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50% off discount code for Parcel2go courier deliveries

Parcel2go are offering half price courier deliveries for the next week.

Their normal charge is £7.99 plus VAT for a 1-2 day standard UK delivery but with the coupon code HALFSD2 inserted on the Order Summary page during the booking process you’ll get 50% off that price. The promotion runs up until the 31st July 2008.

Parcel2go offer FedEx services along with DHL, City Link, UPS, Home Delivery Network, and Royal Mail. There’s no need for a courier contract, you can simply book a delivery when you need it and even pay with PayPal.

If you’ve got orders to send this week, that will cost you more than £4 to ship, then try Parcel2go and take advantage of the discount.

Is there a seller exodus from eBay?

Yesterday, SellerDome’s blog noted that the number of inactive sellers in their list of top 100,000 eBay sellers had increased by more than 15%. SellerDome’s list ranks eBay sellers by feedback: sellers who are NARU, or who have received no feedback for the last 1, 6 or 12 months, made up 18.5% of the list on 25th May; now, they make up 21.3% of the list:

		inactive
	NARU	1mnth	6mnth	12mnth	total
May 25, 2008	9,563	3,930	1,691	3,330	18,514
July 16, 2008	10,462	5,156	1,831	3,859	21,308
Change	+ 899 9.4%	+ 1,226 31.2%	+ 140 8.3%	+ 529 15.9%	+ 2,794 15.1%

I’ve heard a number of sellers make the claim recently that there is an “exodus” from the site: that sellers are leaving in droves, closing up shops and moving their sales to their own websites, eBay’s competitors and the Big River. Is this finally proof that they’re right? Are we losing good sellers like water through a colander?

I spoke to Rob from SellerDome to ask for more information on the NARU and inactive sellers: specifically, for those who appear to have stopped selling in the last six months, what was their feedback percentage.

I wanted to see if we could tell what was causing more recent casualties to stop selling: was it quitting in disgust at eBay’s policies, or something else? We limited the search to “sellers who are no longer registered or have received no feedback in the past month but have received feedback in the past six months”, so as to some once very-large sellers who have not sold anything on the site for a couple of years: glacierbaydvd at #19 is probably the best example of this.

Here’s what Rob found:

NARU or Inactive (according to criteria above)
Top 100 sellers:	Avg Rating - 95.2%	5.0 Percentile *
Top 1K:	Avg Rating - 96.4%	9.5 Percentile
Top 10K:	Avg Rating - 97.4%	14.9 Percentile
Top 100K:	Avg Rating - 98.14%	15.0 Percentile

* means 5% in the top 100 had lower feedback ratings and 95% higher.

This seems pretty conclusive. There were some serious feedback issues going on amongst these sellers. Remember, these are the people who have stopped selling within the last six months, since eBay brought in FVF discounts and Best Match ordering to promote good sellers, and all kinds of sanctions to discourage bad ones. Some have been NARUed, some undoubtedly suspended or disadvantaged off the site, and some have surely made the decision themselves to either quit eBay, or to start afresh with IDs that paid more attention to customer service.

But we can’t claim that these sellers were any great loss to eBay: an average score of 95.2% is astonishingly poor for an eBay seller, and when sellers performing so poorly were some of eBay’s biggest, most visible, discouraging dozens and hundreds of buyers from shopping again on eBay, it’s in all of our interests to get these people off the site.

Sell what you know, or know what you sell?

I was talking to a new eBay seller at Live. He told me he’d sold a few personal things on the site, but with the credit crunch, he needed an additional income stream and was looking to eBay to provide it. “The problem is,” he said, “I don’t know what to sell. People tell me to sell what I know, but I don’t feel like I know anything!”

Since we were trading stories, I told him about how I first got started selling on eBay, and how it was nothing to do with what I knew at all.

It was actually my boss who first introduced me to eBay. In early 2000, he called me into his office. “Look at this!”, he said, showing me a web page that had a list of second-hand clothes marked with some pretty decent prices. “I’ve finally found a way for my wife’s shopping habit to make a profit!”

Two weeks later, he called me in again. “Okay, here’s the deal. There’s this guy I sit next to at football. Turns out he’s in charge of importing all the Italian designers into the UK. I was telling him about the prices my wife’s been getting for her old clothes on eBay, and he’s going to let me have some new stock. I’m going to sell designer clothes on the internet and you’re going to run it for me.”

Those of you who’ve met me will know that there is probably no less likely candidate for Versace saleswoman on the planet: skinny Bond Street girl, I am not. But my boss had found a superb opportunity and even I could see that it was too good to pass up. I can’t possibly read Vogue for entertainment, but call it research and I can manage it. I don’t in the least care what next season’s hot bikinis are supposed to look like normally, but if I have to find out so I can order my summer collection, which has to be done in the depths of winter, then I will.

If you’re offered or find an opportunity to fill a unique niche on eBay, don’t pass it up because it’s something you don’t know about. Knowledge can always be gained: great suppliers are always much harder to come by.

The honest salesman

As well as being one of our most prolific commenters, Lynne sells on eBay as josordoni. Today, she finds inspiration in one of my own favourite marketing gurus.

