The ongoing holiday selling season -- both online and in the malls -- will enter the home stretch  with the celebration of Thanksgiving, and eBay wants to be ready.
On Tuesday, the company announced the Deals app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Deals is designed, eBay says, to make it easier to find the best offers from amid the millions of listings on the site. The free app can be downloaded from iTunes.
eBay Deals is not the company's only recent development. eBay has also upgraded its existing iPhone app with social-networking integration and other features. The company also has made available a mobile web interface (m.ebay.com), which works on any browser-equipped mobile phone.
A Different Approach for eBay
Steve Yankovich, vice president of business solutions and mobile for eBay, said the new application takes a different approach than the mobile apps already offered by the company. The current apps focus on finding products that the user is actively looking for, while Deals monitors auctions against stored keywords and sends notices -- which are simply accessed and reacted to -- even if the customer isn't currently using the system . Saved searches, Yankovich said, become icons on the user interface.
"The Deals is a little different in that what comes up may not be something on your [immediate] shopping list," Yankovich said. "It's basically an efficient way to get through the roughly 200 million listings to find something that is good for you."
Clearly, Deals aims to optimize eBay's revenues during the holiday shopping season. Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis for comScore, said the online outlook in general is shaping up as somewhat better than last year, but qualifies the good news by noting that the comparison is to the months when the financial meltdown was at its worst.
Marginal Online Improvement
Tuesday, comScore released research that said the first 22 days of the holiday shopping season -- from Nov. 1 to Nov. 22 -- saw a two percent increase in online sales, from $8.03 billion to $8.21 billion -- compared to the same period last year. The company predicts an increase of three percent for the holiday season.
Lipsman said the online mobile-auction sites represent a subcategory of online shopping not covered in the report. The mobile-auction numbers being released by eBay, he said, are impressive.
"They are a lot higher than I would have anticipated," he added. "There may be something to the specific community and the way it works, a certain level of engagement in the way people monitor their auctions and the like. They want to keep tabs on their auctions through the day, and that may be helping."
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