This week in the Bloggosphere and beyond … Put the broomstick away for another year, get the earplugs out in the UK in readiness for Guy Fawkes Night, and settle back here with the news round up from BuildaSkill.

If you’re in the US, remember to reset your clocks for Daylight Saving Time.

Bloggosphere

It seems there’s a new buzz word in the e-tailling bloggosphere this week, and that word is “Bonanzle”.  From a hardly mentioned whisper that may just have first appeared here in the BuildaSkill forums early in the summer, momentum has steadily grown, and after AuctionBytes interviewed Bonanzle founder Bill Harding in early October, interest soared.

This week the name is everywhere, from Trading Assistant Journal (where Scott Pooler even wrote an open letter scolding a commenter who he felt had been too harsh about the fledgling site) to Randy Smythe writing a Bonanzle Update in his Blog Utopia and beyond.  Bill Harding did an interview and phone-in live web-cast with AuctionWally, and almost every blog I’ve read in the last seven days has Bonanzle reviewed, discussed, or mentioned in comments.  Of course the name is not mentioned in die-hard eBay blogs such as TameBay or eBayInk – that would be asking too much.  “BusyBill” also appeared on BlogTalkRadio during the week according to the BrewsNews blog, and it goes without saying that “Our ‘Enry” – Henrietta from RedInkDiary covers the site regularly in addition to running adverts for it …  I might have to get around to reviewing the site myself soon … “watch this space” as an astronaut might say.

Steve Lindhorst, author of “Selling on the River” and the blog “The Multichannel Surfer“, has published a useful Newsletter this week.  In it he covers the topic of Amazon now requiring UPC’s (Unique Product Codes) for all items listed by 3rd Party Sellers.  It appears it is possible to obtain exemptions for several reasons, and he lists a step by step guide for how to do it.  The exemption availability varies by category, but it’s useful to know it’s there.

Blog quote of the week

A “double” from Scot Wingo at eBayStrategies this week in his review of the new eBay “InDemand” service -

“eBay has tons of data on who is searching for what, what listings are being watched, what millions of keywords they are buying from Google, etc.  However sellers never have access to that data.  When your supply is blind to (buyer) demand – it seems obvious that there will be un-met demand due to a fundamental lack of information parity.”

“In my opinion, listing/insertion fees are the arch-enemy of selection.  eBay argues they are quality’s friend, but personally I worry more about selection, and quality will take care of itself if you have a good search/finding experience.”

And so say all of us Scot, which is why we have long been advocates of the eBid fees model of one lifetime membership fee, followed by zero insertion fees and only pay success fees if you used optional listing upgrades.  Amazon comes close (as you pointed out in your post) with the monthly subscription and zero insertion fees, but with a high-quality bar to entry to the services.

Money Matters

Another hot topic this week is ProPay and particularly their new service for eBay sellers, especially their newly released secure card reader that appears to be no bigger than a USB memory stick, and works in very much the same way – cart it around, use it anywhere, get home and plug it into your USB port to upload your transactions.  Our ‘Enry did a review of the ProPay card reader on RedInkDiary this week.  Ina at AuctionBytes covered the service a week or two back, and others (AuctionBytes, BrewsNews, ) have been discussing the card reader this week.

Online Channels & Venues

Friday was a bit eventful in the race to homogenise Amazon and eBay.  Echoing policy from eBay UK earlier in the year, Amazon rolled out changes to the Returns Policy for Marketplace sellers.  No great surprises in the content, other than they are far more understanding of sellers needs than were eBay, and they did not bang “the legislation drum” as a means of making vendors comply with the policy.  The introduction was a far more professional exercise than the aggressive stance undertaken by the Richmond team.

On their part, eBay announced a new micro-site, and in their current trend of exclusionary policies made access to it to be only for PowerSellers with 4.8 across the board DSRs, in the process they effectively shut out any seller relying mainly on international shipping (think about it).  I haven’t blogged about this new service, simply because the best review in the Bloggosphere came from Scot Wingo of eBay Strategies.  As eBay have invested in his company, it was natural that he should be given the ability to preview it before it went public – I recommend reading his analysis, and that all sellers note the barbed ascerbicisms he throws in for good measure.

BrewsNews has been busy this week – they had a swathe of reports about eBay and PayPal glitches during the second half of the week.  They started Wednesday with MarkDown Manager still rating Neutral Feedbacks as Negatives in emails – not a priority for eBay to fix it seems.

