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Michael Jackson collection for sale on eBay

The Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas is the venue for a huge auction of Michael Jackson memorabilia including many of the jackets he wore on stage at the height of his fame. The auctions will run concurrently in Las Vegas and on eBay as an eBay Live auction giving fans around the world a chance to bid without having to travel to Vegas.

As well as some the stage outfits there are also letters and contracts along with possessions from other members of the Jackson family including the other members of the Jackson Five - Jackie, Tito, Jermaine and Marlon.

eBay gets a new baby - StumbleUpon

Meg’s been spending again, in the region of $75m for StumbleUpon.

For those that haven’t heard StumbleUpon is a discovery/search site. It aims to show you a combination of your own preferences and those of people like you to present websites, videos, photographs, and even information you didn’t even know you might like. That’s a great fit for eBay - if they can tie the technology into the auction platform they can promote listings you might like based on those people who have purchased similar items to you in the past like. For instance if you purchase clothes for a two year old they might present you with toys. Equally the software might establish that people with two year olds also purchase something totally unrelated and offer you a new hammock - you might just like it if others do!

Either way it’ll be interesting to see what eBay do with StumbleUpon, it can’t do any harm having an eBay owned toolbar on millions of browsers around the world!

UPDATE: Bill Cobb has just posted on the .com announcement board… they haven’t a clue how to integrate StumbleUpon with eBay, PayPal and Skype, but when they figure it out they’ll let us know!

Auctions only on eBay please!

Both the UK and Canada have Cheap Listing days on 31st May, the one difference being the UK announced theirs three days prior but Canada got less than 24 hours notice. The UK is aiming for low start (sub 99p) auctions, and we expect most of the Cheap Listing Days in the foreseeable future to be based around the auction format.

Canada also are focussing on auctions, but have designed the promotion to deter sellers from listing on auction with a Buy It Now price slightly higher than the auction start price. This is a problem not inherent to eBay and Overstock’s CEO summed it up very succinctly:

It’s good to see eBay starting to refocus on auctions, and true auctions with realistic start prices to get bidders bidding again.

Many sellers will simply ignore the Cheap Listing Day in the UK as they view their products as not suitable for auctions. There is a definite shift in philosophy towards low start price auctions to encouraging bidding, if anyone’s still unconvinced take a look at the main “Come on in. Get more” promotions on eBay.co.uk’s home page - all the links direct you to lowest price searches which invariably highlight auctions above Buy It Now listings.

Whether this is down to Philipp Justus moving to San Jose to revitalise the auction platform is unknown, but if it is down to his influence it’s good to see a European having an impact on eBay. After all the European market as a whole is larger than the US

Would you risk £60k to a new eBay trader?

£60,000 is the investment that a company calling themselves bayagent have received in funding from a group of Venture Capitalists called Nstar. That’s a fair amount to invest in a company setting up as eBay trading assistants in a market where other trading assistants are failing. The one point in their favour is that they’re not looking for consumers to drop off items but intend to appeal to businesses with excess stock to dispose of. They aim to grow to a £14m turnover within two years - with fees of 33% that values bayagents cut at over £9m. Currently they state they’ve sold £48k having started trading in November.

It will be interesting to see how they fare, they have plenty of business experience - the founder set up studentmobiles.com which was sold to the Carphone Warehouse. What may be lacking however is eBay experience, although they state they’ve had an eBay account since 2003 they’ve chosen a user id masquerading as a URL. If they can’t follow basic eBay rules it doesn’t inspire confidence in their eBay expertise.

$300million worth of picture hosting

One of the most commonly asked questions on the eBay community boards is how can I host my own pictures instead of paying eBay fees. The answer almost always quick to be given is use Photobucket. Photobucket is the YouTube of pictures, but has caught the eye of MySpace who have just acquired the site for some $300 million.

eBayers who use the photo hosting service in their auctions should be reassured that the Photobucket blog insists it’ll be business as usual and the site will continue to run as a seperate entity.

eBay spends £10million on advertising

eBay has awarded a £10m advertising contract to Albion, they’ll be creating the next series of eBay adverts and it’s thought they’ll carry on using the primary coloured Logo People from recent campaigns. The logo people have appeared in a series of TV adverts as well as on billboard posters and in the national press.

Albion is no stranger to eBay companies, they’ve managed the Skype account since 2005 and have recently started working with Joost, an Internet TV company started by the creators of Skype.

Out with the old, in with the new

Anyone waking up this morning can’t have missed the new eBay header as soon as they logged on! Colourful, bright and new functionality such as the drop down for fast navigation to top level categories.

Click to embiggen
Of course we’ve been expecting this ever since eBay.com got it’s new header. The eBay.com header has the facility to search a category but that’s missing on eBay.co.uk and we just have a longer search box instead. Also missing are links to eBay Motors and eBay Express, it’s a real shame they didn’t go one step further than the US and add them in along with a link to eBay Shops. eBay.co.uk is missing the drop down quick links which you can see if you hover over the Buy, Sell, My eBay, Community, and Help links on eBay.com, these would be useful if they added them for quick navigation of the site.

So which do you prefer? The new header or the old one? Just for anyone that’s already forgotten what it looked like here it is one last time!

eBay Guardian Business Sense competition results

THe Guardian Business Sense Challenge 2007 winners have been announced. As predicted at the start of the competition the overall winner was laptopscrapyard aka Joe Williams who set out selling parts scavanged from broken laptops and fully-refurbished machines. Of course he had a head start as he already ran an IT support business and set up his eBay laptopscrapyard as a second income stream.

The runner up was Diane Davidson who sells Mexican hammocks on eBay as between-the-trees. She actually sold more in monetary value on eBay although laptopscrapyard completed more transactions. Diane also won the best packed item in a mystery shopper challange. The big challange for Diane was the two months it took to set up her business but says it gets easier to run as experience is gained.

Other contestants faced their own challenges, onegiantstepfootwear failed to secure a supplier and purchased goods at retail from UK highstreet stores. Although buying from the comfort of your home has it’s advantages paying retail prices for stock is never going to make a successful business, he’s already closed his eBay shop. Now Karl hopes to take the seed money from the competion to design and manufacture his own range of shoes.

David Hallworth of 100percentpurecotton admits he was unsure of his ability to sell quality cotton school uniforms on eBay and intends to set up his own website instead. Phyllis Avery trading as dollydoodle2007 found it tough setting up her business while holding down a full time job. Because she was manufacturing her own goods there just weren’t enough hours in the day but she’s in talks with publishers for the book rights to her creations.

Although I always thought laptopscrapyard would do well I’m impressed with the runner up, between-the-trees. Starting from nothing Diane has started a business with the potential to build for the future. She’s also making much better use of her eBay shop with promotion boxes to cross sell other items - click through her shop categories and see for yourself how she markets her products!

More UK/US visibility changes

eBay UK have just made another announcement regarding visibility of UK listings on eBay.com and US listings on eBay.co.uk.

A further test is to be run over the next month, with a very small percentage of US searches including UK listings in various options:

With regard to American listings’ visibility on .co.uk, the test categories in which US listings will appear are being changed to the following:

While this is unlikely to pacify the UK sellers who feel that eBay have ruined their businesses by making these changes, it does at least demonstrate that nothing is set in stone: on both questions, eBay expect to make a final decision by the end of August.

Second-guessing eBay is always a risky game to play, but looking at options 3 and 4, which pretty much mirror the “search internationally” options available now, I’d expect that full .com visibility by default is not going to be restored across the board. The intention to “evaluate which UK categories are most suitable for visibility on eBay.com” might give hope to categories where .co.uk is strong and .com is weak - British collectibles I would imagine - but probably shouldn’t be taken as a change of heart for the majority of UK sellers.

Or if you want a total shot in the dark, but based on everything else that eBay are pushing right now, I can see a scenario where auction-style listings *only* have international visibility: that would be one way for Bill and co. to push sellers back towards the auctions we’re all resisting right now.