I have always been pretty laid back about eBay. I have never bothered too much about the various changes, just got on with listing and selling. However, the latest changes are making me paranoid. I watch my Dashboard and my 30 day DSR level with excitement and dread in equal measure – will it pick up or drop today?

All sorts of terrible things flash across my mind. Will my P&P drop below 4.6? Will I lose my discount? Will a couple of difficult buyers leave me negatives or neutrals so that I will lose my Powerseller status – or worse still , be suspended? Will Paypal suddenly take a dislike to something and take all my money and hide it away in a Swiss bank account never to be seen again?

The likelihood is that none of the above will happen. Although that doesn’t make the feeling any less unsettling.

But more importantly, how will this amorphous feeling of doom impact on my treatment of my customers? Can I manage to hold onto my courage sufficiently to believe that I will get back what I give them?

Well, according to Seth Godin, if I can stand back and run my company as if I am acting for my customers instead of for myself, I will knock the spots off my competitors. He wrote:

When a sales rep says, “You know, after hearing your situation, I think you’d be a lot better off with my competitor’s product instead, here’s her number,” it actually creates positive word of mouth and long-term growth. When a brand manager says to the product development people, “I’m not proud of this design, we’re not going to market it, so you better make something else,” it actually creates market share growth. And when a CEO says to Congress, “Our industry relies on chemical X and we’re going to keep using it as long as our competitors do, so please ban it,” she creates a long-term path to stability and growth.

If my buyers can see that I will be honest with them even if that costs me a sale, that will If I act in their best interests, they will trust me, and will behave better than I could ever hope for.

It is something I have always believed in, so I shall take a deep breath, close my eyes and ears to the naysayers, and hope that I can continue to act as if I am Seth’s Statesman.

(And wouldn’t it be nice if eBay would do the same for me?)

Best in show software: Sales in a click

There was a new software product at eBay Live! which has the potential significantly increase sales from exisiting customers and that’s why Sales in a Click gets my vote for the best new software product at the show.

Sales in a Click is eBay email marketing taken to a whole new level. It imports professionally written editorial from a choice of over 100 topics and displays it alongside your shop categories combined with featured products selected from your eBay shop.

If you want to change the suggested editorial or select different product from your eBay shop it’s just a couple of mouse clicks. You’ll never need to write your own email marketing content again, unless you want to. Sales in a Click then send the email to your eBay shop subscribers, producing a piece of marketing which is incomparably better than eBay’s standard template.

The ability to send professionally written relevant email marketing is something that eBay has been lacking for years, and it’s been a source of frustration to me that they’ve made it so difficult to customise the email layout. Sales in a Click solves this but best of all it’s easy to create the emails in just a couple of minutes.

Cost for the service is just $6.95 (~£3.50) a month for your first 250 customers and 2 cents (~£0.01) for each additional customer. The service also tracks how profitable your email marketing is, tracking the number of buyers who make a purchase and the total revenue generated from your email marketing.

Currently the service is only available for eBay ProStores in the US, but it’ll be released for eBay shops in the near future. This is one service I’ll be signing up for as soon as it’s available for eBay - it’s email marketing on steroids.

It’s time to stop disputing unpaid items

A few days ago, Chris wrote about handling unpaid item disputes, and how to get your fees back without getting poor feedback from your NPB. Great advice for sellers, but it shouldn’t have to be like that. eBay has changed, and this should not be about how individual sellers handle the process.

I suspect if we ran the ‘what puts buyers off returning to eBay’ now that bad feedback has gone, UIDs would be somewhere up there in the top five. In my experience, the vast majority of non-paying bidders have what they consider to be a totally legitimate reason for not paying. If we can get rid of negative feedback for buyers because it upsets them, we should do the same for unpaid item disputes. It’s time this process was made much less antagonistic, and much easier and quicker for all involved.

• Change the name This is the single most effective thing that eBay could do to take the sting out of a UID: stop calling it a ‘dispute’. Change it to ‘potential order cancellation’ or ‘friendly reminder about payment’ or ‘hello, did you change your mind?’ - anything that doesn’t sound like I’m about to sue you for not paying me.
• Buyers should be able to cancel BINs Buyers in the UK and Europe have, after all, the legal right to cancel an order: I’m rather surprised the OFT isn’t looking at this one. If a buyer BINs an item and then changes their mind, they should be able to cancel the order in a click. The item could then be simply returned to a seller’s unpaid items, the fees refunded, and the item relisted as the seller chose.
• We need immediate payment required for multiple items eBay is the only website, in fact the only retail outlet I can think of where an item can be sold and yet not paid for. At the moment, the reason that many sellers don’t use immediate payment required is that it’s only good for single items. Giving sellers the ability to require immediate payment for multiple items could - at a stroke - reduce unpaid BIN items to almost nil. And if eBay need an additional incentive, think how this would push sellers even more towards PayPal.
• eBay should refund all the fees for unpaid items not just the FVFs. Insertion fees and any listing upgrade fees should be refunded to the seller too. eBay have talked about ‘aligning fees with seller success’: this more than any fiddling about with IF/FVF balance would achieve that. Why should sellers take the risk that eBay’s buyers won’t pay? That risk should be eBay’s to take. And if eBay bore the fee loss, then sellers would stop feeling quite so antagonistic towards buyers who didn’t pay.
• The whole process needs speeding up By the time I’ve figured out my buyer isn’t going to pay and filed a UID and waited to see if they’re going to respond to that UID, nearly a month has gone by with my inventory gathering dust on a shelf and no money in my PayPal account. Something must be done to speed up the process: perhaps a seller option ‘I’m not waiting for this buyer any longer, I’m cancelling this transaction’ which immediately cancelled the whole thing, just like the buyer option above.

