Business seller registration : some thoughts on enforcement
May 31, 2008
“Why do ebay search results bring up more & more listings obviously business masquerading as private sellers?” It’s been one of the most popular questions on our a Skribit board, and it’s also something I’ve been wondering about myself.
Back in January, eBay UK began to change the rules to force sellers who are operating businesses on the site to register as such. It’s important to remember than this isn’t just an eBay rule: it’s the law, and anyone who is running a business but representing themself as a private seller is breaking that law.
And there are plenty of sellers on eBay UK who look like they’re breaking that law. Whether they believe that calling themselves private sellers will stop the taxman from noticing them, or whether they want to deny their buyers the legal rights they have when buying from a business, I wouldn’t like to speculate, but almost everyday, I get an email from someone saying “my competitor so-and-so is still registered as private, what can I do about it?” So I asked eBay to let us know exactly what they’re doing to enforce this rule. Here’s what they told me:
We have a GMV threshold in place above which sellers need to have a business account, and we’ve set it at a level that sellers could reasonably only achieve if they were a business. Below that, sellers have a legal obligation to self-declare if they are a business, but as mentioned above, we’re largely reliant on member reports of this - and on there being enough prima facie evidence available in the report or in the listings that the seller is a business seller. This applies to businesses trading on eBay across multiple accounts as much as to single accounts, although the former is of course harder to spot.
We will enforce reports of business sellers who are displaying only partial addresses, whether this is outright omission or selective concealment of address information in out-of-the-way places.
Sellers are usually warned for first-time infringements of our policies, and that’s the case here too. We remind them of their legal obligations when we warn them. Repeat offenders will face restrictions up to permanent suspension.”
Obviously the GMV level for compulsory business accounts isn’t being revealed, or illegal sellers would be certain to trade just below it to avoid notice. Otherwise, the message is clear: if you spot someone trading as a private seller when they should be business-registered, report them. And keep reporting them until they register correctly, or quit selling. If they choose to break the law, it’s up to all of us to stop them.
The PayPal bugs that last for weeks
May 31, 2008
With everything else that’s been going on recently, it’s been a good time to bury PayPal glitches. Not that PayPal glitch reports seem particularly time-sensitive these days, because the ones we’ve heard about have been going on for weeks.
I had an email from TameBay reader Antonio, regarding PayPal payment notification emails, which he is simply not receiving. I know this problem has been going on for a while because I’ve complained about it myself: the real problem is that it’s intermittent, so it can take longer to notice that it’s actually happening. Antonio says that PayPal support have told him that “our engineers are actively working to resolve this with the highest priority”, but in the meantime, anyone who works purely on PayPal emails really needs to use another way of checking what payments they’ve really received.
Earlier in the week, TechCrunch reported on another long-running bug, whereby users trying to pay subscriptions (recurring payments) through PayPal would not be able to do so if they were in a different country to the merchant collecting the payment. TechCrunch speculate that this was “a very simple thing to change, perhaps a single line of code”, but it still took nearly two weeks to be fixed. The PayPal Developer blog reports that as of yesterday, the problem is resolved, though some payments may have been collected twice.
eBay UK Seller Dashboard launched, broken
May 31, 2008
eBay UK have announced the long-awaited upgrades to the Seller Dashboard. Sellers can now see where they score on a range of eBay measures:
- PowerSeller status: what you need to do to move to the next level, or whether you’re in danger of dropping down the ranks
- search standing: are your listings being disadvantaged in search?
- seller discounts: did you get one last month, and will you get one next time?
- account status: have you paid your seller invoice?
- policy compliance: have you broken any eBay rules? how many are you allowed to break each month?
- DSRs: are you better than average or worse? Scores are now being calculated to two decimal places, and you can see your average over 30 days and 12 months.
This should have been introduced months ago when all the policies changed, but we’ll let that go: it’s an incredibly useful tool for sellers and should finally make it possible to keep an eye on all the things you need to think about to be a success on eBay (except perhaps actually making a profit - you’ll have to figure that one out for yourself).
But it wouldn’t be a new feature on eBay if it didn’t come with a glitch, and the Dashboard came with a real corker. Numerous sellers yesterday reported seeing messages that their accounts were in breach of unspecified policies. 
