A Lesson for Small Business
… and it comes from the big end of town.
by Stuart Livesey
You may not have noticed it but currently there’s a bit of a punch-up going on between Google and eBay. For quite sometime now Google has wanted to get their payment option - Google Checkout - added to eBay so users can use Google Checkout instead of eBay’s own PayPal and they haven’t had much success.
So in typical Google fashion they decided to push the issue by really getting under eBay’s skin. To do that they invited attendees at last week’s eBay conference to a big party to push the issue of getting eBay to allow their users to make a choice between Checkout and PayPal.
You might think that doing that was a wise move … but then you wouldn’t want to antagonise your biggest business partner now would you? And that’s exactly what they did. You see, when it comes to advertising, eBay is Google’s biggest partner and eBay promptly pulled all their advertising.
As one industry writer put it:
“…eBay, as Google’s largest advertiser until last week, was a true partner. And offending partners doesn’t make for good business.”
There’s a solid lesson there for small business … courtesy of the big end of town.
