It's earning season again, and first to announce is our beloved eBay.

In a world where e-Commerce is growing at 23.7% (and 15.6% in the US), eBay continues to underperform -- growing marketplace GMV at 4%.    (note: whereas overall GMV grew over 5%, a good chunk of that was due to Stub Hub).

And they continue to make progress, albeit slowly, on providing more structured data.  We've written about structured data many times as it makes items easier to find thus driving more sales (see articles on "Best Practices - Structured Data" as well as "eBay's Fall Release - Structured Data").

Some other good news marketing: eBay plans to "shift more...marketing resources towards top of the funnel consideration" to drive more buyers to the site during holiday.  This is fantastic news, as we'll need all the help we can get to ensure eBay drives up the sales!

It's been a long time coming: Facebook has re-launched it's e-commerce play, moving from groups that sell items to a "local marketplace" akin to Craigslist.  

We couldn't be more please, as it's a great next step for Facebook to capitalize on all the "eyeballs" that are latched onto Facebook.  

For those unfamiliar with the new offering, Facebook has moved the "messenger" icon from the bottom center of the main UI to the top left -- just to the left of the search bar.  In it's place is a new "shop" icon which links you to items listed by Facebook users close to you.

Listing items is easy -- just provide a title, picture, category and some text.   

This is definitely an early version of what's to come.  First of all, no payments can be made on Facebook.  So buyer and seller must transact in person.  That means a traditional "sell and ship" e-commerce model is not yet supported.  We expect that to change in subsequent iterations as it's simply too juicy of a revenue model for Facebook to ignore.

But, again, it's early -- watch for updates in the next year as Facebook builds out an understanding of what makes most sense to do next!