advertisement
advertisement

eBay Declares “Mobile Sunday”: Please Shoot Me Now

Written by Evan Schuman
December 15th, 2010

On Monday (Dec. 13), eBay announced a term it wanted to standardize: “Mobile Sunday.” This news prompted us to declare Tarantula Tuesday, the day when Web spiders work harder than any other day of the year. Or perhaps Webcast Wednesday, to celebrate the highest traffic day of the year for Webcasts that declare some other stupid made-up-day event. But wait, the eBay news release gets even better.

Quoteth the release: eBay “sets records on the busiest mobile shopping day ever,” a feat that is even more impressive because it’s the “second year in a row” such mobile records have been broken. Isn’t this akin to a retailer in 1995 declaring that it just had the highest E-Commerce traffic ever? M-Commerce is just kicking in, so of course everybody is having their highest mobile year ever. In fact, I’ll bet that everyone is experiencing amazing triple-digit percentage growth in mobile, too. Retail stats are confusing enough without marketing making up bogus days and offering silly comparisons.


advertisement

2 Comments | Read eBay Declares “Mobile Sunday”: Please Shoot Me Now

  1. Dawn Says:

    really they should make it a mobile monday so the Ms stick together.
    i’m seeing greeting cards now developing with these cyber day celebrations. Is hallmark reading?
    do we HAVE to offer free shipping again on this day, so we can lose more profit too?

    i must disagree on the triple digit growth comment though. any time you can start a new channel and get high adoption is a grand thing.

  2. Evan Schuman Says:

    Absolutely agree that getting high adoption is a grand thing. Touting the revenue and number of mobile sales made is terrific. It’s simply the percentage issue that I found silly.

Newsletters

StorefrontBacktalk delivers the latest retail technology news & analysis. Join more than 60,000 retail IT leaders who subscribe to our free weekly email. Sign up today!
advertisement

Most Recent Comments

Why Did Gonzales Hackers Like European Cards So Much Better?

I am still unclear about the core point here-- why higher value of European cards. Supply and demand, yes, makes sense. But the fact that the cards were chip and pin (EMV) should make them less valuable because that demonstrably reduces the ability to use them fraudulently. Did the author mean that the chip and pin cards could be used in a country where EMV is not implemented--the US--and this mis-match make it easier to us them since the issuing banks may not have as robust anti-fraud controls as non-EMV banks because they assumed EMV would do the fraud prevention for them Read more...
Two possible reasons that I can think of and have seen in the past - 1) Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code. 2) Also, in offline chip countries the card determines whether or not a transaction is approved, not the issuer. In my experience, European issuers haven't developed the same checks on authorization requests as US issuers. So, these cards might be more valuable because they are more likely to get approved. Read more...
A smart card slot in terminals doesn't mean there is a reader or that the reader is activated. Then, activated reader or not, the U.S. processors don't have apps certified or ready to load into those terminals to accept and process smart card transactions just yet. Don't get your card(t) before the terminal (horse). Read more...
The marketplace does speak. More fraud capacity translates to higher value for the stolen data. Because nearly 100% of all US transactions are authorized online in real time, we have less fraud regardless of whether the card is Magstripe only or chip and PIn. Hence, $10 prices for US cards vs $25 for the European counterparts. Read more...
@David True. The European cards have both an EMV chip AND a mag stripe. Europeans may generally use the chip for their transactions, but the insecure stripe remains vulnerable to skimming, whether it be from a false front on an ATM or a dishonest waiter with a handheld skimmer. If their stripe is skimmed, the track data can still be cloned and used fraudulently in the United States. If European banks only detect fraud from 9-5 GMT, that might explain why American criminals prefer them over American bank issued cards, who have fraud detection in place 24x7. Read more...

StorefrontBacktalk
Our apologies. Due to legal and security copyright issues, we can't facilitate the printing of Premium Content. If you absolutely need a hard copy, please contact customer service.