In a recent article, Phil Wolff at Skype Journal has pointed out that eBay is going through a very public separation from Skype. The most recent evidence is the removal of a link to Skype from the listing of “More eBay Sites” on the service’s home page.

More to the point, eBay issued a letter to its customers saying that it was removing the Skype-based click-to-chat or click-to-talk buttons from their listings, effective June 10. EBay’s management cites “limited buyer and seller usage”. But it is more likely that the company, which derives significant revenue by taking a percentage of the value of transactions carried out through its resources, had no incentive to encourage interactions, and the subsequent transactions, to be carried out over a synchronous voice or text-chat conversations.

This should not be taken as a dismissal of voice communications (or chat for that matter) as a vital way for buyers and sellers to communicate in conjunction with Internet based commerce. The opposite is true. With the introduction of more robust IP-based telephony services and companies taking advantage of telephony APIs for e-commerce hosts (like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure) we expect to see rapid-fire introduction of services that can quickly toggle from clicks to conversations.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Recombinant Telephony, eBay, Skype, IP telephony, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure