eBay SE Asia, headquartered in Singapore and overseen by eBay UK, have joined the march of eBay colonialism by introducing policy to move sellers’ legal compliance requirements out of the countries where sellers operate, and into the countries where they list items.

The World Wide Web is supposed to mean that a supplier can create an advertising/sales channel from their own territory, available to all other territories, and even when the server and code is not located in their own territory, the seller is supposed to be able to state in their terms of sale, which territorial jurisdiction applies to transactions – eBay does this in Europe via eBay S.a.r.l. in Luxembourg, and in North America via eBay Inc. in San Jose …. but they are now removing the same privilege from their own paying customer merchants.

eBay UK announced Thursday, on their general Announcements Board, that the AdCommerce service is now live for the site.
Confusingly, the announcement points to a UK registered domain (www.adcommerce.co.uk), which then redirects to the US eBay Partner Network site, and a generic landing page for the USA AdCommerce service.
I make no secret that I am against [...]

Once upon a time, when a user logged into any eBay site and began browsing items, they’d be shown availability from all sellers in all countries.

It’s a couple of years now (at least) since that was a true condition. BuildaSkill is heavily on record regarding the trans-Atlantic visibility debacle of early 2007, and as the news-breaker of the unannounced introduction of fees for International Site Visibility (early 2008).

Last week, Justin Marcucci of eBay’s Global Buying Hub team made an announcement on the main dot com announcement board that seems to have flown under most observers’ radars.

Once again, it is the topic of international visibility, this time supported by the subject of automatic currency (price and shipping) conversion, that looks like it is up for a “revamp” across the wider eBay platform …

I’ve thought and thought about some simple, practical, and effective changes that eBay could make to turn around the current decline in the performance of its core marketplace.  Here’s what I came up with, that is different to what other commentators have said in their lists.
1.  Listing scheduling – The fee for scheduling a listing [...]

José Manuel Durão Barroso, President of the European Commission, having returned from the G20 Summit in Washington has released a paper called, “Fighting on all fronts: tackling the global slowdown and climate change”.

This would be a normally unremarkable event, except that, many of the points and topics he raises, echo exactly much of what I have been positioning as to what eBay needs to factor into policy decisions, and as reasoning for reversing many of their changes this year.

Also, when you read the EC President’s bullet points, they are nearly identical to what has been written in the BuildaSkill blog for the last year. Whilst Senor Barroso is referring mainly to the EC, as well as globalisation of, trade and markets, I have been writing about eBay’s de-globalisation of their marketplaces.