​It’s been six months since Julie Nestor joined eBay Australia as chief marketing officer, and one of her initial priorities has been launching the online marketplace’s first loyalty program.

In a coup for eBay, long-time AMEX innovator, Julie Nestor, has been appointed to CMO of eBay, replacing Tim MacKinnon, who was promoted to managing director last year.

EBay has teamed up with Google’s AI-powered virtual assistant to allow Australian consumers to buy directly from their Google Home and Android smartphone in time for Christmas.

Competition in the online retail space is a good thing and will drive innovation, but there’s no need to be afraid Amazon is coming to Australia, according to eBay Australia’s CMO, Tim MacKinnon.

The impending arrival of Amazon on Australian shores has left many brands and retailers scrambling to implement a response. And it’s the way in which Amazon will serve the market that arguably offers the biggest industry shake-up and reshape how consumers access products and services for brands and retailers alike.

All the latest martech and adtech related news from Data61, Leadpages, SalesPredict, eBay, CenturyLink, Google, Rakuten, Tapa, Conversion Logic, Teradata, Zendesk and MaritzCX.

Zeta Interactive, the US-based email marketing player founded by ex-Apple CEO, John Sculley, is looking to take on marketing cloud giants such as Apple, Oracle and Salesforce after picking up the customer relationship management division of eBay Enterprise.

EBay has reached a deal to sell its enterprise unit, a division focused on building and running online shopping sites for bricks-and-mortar retailers, for less than half than it paid four years ago.

There are many ways you can expose products to the relevant customer without it being creepy, according to Ebay’s head of customer engagement, Harvey Sanchez.

Woolworths and eBay announced a delivery pickup service for customers to collect their online eBay purchases at their local supermarket.

In 2002 Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, issued an edict that all teams in his company were to expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. The edict gave rise to the creation of a service-oriented architecture within Amazon, with all interactions managed through application programming interfaces (APIs).

While many Australians know eBay as an ecommerce powerhouse, fewer know that the company also supplies the technology powering many other online retail experiences – and increasingly, a number of offline experiences as well.

A stronger set of features, possibly including payments, might be coming to Facebook's messaging properties now that former PayPal president David Marcus has come to work for the social network.

Apigee, the mobile API management firm, has acquired big data analytics company InsightsOne.

Google buys Waze. Yahoo buys Tumblr. Facebook buys Instagram.

Trying to make sense of the estimated 100 terabytes of new data received every day to meet changing customer expectations and keep a competitive edge has led eBay to start using big data platforms.