While professional photographers shoot many types of events, many are coming up with unique ideas and incentives to offer their wedding clients, which are giving them an edge over their competitors.

Photographers who are looking for ideas that compliment their current wedding offerings are turning to other wedding vendor’s professional photographer programs to market themselves in a whole new and very unique way.

In a recent survey conducted by Adesso Albums, the following five incentives were identified as the most successful incentive-based marketing strategies for attracting wedding clients and referrals:

Engagement Photo Sessions

Many photographers will add an engagement photo session of the couple to their wedding package. This is a great incentive for couples wanting to publish professional engagement photos in their local newspaper or later use their engagement photos in a showcase album at the wedding.

Engagement Photos Showcased At Wedding

Engagement photos are showcased in an album that is later used at the wedding reception as a guest book.  The photographer’s engagement photos of the couple are showcased in the album and guests then add their handwritten sentiments and warm wishes on the album pages – a keepsake that is a lasting reminder of the day (and the photographer).

Wedding Photo Website

A website that hosts the engagement and wedding photos is a wonderful way for the couple’s out-of-town guests who couldn’t make it to the wedding feel as if they were a part of it. It also gives the couple an opportunity to stay in touch with their guests with fun pictures of the wedding and wedding reception.

Custom Parent Albums

Creating a custom album for each set of parents can boost the currency of the new son or daughter in law in addition to making a very special and personal gift.  The albums feature photographs that are meaningful to each set of parents in a beautifully bound and personally created coffee table album for them to enjoy for years to come.

Hi-Resolution CD

Having a high resolution CD of all their photos gives the couple the ability to have prints made long after their wedding day is over – for family gifts, to frame and send to friends as a reminder of that special day or even to get shots printed and framed for their new home.

Reduced Rates for Enlargements

This incentive is especially meaningful to couples with large families. With a reduced rate for print enlargements, the couple can provide their close family members with more than a few 4 x 6 wedding prints.

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Reports are starting to emerge on several discussion sites, including eBay UK’s PowerSeller Board (PSB) and in BuildaSkill’s PowerSeller Board, that their DSRs have taken a hammering over the last 24 hours - 3 days before the first tranche of FVF discounts are due to be calculated.

www.dsrwatch.com’s DSR watch tool can be set by anyone with an email address, to watch any eBay seller’s DSR ratings and advise of changes to them.  Their mail server must have been glowing with heat from the mail output in the last day. 

Anecdotal comments in eBay UK and other forums are reporting a growing list of sellers commenting on their DSRs taking a very sudden hit.  At least two long-standing UK PowerSellers (and BuildaSkill members) have stated they’ve been hit on their P&P DSR, one losing all discounts in the current promotion if they can’t pull it back up by Monday - all four of that seller’s DSRs dropped by 0.2 yesterday, unusual for such a high volume feedback receiver.

From dsrwatch’s notifications, several prominent eBay UK “names” have been hit too, including both the owners of a major pro-eBay blogging site.  Another very pro-eBay Powerseller with shooting star feedback posted in the eBay UK forums, today, that their shipping DSR got tanked late on Friday.

The rumour mill is already running the conspiracy theory that there may be a rogue in eBay HQ causing this (if it’s not an officially sanctioned action), whilst others are saying it’s the result of a broken Seller Dashboard Lite.   Expectedly, the revelation earlier this week of buyers being financially teased (by cash vouchers and coupons) to leave poor ratings for sellers, has also been raised several times.

The UK Dashboard roll out has been postponed until next week, which is after the cut off for the UK double-discount promotion against the FVFs of sellers with high DSRs.  This obviously erases any transparency in a system already muddied by the inability of sellers to see which buyers down-rated them on which topics.  It also questions whether sellers bottom lines should be based on such buggy software and flawed logic, and what eBay will do about mistakes and transparently discussing and rectifying them.

I’ve heard rumour too, that a 3rd party tool is in development to clean up that transparency.  I must stress this is a rumour and I cannot locate the original source, but it seems the tool will use eBay’s APIs to extract date and time of DSR changes, then marry them to the date and times of regular feedback received, from which can then be determined who left the damaging DSRs, and an approximation of what they were. 