Some of the changes do seem reasonable: for example, that only listings showing the relevent postal costs should be able to show up on other sites. (Frankly, I think all eBay listings should be forced to show postage costs up front anyway.) The specific criterion for US listings showing on .co.uk, that they are “listed by sellers with 100 Feedback at 98% or greater positive” comes very close to saying “Powersellers only”: though it’s no doubt going to be pitched as a buyer-security measure, I think eBay’s famous level playing field just got even more sloped.

eBay Thailand to launch this year

eBay announced their 38th local marketplace will be Thailand, operated in conjunction with a Thai portal - Sanook! The site will be branded “Sanook! eBay” and should be launched in Thai-language by the end of the year. Sanook! is a leading Internet brand and the most trafficked Internet destination for Thais, it would be similar to cobranding a site with Google in the UK.

eBay have had mixed results with moves into new territories, 2006 saw eBay shut down it’s Chinese eBay Eachnet website to be replaced by one run by local partner Tom Group. It looks like lessons have been learnt and partnering with a local established Internet presence in Thailand should ensure a faster takeup of the site.

Hackers compromise PayPal and eBay EV SLL protection

EV SLL built into the new Internet Explorer 7 was supposed to inform you when a phishing site was masquerading as a legitimate site such as eBay or PayPal. The title bar in your browser will turn green for known safe sites, red for known phishing sites, and yellow for suspected phishing sites. PayPal have implemented EV SSL with a security certificate issued by Verisign (who have a strategic alliance with eBay and PayPal).

Now the Channel Register reports users logging into spoof PayPal and eBay sites which request additional information (social security number, bank details, credit card details, mothers maiden name etc) even though the address bar of IE7 is reporting the site as legitimate! Screen shots show not only IE7 reporting spoof sites as legitimate but Norton security software also declares the sites to be safe. It is surmised that a dll file that attaches itself to IE is managing to read and modify the html while in transit. This means although the user is logged onto the authentic site the page appearing in their browser has been tampered with.

All eBay and PayPal users should be aware that no security software is a replacement for vigilance and common sense. eBay are partners in the Get Safe Online campaign which offers advice on safe surfing.

Bid Assistant available in the UK

eBay’s new bidding tool, Bid Assistant is now available in the UK. As I wrote previously, this allows buyers to select a group of items, of which they want to win just one, and the software will bid successively on each until one is won. I think it’s a great idea, and I might just have to overcome my impatient preference for Buy It Now to try it out.

Many thanks to Steve from Kingsbridge Karaoke for the heads-up.

Don’t tell me my buyer is NARU

I’ve been waiting for payment for a buyer for just over a week and today opened an unpaid item dispute. To my surprise I was instantly credited as the buyer is NARU (Not a registered user). You may think why am I surprised? Well it’s all to do with eBay notes.

In the customise options in my eBay you can select whether or not to display eBay notes to inform you of critical events. These notes display information such as “An Unpaid Item dispute has been opened for this item.” and previously a note was displayed if a user was NARU’d. This appears to no longer be the case, don’t rely on eBay notes to tell you if a trading partner no longer has access to the site, you now have to check each User ID by viewing their feedback or My World page

I don’t know if this is a permanent change or just another glitch but either way there’s no point waiting for a NARU buyer to pay - open a Unpaid Item Dispute and claim your fees back instantly!

Who ate my breadcrumbs?

If you have an eBay Shop, you probably used to see a line of links across the top of your listings, showing which category and subcategory your listing was in. They were small links, but beautifully formed, enabling buyers to easily move up one level and see other items in your shop, even if they’d found you through a core listing rather than through your shop front. They were great… and now they’ve gone.

I noticed the links being missing a few days ago - though who knows when they actually went - from all my own Shops, and from those of half a dozen other sellers I’ve looked at. I assumed it was a temporary glitch, but obviously not. It remains to be seen whether this is another bug that will eventually be put right, or one more nail in the coffin of eBay Shops.

Meg puts her shirt on eBay

Ever wanted to give Meg Whitman some feedback? Well, now you can. eBay’s president is auctioning a number of personal items and pieces of eBayana as part of Give Fest, an eBay employee event where items are being sold for charity.

Auction items include various eBay shirts, three (greedy!) bath towels from eBay Live 2003 and a pair of eBay flip flops. Maybe you could call your own business partners on Meg’s old phone, or add up your millions on her calculator? And then there’s my favourite, the Shrek and Donkey plushes given to Dreamworks’ board members.