Click screenshots to embiggen. Thanks to iposters and Board_Surfer.
According to one Account Manager, the problem was caused by “was caused by the tool retrieving data from an incorrect location within our systems”, and should now be fixed. But in the current climate, this is a glitch that should never have been allowed to happen.
Fatboy Slim beach concert tickets for sale
May 31, 2008
“Is this really news? So what? As if we didn’t know that was going to happen! And also who cares?”
That’s the comment of one reader of The Argus, when they reported Fatboy Slim tickets are being resold on eBay.
In an attempt to keep his Brighton beach concert for locals and avoid another 1/4 million fans descending on Brighton tickets were only being sold to buyers who’s credit cards are registered with a BN postcode. Tickets are only currently available on a ticket sales website publicised to previous attendees of his last beach concert.
With the popularity of FatBoy Slim aka Norman Cook it’s unsurprising tickets are being resold for a profit, but I have to agree with the comment above… Who cares?
Reporting problem buyers now easier for UK sellers
May 31, 2008
There have been a couple of changes on eBay over the last few days which should make it a little easier for sellers to deal with bad bidders. Firstly on eBay UK, a new link to “report a problem you had with this transaction” has appeared on the page to leave feedback for buyers. The target of this link gives a list of problems which can be reported, including unpaid items, feedback abuses, unwelcome and malicious buying, and customs fraud (asking for items to be misrepresented on customs documentation). Sellers who have set their breach of policy buyer block will not have to deal with buyers with multiple reports; it appears that eBay is just taking sellers’ words for the accuracy of the reporting here.
Meanwhile in the US, there is a new buyer block available to block buyers who are not ID verified. As ID verification is not available on all eBay sites (not on eBay UK, for example), this won’t roll out everywhere just yet, but it should be very useful, for example, to US sellers of big ticket items who want to be certain that only those buyers who take eBay very seriously will be allowed to bid.
Google puts the boot into eBay
May 31, 2008
As part of eBay’s request that the ACCC approve their request to implement a PayPal only policy on eBay all interested parties were able to make submissions which the Commission would consider when forming their decision.
Following eBay’s response (and after the deadline for public submissions expired on 3nd May), one more 38 page anonymous report was submitted, which set out in detail why they considered eBay’s move to be anti-competitive.
It didn’t take too long though for one eBay user to expose the culprit, examining the hidden (but easily accessible) meta data of the document he found the phrase “ACCC Submission by Google re eBay”. The document has been replaced with an amended version with Google’s name removed.
This has to be embarrassing for Google, all the major banking institutions that made submissions did so publicly, and it looks much worse have your intentions revealed in this manner than it would do to be up front in the first place.
(Thanks go to Richard for spotting this story)
Royal Mail failed to deliver due to strikes
May 30, 2008
Royal Mail failed to meet 9 of its 12 services targets last year, according to watchdog Postwatch. Millie Banerjee, Chair of Postwatch, said that RM’s performance “was severely blown off course by last summer’s strikes”. Over the year, 85.2% of first class mail was delivered next day: the target was 93%. 97.8% of Special Deliveries were made on time: the target was 99%.
Postwatch go on to comment that the industrial action led to an overall reduction in the number of items processed by Royal Mail, as customers found other ways to communicate: this will have a knock-on effect on RM’s financial standing in future years. Daily mail volume is down from 84 million items to 80 million.
Stoke-on-Trent, which has had a series of local disputes between Royal Mail staff and managment, was the worst-performing postcode in the country for next-day first class deliveries, with Twickenham coming top.
How I increased my P&P DSR by 2 points
May 30, 2008
It’s been over a year since DSRs raised their head on the eBay landscape, and I have to admit to start with I treated them with pretty much the healthy contempt I treated feedback with.
I never used to look at my feedback, and remember with horror the morning I woke up to a message on the PowerSeller board saying “Sorry to see you got negged”. It wasn’t so much that I’d got a neg that caught me off guard (and yes it was undeserved 
), it was more the fact that someone else noticed before I did.
There really wasn’t much cause to look at feedback in those days, so I never did. Taking the attitude that if I gave customers great service feedback would look after itself it was one of the least referenced pages of my eBay real estate.
DSRs didn’t make much difference either. Sure eBay were banging on about how they would become relevant in the future but mine were ok, or so I thought.
Then one day eBay introduced seller discounts and the possibility that competitors could be advantaged in search compared to me. Overnight DSRs and feedback had became very important.
My DSRs weren’t that bad though, but what gave me a jolt was that my Postage and Packing DSR was 4.6, any lower and I wouldn’t qualify for seller discounts.
I immediately set about examining how I worked, with the sole aim of improving my P&P DSR without impacting any of the others which have consistently been in the 4.8-4.9 range.
The big question is “Was I one of the fee avoiding postage gouging baddies”, and in truth I have to admit that I was. Certainly I’d never considered myself in that light, and to this day my postage costs are higher than many competitors due to two factors: Everything I ship goes on a priority tracked service and that costs, and I’m VAT registered so have to charge VAT in addition to the basic packing and shipping costs.
That aside I always rounded postage up to the nearest £1 for Royal Mail items, and for courier items the heavier the item the more I charged, even though I was invoiced a flat rate up to 30kg. I figured that buyers would be more than willing to pay a higher price to have a 25kg printer delivered than they would a 2kg docking station. Plus in truth on a lot of items I simply guesstimated the cost with a healthy margin of error - pure laziness on my part.
Ruthlessly I went about cutting postage, on the heaviest items by as much as 25% and it’s paid dividends. Some items I have switched to cost effective Royal Mail, instead of shipping via more expensive couriers, but that’s been a slow process as next day delivery is not guaranteed - Protecting my dispatch DSR was a priority and buyers don’t rate sellers on how quickly they ship, simply on how long it takes the parcel to arrive.
As a result of the changes my P&P DSR has risen from 4.6 to 4.8 with my other three ratings all remaining at 4.9. One of the most useful tools has been the Seller Dashboard (even though it was the lite version), as it enabled me to monitor changes over a short period of time. A change in postage prices could be seen in DSR ratings within about two weeks of making the change.
So what does this mean for me, and what does it mean to eBay? Well in truth I have to say that DSRs have made me a better seller, or at least have made me act like a better seller. Whilst profits are down very slightly it’s not much, I’ve simply lumped the difference onto the selling price and the difference in fees is more than covered by Seller Discounts.
My aim now will be to further increase my P&P DSR from 4.8 to 4.9, again without impacting my other DSRs. Whilst there may not be any immediate benefit, when Best Match fully rolls out in the UK those with the highest DSR scores will benefit most.
Google & PayPal: Skipping competitors
May 30, 2008
There’s this company which I adore because they’re one of the most unlikely companies you’d expect to embrace the Internet.
Topskips (yes a skip hire company) have a website, they have a blog, they even have their own online company TV channel, and back in July 2007 Topskips started to accept PayPal. The reason I like them so much is they pretty much do everything an eBay seller should be doing - website, blog, video (waves to the guys at vzaar) and online payments.
Now however the competition is hotting up in the skip payments industry - Topskips have just announced they’ll be accepting Google Checkout in addition to PayPal. That’s not something that’ll happen any time soon on eBay, but for your own website offering a choice of payment methods is one of the top ways to ensure customers don’t abandon shopping carts.
If you’ve never visited the Topskips website it’s well worth a browse. You might not be in the market for skip hire, but they could teach an awful lot of businesses just how to fully embrace the web.
Living in a passwordless world
May 30, 2008
I changed my eBay password yesterday, and unlike previous occasions it was a painless change, and it’s all down to a mysterious technology called Auth & Auth.
In the past a changing a password was a lengthy procedure, due to the necessity of duplicating the change across a variety of applications such as TurboLister and third party sites like vzaar, Firefox companion and even Facebook (where I have an application that displays my eBay listings). Thanks to Auth & Auth I no longer have to remember every application and site that accesses my eBay account as it’s all looked after for me.
Auth & Auth stands for Authentication and Authorisation, when you link an application to your eBay account you’re required to sign into eBay and agree to share your account information with the third party. This then generates an encrypted security code or “token” which the application uses whenever it accesses your eBay account rather than your username and password.
