This week in the Bloggosphere and beyond … and now for something not so completely different, by all the usual suspects, and few new faces.  Fruit juice and muesli at the ready?  Good, we shall begin …

Bloggosphere

Former eBay UK forum “pink” turned eBay guru and vzaar employee, Dan Wilson, has been busy in the bloggosphere this week.  Early in the week he turned up on Alex Bellinger’s blog “SmallBizPod” with a post called 7 things you need to know about eBay.  SmallBizPod also has a Facebook entrepreneur-group that celebrated exceeding 1,000 members this month.

Dan also posted a useful warning on his own blog about a crowd called EmPwrOnline purporting to run eBay training seminars, but actually running “scrape & bait” pyramid-selling operations for website building and hosting that contravene the eBay email-harvesting policy.  He ran a rewrite on TameBay too, where one of the commenters positioned that EmPwrOnline may be linked to Pangaea Group Inc of Utah.  Some of the commenters on Dan’s own blog made the same connection.  I guess all that teenage door-to-door Mormon evangelising becomes useful as an adult in the sales arena?

On a similar Trust & Scamming theme, Forbes.com ran a piece regarding a scammer using eBay who got 27 years in jail this week.  Adrian Florin Fechet, 39, a Romanian national, was one of 21 individuals charged in the case. Three are fugitives and fifteen of the others have received sentences ranging from two to eight years.  A good result for investigators, and the type that needs publicised more to keep all sites safe.

I’ve been saying all year that eBay UK is becoming increasingly racist and xenophobic about which sellers it permits onto the site – an overall attitude rather than targeting individual vendors – and the latest blog post from another former eBay forum pink, Jamie Parkins, on his personal blog gives a tantalising insight to why this culture has evolved.  Jamie (affectionately called “Jammie” by many UK PowerSellers) was the epitome of what eBay’s paying customers expect from support staff, but he left to join vzaar before the current culture-rot set in at the Richmond, UK HQ.  He is still missed by the forum-using section of eBay customers.  Disclosure – Jamie is not James, the current UK Community (mis)Manager.

Staying, for a moment, with the “we don’t like you” theme, eBay have been hinting at a falling out with Google for some months now, which may explain a large chunk of recent traffic and GMV collapses (it’s not all economy-related no matter what eBay like to say), and this has best been covered at RedInkDiary.  AuctionBytes are also a good source of solid info on this and Henrietta gives links to Ina’s insights there.  The As was marketing blog also has an interesting discussion developing on the topic, they also pose the essential question about has anything changed for buyers?

AuctionBytes’ gleeful anti-eBay supporters were in full-chuckle mode midweek, when Ina reported that the PayPal security key had gone four-legs-up and was locking key-holders out of their own PayPal accounts.

A week or two back, I introduced Sunday Papers readers to a Malaysian blog.  This week jennyhow.com has been covering wholesale buying, including perfumes, jewellery, fashion, and others, plus a post about visible credibility (feedback related).  Worth a minute or two of reading as refreshers.  I’ve also noticed a few “big name” blogs have added jennyhow to their blogrolls after I introduced the site on BuildaSkill.

Blog quote of the week

This week’s quote is not from a blogger, but from a commenter on a blog post at AuctionBytes.  RicRoe said -

“ebay has historically out performed the brick and mortar retail segment as well as the stock market during past recessions.  When times got tough, buyers used to flock to eBay, in search of incredible deals on unique items as well as scoop up second hand goods to help stretch their dollar. Then came John Donahoe …”

and the rest, as they say, is history, although I have to ask if the USA has actually had a recession between 1996 (launch of AuctionWeb pre-eBay) and the start of 2008?  Your thoughts in the comments (below) please.

Discussions & Forums

I bumbled upon a new (to me) forum this week – I say bumbled because I don’t want to confuse by making you think I used StumbleOn – AuctionCUT is an independent auction and eBay forum.  They had 1,748 registered users in their community at the time I found them, but unfortunately I didn’t have time to give them more than a glance because I was a busy bee at the time – as Arnold said, “I’ll be back”.   If you have a nosy, let me know what you think of the place.

International

Seems Amazon’s dirty tricks brigade are coming of age – at least according to Henrietta at RedInkDiary, where she describes that Amazon Prime lets her subscribe, but the service is not available to her.

Online Channels & Venues

Cyber Monday in the USA approaches.  This is the annual one-day buying frenzy where some traders can acquire up to half their annual online sales in just one weekend.  Randy Smythe has posted some sage wisdom (as always) about being prepared for it, especially during this “slow down” in ecommerce.

BrewsNews reports that the current Amazon Sellers Central information for maximising holiday sales is telling sellers to offer profit-chopping promotions and … wait for it … is aping the eBay mantra about offering free shipping.  One phrase comes to mind – “self fulfilling prophesies” – if you tell enough people they want free shipping, and tell them often enough, then they will want free shipping, even if they’re losing combined shipping discounts by demanding the shipping be part of the purchase price.  Unless a buyer collects, there is no such thing as free shipping, so as Michael Caine might have said, “Stop quoting that bloody propaganda at me!”.

An easy to overlook blog post this week appeared from Skip McGrath.  Skip is one of the “must read” bloggers covering eBay for buyers and sellers, and he’s updated his tips page with a shortening from a list of 99 to a list of 77 for the new eBay.  Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re going to say about him being the master of the hard sell and in-your-face advertising etc. but seriously, I scanned this page and found half a dozen ideas I’d never thought about in his first twenty tips alone.  Schedule a percolator of coffee and a big box of doughnuts, and read it with pen and paper in hand – there’s a link to a printable .pdf file at the bottom of the list too.

