Not doing a World of Good for eBay
By Garry | May 24th, 2008 | Category: Fair Trade | No Comments »
A user on a forum I frequent, pointed me to an article in WebProNews about eBay’s most recent charity program called World of Good. It seems eBay are trying to leverage the goodwill from such programs very heavily during this time of escalated seller anger at the policies they’ve introduced this year.
Naturally I replied to the article, it appeared to be yet another example of the reporter simply rewriting an eBay press release, and getting things all wrong. It also made me remember an hour-long telephone conversation with an eBay staffer called Eric Tung last August …
Eric was one of the early engineers of the World of Good program for eBay, and naturally I set him straight concerning the needs of on-the-ground philanthropists, not the least of which was lowered bureaucracy and costs. Not that it appears to have affected their eligibility requirements at all.
It’s interesting that it’s taken almost a year before news-bloggers have noticed World of Good exists, given that it is an eBay-related program, and leaves a bitter taste in the mouth that eBay are insidiously pushing their charitable programs to the fore during this period of extreme unrest amongst their selling members.
But I guess it’s business as usual for eBay – the smoke and mirrors business that is.
