This week in the Bloggosphere and beyond … Put the coffee on, grab a croissant, and settle back for the news round up.

Bloggosphere

Scott Pooler at Trading Assistant Journal reckons the eBay body corporate has Altzheimer’s Disease, and Henrietta over at Red Ink Blog has been doing some number punching about Diamond PowerSeller Buy dot com.

Both of those tie in nicely with a post that Randy Smythe published – a long post containing a protest letter he’d received regarding Buy and the Diamond PowerSeller deals on eBay. Randy also resurfaced the “John Donahoe, Pierre Omidyar & Level Playing Field” video from earlier this year, which had never played for me, then disappeared before I could snag it on YouTube . Thanks Randy, I’ve seen it now, and the one image I couldn’t get out of my head was that of the “nodding dogs” that used to be popular for car dashboards and back window shelves. Hmmm? – maybe I should get some made with the faces of current eBay staff? Let me know if you want to place an advance order for one

AuctionBytes ran a survey of US sellers about eBay UK introducing compulsory free P&P on Monday. By Friday it had over 140 responses – not bad going for a blog post – almost all condemning the move. Randy Smythe and Skip McGrath lead the field amongst preferred JD replacements, with Ina Steiner coming a close 3rd so far. Outside of those three, I’d like to see Rajiv Dutta come back as JD’s replacement, and I’d demand Pierre Omidyar came back and sat as head of technology and innovation.

Blog quote of the week

This week it’s from Henrietta over at Red Ink …

I had a phone call from an Ebay rep. who wanted to tell me about a wonderful offer for sellers, “free shipping”. When I asked who was going to pay for the shipping she replied, “I don’t know”. I asked if I took my packages to the post office will they accept them without postage, she said, “No”. Then who is going to pay for the shipping? She said, “the script I am reading doesn’t say.” She will probably NOT be one of the 1000 getting laid off. She fits in their customer service perfectly…clueless!!!

C’mon Henrietta, tell us everything … hope you didn’t let the CS rep off the hook that easily?

Discussions & Forums

Saturday afternoons are when I get a chance to follow up on all the sites forwarding traffic to BuildaSkill. I can do this easily via a blog plug-in called WP-Stats written by Matt Mullenweg, the author of the WordPress blogging software. This week has been no fun – every eBay forum post (this week) that referred readers to this site has been deleted from the eBay sites, along with the threads they were in. This is a new variant of “GreedBay” – they love everyone to link to their sites, increasing their page ranking and relevance in search engines, but they’re not willing to allow reciprocation. It’s why there’s a massive edit on BuildaSkill, this month, to amend all links outbound to eBay into affiliate links. Might as well earn some cash off them if they’re cutting the back-links eh? It’s probably that LiveWorld have got some new staff and they set them on a clean-up campaign – Yah, Boo, Hiss.

Money Matters

As the global economic crisis unfolds, Europe seems to be outpacing North America for remedies. Amongst other topics on the Brussels agenda are cross border regulations for e-money transactions that could see PayPal reined in and regulated (in Europe at least).

Speaking of cross-border payments, PayPal have finally introduced Website Payments Pro, Express Checkout, and Virtual Terminal into Canada. I’ve written an editorial about it that will appear tomorrow, here on the BuildaSkill Global Biz Blog.

Scott at TAJ has covered the new Merchant Payments Gateway requirements arriving on eBay in January.

Skip McGrath ran a blog that charted the drop in eBay stock price immediately before the Q3 earnings call .. and followed it up with one immediately after it, echoing the share price had again dived. Scot Wingo gave the best summary as to why -

“In the marketplace business, revenue was up 4% y/y. GMV was down 1% y/y and here’s the catch – advertising was up a whopping 127% y/y …. …. The way we’re going, I’m very concerned eBay will become an advertising site with some GMV on the side and that’s definitely NOT the way to fix this marketplace.”

Even more newsworthy/worrying (depending on which side of the fence you’re on) was onlyebay.com’s summary for the Q4 forecast – negative growth in Q4 – can it be true?

Online Channels & Venues

I was given a nudge during the week to say that the ShopIt cart system is now integrated on MySpace as well as FaceBook (available from the shopping section of the Apps Library). ShopIt was reviewed here on BuildaSkill at the end of August. It’s a “one inventory, multiple outlets” system, and it’s free. Try it.