The Auth & Auth tokens are valid for up to 18 months, you’ll only ever be asked to generate them again when the expire unless you make major changes such as uninstall and reinstall the application. Your account is kept safer as you never share your password with a third party service provider, eBay issue them with the token when you authorise them to access your account.
Most applications have been using Auth & Auth since it was introduced back in April 2004, but it’s only just been implemented in the latest release of TurboLister 6.5, and that’s why when I changed my eBay password there wasn’t a single additional application or site that needed updating.
If you want to check who you’ve granted access to your eBay account you can view them in My eBay, Preferences, under the Third Party Authorisations tab, and if you no longer use the application you can also revoke the authorisation there.
Another one bites the dust
May 30, 2008
Stuart had three PowerSeller accounts; he was on target to meet his goal for 2008 of £250,000 in turnover, and was paying eBay the equivalent of £30,000 a year in fees. He had no warning at all of a possible problem, until one day, in the middle of listing, his account suddenly stopped working.
At first, he thought it was a glitch, but then the email arrived: his account had been linked with another which was NARU, and so was itself suspended from trading for 12 months. The account, it turned out, was one that Stuart had not touched for two years and was not in fact registered to him at all. It belonged to a former business partner, who had closed down the business after Stu had left, and owed eBay £120 in fees.
£120 seemed a small amount to pay to be allowed to carry on trading, so Stuart paid off that bill. He then contacted Trust and Safety, informing them what he’d done and asking them to reinstate his own account. He told me, “their responses were robotic, it’s really frustrating that you can’t speak to anyone to get it sorted,” and as for PowerSeller Support,”they talk to you like you’re a scam artist.” Despite the fact that the account that wasn’t his didn’t owe any money anymore, no one would reinstate his account.
In April, Stu attended Channel Advisor Catalyst and managed to speak to an eBay employee face to face. He felt a glimmer of hope that someone would see that his suspension was ridiculous, someone would take pity on him, someone would make a business decision that his £30k a year fees were worth having.
Four weeks passed by. Stu chased up eBay. And chased them again. And then he had a letter, telling him that eBay “cannot make exceptions on a case by case basis on a marketplace of this size”, and his account would stay suspended for the full 12 months. Computer says no.
His two employees have unfortunately had to be let go, but Stu remains positive. He’s making a go of his websites and trading on Amazon. His gardening website has done more business in the last two months than in the previous two years, but things are nowhere near the level they were on eBay. He’s building things up again from the bottom, and that takes time.
I really admire Stu’s guts. Plenty of people would have thrown in the towel and gone and got a job, but he still sounds cheerful. “What will you do next March,” I ask him. “Will you apply to have the suspension lifted, when you can?”
He laughs. “I feel like never going back. But it’s easy to say that now. I probably will ask them to reinstate the account, but I won’t be selling on eBay at the same level, I’ll never rely on eBay again.” Stu was, he says, always one of the people who promoted eBay, to his friends, family and work colleagues, but not any more: “they don’t appreciate how what they do affects peoples’ lives,” he says.
Tomorrow, we’ll be looking at what you can do to protect your business against a bolt-from-the-blue eBay suspension.
eBay Partner Network partners with Pepperjam
May 30, 2008
The eBay Partner Network, eBay’s in-house affliate scheme, is to partner with affiliate network Pepperjam to bring EPN to more affiliate marketers. The move comes just months after eBay left Commission Junction, which won’t do the acrimonious relationship between the two networks any good.
Via Affiliate Tip.
PayPal plan move to Blanchardstown
May 29, 2008
PayPal have announced that they are to move from their current offices to the Ballycoolin Business Park in Blanchardstown towards the end of this year. With 900 employees the new offices will house up to 1250 giving room for expansion as their European business grows.
Blanchardstown, based in Dublin suburbia is approximately 10km north-west of the city centre. PayPal leased the Atrium building, two four-storey office buildings in Blanchardstown in 2006. PayPal have operated from Dublin since 2003 and the Dublin operations center runs PayPal’s European customer service.
