The secret to avoiding phone calls to confirm your identity when selling on eBay was revealed in the US workshop on Trusted Selling with Identity Confirmation. If you don’t want the hassle of phone calls then using the PayPal security key will avoid the need to confirm your identity when selling from a different (or new) computer.
The only problem is the key hasn’t been made available to UK sellers even though it was released over a year ago in the US. Sadly, if they use the same criteria in the UK as the US - cookies and flash objects - whenever users log on from a new PC they’ll have to confirm their identity, almost certainly by phone.
The one exception to identity confirmation with be when using tools (either eBay tools such as TurboLister or those by other companies), which use Third-party authorisations. Third party authorisations allow you to enter your user name and password on eBay and a token is generated to link your eBay account with the third party tool or application.
For those sellers that are required to confirm their identity the proceedure will be:
Select a phone number on file or to specify a new phone number and also put in your Secret Answer.
Select whether you want to receive the call Now or in 2 minutes.
You will receive a PIN over the phone that you should jot down.
You will be presented with a field on the page where you enter the PIN.
Upon success, you will be redirected back to the listing flow.
It should be a fairly simple proceedure, but it’s worth realising that if you clear your cookies, don’t have flash installed, clear flash objects, or don’t have a PayPal security key, then you’ll have to confirm your identity every time you list an item on eBay.
eBay have just two weeks today to respond to hundreds of concerns lodged with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) regarding their proposed exclusivity deal with PayPal. With some 350 odd submissions it’s going to be a busy time for them.
Many of the submissions are from eBay users complaining that they want choice for eBay payments, and in fact the crux of many complaints is simply that they’ll have to pay PayPal fees on top of their eBay fees. In reality this is a lessor concern for larger businesses trading on eBay as they’ll already be paying banking or merchant account fees for each transaction anyway.
One of the most interesting submissions come yesterday, from the Australian Bankers Association (ABA). It addresses two main points - firstly the exclusion of PayPal’s competitors from a large segment pf the market, i.e. eBay. Currently they state 50% of transactions on eBay’s Australian site occur through PayPal, with the next most popular payment method being bank transfer, followed by cheques and money orders. As in the UK whilst there are alternative payment methods they are either used very rarely or are banned from eBay as an unsafe payment method.
It’s the second point that is most interesting though, the ABA assert that exclusivity on eBay for PayPal will give it a “slingshot” effect and unfair advantage for non-eBay transactions. As buyers will be forced to sign up for a PayPal account when using eBay they’ll naturally then find it more convenient to use PayPal rather than sign up for alternative services in the future.
The ABA state “Even banks, which might otherwise be expected to develop their competing services with comparable features to PayPal may be deterred from doing so”. Once PayPal gains an unassailable market position their market share is predicted to be 65% of all Australian ecommerce transactions, should exclusivity on eBay become ratified.
In conclusion the ABA say “Clearly, the public benefits are exaggerated or illusory” and finish with the warning that PayPal would be “able to increase fees and charges to eBay users.” In reality (for the UK at least) PayPal have lowered fees in recent years, although it’s a legitimate concern.
It’s worth noting that other site with third party sellers such as Amazon have their own exclusive payment method and they too are opening up their payments for off-Amazon transactions. If their off-Amazon business becomes substantial they too could face similar issues in the future.
Whatever the outcome of the ACCA ruling it’s going to an interesting time for the online payment industry.
Feedback is changing, and although there is news of a hub for reporting malicious or unfair feedback from buyers the biggest complaint appears to be the removal of mutual feedback withdrawal.
Brian Burke explains mutual withdrawal is being discontinued as it opens sellers up to extortion. Whilst that may be possible it’s no more likely than it has been previously. If a buyer has left non-positive feedback (apart from cases involving retaliatory feedback from sellers), buyers have always been in a position to blackmail sellers with the promise of withdrawing their feedback. That situation won’t change, but when a buyer leaves feedback in haste and genuinely regrets it they should be able to withdraw or edit the comment and rating.
The one piece of good news to counterbalance the end of mutual withdrawn feedback and mediation services are changes to the interstitial feedback page. Whenever a buyer is about to leave non-positive feedback in the future, they will be presented with three check boxes to tick:
Have you communicated with the seller?
Have you allowed enough time?
Have you kept the feedback factual?
In the past these questions have been displayed but the buyer could simply click ‘continue’ to leave the feedback. Now they will have to manually check the boxes to confirm the three criteria.
Whilst this will in no way deter buyers determined to leave a non-positive comment, it should at least act as a speed bump to buyers who are about to leave feedback in haste. Forcing them to confirm they’ve communicated, allowed sufficient time for delivery, and kept feedback factual should (along with the hotlinks to email the seller or request their contact details) reduce the incidence of avoidable non-positive feedback from decent buyers.
The biggest problem of course will be for sellers suspended under SNP (Seller Non-Performance). With sellers facing an instant 30 day suspension for falling below 95% positive feedback, without feedback withdrawal or mediation services ,they are left with no possible way to improve their feedback to avoid permanent suspension.
Days after a report revealed that deregulation of postal services had not provided significant benefits to consumers, Royal Mail has revealed annual losses of £200m. For the first time, the universal system for delivering letters and parcels (which allows senders to enjoy the same rates regardless of where they are in the country) was not profitable.
£800m was pumped into the Royal Mail’s pension pot but despite cost-savings from staff redundancies and 600 Post Office branch closures, the poor results have prompted Royal Mail chief executive, Adam Crozier, to call for greater freedom and deregulation. He said that Royal Mail now competes not just with other mail companies but also online companies. “We probably lost more direct marketing business to Google than to TNT” he said.
On the brightside for eBay buyers and sellers, Crozier reiterated the Royal Mail’s commitment to the universal service calling it “part of the fabric of our society and… vitally important to social cohesion and to the UK economy.”
Sadly, a quick scan of the available listings shows numerous non-charity listings, many of them on a three day duration, though several have been pulled even while I’ve been writing this. When eBay can restrict listings’ visibility for potential trademark issues or even for naughty words, it’s hard to see why they wouldn’t do it for a potential PR disaster like profiteering on charity concert tickets too.
eBay open a brand new energy-efficient office building today, reports the Mercury News. The five-story building on eBay’s North First Street campus has the largest commercial solar roof in San José, as well as soft furnishings that use post-recycled materials, and water-based paint that you can “safely lick”, though Wes Washburn, eBay’s facility operations manager, says it doesn’t taste nice. Outside, a large pool helps keep the building cool by water evaporation, and lots of windows let in lots of natural light. Sensors monitor light levels, and only turn on fluorescent lighting when its needed and when rooms are occupied.
The building will be dedicated in a ceremony featuring eBay CEO John Donahoe, PayPal President Scott Thompson and San José Mayor Chuck Reed. It will be the working home of 800 PayPal employees.
eBay sellers have long said it, and now it’s been proven: people don’t read everything that’s on a webpage. Research by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows that users read approximately 20% of text on an average webpage. And the more words there are on a page, the smaller the percentage that people will read.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard a bewildered seller say “but I said it was used in the listing; why did they think it was new?” So now we know: they just didn’t read it. What’s a seller to do?
I’ve taken a look through my own and some other sellers’ non-positive feedback today, and it seems that around half of it is from people who didn’t read the listing “properly” in the first place, so making listings that communicate more effectively could in future be the difference between keeping your eBay account, or not. Here are half a dozen easy changes you can make to your listings that should help buyers read more of what you need to tell them.
Prioritise information
The more important information should be at the top of your listing. For most items, “most important information” includes the photograph.
Put your listings on a diet
If it can go, get rid of it. Your listing page should be about selling, not your T&Cs or the history of your trading on eBay, and certainly not “thanks for looking” and all that guff.
Keep listing page T&Cs minimal, and if you must have long lists of legalise, have that on a seperate linked page in your Shop.
Use headings for scannable listings
Buyers won’t read reams of text to find the information they want. They’ll scan through quickly to see if it’s there; so show them it is by using headings to highlight important areas.
Use bulleted lists
We’ve all seen those listings with a block of text going on for three screens with no paragraph break in sight. Few of us read them, and neither will your buyers.
