eBay UK’s Head of Trust and Safety has really put his foot firmly in his mouth with the UK PowerSellers.

I don’t want to make a habit of quoting directly from eBay forums, especially at length, but this one really does need exposed, considering Young Mr Ambrose’s habit of infuriating his paying customers.

A 22nd Feb UK PowerSeller Board post addressed directly to him, asking if the new performance discounts would apply cross border for UK registered sellers, after he had dodged the question for 3 weeks in another thread, solicited this response exactly 20 minutes after the new thread was started -

“I’ve just had a chat about this with our pricing czar.
UK sellers who qualify for discounts in the UK won’t get any discounts when they list on eBay.com. The same is true in the other direction, and for other sites.
I realise this seems slightly unfair. We’ve taken this approach for two reasons:
1) Having discounts that carry across to other country sites creates very challenging arbitrage situations – unless each country keeps its pricing and discount structure identical, it could result in sellers from one site pouring onto others
2) The technical work requiring to change our pricing system to enable discounts to be applied on multiple sites is surprisingly complex and would take a very long time to do – it hasn’t made the cut vs. other priorities this time around
I hope that clears things up, even if it’s not the answer you were hoping for.
Regards
Richard”

Did he just happen to be browsing the boards sitting next to the pricing Czar?  Or has he got some sort of alarm system that alerts him to a thread starting with his name in the title?  Anyway …

He was immediately leaped on by a PowerSeller quoting all the announcements from various Asian eBay sites (which I blogged here on 1st Feb) who summarised with -

“Basically if we, reg in the UK list on .com we get NO benefits…correct?
Where does that leave us regarding DSR’s then?
If those sales that we get on .com are NOT recognised for a discount then are the DSRs not included when it comes to visibility or not?
This is a complete shambles I have to say.”

SilverSisters, the rebutting PowerSeller, has a couple of good points in there.  But not to be outdone, Mr Ambrose came back carrying a 155mm howitzer to fire at his own feet -

“Ah, good point – my mistake for not mentioning Asia.
So to add to my post 3:
The pricing arbitrage risk and the technical complexity associated with offering discounts on all sites is very high.
We would like to recognise good sellers wherever they choose to list, though, so we’re looking into ways around them both. To that end there’s a trial solution being rolled out in Asia (quite small markets, quite a small number of sellers).
I didn’t mention this in my initial post to avoid raising expectations unduly – even if the Asian approach works well, it would still take a considerable time to build an equivalent that works in the much bigger markets like the UK.”

And from there the board got really interesting. 

One poster pointed out that the Asian announcements made no reference to the cross-border discounts being a trial, and that those (cross border) announcements were made in January, plus they pulled Ambrose up on his statement about the disparity in market sizes making it more difficult to implement in western markets. 

As was pointed out, the comment about “small” Asian markets is categorically false.  Five Asian countries (at least) are receiving the cross border discounts – Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Phillipines, and Singapore - representing roughly 20% of the world’s population, and cumulatively far larger than the EU and North America combined.  In terms of eBay registrations, they may not be as large as the west, but they are growing fast, and announcements have not yet been translated from eBay China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, or Thailand, but there is no reason to assume those sites will not get the discounts that the rest of Asia are getting.  Additionally, there are fewer members in Australia and New Zealand than there are in India, so why did they not get the cross border discounts?

Another PowerSeller added that the research and technology was already complete if it was in use in Asia, and just needed replicating to the west.  Others then jumped in with derisory comments about such “small” Asian markets swamping their categories (exactly the reason visibility of UK listings was cut from eBay US).

Responding to “unless each country keeps its pricing and discount structure identical, it could result in sellers from one site pouring onto others” is best left to 1porschegirl, who said -

“This is blatantly false – this will increase the number of sellers who create accounts (most likely with false contact information) on overseas sites. This encourages British or German sellers registering accounts on .com with a false American address or American sellers registering accounts on .co.uk/.de with false contact information. Or to even more easily obtain their expected discounts, sellers will simply transfer to an Asian site.
Finally, giving UK sellers the .com discount on their .com sales (as eBay does for Asian sellers) would in no way increase the US sellers’ desire to register on .co.uk, but would decrease the UK sellers’ desire to register an account on .com.”

The rest of the thread relates to variations of the theme that Mr Ambrose is trying to insult UK PowerSellers’ intelligences. 

One point that no-one jumped on yet was the arbitrage point raised in Ambrose’s first post.  There is zero difficulty with that.  Currently if a UK registered seller lists on dot com during a US Cheap Listing Day, they receive the discounted insertion fee on their current account statement, at the point of listing – i.e. it is applied immediately.  Therefore, under the new discounts, when a qualifying seller lists on another site, the accepting site simply needs to check the seller’s home country qualification for discounts, then apply the accepting site’s discount to the insertion fee before posting it onto the seller’s account in the accepting site’s currency, which is then transferred into the registration site’s currency to generate the billed value.

There is very little complication to this when compared to what happens with CLD fees.  So why will eBay not do it?  The answer to that of course, was answered weeks ago in this blog. 

However, to give young master Richard some slack, he may have been instructed in what to say by someone above him, however, there aren’t that many candidates within eBay Towers who qualify for that, now that he’s in charge of Trusses and Safety Pins.

Perhaps he needs this …..

 101 Ways to Stop the Money Leak $9.99 from BuildaSkill’s book & software shop

 Ed  

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