The site that has long been blamed for the majority of item location abuse within the eBay world has launched its own bilingual interface, following on the heels of the Canadian Anglo-French testing throughout most of last and this year.

eBay Hong Kong has several big splashy links on the front page inviting you to switch from the (default) Chinese displays, into English.  There are several markers to warn you its still in Beta stage, but generally it seems to work well.

It seems to do a particularly good job with listing titles, though in the descriptions, there still remains about 10% - 20% untranslated, which I guess depends on the amount of colloquialisms and technical vocabulary used by the sellers.

Whilst giving the site a quick scan in English, I noticed that my favourite categories were swamped by listings from the USA and Australia, which made me chortle more than a little as most of the items on sale are made in Hong Kong - talk about wasting fees?   Or, could it be an indicator of the amount of item-location abuse practised by Hong Kong sellers?

Assuming all those American and Australian listings, showing location as being in those countries, were listed by Hong Kong residents, then following the practise on other eBay sites, those listings would show on the sellers’ home (Hong Kong?) site, as well as the site where they were listed.  And that could explain why so many Hong Kong manufactured items are showing on the HK site as available from overseas locations, but only if the sellers input the items as being located overseas

Thankfully, the eBay HK staff are asking for your input regarding the site and how they can serve you better - ohhhh what an opportunity to really let them know what you think about policy non-enforcement?

Ed

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eBay UK” />  Generally speaking, I’m very wary of “look how good we are” events and promotions - they always leave me feeling that (at best) something is not being said, or (at worst) that something is being deliberately hidden and attention diverted away from it.  My first reaction to eBay.co.uk/backstage was very much the same.

Even a second look at it leaves me thinking of those stalwart musicians who played whilst the Titanic launched its lifeboats.  Even the “all glory to the sellers” column down the right margin does nothing to dispel this feeling. 

eBay’s disastrous policy decisions implemented in Feb 2007 (trans-atlantic visibility) and August 2006 (shops visibility and fees) obviously don’t get a mention on the “backstage” pages - or should that be “backslap” pages? 

And eBay should be slapping themselves on the back, they’ve “got away” with the murderous culling of their selling membership and now happily trumpet that 68,000 people now earn their primary or secondary income on eBay UK.  Sounds good?  It would sound good, except that, that statistic was a six-figure number in the summer of last year and is likely to be lower again next year.  I haven’t yet had the chance to dredge up the proof of last years numbers, but I will, unless of course the team in SW London have done their old trick of deleting the closeted skeletons from the forums again?

There looks to be some useful videos linked to from the backstage / backslap portal, and they might contain some interesting insights, unfortunately our internet connection has been flaky today so I’ve not been able to watch them yet - having to use the periods of good bandwidth to get listings scheduled for the half price day on Thursday   has restricted browsing and research a bit today.

However, I will wholeheartedly congratulate eBay UK member “**Peaseblossom**” for receiving the “Community Member of the Year 2007″ award - shame it hadn’t also been backdated to 2006 and 2005 - she certainly deserved it after stalwartly doing eBay’s customer and technical support for them, day-in, day-out, for years in the eBay Community forums.

Ed

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 osCommerce is a popular Open Source ecommerce catalog and shopping cart system.  It has almost 200,000 registered users in its support forums, and a healthy community of developers providing extensions and modifications for it.  At least a quarter of a million online stores have implemented it, and the number grows everyday.

In the osCommerce support forums, a debate has opened regarding unexpected fees incurred by one user, after they installed a payments gateway extension for one of the less used online payment processors - MoneyBookers Website”>MoneyBookers.

It seems they’re not happy about a 2% processing charge, despite MoneyBookers being open and up-front about their fees.

MoneyBookers fees are at three levels depending on the type of account the receiver has enabled, and on the payment funding method chosen by the payer.  For the merchant to minimise fees, they need to steer clear of the Merchant Gateway solution and use an “old fashioned” email-receiver-details-to-buyer payment instruction methodology.

Although it increases admin load and is not as instant as using the gateway, I recommend the email payment-receiver details method, when using MoneyBookers. Their fees on Merchant Gateway credit card processing are 8% making them the most expensive in the industry (and even making PayPal look cheap) however, they do guarantee zero chargebacks.

