Further investigation revealed an employee had searched for “PayPal help line” on Google and called the first number they found. Unfortunately it wasn’t PayPal they were calling, but an independent company charging £1.50/minute for support.

There are a number of these companies out there with names such as auction help or support line. The truth of the matter is that though they may give great information (I don’t know, I haven’t called them), in reality all the assistance you should ever need is freely available to you.

First port of call for PayPal should be to telephone them direct, you can get their number by logging into your PayPal account and clicking “Contact” at the bottom of the page. Through the PayPal website they’ll supply a unique one use PIN so that when you call they can confirm that the account really is yours.

eBay users who have access to telephone support will already have been provided with the relevant telephone number, whether that be as a PowerSeller, Business seller or as a Buyer.

eBay and PayPal help pages aren’t always the easiest to navigate but Louise, the friendly virtual agent, is always available to guide you to the information you need. (It’s also great fun to ask her totally irrelevant questions although I couldn’t possibly encourage anyone to do so).

For those needing further advice your online colleagues are almost certainly in a position to help. Use forums such as the TameBay forum, ask for help on the eBay community boards, use sites like Money Saving Expert – all of these sites are totally free to use.

If you have no need to ever call (or have your employees call) premium rate numbers ask your phone provider to block access to them. This will prevent all calls to premium rate lines and ensure that if someone does dial them by accident you aren’t faced with an unusually high and unwelcome telephone bill.

On Wednesday 8th the delivery offices will walk out and on Thursday 9th the Mail Hubs (which process mail in and out of London) will be striking. Finally on Friday 10th the London Mail Centres (the large sorting offices) will down tools for the day.

The strikes are in protest at what the CWU say are cuts in jobs and wages. However as the Royal Mail try to modernise at the same time as the rest of the country struggles with recession, there’s likely to be little sympathy from online merchants for the strikers.

Best advice for eBay sellers is to notify customers that there will likely be delays to their purchases arriving. Expect a minimum of two to three days delay for mail in London, but the ongoing effect will probably be to slow mail down for most of the next week as the back log is cleared.

20% is a big drop in revenue, but it may be that last year’s $2.1m bid for Warren Buffett’s annual luncheon auction was simply too big to match. Recession or no recession, the $1.68m raised for the Glide Foundation on eBay this year is still a sizable figure.

If you’re a Skype user it’s time to upgrade to the latest Skype 4.1 release which apparently fixes a few bugs in the previous versions.

China has delayed an introduction of web filtering at the last minute turning planned protests into a celebration. Software was due to be installed on all computers to prevent access to pornography.

If you’re a hand made guitar aficionado there’s a DVD on eBay you have to buy – Antony Dewar chopped down a dead cherry tree in his garden and spent three years filming it’s transformation into a pair of guitars. Running for 3 hours 26 minutes the DVD shows everything from felling the tree to the finished product.

As Director of Trust and Safety for eBay UK, Richard was the media face of eBay, appearing on TV and radio to talk about the company and to defend sellers and the ways they make money online.

With over 1000 feedback (and no negs!) Richard knows eBay inside out. He was a valued and valuable member of the community, spending his own time on boards and forums talking to buyers and sellers and taking their concerns back to eBay’s internal teams. We’ll miss his wisdom, his advice, and his no-messing style.

Richard will be traveling and freelance-writing, with trips planned to Greenland and the US. We’re looking forward to reading about his adventures, and wish him the very best of luck.

For those using offline postage the minimum order value has risen from £5 to £20, plus a separate £1 handling fee. This means if your daily dispatch amount is less than £20 you’ll either need a trip to the Post Office or have to wait until you have £20 of postage before you ship your orders.

The minimum order value for OBA remains at £5, and the difference is due to the cost of printing andhandling paperwork compared to processing postage orders online. If you’re not already using OBA you can contact Royal Mail to add it to your existing business account.

Yesterday, eBay advised buyers of Michael Jackson tickets to contact the seller they had bought from. Other secondary tickets sellers, such as Seatwave and Viagogo, said yesterday that they would ensure all buyers receive a refund.

Exact details of eBay’s scheme are unclear and more information is promised next week but it seems likely that eBay buyers  of Michael Jackson tickets will not be left out of pocket.

Some of the technology that Skype uses is under dispute with Skype failing to secure an early court date in London. The case is now likely to be heard in the first quarter of 2010 and any attempts to float the company before then is likely to impact heavily on the price.

If Skype loses in court the original Skype founders who claim they still own some of the underlying Skype technology could put the scuppers on the service, totally disabling Skype.

