Apologies to readers if I sound like a nagging wife on this topic. It’s one of my hatred-addictions for eBay policies that facilitate the very “crime” that eBay Trust & Safety staff have used as a whipping post for unneccesarily punishing honest sellers.

There are two forms of item location abuse on all eBay sites - the intentional, and the institutionally created.

Intentional item location abuse is performed by sellers for a number of reasons, and in a variety of ways. For example, a seller might seek to game the internal eBay search mechanisms by stating an item is in the domestic country of the site on which they are listing, when in fact it is located continents away.

Those intentional abuses are easily spotted if you’re experienced and observant, but it’s the institutionally created location abuse that is more insidious, more stressful for the honest seller, and the result of criminal negligence by the eBay programmers, not to mention generating the same appearance as the intentional location abuse to the casual user.

When a seller registers and verifies their address, the eBay system notes the country of residence that the seller has input - this is not foolproof…

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Apologies to William Shakespeare, but after the winter and spring of discontent comes the summer of reflection. It appears many eBay sellers are seriously questioning whether they should continue using the company’s sites, and those questions are not related solely to fees, but a growing awareness of the dirty tricks being played on them.

One seller has written to me, and I quote them below with identifying data changed to generic information -

I usually have 500-600 store format listings running at any one time. The prices range from around 100, nickel-&-dime multi-item listings (to help with total items sold counts), through several hundred listings in the site-wide ASP range of $10 - $30, up to items running in the hundreds of dollars. This has always been a good mix for generating both revenue and PowerSeller status.

Back in January it was announced that from the summer, stores format on eBay.com and eBay.ca would have introduced a minimum per item price of $1 and I mentally noted it, but it then took so long to arrive that I forgot about it because no reminders were issued.

Now, weeks after it was put into force, I find that many of my sub-$1 store-items are still auto-relisting according to Selling Manager Pro (SMP), and according to my Seller Account, I’m still being invoiced the insertion fees, but those US & CA listings are not visible anywhere on any of the sites to buyers - they are only visible within SMP, which had caused me to believe they are live on the site for buyers to find. I stress this only affects store items under $1.00 price per item.

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Both North American eBays - Canada and the USA - have announced two weeks of cheap listing fees for fixed price listings.

On both sites from July 16th to July 29th (inclusive), insertion fees for Fixed Price (FP or BIN) lisitngs are fixed at $0.25 in all price tranches.  Listing upgrade fees and other options, including final value fees still apply.  Some Business and industrial categories are not included.

The announcements don’t state if multi-item listings are permitted, though they usually are on these sites’ promotion days.  Try a test listing to find out.

Unusually, the Canadian offer applies to non-residents, something the site has frequently disallowed in past years, but has been opening up to more frequently in 2008.

If you’re outside the US or Canada - watch the eBay exchange rate daily for your currency against the $ - eBay UK updates their exchange rate around 11am during BST, and it is now diverging rapidly from the exchange rate used by PayPal - even though they are both supposed to pull the rate from XE.com

The weak US dollar means that as long as eBay UK are exchanging at under 50-pence to the UK Pound, UK sellers will benefit from rounding down and save an extra 1-2 cents per listing.  Watch you Seller Account daily billing to see where the exchange rate is at.  (I’m betting that exchange rates on eBay will move counter-intuitively to the money markets for the next fortnight, and bump the dollar over 50-pence for better fee receipts for dot com).

Ed

In an announcement made “in the interests of transparency”, the eBay Spain team have posted an announcement of their national DSR averages for sellers during the month of June 2008, and for the 12 months to the end of June.

The numbers are quite revealing, and I’ve repeated them below with the national averages currently displayed for eBay UK and eBay US as shown by the Seller Dashboard (note - UK & US averages are as of today 11 July, not for June as a whole).

The average is calculated as a simple average of all ratings that buyers give sellers.

The calculation for the past 12 months, with the following results for eBay Spain:

Item as described:	4.43	(UK - 4.73 )	(US - 4.73 )
Communication:	4.43	(UK - 4.69 )	(US - 4.68 )
Despatch time:	4.32	(UK - 4.63 )	(US - 4.62 )
Shipping and handling:	4.25	(UK - 4.58 )	(US - 4.59 )

In the past 30 days, with the following results for eBay Spain *:

Item as described:	4.51	(UK - 4.74 )	(US - 4.76 )
Communication:	4.51	(UK - 4.70 )	(US - 4.70 )
Despatch Time:	4.40	(UK - 4.64 )	(US - 4.64 )
Shipping and handling:	4.31	(UK - 4.59 )	(US - 4.63 )

* These results are of June / 2008

Looking at those results, it is hardly surprising that eBay Spain recently made an announcement in which they let slip that they only had 10,000 or so sellers (it’s recorded in our forums somewhere) - if that’s their national average for DSRs then no sellers there will be getting the seller performance discounts.