Anyone worried by this zero-feedback seller should be reassured by her About Me page:

Don’t be scared of my non-existent feedback score. I actually opened up a new eBay account just for my Give Fest Listings (I assure you that I have a very high feedback score on my personal account!).

Don’t worry, Meg, we’re sure you’ll send the shirts. You don’t need them, when you’ve already had the shirts off *our* backs.

Skype affiliate changes

If you’re running a very old-style Skype banner anywhere, Jaanus wants you to know you need to change it:

When your visitors clicked on the banner, they were redirected to Skype and you could earn what we called Skype Points. Until now, there was nothing you could do with these points, and we didn’t put too much effort into developing this program.

Instead, you should be signed up for the shiny new Skype affiliate program which pays out in lovely cash. We like that.

eBay content licence does not take away your rights

The new eBay user agreement content licence has caused concern to some eBay users. It reads:

It was pointed out that eBay users are busy creating auction descriptions, reveiws and guides, about me pages, custom shop pages and now blogs, and it appeared that content would all belong to eBay to use at will. Auctionbytes mentioned that even videos embedded into auctions would come under the content agreement.

eBay have now clarifed the content section of the user agreement and the amended version (at least on the .com site - the .co.uk version is still as above) is:

The Chatter goes into further depth answering users questions and specifically explaining that eBay need a licence to host and publish your content but highlighting that the content still belongs to the user to use at will.

So if you’re busy creating eBay guides and reviews, or blogging on the eBay site you’re free to reuse your content elsewhere. The rights you give to eBay are simply to host and link to your content and to publish it to attract traffic to the site, to your blog, and to your auctions. I don’t think too many people will object to that - after all, it’s why we publish content on eBay in the first place!

(It would be nice to see the eBay.co.uk User Agreement updated to match eBay.com though)

Postal strikes in Belgium, and maybe the UK

If you sell to Belgium, you need to know that postal workers are going on strike from Friday and that those in the Ghent area have already been on strike for twelve days. The protest is against new software designed to organise postal routes: posties feel they are being treated like robots and that the software is far removed from the reality of their jobs. Their union, the CCOD, say that the problems are so severe, they do not envisage a quick end to the dispute.

Meanwhile in the UK, the CWU are offically balloting their members on strike action. Hellmail’s considered piece is well worth a read. For what it’s worth, I think that most of Royal Mail’s current problems stem from the part-privatisation of their industry, which has left private companies free to cherry-pick the most lucrative parts of their business while still shackling RM with old-style micro-regulation. The fight between RM’s management and their workers is a distraction, and shouldn’t be happening since it will damage both parties *and* their consumers. What is needed is government action to free RM to compete properly in the market place.

eBayers needed…

Were you one of the hardy souls using eBay before 2001? Do you remember the days of Billpoint, having to create your own invoices and being allowed to link to your website? Did you send envelopes stuffed with dollar bills to US sellers in the days before Paypal?

Or are you a cutting-edge seller who’s using video to promote your items? Is YouTube your new best friend, or has Flash brought you cash?

Either way, Dan Wilson would like to hear from you.

eBay serves offsite links in preference to listed items!

eBay has started to serve adverts for off site websites in preference to items listed on the site. I can understand that it’s preferable to offer alternatives if a null search result is returned for a buyers search. However I have discovered that eBay are promoting off eBay sites instead of more in-depth searches of listings on eBay.

Tonight I searched for “660CDT psu” and was presented with no “on eBay” results but a selection of off eBay websites from which I could carry on my search.

Not wanting to purchase off eBay I simply ticked the box to “Search title and description” and instantly was presented with six items in core listings and a further five items in shops listings.

My question is why are eBay so keen to serve off site links when they could present more in-depth search results on their own site? Surely they are doing both buyers and sellers a disservice by sending them to off eBay websites in such a cavalier manner? Why don’t eBay auto-select “Search title and description” if it throws up search results, instead of opting to send buyers away from eBay?

eBay Italy competition for reviews

eBay Italy are running an incentive to produce eBay reviews. With twenty prizes ranging from a holiday in Kenya to electronics and jewellery it’s a great incentive to write some reviews. Even better entry into the competition is automatic with points based on the length of the review and the number of votes your review gains.

