eBay announced it will be closing down some of its gratuitous applications soon in order to focus on its core areas of business.
The first of the applications to be closed down will be the eBay Valet app. If you aren't familiar with this service, essentially it allows you to send your items to eBay, which then takes photos and sells the items for you. This will be followed shortly by the eBay Fashion app, and finally the eBay Motors app.
All of these services will continue to be available online through a single application. With that in mind, it's a little surprising that eBay did not design one application for all of these services in the first place. Because the listings are all available on eBay, it only makes sense to have all of these features in a single app, as it would be easier to develop and maintain.
In addition, eBay will be fully retiring its eBay Now service in the U.S., including the pilot program in Brooklyn. The application for this service was merged into eBay's core application last year, and the service continued to be tested afterwards, but eBay has determined that it's time to shut it down. Instead, the company is exploring alternative methods of picking up and dropping off products in the area.
In the UK, the eBay Now service will continue to be tested in its current state. Likely, eBay has made this change for a number of reasons related to the cost of operating the service and the number of users wanting to take advantage of it, making the service in the UK more worthwhile than in Brooklyn. However, the company did not state the exact reason for this move.
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