The eBay SE Asia team arrived in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand yesterday, accompanied by members of the PayPal SE Asia team, DHL Thailand, and Auctiva/Global MerchantRun from Shanghai.  Invitees for the summit were eBay’s top sellers from Northern Thailand.

Attendance was much smaller than I’d anticipated.  A similar event for all seller levels in 2006 gathered over 200 sellers, and in the ensuing 30 months I’d expected many of them to graduate into the top tiers.  Last night’s summit managed to muster only around 30 people, of which several were spouses.  Whilst the 2006 event attracted less than a dozen foreign expatriates (5%), last night’s pulled a near 50% foreign attendance.

As I’ve already described in my own Expat Eye blog, there is an indication that native sellers in SE Asia, and Thailand particularly, may be disproportionately disadvantaged by the many rule changes that eBay introduced last year.  At several points of the formal presentations at this week’s summit, eBay and PayPal staff seemed to be in accord with that conclusion.

The attendance of international courier DHL, and a heavy focus from them, eBay, and PayPal, concerning the two shipping DSRs (plus the inevitable messaging regarding offering non-free “free shipping”) drove home the knowledge that eBay understand DSRs are fundamentally flawed, in their current state, for cross-border vendors.  Even the announcement of 33% deep discounts on DHL charges for eBay sellers (commencing next month) was met with general indifference and dismissal – eBay buyers of average price-point items are simply not willing to pay the cost of an international courier delivery.

Alice, James, and Gai, of the SE Asian eBay team valiantly held up under pressure from myself in questions that interrupted presentations, seeking clarifications or pointing out flawed eBay logic.  After the presentations I also managed to collar Alice for an hour’s worth on 1-on-1 discussion and Q&A.  Here’s the key points that I came away with from the evening -

DSRs & Search - We all know by now that failing a complete change of top management, DSRs are here to stay.  We also think we all know pretty much how they work and how eBay use them for or against sellers.  We’d be wrong to think that way.  From one of the slides during presentation, it was revealed that DSRs have a higher significance in Search than eBay have previously announced.

Attendees were advised that the three most significant search determinants were -

• INRs – both open, and closed but unresolved, INRs affect Search standing and item ranking
• SNADs – as with INRs, open and closed-unresolved disputes affect you in search
• DSRs – The message was clearly given that DSRs under 4.70 affect search visibility.  The impression I received was that this goes far beyond the status shown on the visibility button in the seller dashboard.

In early March 2009, eBay SE Asia sellers will receive the new enhanced Seller Dashboard with granularity for ratings received.  These will be filterable over certain time frames (with minimum filterable time frames so that you cannot drill down to single days).  The information displayed on the presentation slides is a little difficult to describe in words, but it looks extremely useful and will be very welcome.

Free Shipping - OK, we all know there is no such thing as free shipping.  So does the SE Asia team.  However, James displayed data that shows using free … no, let’s call it “masked shipping” … using masked shipping on the SE Asian sites resulted in a doubling of Sell Through Rate (STR) and a significant increase in final achieved price.  I kept quiet that adding shipping into item price was obviously going to elevate the final achieved price … errr 1+0=1, but 1+1= ? let me think about that one.

Luckily, all the sellers on our table spotted that bit of “eBay maths” for themselves, and I didn’t have to explain it.  They also automatically recognised that it meant increased final value fees.

Outside of the formal presentations, during 1-on-1 conversation, I was able to gather insights and present ideas that the team have promised to take forward for consideration and reporting upwards.  Some of those included -

• Insights
  • eBay.co.th is to remain a bi-lingual portal bouncing registrants to either dot com or Sanook.com (the Thai language trading site) but Sanook.com is not governed by eBay SE Asia.  Which may explain why my wife was bombarded with virus alerts within minutes of logging into it last Thursday.
  • Promotions & CLDs – eBay SE Asia now has autonomy regarding running promotions such as Cheap Listing Days, and will be rolling them more frequently after recognising that western sites are becoming increasingly exclusionary towards Asia resident sellers (of all nationalities including western expatriates).
• Input accepted by eBay
  • International visibility – Throughout the ASEAN region, eBay have a number of sites that operate without insertion or success fees (free to list, free to sell).  Given western marketplaces frequently voiced distrust of Asian sellers in general, would it not be worthwhile creating a SE Asia cross-border visibility zone – i.e. with listings on each of Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, being visible on all three sites?  This would add more vibrancy and choice to this regional market area.
  • Rules stability - Re: the announced reversion to site/fee “product” changes into being implemented twice yearly, I positioned the difficulties that any changes after late August cause for wholesale sellers shipping to or supplying retail resellers within the eBay marketplace.  The resellers are planning their Christmas campaigns as early as July, ordering in August, and constructing their campaigns through September (whilst bulk volume product is in transit) for implementation in each month of Q4.  The proposal for marketplace changes to roll in September each year will cause critical disruptions to plans already under way.  I suggested the second change each year should be no later than mid-August.  I saw a light go on in someone’s head regarding this.
  • Invoicing & Payments - I also positioned another serious concern that overlaps in each of – the USA’s Paperless Payments Policy, multi-currency invoicing (non delivery on promise from eBay Live 2007), PayPal Seller Protection Policy, and cross-border selling.  As it’s a mainly payments topic, I’ll explain it in tomorrow’s post about the PayPal segment.
• Tips for Sellers – not sure I should share some of these
  • Very low value items - items under $1.00 / £1.00 / Euro 1.00 – as heavily blogged last year, outside of the Auction format, these are pretty much prohibited on all the western eBay sites.  However, on the Asian sites they are still permitted, and because they use local currency, it is possible to list items at lower than a British penny or US/Euro cent.  Combine this with free shop format listings and no enforced PayPal, and sellers can return to selling individual beads, die-cuts or whatever, using whichever payment method they prefer.
  • Custom orders - If you’ve a transaction that has already involved negotiation and special instructions from the customer prior to them placing the purchase, remember the wording of the Fee circumvention policy only says you cannot take the transaction off eBay.  It does not prohibit placing a personalised listing on one of the SE Asian sites and selling on eBay, but without fees.

As I said, much of the formal presentation covered topics already covered in depth and at length on BuildaSkill over the last year.  I got the impression a lot of it was designed for new sellers, not experienced top sellers, and that it was message reinforcement for those that already knew about it.  Each time the staff asked if anyone already knew about a policy change or feature change, I was the only person who consistently held their hand up, although one or two others did hold their hand up to a few different topics.  I also found my advice and opinion being sought by sellers, every bit as much as the staff’s were, during and after the presentations.

Despite any negativity in the above report, I did very much enjoy the event, especially meeting the various staff and some of the other expatriate sellers.  We can be such an introverted bunch here, and it’s not often that we expatriates gather for a common interest other than beer, or bar sports.

I’m hoping, Chris, John, and the other sellers who exchanged contact details with me, will keep in touch.  Added to the Chiang Mai Sellers’ Circle forming on Bonanzle, it’ll be good to develop a “Chiang Mai Chamber of Home Commerce” and add a few more social events to the calendar.

Tomorrow I’ll report on the PayPal segment of the summit, and then on the other services that attended.

Gaz