If this were to arrive before the cut off of sellers’ ability to leave honest feedback, it would go a long way towards rebalancing the feedback travesty as it stands now.  If it arrives after sellers can no longer give negative or neutral feedback, it will still assist in determining who should be on sellers’ blocked bidder lists, and which ones should be reported on sites such as www.afterthegavel.com and other 3rd party reputation sites for eBay users that are appearing.

Another pro-active measure that sellers can take includes creating their own DSR Feedback tutorial leaflets in shipped packages.  One useful page as a starting point is this eBay UK public help page for Detailed Seller Ratings.  Note the section on how to leave Detailed Seller Ratings - it makes an excellent base text for distributing to customers in their parcels.  eBay UK also have a good links page for all things feedback, which could also be a resource for creating similar leaflets.

What are your ideas on how to combat or prevent feedback and DSR bombing?

Ed

eBay Canada logo” />I’ve searched the eBay Canada announcements board as far back as January 2005, and I can find no announcement for the introduction of an insidious fee that I discovered by accident today.

In preparing some listings for uploading to eBay Canada for their 1-cent promotion week, which highly unusually is open to non-residents (only the second such opening since January 2007) I noticed mention of an International Site Visiblity Fee that I had not noticed when listing there previously.  I always take advantage of open-house promotions on the Canadian site, and always check to see which listing enhancement fees have changed, so this fee appears to have crept in since the post-Christmas promotion for 2007. 

I know there’s no announcement of it in the BuildaSkill forum news boards, and I can’t find one in the eBay Canada Announcement Board archives either.  I’m also positive I’ve not blogged about it as well.  It therefore appears to be a stealth introduction of a new fee.

The fee taken alone is not huge - 10, 20, or 40 cents depending on listing start price, but if you’re a volume lister, then it wipes out John Donahoe’s supposed fee reductions announced in January.    It is made even worse by the fact you must offer PayPal in listings using International Visibility, even if there’s no Seller Protection available for the chosen countries, therefore not only do you suffer an increased risk of losing the goods AND the payment, you also pay an additional fee (to PayPal) for this increased risk.  This is exactly the sort of terms of use that eBay are being class-action sued for, in several cases in the USA.

An International Visibility Fee is not new on Planet eBay.  The eBay India site has done it for several years.  In fact, the Indian fee was frequently cited by several desperate UK PowerSellers in the immediate aftermath of last year’s trans-Atlantic listings visibility cut, as being what eBay.com and eBay UK should do in order to resore the visibility to those that needed it.      As if eBay needs encouragement to add or increase fees? 

Those “over-cashed” few were repeatedly, and uncompromisingly, slapped down by all the other sellers in the eBay UK forums.  However, eBay UK’s Richard Ambrose said several times in the PowerSeller forum, that although an additional fee was not the route they wanted to take, it was not being discounted as an option.

Like eBay Oz, eBay Canada is often used as a testbed for new policies and site functions & features, before they roll to other sites.  I can’t help wondering therefore, if this International Visibility Fee is being trialled on Canada to see if it gets a different take-up rate to the one on eBay India.  Afterall, despite still billing itself as “the World’s Global Marketplace”, eBay have been increasingly fragmenting the marketplace, and introducing cross-border trading restrictions for a couple of years now.  Perhaps we’re starting to see that the passport to continued international trade is lucre coloured?

Ed

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eBay.com logo” height=”33″ style=”width: 85px; height: 33px” title=”eBay.com logo” />As I’ve blogged several times, what gets trialled on eBay Oz, eventually rolls out to the rest of Planet eBay.

Jim Ambach has announced today that the Australian system of moving listings pulled for policy violations into a seller’s Sold Items view in their My eBay pages) has been rolled on eBay USA.  The announcement doesn’t state whether this is going to be global or not.

Major policy violations such as prohibited items, and VeRO take downs are excluded from this, but it should remove a lot of the grief from minor violations such as vague wording that contravenes the choice-listings policy etc.

This allows sellers to edit and relist the items, but again the announcement doesn’t state if relist credit is applied, though I suspect not, as eBay normally refunds insertion fees for listings they take down. 