• Bullets are easy to read
• Bullets can be scanned quickly
• Bullets are a great way to present product attributes
Keep formatting simple
Don’t make important information look like advertising, or something that’s seperate from the rest of the page flow. Big red text gets ignored because it looks like a banner ad, so don’t use it to communicate important information. IT SHOULD GO WITHOUT SAYING THAT WRITING ALL IN CAPITALS IS A REALLY BAD IDEA.
Bold text stands out so you should use it.
Put information in predictable places
eBay are training your buyers where information is on a page. Shipping prices are in the shipping prices box; returns policy is (or should be) in the returns policy box. Condition (used/new) should be in the item specifics box as well as in the body of the listing. Omitting information from the expected places makes life more difficult for your buyers; don’t make them need to read through your entire listing, because they won’t.
Don’t distract
Scrolling galleries of cross-promotions should never be at the top of your listings; sell em what they’re looking at before you sell em something else.
If you’ve read this far, congratulations and let me tell you, this works. I changed my own listing from A packet of fifty beautiful Czech glass beads, 6mm diameter, in silver metallic finish
to Size: 6mm diameter Made of: Czech glass Quantity in packet: 50 Finish: silver metallic
This not only cut the number of people who “bought the wrong thing”, it also slashed the number of ASQs I get. Listings that communicate effectively make life easier for everyone.
A report by JupiterResearch was released today which examines the issues driving multi-channel online selling. The report was commissioned by ChannelAdvisor. The highlight from the executive summary shows that 75% of online retailers surveyed attributed their online multi-channel strategy as a key contributing factor to their success.
Retailers claim that expansion of online channels are meeting their expectations for increased sales and new customer acquisitions. However retailers using multiple channels should be wary of the strain that running multiple channels places on the business processes.
This is something all those who started out selling on eBay should consider - whilst adding their own website, Amazon, Play.com and perhaps Google adwords and Comparison shopping might sound attractive, over-reaching and spreading your business too thinly across multiple channels may be detrimental to growth if introduced too early.
In order to mitigate the complexity of multiple online channel retailing, 55% of retailers outsource some aspects of the business operations. Almost 70% of those outsourcing attribute increased sales (and 65% increased customer acquisition) directly to their outsourced partners.
One of the most interesting parts of the report showed the percentage of total online sales attributed to the different online sources used.
Direct visits to websites, natural search and paid listings contributed almost three quarters of all online sales. Email marketing shouldn’t be underestimated, contributing 13% of online sales. It’s perhaps one of the lowest cost to implement (especially with shops email marketing tools on eBay). Comparison shopping in contrast was only thought to contribute 3% of sales but is used by 34% of retailers. This is one area the report falls down as it fails to explain why so many retailers use a channel for which so few sales are attributed. Read the rest of this entry »
eBay UK have announced some more details of the feedback changes coming later this month. From 15th May, sellers will no longer be able to leave buyers negative or neutral feedback. eBay have acknowledged that sellers are concerned that this leaves them vulnerable to “feedback extortion” from buyers, and have put in place a number of measures designed to minimise this problem.
Before feedback is left
Buyers trying to leave non-positive feedback will be reminded to contact their seller if there is a problem: I believe this already happens, but there is now a special reminder for cross-border transactions.
Buyers will have to wait at least seven days to leave non-positive feedback for PowerSellers who have been registered more than a year.
Buyers will not be able to leave feedback more than 60 days after the transaction (reduced from 90 days).
An enhanced buyer requirement will allow sellers to block buyers who have been reported for policy breaches and non-payment; this has previously been touted as “2 UID strikes over the last 12 months” plus some kind of bad-behaviour block. This will launch at the end of May: shame they didn’t launch it at the same time as the new feedback policies.
After feedback has been left
Feedback percentages will be based on the last 12 months’ figures, so non-positives will not permanently harm a seller’s reputation.
Non-positive feedback will be removed if the buyer is permanently suspended from the site, or if the seller opens a UID “and the buyer either doesn’t respond or doesn’t specifically say the seller is at fault”.
eBay are launching “a dedicated hub for sellers to report malicious or unfair feedback from buyers” (launch date unspecified).
