eBay in Person: Jeff Taylor

Jeff Taylor, Vice-President, Marketplace Policy, leads the team that frames the rules and policies that make the eBay marketplace safer and better for our members.

What did you do before you worked at eBay?
I worked at Intel for almost 19 years. In the 1980s, I was in the Microprocessor Division. I was there from the days of the old 8086 microchip to the beginnings of the 486 era. It was a pretty exciting place to be. In the 1990s, I led Intel's Global Customer Quality and Manufacturing Support Organization.

What brought you to eBay?
I was recruited by a friend who worked here. I was passionate about the eBay marketplace. I had been an active member since March 1997. I really felt very strongly about what eBay was doing for collectors and dealers who were taking their hobbies and turning them into small businesses. Back then, there was an incredible excitement that the early adopters felt about being able to find things that they never thought they'd be able to find. Having a chance to be a part of that was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Describe your area of responsibility.
Our role is all about having our already safe marketplace work better for our members, and also complying with the law of the land. We look at the rules of the marketplace and how they work. Sometimes written policies alone are hard to influence people with. We see a much greater influence through designing better trust and safety processes on our site. Processes like the Unpaid Item process and the Item Not Received process help members in following safe trading behaviors.

How do you make decisions about what will influence behavior in the marketplace?
Predicting how people will adapt to change is very challenging. Experience helps, but we also rely heavily on our Voices program and other Community members to put their brains to work on helping us design Trust and Safety processes and policies. The best we can hope for is to anticipate most of the things that might happen when we make a change and try to plan for that, but we're never going to know exactly. We use different sources of information, such as feedback from members on the Community forums, and also site traffic data to understand members' behavior at the aggregate level. We do this at each stage of a project – the design stage, the launch stage, and also after launch.

What are the top priorities for your group?
With millions of successful transactions leading to happy buyers and sellers every day, the eBay marketplace is extremely safe. However, as we have become better at protecting our members, the “bad guys” are also becoming more creative. Protecting our members from account theft is an important priority, as is maintaining the integrity of the feedback system. The feedback system is a crown jewel for eBay. We are working to improve the effectiveness of the feedback system as a reliable indicator of a member's reputation. Other priorities are reducing unpaid items, increasing trust in eBay transactions and helping our members to resolve disputes that they have with each other. eBay's Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) program, fee avoidance, search manipulation and identity theft are also a proactive focus for 2005.

What's your favorite memory of working with the community?
In the fall of 1999, after a summer of site issues, we had a meeting with Voices program members in Salt Lake City . It was a time when many members were frustrated with eBay, and we were expecting to face harsh criticism from Voices members. It was a long, “tough love” day of passionate meetings followed by all of us going out to dinner. The eBay talk continued through dinner. Even after the restaurant had closed, half of the Voices members stayed with me in the parking lot until late at night to talk about the issues that were important to them. They had such a passion for the marketplace and really wanted to make things better. Members from that Voices group had their fifth anniversary not long ago and many remain active volunteer participants in phone calls and emails. As a company, what a privilege and a competitive advantage it is to have a dedicated Community.

Do you have a favorite eBay purchase?
One of my collections is movie and TV props. On the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the title character died at the end of the fifth season. To have a sixth season, they needed to bring her back to life. The only way this could be done was with an incredibly rare artifact known as the “Urn of Osiris.” After exhausting all other sources, Buffy's friends found the last known Urn of Osiris listed on eBay by a Cairo desert gnome. They even got a limited edition Backstreet Boys lunchbox thrown in with their purchase. Buffy was resurrected and the show went on. When they wrapped the series after seven seasons, a lot of props were auctioned on eBay. When the prop Urn of Osiris came up, I felt a moral imperative to buy it. Fortunately, it didn't come with a Backstreet Boys lunchbox!

What do you like to do for fun?
When my wife and I aren't buying and selling on eBay, we enjoy hiking, theme parks and lying on the beach.