The promotion runs between the 21st and 25th May and reviews generated prior to this date don’t qualify so everyone has an equal opportunity to participate.

I really like this competion, with visibility of eBay listings dropping out of Google, encouraging rich search engine friendly content makes sense. Even if you don’t sell the products directly related to your reviews they will not only attract search engine traffic to eBay, but buyers can click through to your eBay listings and discover what you do sell. I’d really like eBay.co.uk to run a promotion like this!

eBay Seller Rewards you for using PayPal

eBay seller rewards (now renamed “eBay Rewards“) is now complemented with a new PayPal Percentage Rule. For high spenders who have a turnover greater than £10,000 in sales per month on eBay they can gain rebates based on the percentage of eBay sales paid for via PayPal. The bigger the increase in the proportion of sales paid for with PayPal the greater the reward, which tops at at 100% (when eBay have achieved their goal of all your sales being paid for via PayPal).

This promotion is aimed squarely at encouraging the larger eBay merchants to accept PayPal, and of course coupled with eBay Rewards to pay more eBay fees. As Sue pointed out though it’s not all about simply listing more products, canny sellers will be more interested in keeping listing fees down and increasing sales and thus final value fees to gain rewards.

The one thing eBay have left to do with the PayPal Percentage Rule is introduce a bonus for staying at 100% of sales with PayPal, maybe they could consider a payment if all sales over a three month period were paid with PayPal to encourage sellers to continue using PayPal exclusively.

The introduction of eBay rewards bumped their share price a couple of notches - it’ll be interesting to see the reaction of investors and analysts to the new PayPal Percentage Rule.

UK hits £100bn online sales

One hundred billion pounds! That’s the amount that’s been spent online in the 12 years since WH Smith became the first online retailer in the UK, according to the the Telegraph. The article traces ecommerce in the UK back to the first sale, a book sold by WH Smith on Compuserve in April 1995.

Online retailers saw the .com bubble burst and held back until the last two or three years, but are now embracing the Internet and it’s still a virtually untapped market, only about 10% of retail sales are placed online. This is predicted to grow to 13% in 2007 and eventually peak at around 25%.

New to e-tailing this year are Ikea and TopShop but sadly some still just don’t realise the potential. Dan Wilson points out that Clarks, the high street shoe shop have invested in a fancy flash based website, but neglected to add ecommerce capabilities. Buyers in the UK now assume all retailers will have an online shop and £100bn is just too big a market to ignore! It will be interesting to see which main stream retailer in the UK is first to follow in the footsteps of Discovery Channel and close all high street stores in favour of a ecommerce only model.
Read more

Flickr flames Only-Dreemin

Icelandic photographer Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir has claimed that photographs were stolen from her Flickr account, and subsequently sold on eBay by seller Only-Dreemin. She also discovered that Only-Dreemin’s website was selling her pictures. When she contacted the seller, the photographs were removed from the website, but the compensation Rebekka demanded was not paid. She told the BBC that Only-Dreemin had said they bought the pictures from a third party in good faith, and had been shown “official-looking documents”, but that when her lawyers had requested copies of the documents, “we heard no more from them”.

Supporters of the photographer reacted angrily: comments had to be removed from the Flickr site as they contained personal information about and threats towards Only-Dreemin’s owners. News sharing site Digg and several bloggers also featured the story.

Steve, a partner in Only-Dreemin, told us today that he was unable to comment as the matter is in the hands of his solicitor. As of today, their website is closed, though their eBay Shop remains open for business.

Updated 9pm to add: Though Only-Dreemin didn’t want to talk to us, they did talk to another blogger earlier in the week and go into quite some detail as to the backstory.

The community has slipped

Well the community button from the eBay header has. Once it was firmly pinned in the header but logging on to any of the community forum boards this afternoon the button is duplicated below the header.

I’m sure it wasn’t there previously, and it doesn’t appear in eBay groups!

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