ChannelAdvisor Complete launch in the UK
March 30, 2007
ChannelAdvisor are celebrating the launch of “ChannelAdvisor Complete” in the UK by mailing a miniture shopping cart to thousands of sellers across the UK. A cute twist on the traditional pen or mousemat, but one that certainly got my attention. 
Many (myself included) will question if it’s really necessary to hand over a slice of your profits to a third party auction management company. ChannelAdvisor however provide a lot more than just software, in fact I’d go so far as to say the software is an added bonus. It’s the support, strategic input, training and industry expertise that really counts. ChannelAdvisor Complete is their full range of software and support services.
If you want to find out more about ChannelAdvisor why not book up for the Catalyst Conference on April 18th and 19th?
eBid reveal their new look
March 30, 2007
Long-time eBay competitor eBid announced a redesign this week. I love the clear, crisp new look in a neutral shades accented with orange, scarlet, turquoise and teal - close but not too close to the eBay logo. It’s all very easy on the eye, and viewers are drawn to the heavily-highlighted categories on the left, or to the gallery pictures of items ending soon in the centre.
If I have a misgiving, it’s about the accuracy of the headlines. “Free and easy”? It might be qualified with “No fee for listing items on eBid”, and paying only FVFs or a membership fee might be cheaper than eBay, but it’s never quite free to sell on eBid. If that’s misleading, the secondary headline is just silly: “buying and selling is cheaper with eBid”. Buying had better be more than cheap, it should be *free*! And of course, it is: it’s just badly written headline that really should be changed.
eBid’s newsletter also contains the good news that sales have doubled compared to four months ago:
…double the number of auctions are closing successfully as compared to November 2006. This is due mainly to the increase in advertising we have been giving to the site and also the positive word of mouth promotion that all our buyers and sellers are helping to create.
It’s a shame that there isn’t a more concrete figure here, because double one item sold would be two items… eBid really need to play up and trumpet every success if they want to bring new members to their site.
Pope’s old car back on eBay
March 30, 2007
eBay’s most famous motor is going back up for sale! The VW Golf, once owned by Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was bought for €188k by the Golden Palace Casino in 2005. It’s now being reauctioned in aid of Habit for Humanity. Look out for auction number 280099096259 starting tomorrow evening…
Guardian Business Sense Competition update
March 30, 2007
The five finalists from the Guardian Business Sense Competition spent a day at eBay UK head office in Richmond for some training. Andrew Dudley of postalsupplies was on hand to give some advice.
Matt Priddle from eBay also warned new sellers need to pay attention to eBay’s rules: The worst form of marketing is to spend time getting things right, then get suspended. I guess the last thing eBay want is a repeat of godblessthismess who got suspended from eBay whilst being featured on The Money Program last year.
The five competitors all have very different businesses and have all now opened eBay shops:
Phyllis Avery dollydoodle2007: Dolls containing a card, on to which children record any negative thoughts or worries, as well as wishes.
Karl Anderson onegiantstepfootwear: Fashionable footwear for people with large feet.
David Hallworth 100percent_pure_cotton: Quality cotton school uniforms
Joe Williams laptopscrapyard: Reclaimed working parts from broken laptops
Diane Davidson between-the-trees: Top-quality hammocks from Mexico
Each competitor has some eBay experience under their belts now, they’ve been on buying sprees to gain enough feedback to open their eBay shops. Currently as sellers only betweenthetrees are yet to receive their first feedback as a seller. My hot tip to win the competion, laptopscrapyard, has already amassed a feedback score of 33, 17 of which are from satisfied customers. I have to admit I’m biased as it’s the area of eBay I trade in. Those Mexican hammocks are gorgeous though!
PayPal launch Website Payments Pro
March 30, 2007
PayPal have launched new facilities for merchants use on their own websites - Website Payments Pro. It gives greater flexibilty with more choice for buyers on how to pay even if they don’t have a PayPal account. Although the cost will be £20 per month PayPal are waiving monthly fees until 1st July 2007.
