eBay, Amazon, and iTunes Profit from Death of Michael Jackson, Farrah and Ed

Entertainment’s Big Loss Is the Retail Industry’s Big Gain in Merchandise Sales

Speaking of image, eBay made a big public announcement over the weekend stating that it will refund any customers who purchased Michael Jackson concert tickets on eBay if they paid for their purchase with PayPal. That seems somewhat charitable.

Lest we all get confused by that hype and think this is a magnanimous gesture from the company that is raking in Jackson sales commissions every minute from every corner of the world, we need to be clear that these refunds will not come from the eBay vaults. Rather, these will be refunds that are forcibly subtracted out of the PayPal accounts of individual sellers, regardless of their opinion on the matter. The sellers will then be on their own to secure a refund from the concert promoters.

As for the eBay buyers who didn’t use PayPal for their ticket auction purchase, eBay will likely remind you that you had your chance to envelop yourself in the safety of PayPal's "Buyer Protection" policy, and you blew it. Let that be a lesson to you next time.

With policies and actions like this, it’s not difficult for anyone except eBay to understand why sales have been slumping in its marketplace. Donahoe told the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago, “I want to get to a point where I feel really confident about the user experience, and I think we are two-thirds of the way there, or halfway there," he said.

For some reason Donahoe and the eBay decision-makers keep forgetting that sellers are users too, and that these sellers expect a certain level of respect, gratitude, and service recovery just like the buying customers. Until eBay's leaders remember that, they won’t even be close to "halfway there." And if they can't regain the trust and loyalty of their seller community, their annual returns may become dependent on the untimely demise of global celebrities, which hardly seems like a practical business plan.

Besides the unexpected windfall in sales, the world of retailing received another huge posthumous gift that will serve it long after the memorabilia madness has faded. That gift was the unmistakable demonstration that cyberspace is where the customers are.

Just about every major news portal, social media platform, and two-way communication system was pushed to capacity or completely crashed last Thursday as news of Jackson's sudden death instantaneously circled the globe. More than any other time in history, humanity verified that when they want information, connection, and communication, they look to cyberspace as their primary resource.

Recognizing that powerful orientation to the blogosphere, twittersphere, and other cyberspheres, the retailers who can most successfully intersect with consumers in those virtual spaces will be the retailers that capture the future. This is not a big news flash to anyone who hasn't been in a coma for the past decade. But the virtual nuance which was definitely not subtle in the past week was that a tremendous amount of power and control has been shifted to the masses by the infrastructure that is easily accessible to them in cyberspace.

Individuals can meetup and tweetup in any way and, as we observed with shock and awe in Iran, in any place that they want. While retailing's acknowledgement that customers are king is often no more than lip service, consumer masses are collectively discovering that in cyberspace they actually have the power to take their rightful place on the throne, whether any business or government wants them to or not.

From a free enterprise perspective, this means that if retailing fails to involve consumers in its business decisions, consumers will find a way to define their own involvement. If a retailer doesn't establish the type of relationship that is meaningful and valuable to its customers, its customers are just one click, text, or link away from a retailer who will meet them and treat them (and tweet them) better.

In theory customers have always been in control. They are just now realizing how to exert that control en masse. This is not good news to old economy leaders who still want to believe that those with assigned seats in the boardroom are omnipotent, and that the right marketing campaign can manipulate any outcome.

A shift in consumer consciousness is dramatically taking place before our eyes, and many retailers are frantically looking for ways to respond to the shift. Coincidentally, or not, one big answer for the retail industry can be found in the lyrics from the king of pop, himself. "If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change."

Na Na Na, Na Na Na, Na Na, Na, Na-ahh