An alternative is to pay the GBP 50.00 NoChex registration for a Merchant Account (they also guarantee no chargebacks) in order to accept Visa and Mastercard globally, but all transactions will be in UK Pounds Sterling, and you must have both a UK address, and a UK bank account, before you can open a NoChex account.

Failing that, you’re stuck with a regular Merchant Services account or a PayPal account.

It’s worth noting that MoneyBookers is very popular in Central Europe (especially Germany) due to the no-fee bank transfer that users can use to fund their MoneyBookers account. It’s also extremely popular in areas where PayPal are over-strict such as Asia-Pacific, South America, and Africa - in those zones, the MoneyBookers no-chargebacks policy comes into it’s own.

Maybe you prefer Western Union, or similar, from those zones, but with all the anti wire-transfer propaganda that eBay/PayPal have been pushing out, you’ll find resistance to using such services will grow over the coming years, and that could slow your sales of “no charge-back payment type” sales unless you have an alternative routing such as MoneyBookers.

At the end of it all - remember it’s only a couple of years since there wasn’t any IPN, Gateways etc - the vast majority of your buyers will be ignorant of the progress made in such technologies and only expect such automation from mega-companies such as banks or eBay.

For a couple of years at least, it won’t hurt customer-relationships to rely on more manual methodology if you’re trading outside of the developed western alliances - heck, even within such countries, there are still lots of technophobes scared of too much automation.  And with organisations such as the UK’s Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) reporting that online credit card fraud, and identity theft, are the UK’s fastest growing crime type, the unwilling-to-pay-online community will be around for a long time to come.

…. there’s more than one way to skin a rabbit

Ed

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They’re at it again - those awfully nice people at Lloyds TSB are re-running their Introduce a Friend program, and this time you could collect up to £300 for doing so.

The promotion details state that both you and the introduced friend can receive £30 each if the friend opens one of the range of Lloyds TSB’s current accounts, and then in three of the first four months the account is open, your friend deposits at least £500 of salary into it.  You can introduce as many friends as you like, but are limited to the first 10 friends who open an account in terms of receiving the £30 for each.  Each of your friends will also receive £30 bonus when they fulfill the criteria.

It might not sound a lot, but if you think of it in terms of deposit account interest rates, it’s quite a good deal.  For example, if you use a Lloyds TSB Online Saver account, with interest paid monthly, and keep a £500 balance in it, you’ll receive roughly £1.17 of interest after tax at source.  Whereas, the refer a friend scheme is the equivalent of £7.50 per month in interest, and there’s no requirement to leave the money in the account after depositing it.   

If you’re a UK resident and want to take advantage of this but don’t know anyone with a Lloyds TSB account to refer you - contact me and I’ll send you a pre-qualified referral form, then we can both get the free bonus    Or, if you want to do it online, please email or PM me for a referral code, and again, we’ll both get £30 free from Lloyds TSB (ooh - poetry in my ear  )

A further incentive to follow through on this is that if you get the account open before 30 November 2007, and obtain a Lloyds TSB Visa Debit card, everytime you use it to make a purchase, you’ll be entered in a prize draw for a luxury trip around the landmarks of London that appear on a Monopoly board, and the bank will give you a bundle of spending money too.

Ed

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China has launched it’s first lunar orbiter & surveying spacecraft.

India and Japan are said to be close on their heels, and China has announced it wants to put a robotic rover on the moon within 5 years, followed by a manned expedition by 2020.  They are looking for an element known as Helium-3, a non-radioactive isotope they hope to use for fuelling nuclear power stations.

Those of us who remember the USA v USSR space race, during the 1960s and 1970s, will remember all the technological advances that came from it.  Inventions that today are mundane, such as Teflon non-stick cookware and 2-part epoxy adhesives, came from the last space race and opened a whole new world of products to trade.

It leaves me wondering what wonders will be mass-produced from China’s massive capacity for cheap goods in order to fund their stellar aspirations?