* Get features of merchant accounts and gateways at a low cost
* Customers shop and pay with credit cards directly on your website
* Customers can also pay you with credit cards via phone, fax, mail, or in person
* Use PayPal Manager as a central place to manage your transactions
Full details of Website Payments and Website Payments Pro are available on the PayPal comparison chart.
New dynamic galleries for eBay shops
March 30, 2007
eBay have upgraded the promotion boxes in eBay shops with a scrolling gallery option. This is similar to the popular Vendio and Auctiva galleries which many sellers include in their auctions.
The gallery is category sensitive so it can automatically select items to show from the shop category the buyer is viewing. Of course you need to select the gallery option in your listings to make use of this feature, a category with auction without gallery simply removes the promotion box entirely.
Another new option is an animated countdown timer for promotion boxes. This borrows technology from eBay DealFinder and displays a clock ticking away the seconds until an auction ends. Again you can instruct it to select items from the category you’re viewing, or indeed from a specific category you want to promote.
This is one of the best new features I’ve seen in eBay shops for a long time - it’ll be interesting to see how it affects sales! The only thing that would make it better is an option to automatically include the promotion boxes in your auctions! If you want to see the new promotion boxes in action click the pictures above to visit either Sue’s or my eBay shop.
Pirates of the Carribean Bill Nighy script
March 29, 2007
Bill Nighy has donated his Pirates of the Carribean script complete with his highlighted and scribbled notes for sale on eBay. The sale is part of a collection of celebrity goods from the likes of Tom Stoppard, and Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter).
The auctions are to raise money to fund the first High Tide Festival to be held on the 6th - 8th April. High Tide is a writing theatre festival aimed at supporting new work by young writers, directors and actors. It will premier eight new plays over the long Easter weekend at the Cut in Halesworth, Suffolk.
RM Staffordshire strike again this weekend
March 28, 2007
Royal Mail staff are to strike again this weekend. 150 managers will aim to complete deliveries in the area, as postal workers walk out from Friday to Monday in support of a sacked colleague.
Friday morning maintenance extended
March 28, 2007
eBay are extending the regular Friday maintenance period from two to four hours. From 22h00 on Thursday night until 02h00 Friday morning eBay Pacific time, certain features will be unavailable or intermittently non-functional: for UK eBayers, this translates as 6am to 10am Friday mornings, or 7am to 11am Central European Time. Though this will no doubt cause a little inconvenience for buyers and sellers alike, it’s probably the most convenient time possible for most of the western hemisphere, and if it sorts out the appalling site problems that have plagued eBay of late, we are totally in favour.
Skype me money via PayPal
March 28, 2007
I’ve just download Skype 3.2 beta and as promised it’s now PayPal enabled! I can now right click any contact and send them money via PayPal without even leaving Skype to do so. Of course before you start sending money you have to link your Skype account to your PayPal account. Even better then sending money, once you’ve linked your Skype account to your PayPal account people can send you money through Skype, and it’ll appear directly in your PayPal account.
If anyone would like to test send money in Skype feel free to send me some - my skype account is mountroadcomputers 
Another cute innovation is Skype Find, it enables you to search a locality for a local business such as a restaurant, pub, hotel, garage etc. If you have a favourite you can add it to the directory so that others can find it!
Contact management is improved with the ability to search your address books from Outlook, Outlook Express, Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail. If your contacts already have a skype account they’ll be added, and if not Skype can automatically send them a note encouraging them to sign up.
There’s a lot to like in the new version of Skype, well worth waiting a few minutes for the download.
Got a new Motors ad?
March 28, 2007
Top eBay motorbike seller and TameBay guest blogger Sean Coolness sent us this ad, half a page from this morning’s Daily Telegraph, for eBay UK Motors. The tag line is “watch similar sales live and pay the right price at eBayMotors.co.uk”.
Prettying up the buying pages
March 28, 2007
Another announcement from eBay UK today, that they’re making some changes to the bidding/buying process:
- Gallery pictures will appear on the confirmation page: hopefully it would take more than the click of a page for the buyer to forget what they’re bidding on, so I assume this is really to make Gallery a more attractive purchase for sellers. Cute, but unnecessary: Gallery is already the best-value listing upgrade there is, and practically compulsory if you sell in a “pretty” category.