Interestingly, when a multi-item listing is taken down after one or more items have been sold, my experience has been that they also refund the associated final value fees, even when the buyer has already paid and the item has been shipped.  This would imply an incentive for placing non-compliant listings, but I do caution that the tone of the take-down email sent to earlier buyers from the listing, is enough to make those buyers never return to any of your listings.  In fact, that email is positively libelous, though most sellers are more aggrieved at the take down that at the potential to lose customers - something that has probably saved eBay from many thousands of lawsuits over the years.

Naturally, the safest and least-hassle route is to make sure your listings are compliant in the first place.  Experience has also shown, it’s pointless getting into arguments with eBay Truss & Safety Pin staff over grammar and syntax in your listings that they take down.  They just put you into a loop of cut-and-paste stock answers that wrecks your blood pressure.  If, however, you thank them for spotting YOUR mistake, you will get a personalised and polite reply.  I guess that illustrates they want us to all become drones to eBay mantras?

I’m hoping this policy does roll globally - it is certainly useful on those rare occasions when I make an honest mistake in a listing, and it does go a touch towards humanising the slave masters.

Ed

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eBay.com logo” height=”33″ style=”width: 85px; height: 33px” title=”eBay.com logo” />The eBay US discussion boards lit up this week with news that eBay are distributing cash payments to buyers who have filed complaints against sellers, resulting in mass warnings by buyers and sellers alike that this will turn the site into a paradise for dishonest and scamming bidders. 

Most posters agree that this is tantamount to the company bribing bidders to tank a seller’s crucial Detailed Seller Rating (DSR) feedback ratings in order to have the chance of receiving one of the cash coupons, thus potentially losing the seller the opportunity of receiving the  much-discussed Final Value Fee (FVF) discounts announced in January, which are based on sellers maintaining near impeccable DSR ratings.

The cash payments are being made in voucher form, redeemable through PayPal, and so far three formats have been reported -

• a percentage off a purchase with no upper limit
• a percentage off a purchase with a maximum purchase value
• a flat coupon value redeemable against a purchase of any value.

The type of coupon causing the greatest ire amongst both sides of eBay’s trading community is this one.

One of the first voucher recipients posted a query thread in the eBay US Trust & Safety discussion board, concerned because the email including the voucher contained no less than 15 clickable links to eBay and Paypal.  So many, they were sure it was a scam or phishing email.  They added that they hadn’t clicked on any of the links, but when they put the coupon code into PayPal, it worked.  It appears the related dispute with the seller has not even completed mediation.  At the time of receiving the voucher, the dispute was still in the middle of the ten day waiting period with a non-responding seller.  They therefore have the chance of receiving their original payment as a refund too.

In the same thread, several others reported they had received similar coupons of the various formats described above.  One reported that after filing an Item Not Received dispute for a $182 purchase, they received a $200 flat value voucher, but did not state if either PayPal or the seller had refunded their original payment as well.  Another stated they got a $25 flat rate coupon for a $21 dispute, whilst another said they’d received a $500 coupon but didn’t mention the dispute value.

A lot of resentment is building up from both buyers and sellers regarding these coupons, with almost every poster seeing it as a lucrative earning opportunity for the less than honest users that have already earned eBay a bad consumer safety reputation over the years.  Sellers in particular are rolling the conspiracy theory that this has just as much to do with giving incentive for buyers to award bad DSR ratings and lose eBay the liability of invoice discounts, as it has with attempts to tempt previously burned buyers back onto the site. 

Putting those two concepts together yields a “nothing to lose” mentality where buyers spending free money will be less vigilent and diligent when choosing who they buy from, resulting in increased opportunities for two-way scamming, thus escalating eBay’s image of being a scammers’ playground.