It also points to an opportunity and a threat. UK & US sellers who list onto eBay Spain should be automatically elevated above Spanish sellers by virtue of DSR ratings, leading to above average sell through rates for those “foreign” sellers on the Spanish site. However, conversely it also raises the threat that the apparently intolerant Spanish buyers are going to heavily ding the sellers DSRs regardless of service quality.

Either way, I feel that it demonstrates a need for a concerted and sustained education program in Spain for both buyers and sellers - those national averages clearly demonstrate the Spaniards are just not getting “It”. Perhaps it needs an eBay Inquisition to teach them the error of their ways? Or is that what’s already caused those numbers?

Perhaps this is an opportunity to revive a dormant seller account, build up a DSR rating in the UK or US, then try to finesse those higher DSRs as higher visibility on the Spanish site? Perhaps, perhaps not.

What do you think?

Ed

Hundreds of eBay Community discussion board threads and thousands of sellers of all sizes have been saying it for many weeks, but eBay hasn’t listened. Or, if they did, they are ignoring the “noise” from dissatisfied customers.

According to Omniture (the traffic and other stats service provided free to eBay Shop subscribers), so far during July 08, eBay’s own in-site search system has fallen significantly behind external 3rd-party (mainstream) search engines.

The screen shot below, taken from my own eBay shop’s performance stats in Omniture this morning, clearly shows that eBay Search is delivering less visitors that Yahoo - and unlike the amalgamated data for all eBay, the Yahoo stats are broken up by country. (Click the image to view full size)

This is, or should be, a major concern for eBay. All eBay staff have always maintained that what makes eBay such a “vibrant and exciting” marketplace is the volume of buyers they are able to drive to seller’s listings.

In recent months, many sellers have challenged that eBay are continuing to do that - it’s not just that some are losing visibility due to DSR feedback ratings received under a flawed and emotion-based system used by eBay as intrinsic data, sellers simply cannot find their own items when using eBay search, including when they input the exact title they gave to their listings.

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It’s not so long ago that an event like tomorrow’s eBay.co.uk 5-pence Cheap Listing Day (CLD) would be a major excitement.

Preparing listings from within minutes of receiving the announcement, and running without sleep or proper meals to get the maximum advantage from the event - i.e. the maximum listings into Turbo Lister, often saw me working 72 hours straight through.  Those marathons are a thing of the past now.

Before I really knew what I was doing, and was still operating on a dial-up connection, I used to be ecstatic if I managed to get 2,500 listings onto eBay for a single CLD.  Back then, they were actually FLDs - Free Listing Days.  In those days, the strategy involved building all the listings in Turbo lister and holding them in dedicated folders until a minute after midnight, then batch uploading for the next 23 hours and 58 minutes, until they were all listed, or time ran out to get them into the CLD.

Back then, I didn’t give thought to the best time to list for maximum traffic, I simply made sure I had good titles and the correct category - after all, it was a global marketplace and no matter what time the auction ended, there would be someone awake and browsing somewhere around the planet.  Again, not any more …

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Lorrie Norrington in the US, and the UK team have been quick off the mark with announcements from topics spoken about in the keynotes addresses.

In fact the first message from eBay UK (expounding on keynote speech topics) appeared only 8 minutes after the keynote presentations began. At least Lorrie Norrington’s appeared a respectable 47 minutes after they’d finished, but given it’s length, I suspect it was typed before the speeches. Spontaneous - not!

So what’s been announced? Generally speaking, it’s a few mouldy carrots and a couple of extra sticks for sellers, here’s the list -

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As I write this, the keynotes speeches are due to start in 15 minutes time, so it’ll be a rushed post, and if there are any typos I’ll tidy them later.

Jamie Iannone, Vice President of Global Search, on the day that the UK had the new Best Match search dumped on them (yesterday), revealed more details of the system to AuctionBytes.  It seems the criteria for “being found” will vary from category to category, and the DSR criteria for sellers will also vary from category to category. 

One of the key tidbits he dropped is that keywords don’t even need to be in a listing for it to be pulled to the fore.  The example used was looking for a “birthstone for January” which returned matches for garnets in listings that had neither birthstone nor january in the listing or title.  I thought that strange when I read it, as with a July birthday, I’d always been told garnets were my birthstone - perhaps it’s not just UK & US English that differs? 

If that’s the case, then we’re all going to have to become far more Americanised (Americanized?) in order to reach buyers, as this technology and search criteria is set to go global.

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