I don’t think this will do much to pacify those who are worried about feedback abuse from buyers. eBay’s definition of “unfair feedback” is famously not the same as a seller’s: personally I’d say that negging me without emailing me first is “unfair”, but I’m sure that eBay won’t see that as grounds for feedback removal any more than they do now.
We’re going to see a lot more sellers opening up UIDs for buyers who have left non-positive feedback on the off-chance that there will be no response and the feedback will be removed. This is certainly not going to enhance the buyer experience: an unfair unpaid item strike is just as bad as an unfair retaliatory negative now.
eBay’s problem is that they are unable to let go of the idea that buyers and sellers are two sides of a war, and that the company is the only thing that stands between the two sides. Trading on eBay isn’t like that, most of the time; if buyers and sellers can communicate, then most of the time, we can work things out. That’s what eBay should be encouraging.
If they are indeed going to remove the Mutual Feedback Withdrawal process then they really need to institute something in its place, whereby buyers can alter their feedback if a seller has made things right. Otherwise, all this system has done is take the fight between buyers and sellers off the feedback pages and onto the unpaid item console.
What do you think? Does this make you feel safe from feedback extortion? Leave us a comment.
eBay.com have announced a cheap listing week for buy it now items. From 7th to 14th May 2008, insertion fees will be capped at 50c, meaning that any item selling for $10 or more will be cheaper to list. The offer includes media categories and parts and accessories in Motors, though there are several other category exclusions, primarily from Business and Industrial. Auctions are not eligible for the promotional pricing. eBay Canada is running a similar promotion.
I’m seeing a few trials of this capped pricing structure across various eBay sites. I suspect this year’s switch in emphasis from insertion fees to final value fees is not the last “rebalancing” of eBay fees we’re going to see.
The online auction site QXL have announced that they are to close and withdraw from the UK marketplace. qxl.co.uk will close for business this month, with final date to list an item being Friday this week.
Final bids/buys will take place on the 19th May, and trading will cease on the 30th May at which point all accounts will be closed.
QXL have traded in the UK for as long as eBay have opened in 1997. Their name was changed to Tradus with QLX as an operating brand and were acquired by Naspers in a deal finalised in March this year.
QXL are the dominant auction platform in Poland, Switzerland, Norway and Denmark, but hasn’t been a serious contender to eBay in the UK for the last six years or so.
With the purchasers of QXL deciding to shut the platform down it’s likely to give a boost to the remaining eBay competitors - eBid, Tazbar and Cqout. The question remains how long they too can continue profitable operations in the UK?
Whilst many eBay sellers also have their own website, the last place they would probably look for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) advice would be their local florist. I have to admit I also was a little surprised when I found just such a post on the blog of the leading online florist - Arena Flowers.
The post contains some great advice for website owners, and in a easy to understand format. It focuses on some do’s and don’ts for page meta descriptions, with examples of how they can have a positive (or negative!) impact in search results.
This is going to become an increasingly important area especially, as the post points out as of yesterday, competitors can purchase Google search placement with your company brand as the keyword. That means your competitors can advertise their products directly to people who have specifically searched the Internet for your business or brand.
The material is well worth a read for all website owners, I’m just amazed to find such great content from a florist. The article shows how well they understand the Internet and why Arena are simply the best for online flowers.
eBay Australia held the first of their roadshows yesterday regarding the Paypal only changes coming in June. By all accounts it was a pretty rowdy meeting with sellers booing the eBay directors.
Prior to the meeting a select group of 12 sellers were invited to a private Q&A. These appear to have been chosen for their willingness to listen and discuss the changes with the sellers voicing their concerns by taking on board the reasons for the PayPal only decision.
The main session appears not to have gone quite so sedately, with a moderator from a local radio station dubbed the “Referee” by the crowd.
“You can boo and hiss all you like, I can just tell you the simple facts”, was the exasperated response by Alastair MacGibbon, eBay Australia’s Trust & Safety Director. His later riposte “We’re not allowing people to offer unsafe choices, just like in this democracy you can’t go out and buy heroin on the streets”, may not have been the wisest analogy to use. Later Simon Simith, Senior Vice President of eBay, emphasised “The problem is not the people in this room - the problem is the thousands of people not in this room”
eBay UK this weekend accidentally made a customer service telephone number for top buyers visible to all users. The number appeared on a button at the top of My eBay pages, and judging by my inbox, was seen by dozens of surprised users. eBay phone numbers are usually a closely guarded secret.