Ed

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Has anyone noticed the increasingly tantrumic rhetoric going on between America and China?

All year, the US has been pushing hard on Chinese imported products safety - there seems to be a never-ending list of product recalls due to lead in the paint on toys, calls from the treasury to reduce the volume of imports from China, and so on.  In the main, China has been quite accomodating on this, even to the point of holding up their hands and saying “fair cop guv’ner” regarding the lead in paint issue.  They’ve admitted that while the legislation is in place, they don’t have enough inspectors to ensure 100% enforcement.

Now, this medal for the Dalai Lama issue has surfaced, and China is going ballistic.  Is it insensitivity by the Bush administration (timing the award to co-incide with the 5-yearly Beijing politic-fest for the Chinese Communist Party)?  Or is it another storm in a tea-cup?  Are China correct in trying to force the world to accept Tibet is now a Chinese province (and should Taiwan be recognised as an independent country)?

Would Beijing be using the strength of language they do use, if the US had not announced such massive troop withdrawals from South Korea?  (Remember what triggered the Falklands War in 1982 - announcing the reduction of land and naval forces protecting the islands made Argentina feel it was both safe, and time to invade).  Are US withdrawals from Asia Pacific being seen as a weakening of the world’s largest military and economic power?

How would a chilling of relations between China and the US affect your business?  Would it affect your business?

Ed

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eBay procrastinate over returning trans-Atlantic visibility despite strong user demand for such an action.

An announcement today on the US board details that in selected categories, trans-Atlantic visibility is returning for a test period until the new year.

Annoyingly, this test co-incides with a 3-month reduced listing fee in the affected categories on the UK site.  The categories are therefore going to be overflowing from sellers worldwide taking advantage of the £0.05 Gallery Fee in Collectibles for example.  At the end of the test period, I expect eBay management will state they are justified in cutting the visibility again “because little ol’ England swamps the giant US site with products that get no bids from Americans” - exactly the reason visibility was cut in the first place, even though no clarification was never provided regarding how many of those swamping listings were from Brits, and how many were from other countries listing on the UK site.

It should also be remembered that in the face of seller protests, eBay has already conducted 5 months of tests, to ascertain which categories should have permanent visibility returned.

One really does begin to wonder if the people in charge of eBay really know what they’re doing - because if they do, then they seem intent on well and truly stuffing up the marketplace, as well as the sellers who use it.

Ed

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p.s. - 24 hours after the US announcement, the UK has finally posted their own version of it.  Read the details, and our queries that stem from it, here

By appealing to a diverse range of ages, businesses have a greater range of options.

Age-diverse businesses are placed in an excellent position to reach out to and capitalise on untapped markets - for instance the expanding grey market of retired people with large incomes.  It also helps them identify profitable new products or services. (source: Employers Forum on Age 2002)

Employers Forum on Age
www.efa.org.uk
Telephone (UK): 0845 456 2495

Those aged 55-65 have high disposable incomes, on average their weekly disposable income is 17% higher than the national average. (source: Annual Family Expenditure Survey)

Over-55s are the most affluent age group, 80% of the country’s wealth is held by people aged 50 or over. (source: BBC)

Over 55s are likely to be watching TV for up to 34 hours every week – that’s 8 hours more than the average – 26 hours, they are also heavy radio listeners; they listen to about 24 hours per week – 7% more than average.  In addition more and more over 55s are going online; this represents over 20% of the online population. (source: BBC)

More than a quarter of the population are over 55 (approx 15.5million).  In the future, this group will grow to just over a third of the population. (source: BBC)

It is predicted that by 2014 the UK will have more people over 65 than under 16 years. (source: Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development)

Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
www.cipd.co.uk
Telephone (UK): 020 8612 6200

…. As technology integration advances, with more and more function devices being incorporated into a single hardware device; together with tech-savvy “middle-agers” moving into the “senior citizen” grouping, the elder section of the population will become an increasingly important market sector for all businesses and marketing personnel to focus upon.  As it stands right now, if you’re not already addressing this group, you need to start planning for the short, medium, and long term, incorporating them into your customer profiles - after all, YOU will be one of them, one day.

Ed

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