Buyers with policy breach item specific
May 29, 2008
Last week when the Buyer Preference to block bidders went live the second promised new buyer requirement, buyers with policy breaches, was missing. It’s now live on the site.
Options are to block buyers with between 4 and 7 policy breaches within the last month or last 6 months. 4 policy breaches appears quite generous - there’s not a lot a buyer can do wrong apart from not pay, demand extras not included in the listing, or feedback extortion.
Although I’ve set this buyer requirement on my account at 4 reported policy in 6 months I’m not expecting it will block too many buyers. Quite honestly if a buyer has been reported more than 4 times I’d hope that they’d either modified their buying behaviour, or been kicked off the site.
eBay Germany introduce maximum shipping prices
May 29, 2008
eBay Germany are introducing maximum shipping prices allowed to be charged in 34 categories. Ranging between €5,00 and €8,00, a range of items are included in the new policy, from computer accessories, memory sticks and MP3 players, to silver-plated jewellery, some watches, and pearls. The categories have apparently been chosen because they have generally low DSRs for shipping prices, and the set prices are based on the average within the categories. The new rules come into effect from 15th June.
Many sellers are going to see this as a step too far by eBay. If buyers choose to purchase from a seller with a high shipping price listed, that is their choice; shipping prices are the one area where there shouldn’t be any surprises for buyers post-sale, so why would eBay interfere? In any case now, buyers who didn’t read the listing have the opportunity to mark the seller down on the DSRs anyway. The prices quoted will not cover insured shipping in many cases, nor will they take account that some items are heavier to ship than others: categories like Lamps & Lighting or Wholesale & Metalworking are likely to have a massive range of wildly differing items within them, and trying to standardise a shipping cost is a step too far into the Amazon.
Moreover, sellers who want to avoid the restrictions are likely just to list in a different category, so the whole thing seems rather pointless. Nevertheless, what’s done on one eBay is likely to spread, so expect to see this coming to other sites in the near future.
Vielen Dank to Horst from Shadesavers for the link.
Expanded Seller Dashboard goes live on eBay UK
May 28, 2008
The expanded Seller Dashboard has gone live on eBay UK, and it is the all singing all dancing version showing DSRs to 1/100ths.
Their only appear to be two differences to the US version - Search Standing is only “Standard” or “Lowered”, with no “Raised” (To get standard visibility your DSRs need to be all 4.4 or above, in the US it’s 4.6 on P&P for standard and 4.7 on all 4 DSRs for raised). The second difference is that there’s no Buyer Satisfaction rating on the UK version. Buyer Satisfaction is measured from your DSRs, your overall Feedback rating, and any buyer protection claims against your eBay account.
I’m not sure why Buyer Satisfaction ratings aren’t included in the UK dashboard, as the help pages state they are used to calculate whether you have earned Standard or Lowered Search standing. This part of the Seller Dashboard on eBay.com is blocked for UK registered users.
Overall the Dashboard is a great utility for measuring your eBay performance, and now it’s like on the UK site I’m guessing there will be a lot of users visiting the utility over the next day or two and a lot of threads on discussion boards 
eBay need to get dolphin-friendly sooner
May 28, 2008
There’s no nice way to tell you this, so I’m just going to say it: one single pissed-off buyer can spell the end of your eBay account. eBay have previously assured sellers that neutral feedback, or one single negative would never, could never, get your account suspended. But with more recent changes on eBay UK, this is no longer the case. We’re hearing of more and more sellers who are being suspended for - frankly - the flimsiest of reasons. Here are just a few of them.
Gareth from saversoftware posted about his problems in our forum. He’d received just three neutral feedbacks, with no other problems, no negs, no PayPal disputes, but had been told his account was being suspended for 30 days for non-performance. Claire from imagineallthat received three neutral feedbacks over the last month. With 83 positives in the same period, you’d think she was a good seller, but under eBay UK’s new regime, she was suspended for 30 days.
Luciano, who sells as malpastrade has just one negative feedback. But balanced with 27 positives over the last 30 days, that puts him on 3.7% non-positive feedback, which according to eBay, makes him a bad seller. Sarah from just-toys-online also has just one negative feedback. She says she also has one item not received which she’s replaced and is just waiting for the buyer to close the dispute. A buyer who’s a bit slow to close an INR dispute can now get your selling account suspended too. Both Sarah and Luciano are also on a thirty day suspension.