It’s bizaare that having paid $2.6 billion for Skype (later written down to $1.2 billion) that they didn’t ensure they were actually buying the entire kaboodle. Buying a company that doesn’t own or have cast iron guarantees it can continue to use it’s technology is a recipe for disaster, but one that could net the original founders yet another massive payday.

In the mean time putting the Skype IPO on hold appears to be the only option left for eBay, having paid over the odds for Skype in the first place, offloading a major chunk onto the stock market at what would inevitably be a vastly underpriced value just isn’t an option.

Originally launched in 2005 in response to eBay’s hike in Store subscription and final value fees, Wagglepop has closed down before – the first time, just a week after launching. If anyone fancies overseeing its next incarnation, the site remains for sale at $40,000.

Wagglepop is the second auction site announcing closure this month, as Tazbar made a similar announcement a couple of weeks back.

A spokesman for L’Oréal said that the appeals process could take as long as two years, and that the company intends to pursue mediation with eBay in the interim.

Gary’s readers will remember him for his “Garage Sale Challenges” where he documented the gems he found and the prices the items fetched at auction. I’ve followed his challenges with great interest over the years and he’s never failed to inspire with his dedication to show that “real eBaying”, as it was in the early days, is still alive and kicking.

Ever the pro, he researched hundreds of products informing fellow sellers what to look out for at sales and the prices they could expect items to fetch with advice of what to list on eBay and what is better suited to Amazon.

After an incredible nine years selling on eBay, Gary’s last entry on his blog was to let readers about one of his other passions in life – fishing, he was off for a week for a well earned break.

Gary’s bought a refreshing outlook on the industry with a personal touch and bucket loads of enthusiasm. Always an inspiration, he’ll be sadly missed.

photo credit: avlxyz

PayPal have published the results of their second annual Checkout Abandonment Survey, looking at why website buyers don’t complete purchases. Just like last year’s survey, an excessive shipping fee was the number one reason for shoppers walking away. It’s clear that if sellers are able to offer shipping-inclusive prices, this is something that buyers like, however counter-intuitive that might be for those of us who typically sell more than one item at a time. And even if your site charges separate shipping, making that cost transparent at the beginning of the checkout flow – or earlier – is essential.

There’s some suggestion, though, that buyers are getting more savvy with their online shopping: the second most popular reason for abandonment was that buyers wanted to comparison shop, and 25% cited leaving the site to look for a coupon or discount voucher. Sellers should be using this behaviour to their advantage: if you’re not currently listing website coupons on voucher sites, you’re probably missing out on some valuable free advertising, and a fair number of sales.

But there’s some reassurance: a third of shoppers who abandoned their carts later returned to the same site to purchase. Sellers should consider:

• making it easy for shoppers to bookmark their site and specific items they’re interested in,
• using social bookmarking tools as well as traditional browser bookmarks/favourites
• extending the life of shopping cart cookies so that buyers who return later can find the items they’d already added to their cart,
• and offering a wish-list facility for longer-term use.

PayPal are running a video presentation later today to discuss their findings further.

A drop down allows buyers to select a reason for the return, although they can if they wish enter a message to the seller to expand upon why they’re returning the item.

The page kicks off with the message “Please use this form to make use of your right of withdrawal according to the Distance Selling regulations” (DSRs), although even eBay advise that the DSRs only apply to fixed price formats and not to purchases won on auctions. There is no option to differentiate between the returns policies for different selling formats.

Although many sellers (including myself) choose to allow returns on auctions as well as it makes good business sense, many do not. The page doesn’t mention that only business sellers are obliged to accept returns and that private sellers are under no obligation to offer exchanges or refunds.

The link to Easy Returns is from the drop down in My eBay and appears for 35 days from the sale of an item. After 35 days the buyer may still have legal obligations to offer returns but the buyer will have to contact the seller directly.

I’m wondering how long eBay measure returns for before they start to impose limits which can affect your account status. Possibly in the future if the number of requests for returns exceeds a certain amount it could affect Buyer Satisfaction Ratings and even Seller Discounts.

Currently eBay have given no indication that returns monitoring will affect your seller account status, but it’s almost certainly a metric that they’ll be measuring over the next few months. Easy Returns have gone live for purchases on eBay UK and eBay Germany, but expect to see them rolled out to other sites around the world in the near future.

The promotion specifically excludes both Business registered sellers and PowerSellers. There are a few excluded categories to check the details before you list.

There’s no contract, no minimum top up and you can get free text/data bundles for 90days with each top-up. I also use 3 mobile add-ons for roaming Internet Access with costs starting from just 50p per day. You can buy the add on as and when you need it so if you’re away from home for the day a PAYG 3G mobile from 3 is the perfect way to keep up to date with your eBay business at a very reasonable cost.