- Accidental buy it nows: buyers will need to confirm they’re sure if they’re buying a second item from the same listing. I think this is a good idea: it happens, and its a nuisance for both seller and buyer to resolve.
- Buyers will get a heads-up if their bid is significantly below average selling price. I don’t mind admitting, this one had me spluttering indignantly at first, but it only applies to listings created with pre-filled item information. Now I don’t list in any category that offers PFII, but it seems to me that giving buyers a message to say “you’ll be lucky to get that DVD for 99p, you cheapskate, bid a bit more”, has to be good news for sellers. Or am I missing something: what do you think?
In case you hadn’t noticed, eBay is broken…
March 28, 2007
How long ago was it we first noticed that Checkout wasn’t working properly? I blogged it a month ago, but I know I spent a good few days before that wondering if it was me, or my buyers. I know, at this point, you’re hoping I’m going to say it’s fixed, aren’t you? Ooh, you little optimist! It ain’t fixed yet. But at least they made an annoucement about it. So that should reassure the buyers who think I’m trying to get rich by “ripping them off” a quid at a time on their postage.
Surprise fees for Nochex buyers
March 28, 2007
The BBC’s Working Lunch programme yesterday had a feature about a viewer who was charged an extra fee by his credit card company for paying via Nochex. The £3 fee was for a “cash advance” on the card. A number of sellers on the Nochex forums have confirmed that they too are receiving complaints from customers who were not warned about this cash advance fee. Some of the affected cards may be Capital One, GM, MBNA, Mint, Sainsbury’s and Tesco.
There is some suggestion that the sudden rush of problems is due to the way that Nochex payments are coded by card issuers: Nochex themselves recommend that if you have been charged, you contact your card issuer and request the charge be cancelled, as the transaction was an “internet purchase”, not a “cash advance”. Nochex support said today:
It may be that this is being used by a handful of credit card issuers as a way of creating an additional income stream for the banks. It should be stressed that the vast majority of main stream card issuers do not charge such a fee and most customers should not by affected by these bank charges.
Nochex have now updated their payment pages to warn that “some” card issuers may charge a fee. Though this is better than nothing, it does not help the buyer who, in the middle of purchasing, has to decide whether to risk it or not. It certainly doesn’t reassure the seller who relies on Nochex to receive payments, and now has to choose between trying to push all buyers back to Paypal, or dealing with irate emails from those who have been charged by their banks. Many sellers will be thinking long and hard now about the viability of their Nochex accounts, and whether a move to a merchant banking account might be in their longer-term interests.
The closest thing that Paypal UK has to a competitor, Nochex process online payments via debit and credit card; they’re particularly popular with small website operators, as they have a low-cost merchant account which will process any debit or credit card, even from buyers who are not members of the service. Their survival, however, may rely on resolving this latest crisis.
Postage labels create more work for sellers
March 28, 2007
eBay have today enabled Postage Labels on the site, but unfortunately the way it’s implemented has spoilt the workflow for many sellers.
The drop down, in My eBay, used to helpfully display the next natural action in the sales process. For example when you were waiting for a payment the top action would be “Mark as Payment Received”. In awaiting postage it would be “Mark as despatched”, and if you selected the “Awaiting Feedback” view it would be “Leave Feedback”.
eBay in their wisdom have decided that regardless which view you select the top and only link you can click without selecting the dropdown is “Print Postage Label”. Having to click on the drop down before selecting the natural action slows the sales work flow down - there appears no option to disable postage labels in eBay.
Whilst this might be great advertising for their new service for professional sellers it’s a real pain. Most sellers will already have postage arrangements either with their own ParcelForce or courier contract and often a PPI account with Royal Mail. They will not want to use eBay postage labels which incidentally offer no discount on Royal Mail prices (a PPI account gives significant postage savings).