eBay’s argument against all of this is likely to be that unscrupulous sellers will use any or all of the above options to get out of paying their eBay fees. But lets face it, fee-avoiders will find ways of avoiding their fees whatever eBay do. I think it’s time that the site stopped being run to stop this tiny minority, and started being run for the benefit of the vast majority of eBay sellers who are honest, and willing to pay their eBay fees so long as they are charged under fair and reasonable terms.

Returns policy and handling time compulsory from October

The eBay Developers’ Blog brings the news that as of October, all listings must specify both a returns policy and a handling time. Until now, returns policy has been an optional field when listing on .com, though on some other sites including eBay UK it is compulsory to specify a returns policy. A new field, “who pays for return shipping”, will also be introduced.

Adam Trachtenberg spoke about this at DevCon, but this is the first time we’ve had a specific timeline mentioned. eBay have said that for sellers on .com, who do not by law have to accept returns, it will be permitted to specify ‘no returns accepted’ as a returns policy. I’d urge sellers to consider a returns policy as a selling point: ‘I allow returns’ says to your buyers that you stand by the accuracy of your description and the quality of your goods. Nothing boosts buyer confidence in the item they’re about to purchase than the idea that they can change their mind if it’s not exactly what they want.

How to open a UPI without getting bad feedback

As a method for improving your DSRs Scot Wingo recently posted not filing unpaid item disputes (UPI) as tip for improving your DSRs.

Whilst this has certain merits and has been met with approval I’d argue against it on the grounds that bad buyers will never be sanctioned, UPI strikes are the one sure way to get persistant non-payers kicked off eBay. What I would strongly suggest is following some best practices when opening a UPI.

1. As soon as you open a UPI add a message
   The wording from eBay is unfortunate to say the least - no one likes being involved in a “Dispute” so the email a buyer receives automatically isn’t the friendliest. By adding a friendly message along the lines of “Hi, we don’t appear to have received your payment, please could you let us know if you’ve already paid and how payment was sent” it takes the sting out of the “dispute” and sends a more friendly worded email. It also indicates to the buyer you’re a good guy and not assuming they are at fault, after all their cheque may genuinely be lost in the post.

2. If the buyer doesn’t respond close the UPI
   Don’t leave open UPIs longer than you have to - if they buyer doesn’t respond close the UPI as soon as the seven days are up. A closed UPI with no response from the buyer removes their ability to leave any feedback whatsoever.
3. Respond to messages promptly
   Check your UPI console at least three times a week if not daily while you have open disputes. The quicker you respond to a buyers reply the more likely they are to pay, or if not that you can close off the dispute.
4. Avoid antagonistic language
   Keep your communications calm and friendly, either you have a customer who has genuinely forgotten to pay or one who has changed their mind and simply doesn’t want to pay. In the former they probably only need a gentle reminder and in the later an argument won’t get you paid but may get you poor feedback.
5. Telephone your buyer
   Typed words can be easily misconstrued - don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and call your buyer. A friendly phone call often solves more problems than it calls and again gives you the opportunity to explain you consider it a non-feedback transaction
6. If the buyer wants to back out of the transaction let them
   Offer them a mutual withdrawal from the transaction without giving them a strike. Remember in the UK under the Distance Selling Regulations if they do pay they still have the right to return the purchase anyway - you’re simply saving the postage cost.
7. Tell them you won’t be leaving feedback
   There is absolutely nothing wrong with telling the buyer you consider it a non-transaction and won’t be leaving feedback. It’s also an indication to them that you don’t expect them to leave you feedback either and in my experience most don’t
8. Highlight why they haven’t paid
   Make sure you highlight why the customer hasn’t paid and get them to repeat it in the UPI. Don’t forget, unless they specifically call out a shortcoming on your part, eBay have undertaken to remove any non-positive from non-paying bidders.

We’ll all get a bidder that doesn’t pay for their purchase sooner or later. Knowing how to handle a non-paying bidder should be one of the tools in your selling arsenal.

The most important tip of all is to remain calm and dispassionate when dealing with non-paying bidders, as soon as you get emotional or adversarial so will your buyer. Act as if you work for a large corporation and credit control is simply your job, the UPI console is the most important place on eBay to remember “The customer may not always be right but they are never wrong”.

If you’ve got some more tips on how to handle UPIs let us know in comments below.

White Paper: How to Increase Pay-Per-Click Returns

In the run up to the “How to Increase Pay-Per-Click Returns: Tracking the Multi-Channel Path to Conversion” workshop on 16th July, ChannelAdvisor have released a white paper on tracking multichannel conversions.

