I’ve just had three emails in quick succession – two from eBay and one from Google – that knocked me clean off my chair each time.  Each of them was such a nice little surprise that I’m thinking today must be Christmas Party day in their offices and someone is a little too full of [...]

eBay.PL have announced a special listing weekend for their resident users, which makes a mockery of the UK blocking overseas sellers from getting the shop-subscription based insertion fees from mid-September.
The announcement (translated to English in the BuildaSkill forums – forum login & minimum post count required) states that for the 14th & 15th November, “registered [...]

Continuing eBay’s push towards free or inclusive postage on all listings, the four South East Asian eBay countries are offering all their resident PowerSellers 50% off final value fees (FVFs) when they list with “free” P&P on dot com, UK, Germany, Oz, France & Italy until October 9th.

The offer is good for auction and fixed price format and sellers must have DSRs of at least 4.0 across all four criteria, and applies to sellers resident in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, or Thailand.

These discounts are also on top of existing PowerSeller Performance discounts on FVF, which PS’s in those four SE Asian countries receive from the same list of six western countries, and on top of other discounts available to some groups of sellers.

Caroline Malifaud of dot com’s Advertising team has announced that some of the much hated on-site banner advertising space will be available to sellers, in the form of keyword banner advertising.

The new ads will be on a Pay-per-Click basis with sellers bidding on the keywords they wish to trigger the display of their ads, and the ads themselves have options for title, message, and optional picture – in this respect it operates similar to Google’s Adwords program. eBay call their’s AdCommerce.

The bad news is that seller’s ads will be competing with Shopping.com and Yahoo Ads, therefore there will be budget-constrained effectiveness. Although the announcement says sellers cannot use AdCommerce to advertise pages off-eBay, that is exactly what every Shopping.com and most of the Yahoo adverts will be doing.

Over the last few years, in various announcements and forum posts, staff at eBay UK have stated that the UK subsidiary has up to twenty million registered accounts, and at different times the active user number has been placed at between six and twelve million. It’s well known that many people have more than one account on the site, whether for differentiating stock between seller accounts, or for remaining anonymous on the public forums to prevent malicious bidding because someone disagrees with a statement posted.

The total eBay staff in the UK has only ever been stated once, and I was very surprised then to read it was under 100 given that the site was, at that time, eBay’s second largest market after the US. Numbers may have grown since that time with the addition of the customer support centre in Dublin, but even that cannot dilute the disparity between the number of users and the number of staff when the user community is up in arms.

And up in arms the users certainly are …

Newswires were glowing white hot on Saturday with the story of a 7 month old baby for sale on eBay.  Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and USA Today all ran the story as did many smaller publications and several baby care and maternity blogs, and Germany’s own Bild newspaper. 
The story also appeared as far away as [...]

February is a short month, we all know that.  However despite being a few days short of a regular serving, various eBay sites around the globe have never let that stop them from throwing a cheap listing day (CLD) around about St Valentine’s Day.
Unusually this year, only the US (13th March) and Canada (also the 13th) did so (in fact, [...]

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 – [...]

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 [...]