Over the last three months confidence is up, pressure on profit margins and prices has eased and more businesses expect stronger sales in the next quarter.

At the same time as releasing the Online Business Index, eBay and Total Politics co-hosted a breakfast seminar today, with Mark Prisk (shadow minister for business and enterprise), Ed Vaizey (shadow arts minister) and John McFall (chairman of the treasury committee) and other government ministers attending. The aim of the meeting was to help raise awareness of this group of online entrepreneurs and to explore ways that government agencies and legislation can assist sellers in growing their businesses further.

The meeting looked several issues, the first being “A 21st Century Economy”. Key here was the message that small to medium sized online businesses have bucked the trend seen on the high street – a new breed of businesses have emerged which differ markedly to traditional bricks and mortar based companies and are performing well. The 123,000 online businesses registered on eBay make a significant contribution to the UK economy, including £57m worth of export sales generated by UK-based eBay sellers in January 2009 alone.

The discussion looked at ways that online businesses could be assisted and covered topics ranging from reducing business taxation and VAT burdens, to how best support small businesses and make them aware of assistance available.

Finance was also discussed, with the Business Index revealing interest rate cuts aren’t passed on to small businesses, overdrafts have been reduced and 1 in 12 small businesses have to put their homes at risk to secure funding.

“Online businesses want the Government to force banks to loosen the purse strings and stop giving lip service to the extent to which they’re helping small businesses. And they want to see the Government doing likewise by cutting business rates, corporation tax and VAT.”
- Mark Lewis, eBay UK Managing Director

Many small businesses (especially eBay businesses) often start out as part time home based businesses. They grow with advice often being sought on message boards from online colleagues, rather than agencies such as Business Link, the FSB or professional advisers such as accountants and banks. One of the challenges for the government is how to support online businesses, although it could be said many are doing just fine through their own hard work, commitment, ingenuity and determination.

Tactics by manufacturers to restrict trade in their products was highlighted. The Online Business Index highlights the 45% of sellers prevented from discounting goods, and 49% of suppliers who banned merchants from selling their products online. Because many of the restrictions are verbal with the unspoken threat of cutting off supply, this is the first time statistics on restrictive trade activities have been collated (and is why quotes from sellers in the Business Index are anonymous).

In summary the report concluded that small to medium sized online businesses are helping to pull the country out of recession with 41% looking to hire one or more additional employees.

The most important message was summed up succinctly by Ed Vaizey, who concluded stability is vital to enable online merchants to plan and grow. Shot gun tactics by the government (such as last years temporary cut in VAT rates, which did little to help the one sector of the economy that’s booming) simply disrupt online businesses and potentially hinder their growth.

Stability is something the eBay have already recognised is key, major eBay site changes are now restricted to twice a year with sellers being informed well in advance. If the government can adopt similar tactics online sellers can get on with the business of selling.

• Merchant credit card processing integrated into eBay Checkout later this year.
• Revise more data in multi-quantity fixed-price listings even after they have sales
• A new finding API, which should make for some interesting third-party apps.
• Better blocking of buyers in “locations to which I do not ship”: rather than the registration location, this is now being touted as “Block buyers whose primary shipping or registered location is excluded by seller”, so may exclude some of those who register with a UK address but want your mobile phone shipped to their nephew in Nigeria.

That’s the good news. On the flip side, I’m slightly concerned about “All pre-sale member messages intermediated through eBay for safety” – eBay’s email forwarding system at the moment is patchy at best, so if there’s something new coming that’s going to restrict things even further, I’d be worried that it’s going to make communication even more difficult than it is at the moment.

As always, details from DevCon are a bit sketchy because the announcements are not aimed at sellers themselves – so as ever, more details when we have them.

Scheduled, Active and Ended Listings have all been broken down into some useful subcategories, so you can see at a glance – for example – what needs to be relisted, or which items have questions on them. It’s not quite turning Turbo Lister into a proper management tool, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Shoe sellers might also like to know that multi-variant listings are now do-able through TL: you’ll need to run the update first.

If you create a new listing in a relevant category (currently shoes) the option to change to a Multi-Variation listing will appear and you can start the listing flow. The first thing you’ll need to do is decide on the attributes you wish to use – for shoes suggested options are size and colour. Then after adding item specifics as normal you’ll need to create a SKU code (Stock Keeping Unit) for each variation.

The SKU that you choose will appear as a custom label which isn’t normally visible on eBay listings. You can however view them, while listings are live and post sale, in TurboLister, Selling Manager Pro, and some third party management tools.

Once you have created the variations you’ll then need add pictures and enter the available quantity and price for each option. Once you’ve done this you’ll be returned to the normal listing flow to complete the description and launch your first Multi-Variation listing on eBay.