The article discusses the route which a buyer may take from initial searches, more indepth product research leading to an eventual purchase. You can download the white paper for free on the ChannelAdvisor website.

Seller’s Story : why we’re quitting eBay

When I first started hanging around on the PowerSeller Board, longer ago than I like to remember, one of the people I really looked up to was Louise from Boxes & Busts. She seemed to have achieved exactly what I wanted to achieve myself: her own business, based around eBay but not exclusively reliant upon it. Over the last few years, I’ve watched her and soon-to-be-husband Paul expand their business, set up a great website and fill a warehouse with their stock. And then this week, she told me the sad news that as of next month, Boxes & Busts will no longer be trading on eBay. Here’s what Lou had to say:

My first taste of eBay came in November 2001 when we purchased a small occasional oak table. I then discovered gemstones and mounts and started making my own jewellery which I sold thorough - where else - eBay. From there Paul and I started a business selling jewellery through party plan. We had to buy some gift boxes for our own use and could only get them retail in small quantities. After a few months we had some spare boxes and started selling them on eBay. The rest is history.

We started purchasing to sell and Boxes & Busts was born in June 2002, selling not only jewellery boxes, but all sorts of retail display items. At that time there was very little of this type of thing being sold on the site and we quickly grew until we had over 1500 ads running at any one time. We outgrew home when it started getting dangerous to move around - you know the sort of thing - the dining room and one bedroom was a store room, the kitchen table was the packing table, another bedroom was the office and under the stairs was another store room. When the furniture in the lounge started getting closer to the centre of the room, we moved into a 2100sq ft trade warehouse in July 2003 and that’s where we still trade from, although we are now bulging at the seams with approx 2500 lines. We’ve also started our own website at www.boxesandbusts.co.uk.

During our time on eBay the site has changed phenomenally. As with any success story when people see what they believe is easy money to be made, they all jump on the bandwagon. Lots of hobby sellers started selling for minimal profit; lots have come and gone, but our superb service and quality of stock has stood the test of time.

In our early days, being a powerseller was quite an achievement and we were very proud of that status. Then in a move typical of eBay they changed the goal posts and hobby sellers were now powersellers and not businesses. Now the best part of having powerseller status is the Powerseller Forum.

The real start of our demise on eBay came when sellers from the Far East started listing directly on the UK site for less than we could import for, coupled with the change of search default making the worldwide option the first thing buyers saw. We have altered the way we trade to try and overcome this but there is no way we can compete with the prices these sellers can offer. Then to add insult to injury, US visibility ended. Within a short period of time we lost close to 80% of our eBay business.

It is with much regret we are leaving the site. It has been a decision made over a period of time but when we did some number crunching again this month it became much easier to bring down the final hammer. With the lower turnover we were now doing it means the that the latest changes to feedback have put our business at the mercy of what could be a few vindictive buyers or competitors. We are not prepared to keep going any longer under these conditions.

The days are long gone when trading on here was fun. It seems a long time ago when we used to be excited to switch on the computer in the morning.

The future is a rosy one for the business as a whole though, www.boxesandbusts.co.uk is thriving and due for a revamp soon to add our new service and some more refinements. The hot foil printer now means we will soon be offering our customers the choice to have their details on their boxes and we plan to introduce additional services such as stationary and promotional items to complement their boxes etc. We will cease trading on eBay on 31st July 2008.

There are undoubtedly people who will characterise this as failure: of B&B on eBay, or more likely, of eBay itself. I don’t think this is the case. Boxes and Busts is an amazing success story: one of a business which has deftly adapted to changing circumstances, which has used eBay to achieve independence, which hasn’t been bound to its own beginnings and which seems to me to have a bright future. Well done, Lou and Paul!

Got a story to tell about your business and eBay? Let us know.

eBay promote free Gumtree listings

Browsing the computing category today I was amazed to find (albeit hidden away right at the bottom of the page) an advert saying Find computing items on Gumtree.

Up until now Gumtree has been the black sheep of the eBay family. It’s an eBay owned company that no one at eBay ever seems to mention. After all eBay are in the business of paid adverts so a part of the company that gives adverts away for free is a bit of an anomaly. Encouraging eBay buyers and sellers to trade with no cut for the company just doesn’t sit well with the bean counters

I’ve never seen a Gumtree advert on eBay before, at least not one which encourages buyers to click to make a purchase, but if you see a similar advert in categories you trade in I’d certainly drop a listing or two on Gumtree.

If you’ve not yet tried Gumtree as a seller you should, it works well with free listing, no final value fees and it gives a pretty good return on the time invested too.

Does Best Match spell the end for Featured Plus?

I’ve been trying to work out the value of paying for the Featured Plus listing enhancement with Best Match and it’s not straightforward.

In the past it’s been a pretty obvious choice, Featured Plus would get your listing to the top of the page it naturally falls on. With the default listing order as “Ending Soonest” that would always mean at the end of the auction your item would be at the top of the first page of search results.

Now in Best Match items will no longer be sorted “Ending Soonest”, but as most relevant to the buyer’s search. This means that your Featured Plus upgrade costing £9.95 (up to £29.95 in some catagories) may never make it to the top of the first page of search results.