Richard Ambrose posted on the PowerSeller forum that this was a “good old-fashioned cock-up”. The number has been removed from general display now. Anyone who has made a note of the number should be aware that - like the PowerSeller support number - staff will not assist callers who are not part of the top buyer program.
eBay Motors UK have just announced that this weekend, listing fees will be halved. Cars and other vehicles can be listed for £4 instead of the usual £8 insertion fee on Saturday 10th and Sunday 11th May. The offer applies to BIN and auction listings, but not to classified ads. Other normal selling fees will apply.
There appears to be a mistake with the final step being “PayPal’s final decision” which I’m sure should actually read “You may be eligible for a final value fee credit”. (That’s unless PayPal can now adjudicate on cases where a buyer never actually paid? )
eBay say they’ll be holding a series of smaller events in 2009, hoping to meet more eBay users than ever before.
Without giving too much away Lorrie Norrington said “In the keynote address at eBay Live! this year, myself and John Donahoe, our CEO, will be speaking very directly about the future of eBay.”
The future of eBay may be exciting and it’ll definately be different to what’s come before. If you’re still wondering whether to attend eBay Live! in Chicago it’s going to be the most important conference yet, and one which will be looked back on as the turning point in eBay’s history. This is the one eBay Live! you do not want to miss!
Up until this week the “Level Playing Field” Pierre envisaged when he started eBay has been level. All sellers paid the same fees, and even with the introduction of volume discounts, and more recently €0.01 listings for Italian Premium Shops, the same opportunities were open to everyone.
That’s just changed with the news that Buy.com has been granted a deal to list their entire inventory on eBay.com, which has been described as “economically feasible for both parties”. This is the first time that a special deal has been done for a large retailer, and although no specific details have been released it probably won’t be the last, eBayInk adds “any partnerships will be assessed on a one-off basis with hand picked partners”.
Whilst Buy.com have a special pricing deal, they’ll be limited to one listing per product, will have to compete in Best Match to get their product in front of buyers and will be subject to the same feedback and DSR criteria as other eBay sellers.
The big question is of course does a deal with a large retailer to bring new-in-season merchandise to eBay add depth to the inventory available, or does it detract from the overall buyer experience?
The Mirror reports that a phone sold on eBay had stored the phone numbers of Tory leader David Cameron and TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson, as well as those of “numerous business leaders” and the private secretaries of the Duke and Duchess of York, and details of Swiss bank accounts. The £72 MDA Vario phone and organiser was bought by Newcastle woman Gail Lynch, who told reporters “it is like a Who’s Who of Tory MPs and bigwigs.” The phone was apparently sold by an employee of Oxfordshire businessman Richard Graves, said to be the phone’s previous owner. The question of who would want to phone either Mr Cameron or Mr Clarkson was not addressed.
Last month eBay announced they would monitor which PC sellers use for listing on eBay and require additional verification if they list from a different machine. Tomorrow eBay are to host a workshop on the policy officially named “Trusted Selling with Identity Confirmation”.
The workshop will take place on the US workshops board at 6pm BST and last for an hour. They aim to explain how to make it easier to confirm your identity if you are prompted to do so. John Canfield, Senior Director of eBay Trust and Safety, will be available to answer sellers questions.
eBay.com have just announced that from now until the end of July, first time Stores subscribers will enjoy the first 30 days free of charge. This promotion was first run in March and was deemed such a success that it’s being repeated. The offer is valid for Basic or Premium Stores.
That was until TameBay reader Niel, of Snowdon Computers, spotted eBay automatically appending a 14 day returns policy to his auctions. The policy appears for auction style listings when:
You list an auction style listing using the SYI form
You change an auction to “no returns” and then use “sell similar item”, the new listing form has the 14 day returns policy ticked again
If you open the listing to edit it the 14 day returns policy will be automatically ticked again
I can understand why eBay might do this for fixed price listings (BIN, SIF and SCO) as it is now mandatory, but not on auctions. If you’re a seller who chooses not to accept returns on auctions you’ll need to monitor listings closely to make sure eBay don’t sneak in a returns policy without you noticing.
