Gary Kim recently penned a post about eBay spinning off Skype as a cautionary tale for communications enabled business processes. I enjoy reading Gary’s posts and do so daily, but I have to respectfully disagree with Gary in this case. This divorce has much more to do with eBay’s internal teams simply not looking for communications solutions outside the current auction platform process more than not seeing value in CEBP.

In my view, the primary reason Skype was never a good fit for eBay is eBay’s direct communications resistant culture. In my experience, you can’t contact eBay via phone—they don’t support a call center or anything that resembles live customer service. Try to find a number to call on the eBay site—you won’t find one. If eBay doesn’t see value in enabling direct communication channels with its customers, why would they see value in Skype, a consumer-focused direct communications platform? You can see where this relationship was oil and water from the get-go and destined to fail.

eBay missed some opportunities to leverage Skype to create and integrate new communications processes within their core offering, the eBay auction platform.

Skype could have been leveraged within the eBay platform to mitigate fraud and weed out unqualified bidders, especially in high value auctions, such as those for cars or motorcycles on eBay Motors. These categories have a known problem with fraudsters and unqualified bidders, as anyone who has ever sold a car or motorcycle on eBay can attest.

If a phone call were required to take place between the bidder and seller, it would cause many of the fraudsters to disappear–especially if the bidder were required to enter a valid phone number that the seller would then call to verify the bidder. I know this is not a perfect situation and that verifying a phone number doesn’t solve fraud by itself, but even a 5-10% drop in fraudulent activity would be a huge step in the right direction. Then again, admitting you have a problem with fraud raises other larger systemic issues.

Personally, I would want to have a conversation with the seller if I were buying a car sight unseen from an online auction. I would have a laundry list of questions I would want to ask before I felt comfortable paying someone across the country a substantial sum of money for an item I have never seen or touched! To me, having a voice conversation would make me more comfortable with the transaction overall.

In eBay’s defense, I understand their hesitancy to allow phone calls between buyers and sellers because they could potentially circumvent the auction process, meaning eBay would not be able to collect their end of auction fees. But if the auction is over, what would be the harm?

Another use for Skype on the eBay platform could have been adding click-to-call functionality using Skype to enable calls between 3rd party providers on the eBay platform and consumers. For example, under an auto listing I found a callout titled ‘eBay recommended services’ and noticed there were 3 providers: a link for a company offering an auto history report, another link for a company offering auto shipping, and finally a link for a company offering auto financing. There is no doubt that each of these companies have call centers and would love to receive inbound calls for quotes for their services! Why couldn’t these types of calls be allowed to be initiated from the eBay site? It wouldn’t affect the auction itself since these are ancillary services and would instead be a value-added service that eBay could charge a premium for!

One final stretch of an idea is the idea of a live auction via conference and the web. A big part of the excitement of a live auction is the interaction between auctioneer, audience and bidders. That excitement is something an online auction can never recreate. However, if you were able to bridge a group of bidders onto a live call together, couldn’t you create some of that same excitement? Obviously, this strategy is only appropriate for high value items, but it could have been a unique use of the Skype platform mashed up with the auction platform eBay pioneered.

Alas, it seems that none of this matters as the divorce has been announced and will likely come to pass. It’s just a shame that eBay and Skype were never able to innovate together. Sadly, this divorce has nothing to do with CEBP at all, but instead comes down to a simple culture clash. I think eBay really missed some opportunities to leverage Skype—opportunities that will avail themselves as CEBP evolves and becomes a more visible movement in the enterprise space.

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