EBay Challenge Feedback
From SharedExperienceProject
<h2> The participants<br /> </h2> <ul><li> 120 first year, first semester students enrolled in three different faculties at Mount Royal College </li><li> Students participated, on average, in teams of four comprising of 32 teams </li><li> The majority of the students were from three faculties; Business, Sport and Recreation and Computer Information Services </li><li> Students from the Bisset school of Busness were enrolled in introductory marketing and accounting courses, students from the other faculites were not. </li><li> Students were enrolled in seven classes taught by six full/part time faculty members </li></ul> <h2> Student Feedback<br /> </h2> <ul><li> I would like to thank eBay with specific thanks to Isabel Tremblay for supporting this project. Without their help we would not have been able to bring this learning experience to both our students and the college. </li><li> In surveying the students before the project 100% of them had heard of the eBay brand. Only forty 40% of these students had any experience with eBay. Anecdotally I believe less than 10% of the students had any in depth knowledge of the eBay online market <br /> </li><li> The following summarizes written feedback from students collected at the close of the project. I would encourage and welcome any additional student feedback in this section.<br /> </li><li> On the subject of experiential learning all students would encourage the college to do more of this and did not have a problem being exposed to these kind of projects in their first year.<br /> </li><li> Most but not all students would have liked the college to schedule projects like eBay at another time of the semester. There were too many course deliverables for other courses which detracted from their ability to focus on the challenge to the degree they wanted. They felt this detracted from the learning experience.<br /> </li><li> Most but not all students felt that a project of this nature required more time than the three weeks allotted. Again they felt that they just got rolling and then had to wind things down detracting from the learning experience.<br /> </li><li> It should be noted that the students were given an addtional project involving the local military museum one week into the eBay challenge. The military museum project exposed the students to aspects of social entrepreneurship. Many students thought his was too much given their workload. They also felt that a second challenge should have tied into the first challenge.<br /> </li><li> Many students felt a tutorial on eBay would have helped (see issues)<br /> </li><li> Most but not all students felt that a project of this nature required more time than the three weeks allotted. Again they felt that they just got rolling and then had to wind things down again detracting from the learning experience.<br /> </li><li> Students felt that the challenge gave them an initial sense of what an entrepreneur has to deal with given the theory they covered in class. Hectic, pressure cooker, team dynamics, stressful, real money, juggling act and competitive were terms consistently echoed in the feedback.<br /> </li><li> There is no question some students were disappointed in the challenge mostly based on the above comments.<br /> </li><li> Students felt they would have benefited from interacting with other teams during the project in order to see what was working for them and what wasn't. </li><li> Students felt that they learned valuable lessons on the time restrictions, credibility issues </li><li> and limited finances that entrepreneurs may face when breaking into the market place. </li><li> They learned to deal with negotiating and negotiating problems (dealing with selling companies). </li><li> Some felt that the timing (before Christmas) made it more difficult to get slaes agreements as companies were in their busy season and didn't have time to consider a new sales option. </li><li> Most found that networking was a key part of getting sales agreements executed. </li></ul> <ul><li> </li><li> </li><li> Speed's of </li><li> the essence in getting agreements, getting items listed, and refocusing if the initial products aren't moving. </li><li> Organizing time and managing group meetings and actions was a major challenge. </li><li> Students, overall, felt that they had developed a good working relationship with team members. </li></ul> <ul><li> </li><li> One group had 14 inquiries on their product, 12 of which, they state, were a combination of "ham, spam and scam." They were repeatedly ask </li><li> </li><li> ed by potential buyers to remove their items from Ebay and sell them directly, </li><li> which the team replied was against Ebay regulations to move the listing, and they encouraged the buyers to bid via EBay. After several of these scam attempts and spam e-mails, they believed that they had legitimately sold their products via EBay. The buyer wanted them to send the items immediately to his address,<br /> however they noticed that the e-mail they received from "Paypal" was for an amount $400 more than the items had sold for. Later that day they received a notice from EBay that the buyer's account had been "hjacked" and that the listing had been cancelled. Because the Ebay process requires that the listing has to be re-initiated from scratch, the team lost 3 valuable days, through no fault of their own. We need to warn future groups so that they can be vigilant about these types of scams. </li></ul> <h1> Process Learnings<br /> </h1> <p>eBay did a tremendous job ensuring that the project eBay accounts and Paypal accounts worked without interruption. We had issues with their automated Trust and Safety Software when first piloting the software. The following outlines some of the project issues encountered and potential solutions to these problems. </p> <h2> <b>Issue #1</b> </h2> <p>Given that the students were working in teams we did not want them to have access to the Paypal accounts. Instructors linked (or so we thought) each of the student eBay accounts to Paypal accounts set up by the instructors. (eBay informed us that we should have no more than eight eBay accounts linked to one Paypal account). As students set up their seller accounts on eBay some but not all groups were asked for the Paypal information. We couldn’t get around this with all accounts and gave those teams the Paypal information. We believe this was due to lack of faculty knowledge. </p><p><b>Possible solution</b>: </p><p>More dialogue with Paypal to understand how to link the student eBay accounts and the instructor Paypal accounts in such away that monies can flow to the Paypal accounts without the students having access to the those accounts<br /> </p> <h2> <b>Issue # 2</b> </h2> <p>There can be up to a week delay moving monies from the Paypal accounts to the bank accounts linked to these accounts. This is problematic as the students need the money sooner to pay suppliers. Given this was a pilot the project was underwritten by members of the business schools advisory board so it wasn’t an issue. Working capital was put into the back accounts to deal with this delay. This would not be an effective solution if this kind of project was to become main-stream in the curriculum. </p><p><b>Possible Solutions:</b> </p> <ul><li> Explore alternative payment solutions. </li></ul> <ul><li> Have each student pay an additional small amount of money when buying their course material. This money would then be put into their team Paypal account and also give each team a budget to work with for the project.<br /><br /> </li></ul> <h2> <b>Issue # 3</b> </h2> <p>This is a learning experience and the project could and in our case did lose money. Again this would make this kind of project unsustainable if it was to be incorporated into mainstream curriculum.<br /> <br /><b>Potential solutions</b>: </p> <ul><li> As per above students would be limited to the team budget funded as part of their course material. (Hard to manage from a faculty perspective) </li></ul> <ul><li> More time and planning for the project as per student feedback allowing them to have a higher probability to make money. (Still has an element of risk) </li></ul> <ul><li> Come to some arrangement with eBay on fees for this kind of project. </li></ul> <ul><li> This needs more thought <br /> <br /> </li></ul> <h2> Issue # 4<br /> </h2> <p>If an institution was to run this project every semester there is the possibility of students pre-loading the non-academic portion of the project, getting a head start. </p><p><b>Solutions:</b><br /> </p> <ul><li> The project could me modified every semester by having teams focus on different market segments etc. which would only be announced at the beginning of the project. <br /> </li></ul> <h2> Issue #5<br /> </h2> <p>Feedback from the students suggested that they found eBay much harder to use than perceived before they started the project. Although they believed there was value in learning how to use an on-line market they felt there biggest learnings came from other aspects of the project. They would have like to have spent more time on the business side of the project than on the nuts and bolts of the on-line market. </p><p><b>Solutions</b> </p> <ul><li> Provide a formal tutorial on how to use eBay at the start of the project building this into the project time frame. </li><li> Involve members of the eBay community to help the students on this and other aspects of using eBay. (a social networking approach to their education). Ebay could help in reaching out to it's membership to find willing particpants. </li></ul> <h1> <br /><br /><a href="Course:The Bissett eBay Challenge">Course:The Bissett eBay Challenge</a> </h1>
