Several European eBay sites announced mid-month that from this coming Monday (2nd March) sellers who have uploaded listings with a version of TurboLister prior to v6.5 will have those listings removed. No mention of insertion fee rebates or listing upgrade fee refunds were made.

Following the mid-February announcements from several European eBay sites, sellers are reminded that effective from this coming Monday (2 March) the listing format “New and Now” is being retired and listings will be switched to Buy Now format. It may be that some of your listings do not suit the standard Buy Now format, or that default durations and listing upgrades will not be cost effective for them. Therefore please check your listings on …

eBay Italy have announced very late in the day that Tuesday 20th January 2009 is a Free Listing Day (FLD) for Auction format listings starting at under One Euro.
With the Euro, at the time of writing, trading at a mid-market rate of a little over 91 British Pence / US $1.30 according to XE.com [...]

eBay Italy are running free insertion fees in the auction format for all listings with a start price under 1 Euro.
The Announcement board notice states it is open to all users listing on eBay Italy, and it excludes cars, boats, and motorcycles plus the usual list of other exclusions. That means you can use the [...]

eBay Italy have announced a Cheap Listing Week (CLW) running from 1 minute after midnight on Monday 6th October until a minute before midnight on Friday 10th October (EDT times).
Google online translation managed to scramble the Italian into English, and as best as I can decypher, it applies to 7-day Buy Now listings only, and [...]

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.

Countering eBay Canada’s “no foreigners” stance regarding Cheap Listing Days, eBay Italy has announced a week of cut price insertion fees in the Collectibles categories open to sellers anywhere.

Discount of 75% off listing fees are available for items sold in auction-style listing in the following categories:

* Collectibles
* Stamps
* Coins and Banknotes
* Art and Antiques
* Comics

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 …

eBay Italy have thrown a surprise Free Listing Day (FLD) today July 16th, announcing it at only 4pm yesterday.
The announcement states -
From 00:00:01 to 23:59:59 on Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Rates of the listing are free for items sold in auction-style format with a starting price of less than 1 € in all categories except the [...]

I’m hoping it is simply an encryption key that allows Turbo Lister to speak to eBay over an SSL connection, but what eBay have announced so far, seems to make it out to be so much more than that, and even if it was, it makes paragraph 3 above seem even less likely as it wouldn’t verify you at each logon.

Given the ease of bypassing it (the new policy), I can only see this as being a preparation for sites being flooded by the likes of Buy.com and other mega-listers that eBay are courting. In which case, great stuff – anything that keeps the giants in check has to be a good move.

From May 20th, PowerSeller eligibility will be based on only the feedback of the last rolling 12 months, not lifetime sales as at present.

Where this is going to hurt PowerSellers is in the ranks of those who suffered excessive neutral feedback ratings during the last six months (the winter of buyer discontent) and there are plenty of those about.

The lobbyists for the physically disabled homeworkers, who were so vocal immediately after the first US announcement have gone very quiet on the eBay forums, and it can only be assumed they have taken their wares to other sites, which as eBay continually fail to see, reduces the pool of buyers for the remaining die-hard sellers.

eBay Italy announced yesterday that business sellers have until 1st April to comply with EC regulations and change their eBay account status. 
Unlike the UK announcement last month, the Italian announcement does not use the whipping point of losing the ability to sell, and does not make a big play regarding loss of DSR-based FVF discounts [...]