The European Commission last Thursday reinforced its commitment to keeping Europe’s markets open, and to increasing efforts to improve openness further afield.  The following extracts and notes are from the full communique, which can be read in the BuildaSkill “Trade Blocs” discussion board.
The latest communication identifies the main non-tariff barriers faced by European exporters, and [...]

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.

Tip O’Neill, the late Speaker of The US House of Representatives is often quoted as saying “All politics is local,” meaning a politician that helps a constituent with a problem is likely to win that vote based on the personal assistance provided, irrespective of that politician’s stance on the larger, more weighty, geo-political issues.  What [...]

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.

Eddie Davis, senior director of SMB Merchant Services at PayPal, has posted in the official PayPal blog to start a promotion to get merchants selling globally, just as eBay are ramping up efforts to ring-fence each site and reduce cross-border trade.
Eddie’s post contains nothing unknown to seasoned cross-border sellers, but may be useful to those [...]

Continuing eBay’s push towards free or inclusive postage on all listings, the four South East Asian eBay countries are offering all their resident PowerSellers 50% off final value fees (FVFs) when they list with “free” P&P on dot com, UK, Germany, Oz, France & Italy until October 9th.

The offer is good for auction and fixed price format and sellers must have DSRs of at least 4.0 across all four criteria, and applies to sellers resident in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, or Thailand.

These discounts are also on top of existing PowerSeller Performance discounts on FVF, which PS’s in those four SE Asian countries receive from the same list of six western countries, and on top of other discounts available to some groups of sellers.

Representatives of European and North American payment networks will attend the inaugural meeting of the International Council of Payment Network Operators in London on September 22, 2008.

The ICPNO brings together payment networks from around the world addressing growing demand for a safer way to transact online. The ICPNO was established in 2008 to set common standards and rules for global interoperability of payment networks. These payment network operators offer a new form of alternate payment which is rapidly gaining market and consumer acceptance, allowing consumers to make payments to online merchants using their chosen financial institution’s online banking website.

Over the last few years, in various announcements and forum posts, staff at eBay UK have stated that the UK subsidiary has up to twenty million registered accounts, and at different times the active user number has been placed at between six and twelve million. It’s well known that many people have more than one account on the site, whether for differentiating stock between seller accounts, or for remaining anonymous on the public forums to prevent malicious bidding because someone disagrees with a statement posted.

The total eBay staff in the UK has only ever been stated once, and I was very surprised then to read it was under 100 given that the site was, at that time, eBay’s second largest market after the US. Numbers may have grown since that time with the addition of the customer support centre in Dublin, but even that cannot dilute the disparity between the number of users and the number of staff when the user community is up in arms.

And up in arms the users certainly are …

The late summer change announcements for the North American eBay sites are radically different to those with major effects in Europe.

The NAFTA-zone sites are keeping traditional eBay Stores and SIF format, but adding new listing durations and fee structures for the existing Fixed Price/BIN format in core.

Specifically this means that they will retain the ultra-cheap, but restricted visibility, store listing option, and sellers using it will still need listings in Auction and BIN format to drive buyers to their shop inventory. The BIN format listings also get a single unified insertion fee, which remains the same regardless of unit price or quantity in the listing, and also get several eBay-authorised methods to manipulate Best Match search ranking for their listings. The primary kick-in-the-nuts for sellers comes with the new “electronic payments” only policy, that has potential to slide-in a PayPal-only North America via the back door.

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 having the same appearance as the intentional location abuse to the casual user.

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 [...]

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. 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.

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. Have eBay finally heard the sellers complaining that buyers never read the auction titles and descriptions? Are they now determined to impose upon the buyers, the education they should have taken notice of in grade school? If so, this could be one of the most positive moves eBay have taken in a long time.

The example that follows is from a live transaction that occurred overnight 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 …

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.