maintain a top rated seller status when other sellers would usually not qualify.
Since the business model by Spring is to work with manufacturers, it appears most items are drop-shipped from manufacturer warehouses. A check of various listings shows different item locations for individual brands.
Many delivery times seem pretty long as well, often estimating 5 to 9 days. And not all products offer free shipping.
eBay seems to have bent over backward to get Spring on the platform and allow it to get away with some “average” customer service.
Obviously, Spring has great brand partnerships. And for eBay, there is a keen interest to get some of these brands on the site from a seller guaranteed to sell authentic merchandise.
Spring does seem to heavily lean on visuals and items specifics and very little on descriptions. That may come from the fact they purposely promote their products to be sold on mobile devices.
eBay considers Spring a marquee seller. But for that to become a reality on their platform, Spring is going to need to get on board with eBay’s eCommerce best practices.
It is a bit odd that eBay would spend a lot of time during eBay Open 2017 discussing the changing face of eCommerce and then go and promote a seller that doesn’t perform to those standards.
AVOID OLD HABITS TO COME BACK TO HAUNT EBAY
Under the previous management, eBay came under fire from long time sellers in what appeared to be apparent favoritism to brand name retailers.
Often, they did not seem to maintain best selling practices but would hold on to Top Seller status, providing them with a bump in search results.
For this “partnership” to work, eBay will need to work with Spring to up the service. Otherwise, this is just a revisit of an old habit that previously damaged eBay’s reputation with sellers.
Over the last couple years, the company has worked too hard to shed the sins of the past. A misstep here and all the rebuild goodwill will come undone quickly.
What do you think? Is this is a good decision by eBay to partner with Spring? Let us know in the comments section below.
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Richard Meldner
Richard is co-founder of eSeller365. He has over 17 years of experience on eBay which includes tens of thousands of sales to buyers in over 100 countries and even has experience with eBay’s VeRO program enforcing intellectual property rights for a former employer. And for about two years Richard sold products on Amazon using Amazon FBA in the US.
To “relax” from the daily business grind, for a few weekends a year, he also works for IMSA as a professional race official.