None of these sellers deserves censure. None of them should have been suspended, and when their cases came to light, eBay should have admitted that their policy had hit people it was never intended to hit, and reinstated their accounts.
Even eBay’s own ex-employees have fallen foul of these new rules. Vzaar were selling off some of their eBay swag a couple of weeks ago, and one damaged parcel has earned them a negative, a positive and two neutrals from the same buyer. Result? They’re taking a month’s enforced eBay leave too. Jamie told me, “I have to give the guy credit because he even initiated a conversation before leaving the comments. I like buyers like that. In the end I even agreed to meet for a beer at eBay Live this June! Sadly though in receiving these mixed comments from the buyer our account has now been suspended for 30 days from buying and selling with immediate effect. It feels that with one bad transaction (the items were posted as one) against our name, we have fallen foul to the new changes that were introduced to penalise consistent sloppy seller standards.”
So what are eBay doing to resolve these problems, to ensure that changes that were meant to affect bad sellers don’t inadvertantly affect unlucky ones too? On the face of it, absolutely nothing. eBay staff on message boards have consistantly refused to acknowledge any problems with what has happened to these sellers. They’ve been referred to as “dolphins caught up in the nets”; hardly reassuring when your business, your bank account, your family’s living is what’s on the line. Every one of these accidental victims of this policy is a real person, not an eBay seller statistic. Every one of them is having their livelihood damaged by this month’s suspension. eBay need to acknowledge and do something about that.
eBay must immediately introduce a proper appeals procedure for those caught up in this policy. Human beings must be made available to look at accounts which have been suspended, human beings who have the authority to make a reasoned judgement call as to whether a seller really deserves to have their account suspended or not. And they must change this wretched policy that says that one buyer’s feedback can cause an account to be suspended.
My eBay shop design : The brief
May 28, 2008
I’ve always liked my eBay shop design, which is pretty much a standard eBay implemention with a header. Even the header has been designed to resemble ebay shop promotion boxes with curvy corners (thanks to Sue and her code magic).
The time has come for a refresh though, and it’s down to Sue and her experiment with Frooition.
I’ve always had reservations with Frooition’s offering, along the same lines as Sue, in that anything that’s not eBay must be off-putting to buyers. That’s not proved to be the case though and with Sue reporting a 33% increase in sales I simply can’t ignore the results.
So I’ve bitten the bullet, admitted I was wrong, and am in the process of having Frootion re-design my eBay shop, and I have to say the initial design preview which the Frooition designer, Alun Widdowson, sent across yesterday is simply superb!
My shop has worked, and worked well over the years. Importantly it has been able to sell more product than I could physically pack. One of my main objectives will be to establish if a Frooition shop can deliver the same number of sales from fewer listings and save on eBay fees.
My brief to Frooition was to create a simple but professional design keeping my current colour scheme. I found it very difficult to describe what I wanted, as I was asking for less not more. I don’t want a complicated graphics heavy design, simple and to closely resemble a standard eBay shop was the main requirement.
I’m convinced that it’s not easy to design a sleek clean look, but that is what I wanted and the Frooition designers have come up trumps.
Simple, stylish but minimalist was the way I summed up the look and feel I wanted and that’s exactly what they’ve delivered.
As always I’m incredibly impressed with Frootions graphics, they’re simply superb and I love the way they’ve managed to weave my logo into them.
I’ve saved a screenshot of my old eBay shop for comparison. Now I can’t wait for my new shop design to go live!
Chad Smith Signature Drum on eBay for Charity
May 28, 2008
During a masterclass at the Academy Of Contemporary Music held in Guildford last year, three musicians added their signatures to a Pearl Snare Drum, which is now up for auction on eBay.
Chad Smith (Red Hot Chilli Peppers), Mark Richardson (Feeder, Skunk Anansi) & Steve White (Paul Weller, The Style Council) all signed the drum, with the proceeds of the auction going to the YMCA Guildford.