Suppliers & Services

The official vzaar blog (yes, I know I’m mentioning them a lot this week – it’s all Dan Wilson’s fault) had a recent post about admin and team communications tools that BuildaSkill readers with employees may find informative.  I’m not so sure it’s useful to single person businesses unless you’re considering expanding soon.  This, I notice, is a growing trend in the online services and software worlds – an increasing tendency to ignore the sole-operator businesses and move towards the multi-person business.  eBay are becoming guilty of it too, as are other online channels.

Skip McGrath briefly mentioned a new service from Amazon this week, whereby you buy in bulk and have the supplier ship to Amazon, then use Fulfillment by Amazon to despatch orders.  The “sell” is that Amazon get far better shipping rates due to volume and those then offset the fee for the service, but he missed that for international shippers, this provides an in-territory inventory with shortened lead times.  I’d be interested to know what “customer-grabs/ cross-selling” Amazon include with the delivery, or if they use 100% your branding and identity, in and on the parcel.

Webifying

Lots of communication relayed to me this week regarding the ongoing block of traffic to eBid from outside their site-list of 18 countries.

Visitors are still receiving the dreaded http://403 Forbidden Access error message from a server-level port:80 blockage implemented by eBid’s admins.  The same lock-out continues too at eBid-owned online payment processor ppPay – if you’ve got money locked up in there that you cannot access, please get in touch with me.

One relayed email had this to say from an anonymous Customer Support rep (i.e. no eBid signatory to the email = very poor treatment of customers, even eBay don’t do that.  Note the poor grammar and spelling too = not a good image to portray.) -

“Acccess (sic) to eBid is guaranteed to the 18 countries in which we operate. Most other countries around the world have access to view eBid but, at times, some do not depending on factors known to the management at eBid, they can range from possible location of a previous DoS attack or even a large number of unwanted registrations being made from a certain location.”

Our in-house site-tech, Gaz, has this to say about the topic -

There are an unprecedented number of elevated alerts in the Internet security world right now – everything from new viral and trojan threats, to almost all web-master forums reporting an incredible surge in registration-bot attacks overwhelming site adminstrators’ abilities to keep-up with, and delete fake registrations.  Even relatively small and new sites like BuildaSkill are being targeted, so it’s no surprise that larger, ten year old, ecommerce sites like eBid are high priority targets for hackers.

One of the key front-line defences that many sites have failed to implement, and which admittedly BuildaSkill only caught up with recently, following a wave of bot-driven auto-registration attempts, has been “visual verification” tools installation.  These effectively stop auto-registration or submission, by requiring a human to copy a code or answer a question.

Generally, these are available free for almost every website software script ever written, but very few sites have implemented them.  (Ed – including a surprising number linked to from this edition of Sunday Papers).

I installed these not only for BuildaSkill recently, but for all of Ed’s other sites, and for almost all of mine too (only one is still pending and will be done in the next day or so), as well as for all the other sites I maintain for other people, and they instantly stopped the script-based registration invasion, and blog comment-spam attacks – Dead!  Zero since installation of “visual verification”.  On some sites I installed a double-layer system to further defeat “intelligent-bots”.

It took around two minutes to install them for each script/website, and doing so released hours of administrator time per day.  I notice MoneyBookers and NoChex use similar login and registration visual verifications, whereas PayPal, eBay, and eBid do not.  The lack of this simple add-in may explain why those sites are subjected to so much down time, and so many glitches.

So there you are.  Would you trust a site without “visual verification” on registration or login pages?  Who knows what else those registration bots are adding to your site?

I can verify what Gaz said about comment-spam and phoney registrations stopping instantly too.  We’ve since had only one manual attempt, by a bogus identity, in the guest board for registration problems in the forums, easily identified and deleted very promptly, and that’s been it.  You can see what we mean by visual verification in the comments form below this post.

World Affairs

At the close of the APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation) zone summit in Lima, Peru, President George W. Bush has used his final major foreign affairs engagement to emphasise a message that eBay should be listening to.  He delivered a closing statement that delivered a new catch-phrase, “Free Trade, Free Markets, and Free People”.  The overall message he delivered was that too much government in marketplaces is more damaging than too little.  For the first time in his eight year administration, I am in agreement with him … I need a lie down, where’s my hammock?

At the other end of the APEC zone, hot gossip this week “out-East”, is the mid-week attack on anti-government protestors camped in Government House in Bangkok.  From the extremely wishy-washy Thai-news reports that tried to subdue the event, due to the six-day state funeral for HRH Princess Galayani, some extrapolations can be made.  Reports state a grenade was thrown into the compound from “2-3 blocks away”.  Now that’s a “throw” that the New York Yankees wish they had for their outfielders, or the England cricket team had for their squad – it’s several hundred metres and even Olympians cannot match that.  Ergo, it had to be a rocket propelled grenade (RPG).

At which point, fingers should normally be pointed at the uniformed services, but pointing is not polite in Thai Society, so no-one has done so.  The gossip has been that if an RPG was used, it indicates military or official para-military police/regular police unit involvement, and may have to be recorded (in the future) as the opening shot for a civil war, which an increasing number of pundits expect (off the record).  It’s also worth noting that the usual suspects have not been rounded up (as of the time of writing) – that sends a strong message to “professional watchers and commentators” too.

The question for all of you is – at what point does mass protest become civil unrest, and when does that become insurgency (and is that a polite name for terrorism?), and when does insurgency become civil war?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on that – it’s not completely off-topic for the normal content of this blog, if you think of it in terms of eBay seller boycotts/strikes, Trust & Safety clampdowns, and the like, this year.

Looking Ahead

Right, I’m off to rummage under the stairs for my flak jacket and battle-bowler – happy reading everyone.

Ed