Canada post have provided eBay with a lengthy announcement relating to a new classification for certain lettermail items deemed “Irregular” due to their size or shape.

Essentially, the new classification relates to non-flexible items between 10mm and 20mm thick, with “box-like” corners.

Full details can be found in the full Canada Post announcement in the BuildaSkill Global Post Offices Forum board (login required) with links to all the relevant info pages on the Canada Post website.

Ed

Those of us lucky enough to have regular work that involves travelling a lot in far flung lands, soon become aware that not everyone speaks our native language with the same fluency as ourselves.

In fact, the more we travel, the more we come to realise that English has more variations than eBay Customer Supports’ interpretations of eBay policy for a particular topic. We also, without realising it, soon get drawn into becoming ad-hoc teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), and it is the wise frequent-traveller who keeps a set of notes in their baggage for fulfilling the all too frequent requests to present something on the EFL topic when visiting distant destinations.

Thus it happens that I keep in my “journo-bag” a set of notes for giving a brief presentation regarding descriptive English, which was first presented years ago to a group of undergrad journalism students. It’s a presentation that I can now give from memory, but I keep the notes handy as they can be copied and used as hand-outs, which are always appreciated.

Following up on an email from a BuildaSkill reader, I downloaded eBay Australia’s new 12 page manual for how to use their New Search system, already imposed on the UK and ready to roll in Australia soon. Currently New Search is only available to Australia in the eBay Playground, where in my opinion it should stay. After all, as the BuildaSkill reader said, if it needs a 12-page manual, then it should be ditched and taken back to basics … ummm … a bit like Google search perhaps?

Anyway … browsing through the New Search tutorial, I managed to just in time stop myself from spraying my keyboard and monitor with coffee, and somehow avoided choking myself with it as I burst out laughing at this graphic on page 4 …

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eBay India has today announced wide ranging fee changes affecting almost every aspect of selling on the site.

In particular, they have heavily cut fees for basic services such as basic listing fees, international visibility, plus a range of category related fees, and radically, they have introduced a cap for the maximum fees any seller will pay in any month. 

Monthly shop subscriptions have increased slightly, but are still far lower than the equivalent from EU or North American eBay sites.  FVFs have diverged heavily with Technology categories dropping to a flat rate 1% for all final prices, and all other categories moving off the tiered tables to a flat 5%.  The media categories get FREE insertion permanently with FVFs of 6%.

Is this a taste of John Donahoe’s eBay that “will be unrecognisable next year”?

In summary, the fee changes are as follows (for rough currency conversion, reckon on 1 Re = 1p UK / 2c US) -

• Listing fee reduction:
• - Flat listing fees of Re. 1 per listing with a maximum cap of Rs. 1500 per month.
• - Zero insertion fees for Books, Movies, Music & Video games categories (Media Categories).
• - Maximum listing fees charged in a month will be Rs. 1500 – this means that if your listing fees exceeds Rs.1500 in a month, you can list additional items (over and above the maximum cap of Rs 1500) for free.

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With tomorrow as the deadline for additional information and the public meeting set for Monday, eBay Australia announced today that they are postponing the PayPal-only policy in order to work further with the ACCC.

The announcement, signed by “the eBay Team” rather than Alistair MacGibbon, included the following statements -

Changes to eBay.com.au »”>eBay.com.au scheduled for 15 July are being postponed until the review process with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) regarding its recent draft notice is complete. As previously announced, eBay.com.au is continuing to work with the ACCC to achieve an outcome that benefits buyers and sellers.

Changes that came into effect on 21 May 2008, requiring all sellers to offer PayPal, will remain. These changes mean that all buyers have the option of choosing PayPal, the safer payment method for shopping on eBay.com.au. Payment methods that are currently permitted will continue to be allowed on eBay.com.au until further notice.

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Etsy.com whose homepage declares, “Your place to buy & sell all things handmade”, has rolled out a new search engine that returns only handmade items in results.