Actually it could be even worse than that, because if you aren’t being advantaged in search, or currently if you’re being disadvantaged compared to those with standard search standing, then your items are highly unlikely ever to appear on the first page of search results.

It may be that when Best Match is implemented it will still show the Best Matching Featured Plus items first, but to be honest if you can pay to be Better Matched than your competitors it’s not really Best Match is it? If, as a buyer, I’m expecting to see the Best Matched products that’s what I should be presented with.

There may still be users that manually change their sort preferences to “Ending Soonest” in which case Featured Plus would still work well, but do you want to pay for a listing upgrade reliant on users preferences?

Should you carry on paying for Featured Plus listing enhancements once Best Match is fully rolled out in the UK? Personally I’ll probably save my money, and invest it in cheaper listing enhancements such as Bold, Highlight and Subtitle.

Making my listing stand out when it does appear strikes me as a lot more cost effective than paying for a Featured Plus enhancement which may never be seen.

My eBay shop design : Going live

Having given Frooition the approval on the final design for my new eBay shop it was installed in one afternoon.

Alun, the designer, has done a fantastic job although I still need to tidy up a couple of custom shop pages. I especially like the way he has changed my brand colours slightly making them deeper and more “mountcomp” than they were before.

One of the things I like best about standard eBay shops is the white space which helps to keep the page clean and fresh. Alun has managed to achieve this whilst injecting colour into the page but without heavy backgrounds.

The shop categories menu now works better than ever - Alun has styled it to make the categories stand out from the sub-categories to assist buyers to find the items they’re looking for.

One of my biggest dislikes of eBay shop search has been removed - I now have a search box which searches titles AND descriptions by default. It also searches my entire shop by every time, instead of just the category the buyer is in. This means if I have products matching a buyers search they’ll always be found. eBay’s standard shop search only looks in the category a buyer is currently browsing, although to be fair eBay do at least now display additional items found in all categories for null search results.

What was most important to me was that the shop looked and felt as much like a standard eBay shop as possible, whilst leveraging the advantages of Frooition technology. This has been achieved admirably retaining the eBay promotion boxes with curvy corners and carrying that theme across to the other display areas on the page.

I’m able to display six key products, automatically select from those available either by price, newly listed/ending soonest, shop category, or a mix of criteria. This enables me to showcase a star item, either an item with great profit, or one that I have large quantities of, and to display a further five items which currently promotes the printers I sell. Whilst the products are chosen automatically from those available a judicious use of criteria pretty much means I can identify the exact products I’d like promoted.

There’s just one thing letting my shop down at the moment, and sad to say that’s down to me and not Frooition - my product photos just aren’t up to standard and all need reshooting and tidying up.

My next job will be to update all of my listings to a new template to match my eBay shop, and that’s where the work begins for me. Up until now Frooition have done all the hard graft. I’m looking forward to it, if they look half as good as my shop they’ll be worth the effort.

Overall I’m extremely pleased with the new design, it’s cleaner, more professional, gentle on the eye, and most important of all it retains everything that was great from a standard eBay shop template and then improves on it.

It’s so much better than my old eBay shop. Quite honestly I think it’s the best looking eBay shop I’ve ever seen.

How to get top placement on Google for free

Not only is my eBay listing the first one returned in a worldwide Google search but I get a shopping bag icon beside it. The secret behind how to do this is Google Product Search (also known as Google Base).

Google Product Search is a shopping comparison engine, and one that all eBay sellers and ecommerce website owners should become familiar with. According to Scot Wingo we can expect to see a 10x increase in traffic from Google Product in the UK sometime this year, and sellers should be prepped to take advantage.

When Google Products are displayed in search results they’ll be shown as “Shopping Results” and displayed between the three sponsored links (paid adverts) and the natural search results. (In the example pictured there were no paid adverts)

There are a multitude of shopping comparison engines out there - everyone from eBay’s shopping.com to shopzilla, Ciao, Kelkoo and and Nextag. Each has a different format file which you need to create known as a “feed”, and they all have different pricing models. Some charge you on a Cost Per Click basis (CPC), others charge when a buyer makes a purchase (CPA/CPO - Cost Per Acquisition / Cost Per Order), and some like Google Product are free.

Companies such as ChannelAdvisor can manage your feeds and your budget, to list your products to multiple shopping comparison sites. They can adjust the amount you pay per click/acquisition tailoring unique offers and search terms that drive traffic and convert customers. A good feed management company will also filter out items which are not profitable from your data feed, so that you’re not paying for hits that don’t generate business.

Google Product however makes things slightly easier than other shopping comparison sites - they have Google Base Store Connector which can link eBay, Yahoo, or osCommerce shops to Google Product Search for free.

Simply download the Store Connector (software which runs on your PC), and enter in your shop web address. You’ll need to have a Google account, but if you have gmail or use another Google utility you’ll already have one. Store Connector will download all your listings and then it’s the click of a button to upload them to Google.