In the Seller Central discussion board, another thread is discussing these vouchers, with a predominantly seller participation, and the mood is not jolly there either, though the opinions are more analytical and incisive.  One seller sums it up as, “Here we are trying to figure out how to get buyers to contact sellers before filing any complaints or leaving FB and ebay is giving rewards.“  Another said, “I would love to see eBay send me a $10.00 off coupon as compensation the next time one of their buyers, who should have been suspended ages back and has had numerous complaints against them, buys one of my widgets and refuses to pay.“   The most succinct (polite) summary of the issue was, “They are trying to keep buyers on the site and molify the unhappy ones. And also as usual, they are going to be hit with unintended consequences - buyers who will file disputes against perfectly good sellers in hopes of getting coupons” rebutted by, “All of ebay’s policies in the past few years have rendered harmful unintended consequences, one would think they would think things through fully as a result” echoed and agreed to by several sellers.

Naturally, the topic of eBay’s unearned $100 million p.a. (of listing fees lost to sellers due to non paying bidders (NPBs)) managed to sneak into the discussions, and in this case rightly so, as potentially these coupons are being paid for from that unjustly retained income.   Others stated belief that this is the hidden purpose for the FVF increases announced in January. 

My favourite comment on the whole topic is, “I’m guessing they think all buyers are like kids, with all the hand holding and all. The sellers jumping through hoops may be eBay’s way of taking the buyers to the circus to watch all the clowns perform.“  It so accurately sums up so much of eBay management’s recent policy tweaking, and the effects on the seller community.

Even the pro-actively neutral Ina Steiner at AuctionBytes could no longer stay on the fence on this revelation.  In the AuctionBytes blog, she stated, “… the bottom line is that eBay is giving buyers an incentive to give sellers bad ratings and to file complaints. (”Maybe I’ll get another coupon if I complain again,” they might be thinking.) That surely outweighs any positives that might be gained by such a program.  For that reason, this coupon program gets a thumbs down in my book.”

As of posting this piece, none of the other eBay bloggers seem to have picked up on this breaking news.  Perhaps they don’t see the significance of it?  I’ll leave the last word to one of the sellers in one of the ebay boards linked above (the bold text is theirs), “I also think eBay did not intend for this to get out.  As I’m sure most of what has gotten out wasn’t intended to get out.  They fail to realize that due to the new changes they implemented, there is now a very large network of people and it’s going to become increasingly impossible to hide things like this.”

Ed

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One of the most popular new products on the market today are digital cameras.

Within the constantly changing world of technology, these digital cameras have become popular even amongst those who are not technically oriented.  They are now quite easy to use and available at a wide range of prices.  Even the least expensive ones can produce a quality picture that can be reproduced and sent off by the dozen to all your relatives and friends.  Their being both affordable and easily available are strong features of their popularity.

Because most homes have a computer, downloading digital pictures is a quick and easy snap.  It doesn’t require a lot of training and skill.  And, because of the abundance of
prints that one can easily reproduce, digital photography is here to stay.

Because photo labs were originally accustomed to the black and white processing, and then added color developing and printing, they had to rise to the challenge of working with
digital prints.  They found that it was actually much easier to edit and print the digital prints than it was to edit black and white, or color.  This has added to the desirability of using digital cameras.

Before the photo labs became involved with digital photography, people had to download the photos onto their home computer and then print them on their printer.  As printer quality then was intended for text, not photographs, the result wasn’t always what people wanted.  (But they still loved doing it!) Although technology improved the quality and durability of the home digital photos they still didn’t have the quality of a print that came from a film negative.  Over time the processes became more capable, yet the cost often prohibited making large numbers of picture reproductions.

Now the photographer has quite a few options.  The improvement of printers has been a great boon.  They can now handle printing many pixels in a beautiful manner.  And the
cost of the ink cartridges is slowly reducing, making home printing at least a little more affordable.  The durability of the prints remains a problem in some cases, and this
challenge has been handled well by the professional photo labs.

Many people find the discount labs to be a terrific place to get their digital photos processed.  These discount labs will download and edit most of the digital media cards on the market today.  As they will only actually print the better pictures, selected by you, you don’t end up paying for prints that make you cringe because they are out of focus.  (Or because they are oh, so embarrassing, or someone put their finger over part of the lens.)  On the other hand, those masterpieces that you want to share with the world can be reproduced in quantity, all at a decent price.