Now almost 3 years old, with 1.1 million listings, and 5 buyers for every seller, they’ve tweaked how both browsing and searching works. Effective 5th May, -

The main search bar will default to searching only handmade goods. This means that vintage items and commercial supplies will, by default, be excluded from search results. Of course, the searcher can opt to include them by selecting the correct option from the drop-down menu to the right of the search bar.

Right now we have what we call “subcategory bleed.” When you click into, say, Art, you only see items whose first tag is Art. But as soon as you hit a subcategory in Art, like Drawings, you see all items who have both those tags, no matter what the first tag is. This will be remedied to work in the way that most people expect it to work (from other ecommerce taxonomies): Art > Drawings will only show items with the first tag Art; in other words, items inside that top-level category.

The site yesterday announced extending the visibility of non-handmade items, such as commercially produced handicraft supplies and vintage items, by four months, to compensate for the loss of search and browse visibility. Those both have their own categories at the top level, and should still be easily findable by enthusiasts on this niche site. The 4-month extension is available to all listings extended or renewed before 30 June. All such listings must be correctly tag-categorised.

Seems it’s not just eBay playing with search & finding - eBay, now Etsy, will eBid be next in the “e+3 site names” to play with visibility? Ee-bye-gum - it’s all too much for me.

Ed

Niche online-auction site WargamesMarket.com has changed name and expanded the sectors it hopes to attract.

Relaunched and rebranded as Games2Trains.com, the original site was conceived in summer 2006 by a disgruntled eBay seller, and launched in January 2007. The current site configuration arrived in the summer of that year after reliability issues with the previous site engine.

Games2Trains guarantees being always fee-cheaper than eBay and runs on a no-final-value-fee model (pun intended). Categories have been expanded (but not alphabeticised) for trading cards, die-cast models, and traditional “lead soldier” collectors and manufacturers. The site owner is extremely interested in attracting manufacturers to list their catalogue, and unusually does allow in listing links to seller’s own websites.

Ed

MoneyBookers have announced the appointment of a new CFO.

As one of Europe’s largest and fastest growing online payment systems companies, they have announced the appointment of Paul Goodridge as Chief Financial Officer.

Prior to joining Moneybookers, Goodridge was Director of Finance at CSR Plc where he was responsible for all financial, legal, IS and investor relations aspects of the business. While at CSR Plc, he oversaw both its floatation on the London Stock Exchange at a valuation of £200m and its subsequent promotion into the FTSE 250, making it one of the most successful technology IPOs in the last five years. Under Paul’s stewardship, CSR grew from a loss making 70 person company with $5m revenue to a 1,200 person business with $850m revenue and a 20% EBIT margin.

MoneyBookers provides domestic payment options in more than 40 countries and processes over €10m in transactions each day for customers in 200 countries, and provides customer service in 12 languages. With almost 5 million account holders Moneybookers is one of the largest e-wallets worldwide.

Moneybookers enables any business or consumer to securely and cost-effectively send and receive payments online, simply by using an email address. Everyday, Moneybookers welcomes more than 9,000 costumers as new owners of its electronic wallet - which provides convenience and enhanced security for online shopping, real-time payments and transactions. More than 9,000 merchants use Moneybookers’ gateway product, among them global ecommerce brands such as Skype, and Foto.com

Starting at the end of June, all listings on eBay Spain must state a shipping method and cost, or the listing will not be accepted.

An announcement released today, does permit collection as a shipping type and gives the example of a sofa as being an item suitable for such a method.

The announcement claims that there are currently 50,000 items on the site with no shipping method or costs stated, and that buyers are complaining of being charged up to two or three times what was quoted pre-bid. The announcement states that such actions are driving buyers away from the site.

Personally, I’m all for policies such as this (maybe the first sensible one from any eBay this year?).

From the very first item I listed on eBay, I have always stated shipping costs for all zones, and after the first few months of finding my feet, I have always tried to specify a minimum of two, shipping methods and costs, to each geographic zone. My only gripe is that the eBay shipping system does not offer sellers enough flexibility to specify more zones and more delivery options.

Maybe that’s why I love the system that ecommerce site software osCommerce offers - I could run a local post office from their shipping modules.

Ed