After two years of incessant price increases, and being told the major fee revisions in January and last week were price decreases, which does not agree with the actuality, many eBay sellers are extremely price sensitive when looking at new channels. For that reason, most have expressed a preference for building their own ecommerce website and many serviced, script-based, store providers have emerged in the last year. Many of those providers have built their offerings on the back of customised versions of the open source osCommerce web store software - still the best and most powerful of the generic offerings on the web.

Thus it was with great surprise and welcome enthusiasm that I discovered (by accident) a new service called “shopit” yesterday …

According to reports, there may be a back door built into Skype, which allows connections to be bugged. The company has declined to expressly deny the allegations. At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception of IP based services held on 25th June, high-ranking officials at the Austrian interior ministry revealed that it is not a problem for them to listen in on Skype conversations.

This has been confirmed to heise online by a number of the parties present at the meeting. Skype declined to give a detailed response to specific enquiries from heise online as to whether Skype contains a back door and whether specific clients allowing access to a system or a specific key for decrypting data streams exist. The response from the eBay subsidiary’s press spokesman was brief, “Skype does not comment on media speculation. Skype has no further comment at this time.” There have been rumours of the existence of a special listening device which Skype is reported to offer for sale to interested states.

A crushing blow to sellers of low price items arrived on the UK site less than an hour ago with news that from the removal date of eBay Shops, and their migration to new-BIN style listings, items priced under 99-pence will no longer be listable on the site.

eBay UK Community Manager “James the Pink” was the messenger that delivered the bad news in this PowerSeller Discussion Board announcement.

Reading between the lines of this announcement, despite repeated assurances that pre-existing SIF format listings (on 24th September) will directly migrate to the new-BIN format, it would seem that sub-99p item listings will not.

One of the least discussed announcements of this months policy shifts, is that eBay.com will stop sellers from selling if their DSR ratings hit 4.3 or lower.

It’s no secret that I am still heartily opposed to the DSR system because of several reasons -

• eBay messaging buyers that a rating of 4 out of 5 is “good”.
• The non-transparency of the whole system and the repeated apparent manipulation just before seller invoices are due.
• The massive failure and withdrawal of the DSR system, Seller Dashboard, and Best Match a few weeks ago.

Therefore the news that the USA will block sellers for achieving a rating higher than what they tell the customers is “good”, really rankles with me. I don’t care if those below 4.3 ratings need a good kick in the pants or not, this new policy displays far more insidious double standards than the whole Iraq War/Haliburton contracts issue.

AuctionBytes have published a timely story to remind sellers about several policy deadlines that could have been overlooked with all the recent news of fee and listing format changes. Shipping choices, sale handling time, and returns, policies are all changing this autumn.

Triggered by an eBay Developers Program news announcement, the sequence of events most affecting sellers began on Monday this week with the requirement that all sellers specify at least one domestic shipping option. Overseas sellers can select “Seller’s Standard Rate”, or variations including economy and expedited, in order to avoid having to name USPS services not available from other countries.

In what is becoming typical eBay style, the tools to enable sellers to quickly respond to, and comply with, changing policies will not be available until after the policy is in force. Currently sellers will need to edit listings one-by-one from their “My eBay” or Selling Manager tools, or by going into each listing and doing it from there …

Electronic Payments & Accepted Payments Policy Changes for 2008-2009

Beginning in late October 2008, cheques and money orders will no longer be allowed as payment methods on eBay.com. All listings appearing on eBay.com must accept one of the following payment methods:

• PayPal (funded by PayPal account balance, credit card, bank account, or eBay gift certificate)
• Credit card payment to a seller (through a seller’s Internet merchant account)
• ProPay (a third party service not currently available for Canadian sellers)
• Payment upon pickup

Major “Gotcha” - My first reaction to this is that this is a back-door route for a PayPal-only eBay USA. Small sellers, and those whose business model precludes them from obtaining Merchant Services, and sellers outside the USA who cannot obtain a ProPay account, will only have PayPal available to them as a payment method on the USA site during the peak pre-Christmas selling season.

eBay’s Matt Olson from the US Finding teamposted an announcement yesterday that the Matching Products module in the product search had been updated. (Read full post & click image to view the image full size).

Although I do like the new look, I can’t help feeling it is a little “too Amazon”. In particular the results data about how many found and their price range is exactly how Amazon have been presenting their third-party vendor results for years.

The late summer change announcements for the North American eBay sites are radically different to those with major effects in Europe.

The NAFTA-zone sites are keeping traditional eBay Stores and SIF format, but adding new listing durations and fee structures for the existing Fixed Price/BIN format in core.

Specifically this means that they will retain the ultra-cheap, but restricted visibility, store listing option, and sellers using it will still need listings in Auction and BIN format to drive buyers to their shop inventory. The BIN format listings also get a single unified insertion fee, which remains the same regardless of unit price or quantity in the listing, and also get several eBay-authorised methods to manipulate Best Match search ranking for their listings. The primary kick-in-the-nuts for sellers comes with the new “electronic payments” only policy, that has potential to slide-in a PayPal-only North America via the back door.

The announcement from eBay SG is in, and like North America they seem to be going with the “Modify BIN but leave shops alone” change model.

There are three main sets of fee savings for western-country sellers that can be achieved by making use of eBay Singapore, though so few sellers seem to realise or leverage this. In this post, I’m not just giving you the news, I’m giving you some serious food for thought for the future of your eBay business. Throw out all your preconceptions about having to work in multiple currencies (they’re likely wrong anyway) and put on your accounting head for a few minutes - you could save your business a small fortune and really send a message to eBay about their fee-extortion in western countries …

This started out as not so much a blog post, but as simply a memorandum to myself (and readers) to harass eBay staff for answers to the following points regarding yesterday’s “New-BIN” and fee change announcements.

This list is geared at primarily eBay UK users, and I’ll try to complete one for the US and other sites if time allows (remember I have a regular job as well as an on-eBay business too) - maybe some nice, kind US-based seller could do one for their site for me and post it to the blog?