Creating a Multi-Variation listings isn’t much different to creating a new listing, but you’ll want to know exactly what quantities you have of each variation and images of different colour options before you start listing. It also makes sense to have a gallery image showing all colour options to ensure buyers know they have a choice.

Think carefully about your Multi-Variation listing titles. Don’t include colours or sizes as if you run out of stock of one variation you still want search results to be relevant. Use the variations and item specifics to ensure the different attributes are picked up in search results and keep the title generic to the particular product on sale.

If now you don’t need to include colours and sizes in your titles consider using spare characters to call out services such as “Free post” or “Next day delivery”. It’s a good opportunity to differentiate yourselves from your competition.

It will be interesting to see how quickly sellers start migrating listings to Multi-Variant listings. It should in the long term cut down on inventory management and the number of active listings sellers have to monitor, although it’s yet to be seen how easy it is to pick and pack orders and how the post sales information is presented to sellers.

If you launch any Multi-Variation listings and have any more tips please do add them in comments below.

The shortcuts menu has been imported from My eBay (along with any shortcuts you’d previously added) and a new at a glance bar chart shows your gross sales for the last 120 days. There’s also a useful Account Status section (not shown by default, click the Page Options at the top of the screen to enable it). This will show your latest invoice and current outstanding fee balances.

What does amuse me are the three items on the To Do list that eBay have kindly created for me – it’s more of a “What Not To Do List”. In third place we have “End Listing Early”, a great way to ensure you don’t sell anything. In second place “Cancel bids for a listing” (just in case you hadn’t ending your listing early). And first prize for usefulness on your brand new SMP To Do list is to “Block or pre-approve bidders”. It may have escaped eBay’s notice that the ability to pre-approve bidders was scrapped way back in February 2007 but I’m sure you’ll appreciate the reminder anyway.

The best part of the new SMP design is that it’s been limited (currently) to the summary page, which to be honest is a page I never look at anyway. Thankfully the really useful stuff in the Active and Sold sections has been left alone for now. However if you like tweaking colours and rearranging widgets you can have some fun. Just ignore your new To Do list

Multi-Variation listings are due to launch tomorrow at 6pm in the shoes category and mid-July for Clothing and Accessories. This new format for fixed-price listings allows sellers to consolidate product variations (e.g. colour/size) into one listing for one listing fee.

Patrick Munden, Seller Communications and Anshu Goel, Product Manager from eBay will join John Hayes from ChannelAdvisor to discuss:
* Why eBay is launching this format and how it benefits you as a seller
* How to create listings in the new format
* How listings will appear in search
* How to optimise your sales strategy using this format

You can reserve a place on the ChannelAdvisor website and there will be time for questions and answers towards the end of the session.

Disclosure: ChannelAdvisor advertise with TameBay.

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“If wishing to go ahead with this purchase simply add the £179.95 to your Paypal checkout total.”

As the listing’s still visible, we might guess that it’s been ended by the seller rather than pulled by eBay (in which case it would disappear altogether).

This is not the first instance of eBay’s Daily Deal breaking eBay’s own policies. Recent weeks have seen multiple instances of both eBay rules and UK consumer law breached in these listings:

• sellers charging “restocking fees” for returned retail purchases
• sellers refusing to refund outward postage fees on returned items
• misleading former prices quoted, where these have not been offered by the same seller in the last 30 days
• sellers listing without business contact details
• refurbished items described as “new” in item specifics

Not to mention that eBay’s own stated criteria for inclusion in DotD include “ideally a PowerSeller with min 95% positive feedback”. In order to qualify as a PS, sellers need to have at least 98% positive feedback.

All of which suggests that the problem here is that eBay staff don’t really know what eBay rules are.

“Whatever happened to the level playing field?”

Sellers not included in this major promotion are – quite rightly – asking why DotD listings are not vetted to ensure they’re abiding by the same rules the rest of us have to. Threads on eBay message boards, forums and Twitter have wondered why eBay are so heavily highlighting listings that break both eBay policy and the law: why, if you’re a small seller who breaks eBay policy inadvertantly, you end up with a big red notice on your seller dashboard, but if you’re a big seller with a lot of product to clear, you seem to be able to get away with more?

I’ll admit – I’ve been avoiding blogging on this issue because I don’t want to send the mob after individual sellers. I don’t think this is about the sellers so much as it is about eBay themselves, and the people who are in charge of this promotion not having the knowledge they should have. And if marketing people don’t necessarily know the right bits of the law or of eBay regulations, then they need to bring in people who do. They could hire a seller or two to cast an eye over DotD listings before they go live – we tend to know what eBay regulations are, because our livelihoods depend on it.