The drum is brand new, but with these signatures will anyone want to play it? Bidding starts at £400 with the auction running until 8am on the 1st June.
eBay Germany slashes insertion fees to 1c
May 28, 2008
eBay Germany have announced a massive cut in insertion fees for business sellers in certain categories over the next two and a half months. From 29th May to 16th August, sellers in electronics and books categories will pay just 1c insertion fees for Buy It Now listings (including multiple item listings) if they offer PayPal as a payment method. Categories included in the offer are:
- Audio & Hi-Fi
- Books
- Computer
- Photo & Camcorder
- TV,Video & Elektronics
The 1c insertion fee includes Gallery pictures.
Excluded from the offer are private sellers, Stores listings and Auction listings. There’s a bit more small print, so do read it before you list.
eBay have made lots of noise in recent months about linking fees to seller success (i.e. lower IFs and higher FVFs), and about encouraging sellers to list their entire inventory on eBay. By presenting it as a special offer rather than a permanent price change, they retain the facility to change things as they see how the new pricing affects sellers’ listing behaviour. I don’t think this will be the last of this kind of offer we see.
Rank PayPal on their DSRs
May 28, 2008
Over the last few weeks I’ve heard a lot of people discussing how they would rank eBay if they could give eBay Detailed Seller Ratings. Well I’ve not found a way to rank eBay but you can certainly rank PayPal’s website design.
Feel free to go give PayPal a DSR rating (go on, do it, you know you want to - but be fair, you’re ranking them on their website, not their service).
The link to rank PayPal is “Site Feedback” found at the bottom of any PayPal page
As an aside I do prefer their happy/sad smilie faces rather than eBay’s stars
Open multiple accounts, get $50,000
May 28, 2008
It’s a long time since I opened my PayPal account, but a story on Wired struck a chord with me today.
A Californian man has apparently made $50,000 from opening online accounts. Like PayPal, many companies verifiy your identity (or at least your bank account) by making one or two small deposits, and then asking you to confirm the random amounts you received.
Normally this is pennies, but this gentleman opened some 58,000 accounts netting a small fortune (plus another $8,225.29 from Google Checkout which he’s not yet been prosecuted for). He said he “needed the money to pay off debts and stated that this was one way to earn money”.
Now back to my PayPal account - when I first set up my account rather than deposits PayPal used to make a small charge on your credit card, which was credited to your PayPal account when you made your first purchase. The first time I attempted this the charge failed and some time later I used a second card to verify my account. When I made a payment PayPal true to their word refunded the charges to my account, but for BOTH credit cards on that was charged and one that wasn’t.
So PayPal I’m ‘fessing up - I owe you £1.37 from years ago.
We want peace of mind too…
May 27, 2008
When eBay banned non-positive feedback for buyers earlier this month, many sellers were understandably worried that this would lead to negative and neutral sprees by buyers, with no right of response. Two weeks after the change rolled out, it’s clear that a few buyers had indeed waited until the changeover to leave their own non-positive feedback. Did they know about the change in advance and wait deliberately, or did eBay’s announcements that buyers can no longer be negged inspire those buyers to leave negative feedback when previously, they’d have said nothing?
eBay did their best to reassure sellers that they were not going to push buyers towards non-positive feedback: the pop-up message informing buyers of the change in policy would, they said, show up a maximum of three times. Sadly, this isn’t true: Chasbert, a PowerSeller and power buyer, has seen the pop-up message when leaving feedback for her sellers more than twenty times. I’ve seen it half a dozen times and counting. Chris saw it when leaving positive feedback for a *buyer*. This “neg your sellers if you want to” message is not going away.
It’s not only there. The little logo people are on eBay’s front page, telling buyers of their new powers:
I wonder if using the red person was a coincidence?
And many UK-registered buyers received eBay’s marketing email yesterday, again reminding them - twice! - that they can now leave as many negatives as they want to.
Enough already!