Update – I’ve also just discovered that this week ShopIt announced they’re now also available on the Ning social networks system – and that in total they now have 500,000 stores set up on the ShopIt system. At this growth rate they’ll soon have more stores than eBay.

Randy Smythe ran a delightful post-mortem on eBay’s Q3 results, with a gleefully “told you so” tone, citing several Wall St analysts. Also, although many blogs also ran a list of change-deliveries on dot com for this week, Randy’s was the most comprehensive. I didn’t get to do one as I was watching a rumble in the jungle (see World Affairs below) and the changes were well covered by “diary pre-entries” in the BuildaSkill forums. BTW – Randy also remains my favourite source of blogged info about Amazon, just wish he’d do a post or two for overseas sellers trying to get on to the Big River.

In the iBusiness Logic blog, Scott Pooler (he gets around doesn’t he?) has run a side-by-side site traffic comparison of Etsy, Bonanzle, and OnlineAuction. The only surprise is Etsy’s rate of growth – wow!

eBid appear to have again blocked out tranches of users East of Suez, though no explanation as to why has been received (although query acknowledgements and statements of passing the queries to technical did get received). I’ve not been able to view the site since last weekend – I get http:403 (access denied) errors, and their clixGalore affiliate banners (468×60 size) have been unavailable for the same period – strangely it is only that banner size – other sizes are unaffected. Gaz in Thailand reports he’s suffering the same issues, with eBid, and that CS escalated his reports to technical earlier in the week (apparently as of Friday afternoon, eBid techs were stumped). Two users in Oz have said the same thing has happened, and one from Singapore. I haven’t tried eBid’s ppPay payment site to see if it’s doing the same, just in case I jinx my account.

Hope it gets fixed soon, or I might just have to send a personalised growl to Mark Wilkinson and Gary Sewell … are you listening guys? UK users are telling me everything is working fine, and strangely, forum reply notices are coming through with no problem. Maybe someone at the kewtonia blog (an eBid-sellers’ help blog) would like to post about this and try to nudge the technical team for a faster answer?

Webifying

As blogged during the week, the affiliate ad agencies are ramping up for Christmas. The eBay Partner Network is too, but they’re determined to milk Halloween first, then no doubt they’ll do the same for Thanksgiving, and might finally get around to pushing Christmas campaigns, about the same time as the advent calendars go up?

World Affairs

Hun Sen, the (former Khmer Rouge) leader of modern Cambodia, rattled his machete at Thailand this last week. The cause was a couple of square miles of disputed border land and a 900-year-old cliff top ruined temple. Thailand gave back as good rhetoric as they got, and mid-week it escalated into several gunfights ending with a couple of dead Cambodian soldiers and several wounded on both sides. Troop deployments mounted rapidly, and the squabble hit the international media (search “Preah Vihear Temple”). Expatriate eBay sellers abandoned Turbo Lister and moaning about DSRs, Best Match, and UK fees, and ploughed in here instead. As the week’s closing, it looks like the two nations’ militaries are finding a compromise, whilst the leaderships continue posturing.

The incident remains important as it could set a precedent regarding huge offshore oil & gas supplies in waters also disputed by the two countries, and could roll over onto disputed Thai:Malaysian and Thai:Burmese waters also rich in Natural Gas. Starts to look like Thai plans to buy a submarine may go ahead – they’d be the only SE Asian nation to have one, and it could cuddle up to their permanently moored aircraft carrier (the one with no planes) that they bought a few decades back – again the only locally owned flat-top in the region.

Looking Ahead

Of most immediate concern to North American eBay users is the commencement, tomorrow, of the Paperless Payments Policy – watch for my blog post appearing tomorrow with some hints and tips for how to survive it.

On the back of disappointing 3rd quarter results from eBay this last week, Amazon’s are due out this coming week. With quarterly core-marketplaces revenue growth of just 4% under CEO John Donahoe, whose explanations range from bedding in of his “disruptive innovation” strategy (with at least one more year of it ahead) to the state of the general economy, everyone is waiting with bated breath to see if Amazon is suffering the same slowdown, though no-one is expecting them to do so. Calls are already mounting for JD getting booted out – not just from eBay’s customers either – has anyone snagged the domain name “FireJD.com” yet?

I’m off to my hammock in the sun with an afternoon cocktail or three – happy reading everyone.

Ed