Anyway you look at it, the two years of disruptive innovation at eBay have created a new form of virtual communism.
Both buyers and sellers, disenfranchised by the sweeping changes to the culture, ethos, and operations of the auction giant, have migrated out across the web, clustering in new homes in a commune-like fashion.  Whether it [...]

Coming into effect next Friday (20th November), eBay India has announced a major change to its duplicate listings policy immediately before the seasonally-critical peaks of the fourth quarter selling period.
eBay India has long been a test-bed site for policies that later roll globally across the eBay platform, most notably the International Visibility Fee (used on [...]

eBay North America have just announced that from next week all sellers will be moved to the new item view page when viewing their own listings.
I have mixed feelings about the new page style, and thus far have always opted out of it on each site that has presented it to me.  This is mainly [...]

In a surprise announcement, eBay UK have announced today that Private Sellers will no longer pay insertion fees for Auction format listings with a starting price under £0.99, with a similar offer extended on the Irish site for Auction listings beginning under €1.49.  FVFs have been levelled across the board at 10%.
There are a host [...]

In an article titled “Cellphones as Credit Cards? Americans Must Wait”, Leslie Berlin writes for the New York Times about why America is not on the verge of mobile payments at POS.

For that to happen, all the players will have to work together to define standards, determine revenue-sharing, expand the network of electronic readers, and think through the other parts of what he calls “this 2,000-piece puzzle.”

Unfortunately, it’s not a pretty picture, and it could get worse before it gets better. The cellular payments industry is in even worse shape than the online payments P2P and 3rd party merchant servicing industry.

In part, this is because of it’s relative youth compared to the value-stored online services like PayPal, and the card processing services like GoogleCheckout. Yet that same freshness should be exactly why there is none of the fog and incompatibility that surrounds the older services.

Closing an already PR-disastrous 2008, eBay Australia have announced on New Year’s Eve that they are to close the eBay Education Specialist program for eBay Australia.
The brief announcement posted to the Australian Announcement Board on 31st December, giving no forewarning of the change, includes the statement -

According to a recent study, demand for skilled IT workers is expected to reach 250,000 per year by 2010, but only 180,000 are likely to be available. Education and investment to leverage interest in the ICT field from future generations are among the most important ways of addressing this need and creating future growth. To better equip Europe to handle the expected e-skills shortage in the future, public and private partnership investment in our future generations will be vital.

Imagine, a disaffected eBay seller, who is giving up ecommerce but has acquired webpage building skills and a basic level understanding of data structuring, being given access to a selection of training paths based upon those existing abilities, that would move them forward to a higher level IT or ICT proficiency at their own pace, in their own home, with their own targets for achievement and further development and skill deployment?

We all felt it. eBay sales didn’t so much die in October, they reverted to pre-Internet levels. Of course, eBay trotted out the usual lines about we all need to learn about the new search and Best Match advantaging etc. But that was just masking the underlying reality, and distrust of all pronouncements from eBay may have caused more damage to sellers that previously thought.

A detailed article on the New York Times website paints an even gloomier picture than an eBay Q&A forum.

In it the reporter reveals that price-decimation and free shipping truly appears to be the only way to maintain turnover online “where competitors are just a click away”. The article cites many examples of household name retailers being forced into selling below cost just to maintain cash-churn – this leads to the dangerous and self-defeating situation of trading on cash-flow, which sucks liquidity from a business as fast as any other strategy known, ultimately leading to its demise if it is practised for too long.

Philipp Justus, PayPal’s senior vice president of global markets, has followed up Eddie Davis’s post on Monday regarding selling globally, with announcements of wide ranging expansions to the number of localised PayPal sites.

The latest post in the PayPal official blog states that PayPal have opened new sites in another 18 countries, and improved locally relevant information globally for another 173 countries. That’s a massive content edit and creation task and the team are to be applauded for doing it, though one does wonder if it was the root cause of so many glitches in the system this last month? Most notably the global echeques problems late last month and early this month, as well as the currently emerging one of sellers paying eBay fees that are then marked unclaimed.

Looking beyond the obvious of major PayPal site upgrades leading to temporary glitches, this week’s announcements may be indicative of some of where eBay sellers’ woes have been coming from this year.

Yesterday, 29th January, in a heated discussion on the eBay UK Q&A discussion board, eBay UK’s Head of Trust and Safety, Richard Ambrose, blurted out several admissions that collectively reveal a hidden agenda behind the new eBay Feedback Policy for 2008.
Ambrose, notorious with UK PowerSellers for posting in an insulting and dismissive manner (in eBay forums) [...]