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…

(more…)

The July newsletter from UK-managed auction & stores network eBid is in, and the achievements are impressive.

The site hit the critical-mass one million active auction listings during July and are correctly trumpeting it proudly - this moves them from the “small fry” into the “big fish” pond, and leaves self-proclaimed competitor TazBar flapping in the shallows. Of course, eBid still have a long way to go to catch up to eBay or even some of the middle tier US-only sites, but with a million listings in the search engine results, it’ll drive traffic, sales, and additional listings. That’s something the site are pushing hard for, with twice monthly uploads of the whole (eligible) inventory database to GoogleBase certainly helping, with a reported 25% increase in GMV, month-on-month, between May & June 2008.

Pushing hard to capture volume from the eBay negative press, eBid are still offering Seller+ lifetime membership at only £49.99. This means sellers get up to 5 stores FREE, options for FREE listing, FREE photo inclusion and NO Final Value Fees, depending on how you list, and that’s FOREVER!

(more…)

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

Canada post have provided eBay with a lengthy announcement relating to a new classification for certain lettermail items deemed “Irregular” due to their size or shape.

Essentially, the new classification relates to non-flexible items between 10mm and 20mm thick, with “box-like” corners.

Full details can be found in the full Canada Post announcement in the BuildaSkill Global Post Offices Forum board (login required) with links to all the relevant info pages on the Canada Post website.

Ed

Those of us lucky enough to have regular work that involves travelling a lot in far flung lands, soon become aware that not everyone speaks our native language with the same fluency as ourselves.

In fact, the more we travel, the more we come to realise that English has more variations than eBay Customer Supports’ interpretations of eBay policy for a particular topic. We also, without realising it, soon get drawn into becoming ad-hoc teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), and it is the wise frequent-traveller who keeps a set of notes in their baggage for fulfilling the all too frequent requests to present something on the EFL topic when visiting distant destinations.

Thus it happens that I keep in my “journo-bag” a set of notes for giving a brief presentation regarding descriptive English, which was first presented years ago to a group of undergrad journalism students. It’s a presentation that I can now give from memory, but I keep the notes handy as they can be copied and used as hand-outs, which are always appreciated.

Following up on an email from a BuildaSkill reader, I downloaded eBay Australia’s new 12 page manual for how to use their New Search system, already imposed on the UK and ready to roll in Australia soon. Currently New Search is only available to Australia in the eBay Playground, where in my opinion it should stay. After all, as the BuildaSkill reader said, if it needs a 12-page manual, then it should be ditched and taken back to basics … ummm … a bit like Google search perhaps?

Anyway … browsing through the New Search tutorial, I managed to just in time stop myself from spraying my keyboard and monitor with coffee, and somehow avoided choking myself with it as I burst out laughing at this graphic on page 4 …

(more…)

eBay India has today announced wide ranging fee changes affecting almost every aspect of selling on the site.

In particular, they have heavily cut fees for basic services such as basic listing fees, international visibility, plus a range of category related fees, and radically, they have introduced a cap for the maximum fees any seller will pay in any month. 

Monthly shop subscriptions have increased slightly, but are still far lower than the equivalent from EU or North American eBay sites.  FVFs have diverged heavily with Technology categories dropping to a flat rate 1% for all final prices, and all other categories moving off the tiered tables to a flat 5%.  The media categories get FREE insertion permanently with FVFs of 6%.

Is this a taste of John Donahoe’s eBay that “will be unrecognisable next year”?

In summary, the fee changes are as follows (for rough currency conversion, reckon on 1 Re = 1p UK / 2c US) -

• Listing fee reduction:
• - Flat listing fees of Re. 1 per listing with a maximum cap of Rs. 1500 per month.
• - Zero insertion fees for Books, Movies, Music & Video games categories (Media Categories).
• - Maximum listing fees charged in a month will be Rs. 1500 – this means that if your listing fees exceeds Rs.1500 in a month, you can list additional items (over and above the maximum cap of Rs 1500) for free.

(more…)

Many people keep reporting this, both on and off eBay, but eBay refuse to listen, or to fix the issue. 

Prior to the Ides of March, eBay’s willingness to fix or not fix the issue affected only potential or actual feedback that sellers would receive, plus the potentiality of losing the sale.  In legalese, that would constitute an indeterminate consequential loss of income to the seller - something which would be very difficult to present in court, particularly in the EU where buyers have the right to a “change of mind” within seven days of purchase.

Since this year’s Ides however, eBay has lost its “only a venue” defence with the introduction of seller-fees discounting based on anonymous and subjective opinion from buyers, in the form of the controversial Detailed Seller Ratings (DSR) feedback system, and the regular suspension of selling permissions based upon those same DSR’s.

As any eBay seller is already experiencing, just weeks after the introduction of invoice totals discounting, a proportion of buyers are being unreasonably critical of seller performance issues that are not caused by the sellers, but by the eBay systems supposed to provide a “better buying experience“, and by other 3rd-parties such as post offices and national Customs divisions.

The example that follows is from a live transaction that occurred last night on my main selling account.  Fortunately, this buyer is a regular customer and it was she who alerted me to an unauthorised change in the content of my listings - a change that can only have come from eBay’s site modifications, and which also revealed a serious flaw within a core site-function …

(more…)

Since January 2007, eBay sellers have complained that the eBay system has been broken as far as shipping calculations are concerned, particularly in the area of multiple item sales where the sellers offer discounts for shipping in one parcel.  Additionally, there have been regular reports of eBay applying or displaying incorrect postage settings and prices.

In the UK, there have been numerous forum threads where sellers interacted with eBay staff, reporting specific instances of problems whilst the technicians dug into the site programming to isolate the fault.  After each such thread, eBay pronounced the problem fixed, though sellers frequently knew it was only masked.

Now a new trick has come to light in the 16-month-old broken shipping calculator saga.

This time round, it relates to a whole new kettle of fish and arguably should be reported direct to regulatory authorities, as it is obviously the result of deliberate programming designed to defraud sellers of the visibility they are expecting when they buy advertising space on eBay.  The manipulation, demonstrated below, also absolutely removes forever any potential for eBay to claim they are “just a venue” due to the way in which they are recalculating and displaying shipping costs set by sellers.

(more…)