On Thursday, BrewsNews reported a hat-trick of glitches.  PayPal decided to cut out the middlemen transaction of a seller shipping goods before PayPal gives the buyer their money back, or so it would seem with a PayPal glitch+error+correction-that-needs-another-correction report from Brews where PayPal are now telling sellers they have to manually collect funds from echeques, then the system won’t give them the funds, and when they phone PayPal to get it sorted, PayPal don’t credit the cleared echeque to the seller’s account, they take that value OUT of it instead.  Then the eBay shipping calculator broke before giving up entirely and telling buyers they had to contact the sellers for shipping costs, after which the relisting system collapsed causing sellers to have to manually check if each relisted item had, or had not, been relisted.

Some excellent blogging from Brews, including that the PayPal echeque debacle was blogged live while they were on hold waiting for a solution – maybe WordPress should build a module for live blogging, with embedded voice recognition software, and socially networked live webcasting of the customer service conversation in progress.  We could all get auto-tweeted, or SMS’d, to log in and listen, and it could be called … Web 2 point 007

Strangely (or not), whilst the main sites made no acknowledgement of Brews’ issues, eBay Australia did carry a couple of announcements mid-week.  The first, on Wednesday related to unclaimed funds and upgrading from a personal PayPal account,  The second, on Thursday related to the echeque issue.  (You’ll need to register as a user in our forums for both those links).

Webifying

I mentioned last week that we are playing around with the OpenX Advertising Server software here at BuildaSkill.  An email from them landed in my mailbox mid-week to say they have launched a hosted version of the server within their own infrastructure – great!  Wish I’d been told three weeks earlier.

Anyway, OpenX Hosted is free to publishers serving up to 25 million ad impressions each month, with professional and enterprise packages available for larger publishers who need the additional services and support to manage their businesses.  Apparently hundreds of publishers (web site owners) helped test the new system, which has been in Beta since January.  We’re already too far down the road with our stand alone self-hosted implementation to switch, but we’d like to hear from anyone who is, or begins, using the hosted version, especially if they have experience of both and can write a comparative review.

Also on the radar this week, is social commerce company ShopIt, which Gaz reviewed for BuildaSkill a few months back.  They’ve heard the criticisms around the web and have moved to make improvements.  Amongst them is that shop owners can now configure and write an “About Us” style summary for their landing page, and a sort of DSR stars system that looks to “represent your overall store rating … an awesome rating system where users will be able to rate your store based on a number of different things such as product quality, your transactions with others, customer service, etc.“  This may prove a sore point with eBay sellers, but at least it presents an aggregate score on your shop home page, and your use of the service is not going to be promoted or demoted by the scores received.

Also new, in ShopIt, is a ‘User Updates’ section allowing -

“constant update of what your friends and customers are up to – adding new products, recently sold items, new friends on the network, etc.  One of the coolest new features on our new site is the ability to buy and sell digital music tracks, which will be available in the next round of updates.  You can now also leave comments for your friends and customers right on their profile page. Tell them what you think about their profile, their videos, and the stuff they’re selling.”

ShopIt is available from the Apps libraries in FaceBook and MySpace, and is due soon into LinkedIn and other social networking sites, as well as from the www.shopit.com website.

World Affairs

It’s pretty quiet this week in the Far East.  Quiet that is if you tune out the noise from the Economic Crisis and the “I’m better than he is” hoohaa running up to the ballot in the USA.  Some of the smaller Asian countries that had said, a few weeks back, that they were shielded from this year’s crisis because of processes put in place after the 1997 crisis, have now admitted they got that wrong, and that their economies will be hit by falling exports and tourism slow downs.  Australia appears to be battling as desperately as the US and Europe to stave off the worst of it, and the UK seems unsavable from a currency exchange point of view.

I woke up Thursday to be tipped off by Gaz, then told by my UK bank, that Sterling had dropped 10% overnight, only to discover that by mid afternoon the 24-hour shift was only around a 1.5% drop – crisis mode averted.  Still it shows the importance of needing to check exchange rates several times a day in the current financial climate – especially if you are regularly selling internationally.

Looking Ahead

Halloween’s over.  In the UK, Guy Fawkes Day and Bonfire Night is held on Wednesday this week – be careful everyone – and in the US, there’s something-or-other happening this week that I feel I should be able to remember, but appear to have tuned out of my consciousness.  In e-tailing, the focus will now be on the march up to Thanksgiving, and the last Friday of November, which is apparently when Americans begin shopping in earnest for Christmas.

Great name for a department store that would be – “Shop in ‘Earnest‘ this Christmas!” ….

…. I’ll get my hat – the hammock is waiting – happy reading everyone.

Ed