Until now, I’ve largely been in favour of these feedback changes. I think they will give buyers more confidence that the feedback they’re checking is accurate; if buyers have more confidence in the site, we should all have more sales. But eBay have to get the balance right; at the moment, every seller is at the mercy of their buyers. Safeguards for sellers - the hub to report feedback abuse and the removal of negative and neutral feedback from NARU members - keep being promised “soon”, when these should have rolled at exactly the same time as the other changes. Sellers have been penalised first, helped second, and it should not have worked like that.
Don’t stop selling
More problematically, the way that percentages are being calculated does sellers a huge disservice. Seller non-performance seems to be worked out on a rolling 30 day average. If you cut back on your sales, a couple of neutrals, that you thought wouldn’t affect you, may suddenly come to represent a much higher percentage of your feedback, and could leave you with sanctions against your account. Those who are cutting back their eBay sales and closing their Shops may not care, but I predict the sight of eBay sellers returning from holidays to suspended accounts will be more common this year than it’s ever been.
eBay really need to find us a better incentive to keep listing than that!
Competition: You Gotta Bling! It to Win It!
May 27, 2008
Last year we ran a comptition to win Bling!It, the revolutionary graphics software which allows you to quickly and easily transforms typical product shots from bland to extraordinary.
Designed for everyone from the novice user to businessperson and web designer, Bling!It sets the new standard for web product shots. With Bling!It, quickly replace everyday backgrounds with professional ones, sharpen and enhance a product’s appearance, and optimize the shot for auction sites such as eBay, or even your own website!
Starting today Bling!It are running an exclusive TameBay competition, we’ve got 100 licences to give away for the best “Blings”!
There are two categories you can enter , first is “The Best eBay product Bling!”. This is where you can showcase your product to it’s very best as Lynne has done with this fantastic horse bling.
This was created by cleaning the background from the original product shot, and then placing it onto a new background from a holiday snap of the sunset all done using Bling! It.
Send us your blinged product shots for a chance to win the software for free in the “The Best eBay product Bling!”
Bling! It is fantastic for product shots, but it can be fantastic fun too. People have blinged everything from their cats to their dinner, so this year the second category is “The funniest Bling!”.
To win the “The funniest Bling!” you can use a picture of absolutely anything from your cat or dog to a still life. Lynne blinged my avatar which you’ll find next to any of my posts in the TameBay forum so why not try blinging yourself?
Simply download a free 14 day trial of Bling! It and send your before and after shots to chris@tamebay.com. Winners will be selected on the 10th of June, so get “Blinging”.
Have a look at this video for some tricks and tips when using Bling!It. We’ll post all entries in the TameBay Forum so please supply a “before” and “Blinged” picture with your entires
eBay.com seller dashboard now displays 1/100ths
May 27, 2008
Logging into the seller dashboard on eBay.com now reveals your DSR scores to the nearest 1/100th. It should now be clearer if your score is edging upwards or downwards over a shorter period of time.
For those who have seen their scores fluctuate between two decimal places you are likely to see your DSR score in the 1/100ths hovering around the x.x5 mark and being rounded up or down.
I would caution against giving your scores too much weight over a short period of time. Just one or two feedback DSR scores received could show large swings, especially over a 30 day period unless you receive vast amounts of feedback. However if you monitor the dashboard over an extended period of time you should be able to see if your scores are trending up or down.
The UK Seller Dashboard is expected to go live this week, and to display scores to 1/100ths by next week.
Recent Comments
- Whirly: #3 you don’t deserve one after having a 1p listing festival you jammy blighter.
- Chris Dawson: #1 I didn’t get a voucher either
If anyone has one and wants to spend it with me... - northumbrian: the only fault with that bling thing is if anything it makes the item look to good
- faculty-x: us techies are honoured at the mo from ebay or the ones that have dropped off ebay the most, us...
- faculty-x: bling looks excellent, must get a copy. been messing around with coral for years, should save ages. so...
- Whirly: No voucher for me which is a pain as I need some stuff I know a buyer who will get one, he likes...
- Whirly: #2 If you build the fee’s into your sale price I think it’s a justifiable expense, we regularly...
- Trish Connolly: I need to dissagree with part of your statement. You say, “I’ve met many buyers who are more...
- J R: if we sell something for £500 there is no way we would be willing to give ebay £50 plus Paypal fees, there...
- Whirly: lmao
