In the UK, the 5th of November is the annual Bonfire Night and Fireworks Festival, held annually to commemorate (or commiserate) the unsuccessful attempt by Guy Fawkes to blow up the British Houses of Parliament, or Westminster Palace as it was then.

On planet eBay, 5th November 2007 will be remembered for many things -

•  India announced a 20% REDUCTION in Front Page Featured Fees which will last for 5 days.
•  Italy announced a week-long FREE listing period for Motors & Motorcycles.
•  Canada announced a 5-week period of FREE Gallery in core listings.
•  USA also announced a 5-week period of FREE Gallery in core listings.
•  USA announced a 5 week period of INCREASED STORE LISTING VISIBILITY in core search & browse.
•  USA
  announced that browsers can use GUEST BUYING to buy on eBay.com without an eBay or PayPal account.
•  India announced MAJOR CHANGES to PaisaPay terms including a maximum delivery period that must be adhered to.
•  Germany announced that seller email addresses will no longer be shown to buyers after a sale, in an attempt to curb harvesting for Spam purposes.
•  UK announced it was changing how SELLER ACCOUNT BALANCES and calculations are shown, this followed closely announcements on several other sites.

All these announcements come hot on the heels of a flood of announcements, during the last week, regarding all sorts of functional and cosmetic changes to how eBay are going to treat or do business with their buyers and sellers.  In no particular order, they included  -

•  eBay Gift Cards launched in the USA with a major marketing program.
•  Finally, eBay saw the light and announced Skype buttons would be allowed on all listings in all categories on the UK and USA sites.
•  USA announced a November competition for Stores Sellers with $2,500 prizes up for grabs, which looks miserly next to Canada’s $50,000 competition.
•  Hong Kong announced the Beta of their site in both English and Chinese, obviously hoping to pick up some international buyers for their manufacturing and exporting sellers.
•  Both UK & USA made announcements regarding re-introducing TRANS-ATLANTIC VISIBILITY in certain categories, subject to sellers meeting certain criteria, which discussions on eBay forums, backed up by comments by UK staff, prove to not be getting applied evenly on both sides of the pond .
•  UK then promptly announced that the trans-Atlantic visibility will not apply to CLD listings, nor to listings inserted between 10am the day before, until 10am the day after a CLD.
•  Meanwhile, almost every site has been announcing changes to the sign-in pages, and Canada announced the launch of a new shipping calculator, which will surely add to the global problems of the bug-ridden eBay checkout’s, combined shipping calculations?.

So, there’s lots of changes going on at eBay around the world, and the general impression is one of trying to improve the safety reputation of the sites, whilst further fragmenting the “global marketplace” that is continually touted in eBay marketing and PR.

There is also an increasing appearance of desperation to maintain volume of listings and the GMV of sold items.  This of course, is perceptual, and should only be thought about with long experience and knowledge of what has been happening on eBay over the last few years.  After 20 months of punitive measures seen as anti-seller / pro-buyer policies (always denied by eBay) the swathe of fee reductions (albeit only for limited promotion periods) brings some welcome relief to the long-suffering sellers. 

The changes and promotions do not change the basic position that eBay has milked and squeezed their paying customers to the point of causing a mass exodus to other venues, whilst trying to set itself up as a replacement for the government agencies that should be regulating consumer protections, and ignoring eBay’s own liability to the people who buy services from them. 

They do, however, show there is a glimmering of recognition that the sellers are no longer happy to use eBay, and that eBay is haemmorhaging the experienced and knowledgable long-term business sellers, who, no longer available to help the newbies, have moved off to their own sites, and other venues such as Amazon and eBid.  Such contractions of user-base knowledge must be having a punishing effect on eBay’s notoriously sluggish Customer Support, especially when coupled with the wholesale banning of many sellers from the eBay Community forums - newbies now have to rely on other newbies for help and advice, much of which is incorrect or misguided.

It would seem that, following eBay’s withdrawal from China,  they are living under the Chinese curse of “living in interesting times”.  Or, have they been preparing for the flotation of alibaba.com, which launched on the stock exchange on 5th November, and doubled it’s market value in the first 24 hours .  It is now China’s largest dot com by stock value, and now eBay’s largest business to business+consumer, online-marketplace competitor.  No doubt now being a public company, it will not be long before it expands dramatically in eBay’s core market regions, and that level of competition may also explain what is becoming a general reduction of eBay prices, by proxy of promotion days.

Ed

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