Following last year’s cut of trans-Atlantic visibility and a year of tweaking and twiddling restoration for specified categories, then cutting it again on UK promotion days, which all came after the much called-for Location Abuse Policy came into force, eBay has apparently handed it’s most prized territories back to the sellers that were most complained about - the Asians.

Starting from 20th February 2008, PowerSellers in Australia, India, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines will receive the same PowerSeller Incentives (Invoice Discounts) as sellers in Germany, the UK, and the USA, who list on those three as their home sites.  This concession might also apply to China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand but I’ve not yet been able to get translations from their announcements pages.  The wider eligibility has been hinted at in some announcements and comments on the South East Asian markets mentioned first, but I must stress I’ve had no firm confirmation of it yet.

Spain has also made the same announcement, and I expect other smaller European sites to follow suit over the weekend.  Keep watching our main eBay Forum for all the international announcements as they arrive from each eBay site around the world.

As European and North American buyers and sellers pause for breath in the heated forum exchanges regarding the feedback, business registration/address visibility changes etc. how many have looked beyond their own borders for further implications?

On eBay India’s International Selling Forum,  there’s no new threads or comments about the changes, despite prominent links to announcements about them.  The “Selling on eBay” board also has neither threads nor comments about the changes.  In fact, I couldn’t find any discussion anywhere on the sub-continent’s site, either for or against the changes.

In Malaysia, the International Trading Board the most recent thread is actually complaining there’s no benefit to being a PowerSeller, and that being one is no fun.   In the General Discussion board, there’s one thread of discussion with the OP (posted by a western expatriate) having links to the early announcements on dot com.  Most of the posters also seem to be UK & US expats.

Strangely, Singapore’s International Trading Board has neither comment nor posts about the new cross border discounts for Powersellers.  Normally it’s a very lively board (and a great initial source of info for new on-eBay scams from China) .  There’s not even any mention of the topic in the General Discussion Board.  In fact, there’s no discussion at all on any of the Singapore boards.

In the Philippines, the same OP as in Malaysia has contributed to a thread in the Filipino International Trading board but in the context of getting a PayPal account verified, there’s no discussion of the new changes.  In the very active General Discussion board (well over 100 threads started since the announcements)  there is one thread about the changes by the same OP as above (he gets around doesn’t he?), it even has a “pink” posting in it, but it has under 30 posts in total - most of them echoing concerns aired by sellers in the UK & US.

The Australian International Trading Board also has nothing about the changes, nor does the PayPal forum.  In the Member to Member board, the feedback restrictions get their own (currently 3-page) thread and a “pink” response, plus a shorter thread.  The lack of fee changes for Oz has a thread as well, but no replies, from the pinks or anyone else.

So does this lack of on-eBay discussion throughout the Asian region mean that Asians are not that bothered by the changes, or does it mean they’re too busy loading up Turbo Lister ready for February 20th?

In the last quarter of 2007, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the Philippines were added to the range of countries supported by Turbo Lister.  India and Singapore were added in 2006, and Australia the year before that.  China and Taiwan are in there too, but not in English.  With the wider Asian region already having more Powersellers amongst the expatriate community than most individual European countries have at home, has it been fair to penalise these westerners-gone-east in the way that eBay has done over the last 3-4 years?  They were certainly the core user-base that enabled eBay’s expansion in the Orient to progress as far as it has done.  The anouncements of cross-border PowerSeller Incentives may just be the boost they needed to staunch the haemmorhaging towards other channels that has occurred in the last 18 months.

Should Germany, the UK and the US be concerned about a second tsunami of Asian listings in their eBay markets?  I predict they should. 

The first wave were mainly from the expats and from China/HongKong.  Today, nearly two years after that tide ebbed, the far greater number of users stretched from Karachi to Kamchatka, and from Mongolia to Melbourne are locals, and they have grown dramatically from two years ago.  They’re also far web-smarter than the early adopters, and have access to more payment channels having learnt from earlier lessons. 

Many are the new generation entrepreneurs operating from regular business premises, with bank-provided credit card and merchant services facilities, in addition to online services such as MoneyBookers & PayPal.  In northern hemisphere Asia, an incredible number of them undertook post-graduate education in Europe or the States and have bank accounts there with verified postal addresses - overall, the genuine ones will be far easier to trade with than previously, and will be able to offer far more attractive pricing on many products, than could home-based westerners.

The scammers will resurface too, smarter, sharper, and more experienced of what does and does not work - whether it be outright scams, counterfeits, or simply fake goods. 

With the new feedback policy that buyers can only receive positives, and opening the big three markets to PowerSeller discounts for (all?) Asian sellers, the opportunity is going to be just too attractive to the Orient, whether the seller be genuine or fraudulent.  There will be no way eBay could police it all, despite the assurances from Mssrs Cobb and Donahoe et al.

I think it’s time the West began selling to the East, and listing on those lovely eBay sites with zero or near-zero insertion and final value fees.  Our goods will probably have more visibility that way round (and cost a darn sight less to sell at the same time).

Ed.

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

Discuss this in our forums

The site that has long been blamed for the majority of item location abuse within the eBay world has launched its own bilingual interface, following on the heels of the Canadian Anglo-French testing throughout most of last and this year.

eBay Hong Kong has several big splashy links on the front page inviting you to switch from the (default) Chinese displays, into English.  There are several markers to warn you its still in Beta stage, but generally it seems to work well.

It seems to do a particularly good job with listing titles, though in the descriptions, there still remains about 10% - 20% untranslated, which I guess depends on the amount of colloquialisms and technical vocabulary used by the sellers.

Whilst giving the site a quick scan in English, I noticed that my favourite categories were swamped by listings from the USA and Australia, which made me chortle more than a little as most of the items on sale are made in Hong Kong - talk about wasting fees?   Or, could it be an indicator of the amount of item-location abuse practised by Hong Kong sellers?

Assuming all those American and Australian listings, showing location as being in those countries, were listed by Hong Kong residents, then following the practise on other eBay sites, those listings would show on the sellers’ home (Hong Kong?) site, as well as the site where they were listed.  And that could explain why so many Hong Kong manufactured items are showing on the HK site as available from overseas locations, but only if the sellers input the items as being located overseas

Thankfully, the eBay HK staff are asking for your input regarding the site and how they can serve you better - ohhhh what an opportunity to really let them know what you think about policy non-enforcement?

Ed

Discuss this in our forums