The downside to using Google Store Connector is that your products will only be indexed for 30 days, so you’ll need to upload your feed monthly at a minimum. To balance this it works with both eBay, and osCommerce shops. Alternatives are to upload your feed manually, set up an automated feed, or to use a third party to do the work for you. ChannelAdvisor have a free evaluation offer if you want to try a Google Product feed from your website.

It’s worth pointing out that it’s possible to generate a product feed on eBay suitable for Google, however that feed will only contain your eBay shop listings. By using the Store Connector you can post both SIF and BIN listings to Google Product Search.

One word of warning… once you’ve set up your Google Base account make sure you edit your display details prior to uploading products. I was daft enough not to and I now have several hundred products on Google Shopping with my email address instead of “Mount Road Computers” as the merchant. Doh!

Everyone selling products online should be uploading a feed to Google, it costs nothing and it should get you more traffic and more sales. Download Google Store Connector and give it a try today.

How much communication is too much?

With eBay sellers paying ever more attention to their DSR scores, the question of communication has come up on more than one eBay forum recently. “I’m sending out every single email that SMP will let me send,” goes the complaint, “and I’ve still only got 4.6 for communication. What am I doing wrong?” Inevitably someone else responds “you’re sending out too many emails. When I buy, I mark the seller down if I get spammed.”

It’s true: one buyer’s “good communication” is another buyer’s “spam”. What’s a seller to do? I want to take a look at how seller emails - and in particular, automated systems - might be made to work more usefully for both buyers and sellers.

You can’t please all the people all the time

Inevitably, people’s wishes about email communication differ. eBay sellers when buying are generally at one extreme end of the spectrum: we’re mostly online all the time, we get a lot of email, a lot of spam, we know how the system works and largely we trust it: we’d rather have less email, and we’ll let you know if there’s a problem.

At the other end of the spectrum is the buyer who replies to your automatic “item dispatched” email demanding to know when you’re going to dispatch their item: this buyer needs their hand holding every step of the way, they’ll write and thank you for leaving them feedback and if their item takes more than a day to arrive, you’re going to know about it. Bless: we were all there once.

It would be possible, I suppose, to individually email your buyers based on their level of feedback and how experienced they look, so that brand new buyers got more email and hand-holding, and people who were sellers themselves just got told the essential “your item is in the post”. I don’t frankly have time to email each individual buyer myself, and I’ll leave it to someone else to design an automatic system that will do it for me (Eddie? ). For now, I’m doing my best to make SMP’s automatic emails work as well as they can.

Making SMP’s automatic emails work for you

SMP offers five automatic emails you can send to buyers:

• winning bidder/BINner notification
• payment reminder (seller’s choice of how many days after the sale)
• payment received
• item dispatched
• feedback reminder (i.e. please leave it)

Sellers have the choice to use none, some or all of these.

Before we take a look at each email in detail, let’s remember the most important fact about eBay-related email: (most) buyers have seen it before. Buyers know when they’re getting an automated email; the single most useful thing a seller can do, therefore, is change the subject lines on those SMP-generated emails. Make them yours. Make them unique. That way, you stand a halfway decent chance that buyers are going to read them.

Winning Bidder Notification

If you normally sell multiple BIN items to one buyer, then turn this one off. Little is more annoying on eBay than a dozen copies of an email beginning “Good News!” for something I already know about. If you normally run auctions, there’s more reason to use the winning bidder notification, as your buyers may be away from the computer when the auction ends. But even so, eBay send out emails to winning bidders anyway; do you want to duplicate that?

You could use this email to encourage further sales. If you have a shop, remind buyers to take a look before they pay; mention your combined shipping policies to give them an incentive to do so. And edit eBay’s default for tone: make it more appropriate for your audience. Crafty ladies like friendly and personal; I suspect computer parts buyers don’t, so much.

Payment Reminder

eBay’s standard text for this email is - frankly - bizarre. It spends a lot of time telling the buyer what they’ve won, but does not contain a “pay now” button. I’d strip out all the garbage from this, and say very simply, you won this item, we haven’t got your payment yet, here’s a button to click to pay with PayPal (or a Nochex link or whatever you use), and if there’s a problem, please let us know.

I still have misgivings about having this email automated. There are too many buyers around at the moment with “problems with their PayPal accounts”, and the last thing I want to do is rile someone by reminding them to pay when they’ve already told me I’ll have to wait til Monday. So I’m keeping this email as a manually-generated one. If you’re a massively high-volume seller who can’t keep notes on who’s told you there’ll be a delay in payment, then do at least warn tardy buyers they may get automated reminders.

Payment Received

With 99% of my eBay payments coming through PayPal, I used to think this one was completely pointless: my buyers knew when they’d paid me, and PayPal told them anyway. But this email is a perfect example of how you can highjack eBay’s original intent and use it for your own purposes.

I now use “payment received” to give my buyers an idea of shipping times. I appreciate that for those who pay on Friday night, not hearing from me until Monday morning may be just too long to wait, and so they get an email saying “we’ll be shipping on the next working day; if it’s Friday today, that means Monday.”

Item Dispatched

This is the most important email. This is your opportunity to really control your buyers’ expectations.

