Starting at the end of June, all listings on eBay Spain must state a shipping method and cost, or the listing will not be accepted.

An announcement released today, does permit collection as a shipping type and gives the example of a sofa as being an item suitable for such a method.

The announcement claims that there are currently 50,000 items on the site with no shipping method or costs stated, and that buyers are complaining of being charged up to two or three times what was quoted pre-bid. The announcement states that such actions are driving buyers away from the site.

Personally, I’m all for policies such as this (maybe the first sensible one from any eBay this year?).

From the very first item I listed on eBay, I have always stated shipping costs for all zones, and after the first few months of finding my feet, I have always tried to specify a minimum of two, shipping methods and costs, to each geographic zone. My only gripe is that the eBay shipping system does not offer sellers enough flexibility to specify more zones and more delivery options.

Maybe that’s why I love the system that ecommerce site software osCommerce offers - I could run a local post office from their shipping modules.

Ed

Harald and the team at osCommerce.com have announced this week that version 2.2 RC2 is now in public release.

This is backed up by the removal of RC1 from the osCommerce site’s main download sections, replaced with both the full, and upgrade, downloads, documentation, and migration code from earlier versions.  The code for earlier versions is still available from various sources, including the osCommerce site (if you know where to look), and v2.2 MS2 is still the default within the Fantastico script installer provided free by many web hosting companies. 

Considering that most of the osCommerce contributions and add-ons are designed for 2.2 MS2, removing the RC1 downloads is not as big an issue as it may appear.  In fact some add-on coders refuse point blank to update their MS2 code for any of the RC releases, and aggressively state they will wait for the final 2.2 (stable) release before they do so.

RC2 was announced as featuring the following updates and changes -

* Over 15 bug fixes and improvements.

* Improved register_globals compatibility layer for PHP 4.3+ servers.

* New and updated payment modules that include PayPal Express Checkout, PayPal Direct Payments, PayPal Website Payments Standard, Authorize.net AIM and SIM, WorldPay, and more.

* Introduce the ability for payment modules to show checkout buttons on the shopping cart page.

* Introduce the ability for order shipping and billing addresses to be defined from an external source (ie, payment method).

* Introduce a public status flag on order status levels to show or hide orders from customers depending on the order status level.

* Introduce a download flag on order status levels to allow customers to download virtual products at specific order status levels.

* Introduce version signature strings to payment modules that link to the add-ons site for easier version tracking.

The bug fixes are always welcome of course, but early reactions in the developer and implementer community seem focussed on the new and improved PayPal modules.  3rd party add-ins for PayPal integration have been known to be buggy and difficult to implement with ongoing success.  This was not helped by PayPal changing calls from their Application Programming Interface (API), nor their rolling goalposts for successful API connecting by merchants from around the world.  Now, “straight from the box” comes several solutions for differing merchants, created and implemented by the core osCommerce development team, and that is GREAT news indeed.

The new version includes some nice tweaks - the payment modules’ checkout buttons in the shopping cart, and the public order status flags for logged-in registered customers, for example.  Within this category, the ability to acquire shipping addresses from outside of osCommerce will be a winner with the online payment processor users - again, PayPal has been a major source of headaches, in this field, in the past.

And finally, version tracking for payment modules brings osCommerce a tiny step closer to the ease of expandability long enjoyed by implementers of other open source applications such as SMF Forums (which we use at BuildaSkill), Joomla! Content Management System, and of course - WordPress blogging systems.

Having a number of osCommerce 2.2 RC1 stores under development, this version advancement couldn’t have come at a worse time for me, but I’ll take it on the chin and next week implement both a clean install, and a version upgrade from RC1 to RC2, and hopefully be able to report back to you during the following week, so be sure to subscribe to the BuildaSkill Biz Blog via the RSS or XML tools provided, or register as a subscriber.

……. and don’t be scared to add comments regarding your own experiences with the new version (it’d be nice to know someone reads the blog  ).

There’s also been some announcements, this week, regarding the forthcoming major version change to osCommerce v3.0 - but I’ll blog those in a seperate report.

Ed

 osCommerce is a popular Open Source ecommerce catalog and shopping cart system.  It has almost 200,000 registered users in its support forums, and a healthy community of developers providing extensions and modifications for it.  At least a quarter of a million online stores have implemented it, and the number grows everyday.

In the osCommerce support forums, a debate has opened regarding unexpected fees incurred by one user, after they installed a payments gateway extension for one of the less used online payment processors - MoneyBookers Website”>MoneyBookers.

It seems they’re not happy about a 2% processing charge, despite MoneyBookers being open and up-front about their fees.

MoneyBookers fees are at three levels depending on the type of account the receiver has enabled, and on the payment funding method chosen by the payer.  For the merchant to minimise fees, they need to steer clear of the Merchant Gateway solution and use an “old fashioned” email-receiver-details-to-buyer payment instruction methodology.

Although it increases admin load and is not as instant as using the gateway, I recommend the email payment-receiver details method, when using MoneyBookers. Their fees on Merchant Gateway credit card processing are 8% making them the most expensive in the industry (and even making PayPal look cheap) however, they do guarantee zero chargebacks.

An alternative is to pay the GBP 50.00 NoChex registration for a Merchant Account (they also guarantee no chargebacks) in order to accept Visa and Mastercard globally, but all transactions will be in UK Pounds Sterling, and you must have both a UK address, and a UK bank account, before you can open a NoChex account.

Failing that, you’re stuck with a regular Merchant Services account or a PayPal account.

It’s worth noting that MoneyBookers is very popular in Central Europe (especially Germany) due to the no-fee bank transfer that users can use to fund their MoneyBookers account. It’s also extremely popular in areas where PayPal are over-strict such as Asia-Pacific, South America, and Africa - in those zones, the MoneyBookers no-chargebacks policy comes into it’s own.

Maybe you prefer Western Union, or similar, from those zones, but with all the anti wire-transfer propaganda that eBay/PayPal have been pushing out, you’ll find resistance to using such services will grow over the coming years, and that could slow your sales of “no charge-back payment type” sales unless you have an alternative routing such as MoneyBookers.

At the end of it all - remember it’s only a couple of years since there wasn’t any IPN, Gateways etc - the vast majority of your buyers will be ignorant of the progress made in such technologies and only expect such automation from mega-companies such as banks or eBay.

For a couple of years at least, it won’t hurt customer-relationships to rely on more manual methodology if you’re trading outside of the developed western alliances - heck, even within such countries, there are still lots of technophobes scared of too much automation.  And with organisations such as the UK’s Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) reporting that online credit card fraud, and identity theft, are the UK’s fastest growing crime type, the unwilling-to-pay-online community will be around for a long time to come.

…. there’s more than one way to skin a rabbit

Ed

Discuss this in our online payments forums