The internet provides an awesome choice of businesses which will print your photos for you.  The photos are downloaded to a special web site which you can let your friends and family know about, and they then choose, and pay for, the prints they want.  They can then print these off the internet or have a quality print mailed to them.  Another feature of some of these businesses is having your picture printed onto a tee-shirt, mouse pad, or mug.  You can design your own whole-year calendar using your photos and letting the company finish designing and printing them.  You are limited only by your imagination.  These companies will help you fulfill your dreams.

Digital photography can bring you much joy, and by using the right digital equipment you can fulfill many of your dreams.

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This article was submitted by BuildaSkill member GazLanNaThai on Monday, 24th March 2008

As per the lyrics of an old song ….

There may be trouble ahead
But while there’s music and moonlight and love and romance
Let’s face the music and dance

Before the fiddlers have fled
Before they ask us to pay the bill and while we still have the chance
Let’s face the music and dance

eBay.com logo” height=”33″ style=”width: 85px; height: 33px” title=”eBay.com logo” />As the eBay policy hammer repeatedly flattens sellers on the anvil of compliance, what choices do sellers have, and are the alternative venues ready to take up the challenges of mass influxes of disenfranchised eBay users?  Or does the unpreparedness of alternative venues mean that the nomads will drift back like prodigal sons and daughters to eBay’s punishment school?  Today, I take a brief look at comparing eBay to its best know UK competitor (because Ed told me he’s a bit too busy to post much this week).

My impression of eBay right now, after five years there as a volume seller and three as a PowerSeller, is that they don’t know what they want, or where they’re going. 

In the last 18 months, the corporate mantra has been that they focus on buyers, buyers, buyers, to the detriment of the fee paying customers.  This has been repeatedly emphasised in eBay discussion forums by the eBay staffers known as Pinks (due to the header colour of their posts in eBay discussion boards).  The mantra has left a lot of paying customers feeling alienated, and has led to a lot of discussion, on and off site, regarding whether eBay is breaking any consumer protection laws with the frequent retrospective changes to terms and conditions during the live period of advertisements (auction and shop listings) already billed to paying customers. 

The “changing the contract after start” mentality is also being complained about increasingly with regard to buyer behaviour too.  eBay buyers are increasingly adding demands onto sellers after purchase, payment, or in some cases after delivery, and with the loss of honest feedback from sellers in May, this will only increase - possibly to the point of making the site unusable by professional sellers and businesses.  I’m anticipating that by mid-autumn, even the highest quality sellers will have feedback that looks like today’s scam-artists.  The truth is that the real growth area for scams on eBay, in the last 2 years, has been amongst buyers, not sellers.  My own trading experience verifies this, as does countless on and offline discussions with 1,000’s of buyers and sellers in that period.  Whilst the print and broadcast media love to focus on the “consumer interest” stories of scam sellers, the raw data reveals there are far more dishonest (and pig-ignorant) buyers than sellers.

Any eBay policies introduced, seem to swing each quarter-year between hammering the big sellers, the medium commodity goods sellers, then the little guy, then back again.  eBay have become so image conscious about shoddy goods, dodgy sellers, IP rights over names, location abuse, delivery failures, etc, that they have forgotten how to maintain a vibrant marketplace.  They’re too intent on policing the good sellers, and preventing them stepping out of line, that they have lost the vision of how to police and catch the bad sellers (and buyers).  Pierre Omidyar’s level playing field is now a vertical cliff, and the fingernails of those clinging onto it are starting to snap.

When any company states in its own annual report filing to the SEC that its own policies are a threat to the business’s continuance (i.e. January’s announcements) but then refuses to withdraw those policies, then the top management needs replaced regardless of whether the policies are right or wrong, and shareholders should be asking chair-squirm inducing questions at eBay’s AGMs (where the press are banished to an ante-room).  As Ina Steiner said at AuctionBytes, there are too many, too-young people in charge at eBay nowadays. I agree with her and add that there are too many big egoes in too many young heads, all vying for alignment to replace the big names as they shuffle up, or off, the corporate ladder - that creates policy crises as each tries to prove they have a better grasp of the marketplace without ever having used it in anger,  and thus their understanding comes only from the flawed, or manipulated, data presented to justify earlier policies.  They have no basis of knowledge created from using the sites’ functionalities and marketplaces.