Allow for postal delays: I say “your item should be with you in the next few days, but please allow a little longer because postal services are not always as speedy as we would like them to be”. It saves my buyers panicking quite as quickly; it saves me having to answer a few “where is it?” emails.

Let me know if there is a problem: I say “please contact me if there is a problem. I can resolve most things, but only if I know about them, so please don’t be shy”. You might want to go for a bit less touchy-feely, but this is the time to imprint on your buyers’ minds that if there is any problem, they should contact you, not just reach straight for the negative feedback.

Feedback Reminder

Until recently, I had never used this email and had strongly encouraged other sellers to turn it off too. Don’t tempt fate, right? But the times are achanging, and I think it could be useful for some people. The default message about “please leave us feedback” is too strong, because you might just get some feedback you didn’t bargain on. But again, highjacking eBay’s automation to say “we hope you’ve received your order safely by now and that you had a five-star service; please do let us know if there is a problem” could be a good move for many sellers.

Use the opportunity

The primary aim of all of these emails should be customer service: keeping your buyers informed and letting them know what to do if there is an issue. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t use SMP’s emails as a further opportunity to promote your brand and encourage further sales.

You can include your Shop logo in SMP emails; this is a great way to start building customer loyalty to *you* rather than to eBay. You can also include your default cross-promotions so that your emails also showcase other items you’re selling.

Rather than being just the same old eBay default spam, even if they are automated, your email communications should be personal to your business, and useful to your buyers. Happy, well-informed buyers come back to shop with you again, and hopefully they give you 5/5 for communication.

Comsulting Bulk Reviser for eBay

There’s long been a need for an easy way to bulk revise listings on eBay, and Bulk Reviser from Comsulting is the perfect tool to fit the job. I’ve always been a fan of TurboLister but mass editing listings is easier and quicker with Bulk Reviser.

There are two versions of the product - one for eBay.co.uk and another for eBay.com. When you install the program you need to link it to your eBay account and you can then download your active listings into Bulk Reviser.

You’re now ready to edit most variables on listings including price including quantity, Best Offer, payment methods, postage (both domestic and international) and even the titles of your listings.

If you need to perform even simple tasks such as changing VAT rates or editing the email address for PayPal payments this program is superb. Tasks such as adding, removing, or adjusting Best Offer accept and decline prices can be achieved in seconds.

To make selecting the listings you wish to edit easy it’s possible to sort by clicking columns (eg sort by title, listing format, price etc), or to refine your selection by searching for keywords in item titles. Items can be selected and edited en masse, or individually with changes uploaded to eBay in bulk.

There are only a couple of limitations to the software: You can only revise listings on one site (either eBay.com or eBay.co.uk depending which version you purchase). Currently you can only link Bulk Revise to one eBay ID, although a multi-ID version is to be released shortly. The software interface is slightly techie but no more so than TurboLister - experienced eBay users will have no trouble finding their way around.

If you need to edit multiple attributes on one listing each has to be done in a seperate screen and uploaded to ebay. This however isn’t a weakness of the program, it’s designed so that you can make a single change to multiple listings quickly and efficiently, and that’s what the program does best. If you need to make the same change to some or all of your live eBay listings, then this is the program for you.

Bulk Revise costs just £39.95 for either the UK or eBay.com version. Comsulting are offering all Tamebay readers a 10% discount. To claim the discount enter “Tamebay” as a coupon code when making your purchase.

I have no reason to give great service on eBay

Today I received a totally justified negative feedback from a buyer. He stated in the neg that the item I supplied was not fully working with an intermittent fault.

Sadly the buyer never contacted me or he would have received a full refund or a replacement (or possibly both!). I’d have actually preferred that he open an INR dispute for SNAD (Significantly Not As Described) prior to leaving feedback, as than I’d at least have had an opportunity to rectify the situation.

I should point out I’m not that fussed about a neg per se. It’s not the first and it almost certainly won’t be the last that I receive in my eBay selling career. The problem is that it could spell the start of the end of my eBay business. The Seller Non-Performance criteria are an unknown quantity, both the exact criteria and the visibilty of a sellers standing. It may only take a couple more negative or neutral feedbacks combined with a few low scoring DSRs or maybe a buyer dispute opened, and my account could be suspended.

Having already received the neg I can see no reason why I should help an unhappy customer. If it led to a suspension I certainly couldn’t afford to be magnanimous and assist in spite of receiving poor feedback, which is what I have done in the past.

Recent eBay changes such as business seller registration, highlighting the Distance Selling Regulations and Sale of Goods Act and insisting on returns policies haven’t helped this buyer in the slightest. eBay has put me in the position where I have zero incentive to give great service and plenty of reasons to simply not bother.

But of course I did, this evening I telephoned the buyer and it was an interesting conversation. First I simply said I saw he had left negative feedback, sorry about the problem, would you like a replacement or a refund. A pleasantly surprised buyer asked what about the return postage costs and, when I said he wouldn’t have to pay any, there was a stunned silence followed by “What’s the catch?”

Well there really is no catch but he couldn’t believe that I was willing to simply replace the product, that’s why he hadn’t bothered to contact me in the first place. It turns out he’s new to eBay and one of his other purchases, significantly higher value than the one from me, had gone wrong. He explained “I’m really sorry but I’d just about given up on eBay, there was a problem with the last item I bought and you just got the brunt of it.”