It’s day two of the seller strike and I wondered just how much effect it may be having on the site. It’s difficult to tell, but one thing’s for certain. The number of listings on eBay.co.uk is well up compared to earlier this week. That’s not altogether surprising considering there was a 5p cheap listing day for auctions yesterday, but the numbers are astounding.
On Monday 28th April when I checked there were 6,996,764 active listings on the site. This morning there are 9,100,154 listings live, or a touch over two million additional listings since the beginning of the week.
Whether that number would have been significantly different had there not been a strike is almost impossible to tell. One thing is for sure, there’s a lot less noise in the press concerning the strike than for the previous strike in February.
It’s time for the strikers to change their approach to eBay. Rather than focus on the negative side of eBay it’s time to focus on the positives of running a multi-channel business. Instead of publicising a boycott of eBay (who have about a 25% share of all ecommerce in the UK) it’s time to publicise the fact that if you’re business is solely on eBay you’re missing out on the remaining 75% of the online marketplace.
Amazon, Play.com, paid and natural search and shopping comparison sites make up three quarters of the available online business but the 25% share that eBay holds is just too big to ignore.
Two million new listings on the site says that the strike won’t have a significant impact. The message should be that it’s time to go capture the 75% of sales you’re missing out on - Not to cut off the 25% of sales that you already have.
A sharp-eyed reader of the eBay UK Business Seller Board spotted a comment on eBay Germany, saying that mutual feedback withdrawal will not be available after the end of May. eBay Pink Richard Ambrose responded:
All eBay countries will be phasing out the Mutual Feedback Withdrawal process as part of the forthcoming feedback changes - with only buyers able to leave negs, there is little point in continuing the process as it is. Sellers will be able to appeal malicious, defamatory or accidental negs to eBay.
Richard’s logic is of course impeccable, but eBay need to consider that often, feedback is not the end of the matter. Frequently it’s used by inexperienced buyers to communicate a problem; and eBay’s insistance that feedback somehow “protects” buyers is part of the cause of this.
If a buyer uses feedback to notify me that their item has been lost or damaged in the post, should I
(a) contact that buyer myself and try to make things right, or
(b) shrug it off, save myself the money and the hassle, and not even bother responding to them?
Option (a) obviously makes for a better buyer experience on eBay, but without some way for the buyer to remove, change or edit their feedback, I don’t have much incentive to do it as a seller.
I sincerely hope that Richard’s post is only half of the story, because otherwise sellers are going to be backed into a very nasty corner, and that can only be bad news for both buyers and eBay.
Have you ever wished there was an easy way to see which of the blogs you read has posted recently? Or wanted to check the headlines on a dozen different news sites without having to click through them all? Or even wanted to keep an eye on your favourite eBay sellers, searches or competitors? If so, you need RSS.
RSS is a way for you to automatically receive updates from websites without having to visit the sites themselves. All you need is a bit of software to collect the RSS feeds, and you can see at a glance which blogs have updated, what the latest headlines are, or that your favourite eBay seller is having a sale.
All you need to do is look out for the orange symbols like the one above - or sometimes they’re an orange button with “RSS” written on it, like at the bottom of eBay searches. If you’re using Firefox or IE7, you can just click the orange buttons and your browser will automatically subscribe to the feed. Or if you prefer, there are dozens of seperate feed readers: personally I like Google Reader.
And today is RSS Appreciation Day, so if you haven’t discovered just how convenient RSS feeds can be, now’s the time to find out! Oh, and here’s our feed.
The one piece of good news to counterbalance the end of mutual withdrawn feedback and mediation services are changes to the interstitial feedback page. Whenever a buyer is about to leave non-positive feedback in the future, they will be presented with three check boxes to tick:
and let me tell you, this works. I changed my own listing from
One of the most interesting parts of the report showed the percentage of total online sales attributed to the different online sources used.
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Have you ever wished there was an easy way to see which of the blogs you read has posted recently? Or wanted to check the headlines on a dozen different news sites without having to click through them all? Or even wanted to keep an eye on your favourite eBay sellers, searches or competitors? If so, you need RSS. 