In PayPal if you wish to remove the postage options you simply click on “Auction Tools > Postage Preferences” and uncheck all the options. Sellers need a similar facility to disable postage options in eBay.
Finally the help pages on eBay.co.uk refer to the US postal service and UPS. Not really a lot of help for sellers in the UK!
Hijacked accounts are costing you fees
March 28, 2007
At the beginning of the month we blogged that sellers were not receiving automatic final value fee credits when auctions were cancelled due to a hijacked account. When eBay restore the account to the rightful owner they cancel all auctions that have been won, and email the seller to inform them. Currently eBay have no process in place to refund final value fees though.
Having contacted support for a final value fee credit at the beginning of the month (only a paltry £3 odd, but it’s the principle that counts!), today I checked my account and no fee has been applied. I’ve contacted support again and apparently it can take a few days as credits have to be applied manually, and they’ve now promised to process them immediately.
A quick browse on the community boards reveals there are an awful lot of sellers who have received TKO notices recently, significantly more so than usual. Unless these sellers each apply individually for final value fee credits they’ll all be paying for sales which never took place!
Buy a nuclear reactor on eBay
March 28, 2007
The title to this post sounds like one of those anomalies that come up on Google, but in this case it’s true! A seventeen year old amateur physicist by the name of Thiago Olsen spent two years scouring eBay and other sources for the parts to build a nuclear reactor in his parents basement.
Amazingly he achieved his goal and although it’s not going to power his house he’s built a machine capable of fusing two hydrogen atoms together to create helium. Apparently it’s quite safe, just rather high 40,000 volts and small amount of X-rays emitted through a glass window in the vacuum chamber when the eerie 200 million degree ball of plasma is formed!
A truly astounding DIY achievement, you never know, one day he might be selling the finished product on eBay!
Apple iphone trademark misuse on eBay
March 27, 2007
I came across an article today where eBay cancelled auctions for six iPhones from the .com site. They were pre-sales but as the iphone is not due for release until June in the US eBay took the understandable view point that the auction breached their pre-sales rules (which state the item must be available within 30 days of the auction ending).
Nothing particularly new there then, apart from a throw away snippet at the end of the article:
There is an increasing number of email addresses and URLs being sold for popular products. Each is hyped as the “Must have” email address if you want to sell that product. Sellers and buyers should be aware this is a dangerous game to play though.
Microsoft have already reclaimed thousands of web addresses such as wiindowsvista.com and in the US the 1999 Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act provides for fines of up to $100,000 for anyone convicted of registering a domain name “that is identical, similar or derived from an existing trademark with an intent to profit.”
Anyone buying or selling email addresses or URLs which are misspellings or variations of tradenames should be wary. Realistically it’s doubtful if it’s a huge business advantage for an eBay seller anyway.
More deadly than the Mail?
March 27, 2007
The Daily Mail are on their high horse about eBay sellers making a profit. When half their readership must be making a few quid here and there on eBay, their vitriolic piece slamming sellers as “a cynical new breed of internet profiteers… with rip-off prices” seems frankly a little bit like jealousy.
This is not bread being taken from the mouths of starving children: it’s overpriced handbags made by overhyped designers, concert tickets for spoiled-brat rockstars who’ll be over next week, silly fads created by marketers to dupe buyers who have more money than sense. And if eBay buyers themselves want to push auctions up to silly prices, no seller is holding a gun to their head. Good luck to them, I say!
Bulgarian woman ’scammed Americans of US$350k’
March 27, 2007
A Bulgarian woman has been arrested, accused of using eBay to swindle American buyers out of US$350,000. Mariyana Feliksova Lozanova, a.k.a. “Gentiane La France,” a.k.a. “Naomi Elizabeth DeBont,” who is said to be part of an “transnational crime group”, advertised expensive boats and cars for sale on the site. Winning buyers were then advised to wire cash to “eBay Secure Traders”, a sham payment site which then transferred the cash to bank accounts held by Lozanova, which had been opened using fake US passports.
