Skype me a Christmas card
December 24, 2008
There’s gotta be someone out there that you meant to send a card to, that special person who’s card plopped onto your doormat this morning and you realise there’s no way you can get a card to them for tomorrow. (Well you might be better organised, but it’s happened to me on more than one occasion 
)
Well now there’s a solution, why not Skype someone a video card? Simply choose a card cover, record your message with a webcam and you’re ready to send to your friends. It’s even easier if you’re on Facebook as Skype have built a Facebook app for video cards as well.
I really like this idea for people who won’t be home this Christmas, and want to send a personal message to family or friends. Plus it’s a neat idea to get a few more people using Skype to communicate.
Guess What? eBay wrapping paper up for grabs
December 12, 2008
Guess What? We managed to get our hands on 50 sheets of eBay “Guess What” wrapping paper. This is the stuff the eBay elves have been giving out to commuters at busy mainline train stations.
We’re not going to be buying that many presents so we’ll send 5 sheets for free to the first 10 readers that post in comments below, saying why they’d like some! We’ll contact you (using the email address you enter when leaving your comment) to request your mailing address.
While we’re willing to post world wide (we know eBay love those cross border transactions) we’ve already passed the final posting date for Christmas for readers outside Europe, so you might not get the paper in time for Christmas but it’ll be perfect for birthday gifts.
If you’ve bought someone a Christmas present on eBay why not finish it off by presenting it in Guess What wrapping paper?
Merry Christmas, fun is over
December 11, 2008
What a difference a week makes. TameBay’s correspondent from Victoria Station reports that last night, all the eBay branding from the Christmas tree had vanished:
Hope it wasn’t anything we said 
Can you spot the fun?
December 6, 2008
And here, for your fun and delectation, is the tree. Lovely.
Christmas FUN at Euston
December 5, 2008
Here we have fun happening at London’s Euston Station this morning. Nice tree, shame about the shoddy branding: couldn’t someone have checked the height of crash barriers before the printing was done?!
eBay Elves out and about – with pictures!
December 3, 2008
Some more pics of eBay’s Christmas promotion – and this time, fun is happening! In Manchester, there have been queues for eBay goodie bags, and one guy in Birmingham returned his new shoes to a shop when he realised he could get them cheaper on eBay.
In all, elves will be handing out more than 120,000 shopping bags with shopping guides featuring sellers and items, wrapping paper and other goodies. And a team of ‘adwalkers’ are out on busy streets giving live site demonstrations to Christmas shoppers.
If you want to catch the eBay Elves yourself (in which case, please take a camera and capture the fun for us), they’re at Glasgow and Manchester Piccadilly stations at rush hours this week, and Waterloo and Paddington next week.
-
- Manchester
-
- Glasgow
-
- Leeds
-
- Birmingham
-
- Birmingham
On the first day of Christmas, eBay gave to me…
December 1, 2008
… an uuuuugly Christmas tree.
Alex Bellinger from SmallBizPod spotted this monstrosity at Charing Cross. If you wanted to spread the message that you can buy tacky crap on eBay this Christmas, you’re doing it right.
I’m still looking for the fun events.
Guess What’s missing from this picture?
November 29, 2008
Where’s the fun activity?
For those who
- missed the logo,
- didn’t already know that eBay UK’s Xmas slogan is “guess what” and
- couldn’t read that execrable writing as they were sprinting for their train,
this cake frill round a tree is meant to make you do your Christmas shopping on eBay. Just so you know.
eBay UK’s homepage and the GREAT BIG AD
November 24, 2008
click to embiggen
At the spendiest time of year, eBay UK are promoting not their sellers, not even something related to their sellers like PayPal buyer protection or some kind of holiday giveaway – they’re promoting an off-site deal for a mobile phone company to, as far as I can tell, every single person who visits the site.
Experienced sellers, I know, will be itching to comment that they never visit the home page but go straight to My eBay. But this is the time when – we hope – new buyers might just be visiting the site, checking it out to see if those tempting ads about eBay being 25% cheaper than the high street are really true. Wouldn’t it have been nice to show them some eBay content rather than sending them straight off to a different site altogether?
Would it have been so much to ask to have had some nice promotional creatives featuring different areas of the site in which Christmas presents might be procured?
eBay’s Christmas promotion pushes buyers to favoured merchants
November 14, 2008
eBays all over the world begin their Christmas marketing campaigns today. eBay UK put out an announcement this morning about theirs (though you read it here first) highlighting their message that
eBay is on average 25% cheaper than the high street on like for like new items
“eBay is cheap” was very unpopular with sellers last year; will this credit crunch Christmas be any different?
Meanwhile, over the pond, Greg Fant from the Marketing and Buyer Experience team has details of what eBay.com will be doing. “Millions of eligible customers” are to receive coupons for money-off their eBay purchases; the coupons will appear throughout the site and in buyers’ My eBay accounts. Presumably there’s some targetting going on, as the actual percentage discounts offered will vary; several UK members I know have received vouchers for 10% off in specific categories. The coupons will be valid for both auctions and BINs, “for a very limited time” to get shoppers out spending as soon as possible.
from top rated sellers
The Bid From $1 promotion, featured on eBay.com’s front page, sees a range of small electronics sold on auction starting at $1, with free shipping. Any sellers thinking of adopting that as a listing strategy in order to gain the extra promotion, however, can forget it: these are specific products from specific big sellers, eforcity and henrys.com, for example. You can see this even on the ones that are sold out: check out the URLs, all of which currently contain the “SpecificSeller” criterion.
The Daily Deal will also highlight a deep-discounted product again with free shipping; a different product, available in limited quantities, will be featured each day. So far, this promo appears to be entirely of buy.com.
Frankly, Mr Fant’s AB post is, at best, disingenuous. These promotions are not for all eBay sellers: they’re of specific, selected sellers, whose IDs are coded into the links from eBay’s home page. Presenting this to eBay sellers generally as “special deals to increase excitement, drive buzz, and keep buyers coming back to eBay for more” is missing the point entirely: what’s being driven is buyers straight from the home page to the listings of eBay’s favoured merchants.
eBay UK was top Christmas shopping site
January 22, 2008
A little bit of good news amongst all the speculation for eBay today: eBay was the most popular shopping site again this Christmas for UK shoppers, and was the nation’s fourth most-visited site on Christmas Day itself.
Figures released last week showed that Amazon beat eBay.com in the US for the first time ever. What ought to be read into this depends on your point of view, with ex-seller Randy Smythe believing that Amazon is just better, while optimistic shareholder OnlyeBay thinks that the rise in the use of BIN is responsible for the fall in eBay’s traffic.
Recent Comments
- Chris Dawson: Just in case you haven’t seen it on the announcement board… http://www2.ebay....
- Lorna: Pete, so many times I see on the Q&A, where a buyer comes on and complains that a seller has refused to...
- Pete: #2 In a word…No. That would be the same as saying “it’s a free world, so if I don’t...
- Lorna: ‘Brand owners (and not just those supplying luxury goods) are threatening free trade by attempting to...
- Lorna: It’s possible that the retailers of particular brands stipulate a restriction on who else has access to...
- Gay: I think I might just put holiday settings on for a week!
- Richard: There’s a clone of Louise on the PayPal site too who wears a blue top.
- Chris Dawson: Nick, I thought I’d try my luck…. You: Hi Louise – eBay: Good evening how can I help...
- Pete: I know, we had an issue with our first installation, the barcodes were unreadable and we had to install a few...
- Nick Talley: Louise – eBay: Hi! I’m Louise and I’m here to answer your questions about eBay. Can I have your...