All of this is a major opportunity for competitor sites such as the UK’s eBid, and the USA’s OnlineAuctions.  As the UK online video tools company vzaar has shown recently, by capturing and employing Dan Wilson and Jamie Parkins from eBay UK (Jamie was head of the UK PowerSeller program for a long time), there are senior level eBay personnel seeking to move out, but stay in the same market arena.  I’m sure those two are not the only ones, and it does seem to be those who operate as forum Pinks who are the most capturable - they bear the brunt of the wrath of users regarding ill-thought out policies, and realise the strongest where eBay is weakest.  There was the short lived tenure of UK’s community manager Monisha Saldanha, who just couldn’t survive the barrage of anger over this year’s changes, and left after less than half a year in the post.  With this month’s announcement that eBay are shedding 150 jobs around the world, there has to be some competitors looking to hook them, if not, why not?

eBay’s over-reliance on PayPal is another weakness. A major market report issued by PayPal this year proves that in all sectors of ecommerce, just as in the high street, buyers value choice of payment method more than they value payment route loyalty.

Few people have the luxury of a financial stability that allows putting all their money into one channel, it’s why cash will never die out in favour of tech-gadgets that make payments automatically.  Whilst eBay’s banning the offering of accepting cash and international money orders may have been a good step towards reducing scam sales, it did far more harm to honest sellers, and proved again that eBay is intent on taking away buyers’ own responsibility to protect themselves, in other words, dumbing down the marketplace and introducing additional problems for sellers in the aftermath.

In a similar way, PayPal are exacerbating the problem by refusing to allow merchants to create blocked user lists. 

When I positioned this to PayPal UK, I was told, “I understand that you are enquiring about blocking some buyers who wants to pay you or bid for your items online.  I apologise but it is not available in the system that you can block methods from specific users or buyers online since this is written to the User Agreement of PayPal, however you can block their method of payments that they will made to your account but not the sender/user itself. If you offer PayPal as a payment option on eBay, you must accept all forms of PayPal payment including credit cards. Sellers may not communicate to buyers that they accept, or will not accept, specific forms of PayPal payment.”

That response is so obviously a cut and paste from several stock responses, that it is not only difficult to read and understand, but it becomes insulting to the paying customer (me) who made the enquiry.  I do understand what they are trying to say, and had the responder been allowed to free-type a reply instead of use a cut-and-paste from stock responses, it would have been far more legible.  To a new PayPal merchant, it would probably have caused them to close their account and move elsewhere, which appears to have happened too frequently in the past - PayPal’s own performance figures show that only a quarter of worldwide registered accounts are active.  In perspective, what PayPal are saying is that, even if you know for sure in advance that a “buyer” is using stolen credit cards, you cannot block that email address.  Surely this falls under fraud facilitation, rather than fraud prevention?

I can no longer see clearly what eBay is trying to do with its marketplace, and I’m not alone, many other bloggers, eBay users, and journalists now write with the same opinion as me, although, like BuildaSkill’s editor, I write without pulling the punches that others do.

Amongst eBay’s competition, at least we know the strategies in place - to slowly and managably grow their marketplaces and memberships, relying on good will, word of mouth, and lack of controversy to secure long-term loyalty and business growth. This will neccesarily cause periods of famine and feast for sellers, and the less loyal to blow in and out with the breezes from eBay.

It’s why I say that sites like the UK’s eBid, need programs to leverage and empower existing trusted sellers (or power buyers) of long standing, to take the sites’ messages to those who would otherwise consider eBay as a potential extra sales channel.  I’ve long believed that one of the market sectors eBid should concentrate on, is a package for existing small bricks & mortar niche stores wanting to get onto the Internet. 

There are enough tech savvy people amongst eBid’s membership, that some sort of “eBid trading facilitator” program could be set up where “approved” trainers could be booked (and paid) to teach B&M stores how to use eBid. A program like that could seriously boost the listings count, and with that level of choice, the site would have more stickability to the casual visitor.  Unlike the eBay Trading Assistant program, a trading facilitator program could be geared to target B&M niche stores in those product sectors where the sponsoring site has weak numbers of listings and sellers.  This would build balance and depth into the offerings on the site.