My buyer has asked how he can erase the feedback (his suggestion, not mine) but of course he can’t – a great argument for editable feedback or the return of feedback withdrawal. eBay emphasise that many of the recent changes are geared towards offering great customer service and resolution of issues up front so that buyers have no need to even consider a neg or dispute in the first place, also they’re doing what they can to encourage buyers to communicate with sellers at the point of giving potential negative feedback. Unfortunately neither happened in this case.

I have a happy customer and one that will probably go on to trade on eBay in the future. It’s just a shame I caught the tail end of another seller’s poor service and now have a neg on my account for the next year.

The question is what would you do? Once the feedback is left there’s no possible benefit to you so would you ignore the neg and still look after the customer? Although I did in this case, I’m not so sure I would if it was the neg that got me suspended.

Business seller registration : some thoughts on enforcement

“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:

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.

How I increased my P&P DSR by 2 points

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

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.

Another one bites the dust

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 need to get dolphin-friendly sooner

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

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!

RepXchange : passing on the bad bidders

When eBay banned non-positive feedback for buyers, it was inevitable that other companies would spring up to try to fill the gap. Whether they’re trying to pass the word on dodgy buyers, or just give frustrated sellers a place to vent, there are a few of these around. I thought we’d take a look at them.

First up is RepXchange.com. RepXchange is essentially a way to exchange blocked bidder lists: sellers can upload their entire list, or entire problem buyers and details of the transaction one by one. Reports are then pooled, and sellers can download a list of bidders to block based on filters they choose: for example, if you’re an electronics seller, you might choose only to download buyers reported by others in the same niche.

The site is free to use, but operates a system of ‘credits’, so that each member has to give some information in order to benefit from that given by others. More useful activity - specific transaction details and referring new sellers - is rewarded more highly than just uploading your entire blocked bidder list.

Of the sites I’ve looked at over the past few weeks, RepXchange is probably the most useful and certainly the only one I would consider using. But I still have reservations about it. Firstly, information is necessarily limited to sellers who are taking part in their program: even if they grew at an exponential rate, the number of eBay members is so huge that I would stand a needle in haystack’s chance of finding my next problem bidder on their list.

Secondly, even with filtering, just because a buyer causes *me* problems, that’s no guarantee that they’ll cause *you* problems. I know from looking at feedback that my competitors and I often disagree on whether a buyer is a good one or not; indeed, I remember one buyer who negged me two or three times on one ID, but continued buying from me on another ID, and told me how happy she was to be buying from me and not that other shyster she’d had to neg Sometimes people just don’t hit it off.

My other concern is around the legal issues of sharing this kind of information. RepXchange founder Laurie Borden told me in an email:

Our service simply accepts manual entry of blocked bidder IDs that sellers have collected at their own discretion, which is rightfully the property of the sellers. Although eBay allows sellers to maintain a list of blocked bidders, eBay doesn’t claim to own this data anywhere in the agreements we have reviewed, nor does it state that this information is non-transferable.

eBay have given hints that the sharing of BBLs is somthing they don’t like: Pink James recently posted on the PowerSeller board that “the publication of any BBL or links to BBL will be reported to Liveworld as a violation of board policy as it boils down to ‘naming and shaming’ a member as a bad buyer and as such won’t be tolerated in any way shape or form.” Whether the sin would extend beyond “board policy” is yet to be seen.

RepXchange is currently in public beta.

PayPal confirm genuine emails are spoofs

I received an email from PayPal last week, notifying me of a payment reversal by the buyer’s bank. I wouldn’t normally quote such things in full in public, but I don’t think I’m betraying any confidential information here because the email is strangely lacking in any sort of information at all:

I was really not sure whether this was a real email or not. So like a good eBayer, I forwarded to spoof@paypal.com. Then I signed in to my PayPal account, and sure enough there was a reversed transaction. Was this a real PayPal email, or just a spooky coincidence? I erred on the side of protecting my PayPal account, and replied to the email with the information requested.

This morning, I had two emails back from PayPal: one from customer support thanking me for the information I’d supplied, and the other from spoof@, thanking me for forwarding the spoof email and confirming it wasn’t genuine.

At this point, I started to wonder whether it was me or PayPal who had gone mad: but Jane the demon bead lady confirmed in our forum that exactly the same thing had happened to her.

I can understand that PayPal might not want to send out confidential financial information in emails, but the above email is completely inadequate. How many sellers are going to see it lacking any kind of credibilty, assume it’s a spoof and delete it, only to have PayPal return the payment to the sender a week later because the seller hasn’t complied with the information request. At the very least, this should say “please sign into your PayPal account and supply us with the information requested through our website”, rather than using email for investigations.

As for spoof@paypal.com, it’s long been my suspicion that they tell us that everything is a spoof, just to be on the safe side. If genuine emails can and are being flagged as phishing, then really what’s the point of having spoof@ at all?

In the meantime, any sellers receiving such an email should sign into their PayPal account to check whether a payment really has been reversed before replying to *or* deleting the email.

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• Recent Comments

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