The Register, with their usual anti-eBay bias, want this story to be about how eBay should police their site. Really the issue is one of buyer common sense. Would you send several thousand quid to someone you didn’t know, by a method that offered you no protection if something went wrong, trusting them to send your expensive purchase? No? How about if a website said it was alright? Just because it’s eBay and it looks like a bargain, doesn’t mean common sense should go out the window. Sending money to an escrow service you’ve never heard of, recommended by a seller, is just asking for trouble. Credit-card funded Paypal payments offer buyers two levels of protection in the event of a problem. And always remember: if it looks to good to be true, it probably is.
Should eBay buy QXL?
March 26, 2007
eBay should buy QXL according to Michael Jivkov, he argues that QXL has a clear market share in many East European territories whilst eBay is a minor player. In the UK QXL languishes way behind eBay but in Poland for instance QXL has a 95% market share. QXL also intends to move into more East European countries this year and currently faces very little in the way of competition.
Currently out of the main auction competitors operating in the UK (eBid, Tazbar, Cqout) none of the others are attractive for eBay to purchase. QXL in the UK isn’t attractive but due to their expansion in territories eBay hasn’t conquered, along with it’s profitability, QLX does have a level of attractiveness.
Shops fall out of Google results
March 26, 2007
eBay sellers watching their traffic reports closely last month might have noticed a drop in their traffic coming via Google. What they didn’t realise until today was that Google traffic had fallen not just to individual shops, but to the whole site. An eBay employee on the Powerseller Board (sorry, you can’t get in if you’re not a PS) described Google’s change as a “massacre”, saying:
one week 2,000 of the keywords we track were returning a Shops page on the first page of results, the next week it was 300.
It seems likely that this is the result of one of Google’s periodic changes to their search algorithm: please, lets not have any silly conspiracy theories about revenge for eBay’s banning of Google Checkout. Lets just hope that eBay’s search engine optimisation experts can get us back up at the top of the list again soon.
Scottish postal workers strike
March 26, 2007
If you’re a seller or a buyer in the Edinburgh area, you might like to know that posties from the central Edinburgh depot staged a wildcat strike this weekend. Strangely missing from any news reports, the strike is over new working practices: staff feel that they are not being consulted over changes to their jobs, while management described the strike as “unnecessary”.
My eBay’s missing payments
March 26, 2007
eBay’s site melt down got a step worse today, as communication between sellers’ records on eBay, and Paypal, broke down. The problem began some time over the weekend, as items with cleared Paypal payments were showing either as “payment pending”, or not showing as sold at all in both SMP and My eBay. For once, eBay have put out an annoucement about the problem, confirming they’re aware of the issue and are working to resolve it. Let’s hope it’s sorted a little more quickly than the still-ongoing problem with Checkout’s postage prices, but in the meantime, sellers should cross-check their eBay sales against what’s in their Paypal account to avoid missing payments.
1 in 10 Internet users are scammed for £875
March 26, 2007
That’s the finding of a YouGov survey from early March this year. However it was also pointed out that if internet users took the same precautions online that they do on the high street, a substantial proportion of online fraud losses could be prevented. Astonishingly less than half of Internet users believe that they are responsible for their own online safety with 16% under the impression that it’s their banks job and 13% assuming their ISP should look after them.
Garreth Griffith, head of eBay Trust and Safety and director of Get Safe Online
It really is amazing that people go online blithely expecting others to take care of them. Whilst credit, bank cards and wallets are high priorities for most people their online passwords and email barely get a passing thought. When asked over half thought there should be an “Internet Safety Test” before people are let loose on the Internet, with over three quarters believing that schools should run lessons in online safety.
With so many admitting that Online Safety should be a priority but equally expecting someone or another organisation to take care of them it’s not surprising 12% of internet users have experienced online fraud in past 12 months.
The UK population spend some £30 billion online each year. 3.5 million people being defrauded at an average cost of £875 each is simply far to high to be sustainable. Users need to start taking responsibility for their own losses, and if they aren’t Internet savvy, to make sure they educate themselves with resources such as Get Safe Online. Alternatively the European Computer Driving Licence includes online safety material as well as educating on how to use a computer!
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