At one time, eBid had over 60% of it’s listings in just two top level categories - clothing, and music & movies.  As the management adjusted the categories and new sellers moved in, that balanced out a bit, and eBid did carve a niche for itself in several areas (e.g. Spirituality & Metaphysical).  To me, eBid has always seemed a bit low in areas like Art & Antiques, Collectables, and Toys & Games, where eBay regularly saw the best sell-through rates and prices achieved.  I notice eBid are starting to fill up in these categories now, but slowly, and they need to be having marketing drives specifically for those.

As the balance and choice improves on non-eBay sites, the buyers will follow.  However, it should be remembered that for best search engine leverage, it will be the unusual and unique that drives growth, not the commodity items.  One of my pet gripes about eBid has always been a lack of focussed promotional campaigns (the site isn’t big enough for TV campaigns yet, and the name is too close to eBay’s to use for radio campaigns - they’d cause listeners to go through to the larger site if the listeners weren’t sat at their keyboards when they heard the ads). 

In an example where someone searches for “woman’s ball gown black size 12″ eBay’s marketing and SEO muscle will always win out over smaller sites.  But, for searches such as “reproduction Roman denarius coin 4th century Hadrian” (or similarly esoteric) eBid and other smaller sites have a very real chance to defeat the San Jose giant - if they market to sellers in such niche avenues.

Although in recent years, eBay management have denied they’ve ever had a focus on seller acquisition as a route to site growth, eBid has always maintained the age-old philosophy that wherever vendors congregate, there will a marketplace be built.  It’s why their entire structure is built to encourage sellers to list on the site, and why the fees are so advantageous to those.  It’s a model that hasn’t hurt Amazon sellers either - especially the store-sellers who pay a fixed monthly fee and can list as much as they want without additional listing costs.  TazBar are following that Amazon subscription model, but eBid prefers the lifetime subscription route, and so do their sellers. 

Each experienced seller that joins any non-eBay site is sure to bring a portion of their customers with them, and the challenge now is to prevent the sellers jumping from eBay’s ship going straight into solely their own website, but into using the smaller auction sites’ lifeboats as either an interim or permanent step.

Nowhere is this more important right now than in the USA, where there is an official recession after two quarters of negative growth - the fee savings that casual and professional sellers can make on eBay alternatives with long-term market strategies needs communicated to them, by people already using and succeeding on those sites.

Before the fiddlers have fled
Before they ask us to pay the bill and while we still have the chance
Let’s face the music and dance

Soon we’ll be without the moon, humming a different tune and then
There may be teardrops to shed
So while there’s moonlight and music and love and romance
Let’s face the music and dance

Gaz

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eBay Italy announced yesterday that business sellers have until 1st April to comply with EC regulations and change their eBay account status. 

Unlike the UK announcement last month, the Italian announcement does not use the whipping point of losing the ability to sell, and does not make a big play regarding loss of DSR-based FVF discounts if registration is not done, but does state that sellers’ names and addresses will appear in all listings - exactly the issue that sparked a firestorm in the UK seller community, forcing eBay UK to back down from the over-stretching of the actual law.

The announcement from Italy states -

“To support vendors and facilitate transparency in transactions, starting from 1 April 2008 some data on companies operating on the Internet will be automatically shown in Listings:
Name of the company, if it exists;
Name and surname of the legal representative of the company;
Address of the company.
As from 1 April 2008, the listings offered by professional sellers will include the automatic right of withdrawal, as governed by Italian law for business conducted at a distance.
Finally, the terms and conditions for payment that each business seller sets for its sales, can use discretion for showing within each listing or simply placing them in My eBay during the sale.”

(I’ve had to re-grammatise the announcement as the Yahoo online translation is a little shaky, so, my apologies if doing so has changed any meaning).

So far, I’ve only seen announcements from eBay UK and Italy, but if this is an EU law being enforced, surely all EU sites should have announced this by now?  Or is this Marxist capitalism where all sites are equal, but some are more equal than others?

Let us know if you’ve seen announcements on the other EU sites and we’ve managed to miss them.

Ed

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