Messages from buyers highlighted in SMP
July 22, 2008
Messages from buyers, entered at checkout, are at last being highlighted in Selling Manager Pro (SMP) with an eBay note. If a note is entered on the PayPal payment it will now appear on the SMP sales record with an eBay note to let sellers know that it’s there.
It’s worth noting that the notes are not displaying in My eBay: users who wish to ensure they’re informed of messages from buyers should consider upgrading to SMP which is free with a featured shop, or £4.99 per month as a stand-alone option.
SNP: 1 month grace before suspension introduced for eBay UK
July 18, 2008
eBay have just officially announced a one month grace period for any seller falling foul of the seller non-performance (SNP) policy for the first time.
Rather than face an immediate site suspension they will be informed that they’re in breach of the policy and given a month to bring their account back into good standing. This is great news and hopefully will keep the dolphins out of the eBay nets. It also means that one upset customer can no longer threaten your eBay business - by the end of the 1 month warning period their feedback will have dropped out of the 30 day feedback and DSRs used in the SNP calculation.
If a seller breaches the policy for a second time within a six month period then they will still face an instant selling restriction or suspension.
eBay have also expanded the Seller Dashboard to include a new Buyer Satisfaction Rating (BDR) to enable sellers to track their performance. This includes negative feedback, neutral feedback, low DSR scores (1 or 2 star ratings) and any buyer protection claims closed in favour of the buyer.
BDR is important not only for SNP but also can affect your standing in search - sellers with low BDR will be disadvantaged under the new Best Match search results. Sellers will be considered in breach of SNP if their BDR drops to “poor” or “unacceptable”.
The only part of BDR that is hidden from sellers are the DSR ratings, sellers should be aware of any other factors that could affect their standing. If eBay would change from anonymous ratings and enable sellers to see where they’re falling down it would be a valuable tool to assist seller increase customer satisfaction.
By keeping DSRs anonymous sellers have no clear understanding which transactions or which buyers are marking them down and sellers are unable to target specific areas or product lines for improvement.
Overall it’s a welcome change though - removing the fear and uncertainty sellers have felt with the knowledge just one or two buyers could earn them an instant 30 day suspension is great news.
Parcelforce PM & Parcelforce 48 Large services launched
July 18, 2008
Parcelforce are launching two new services - Parcelforce PM and Parcelforce 48 Large.
Parcelforce PM is a next day services promising delivery between 12 noon and close of business. The service enables you to promise an afternoon delivery to buyers who then don’t have to wait in all day for a delivery. ParcelForce already offer services with delivery by by 9am, 10am and 12 noon so sellers can now offer early, morning or afternoon delivery slots if they wish.
Parcelforce 48 Large is designed for oversize parcels which will be delivered within two working days. Items up to 2.5m length and 1.5m width and a maximum of 5m length and girth combined can be sent on this service. (Up to now the limit has been 3m length and girth combined). Individual parcel limits of 30kg still apply, but for those selling larger items this service is a great addition.
As with all Parcelforce services full online tracking is provided and most importantly both new services qualify for PayPal seller protection.
PDF documents describing the services are available for Parcelforce PM and Parcelforce 48 Large, or you can contact Parcelforce on 08708 50 11 50
eBay to ban email communications from August
July 13, 2008
At the Developer’s Conference, held just prior to eBay Live!, Adam Trachtenberg announced that emails between sellers and buyers prior to a sale would be anonymised. The latest API notes for developers reveal that this change will roll out across eBay sites in late August.
This means that buyers and sellers will no longer have access to each other’s email addresses prior to a sale. Only once a bidder has won an item will the buyer and seller be able to email each other off eBay.
How this will work is that when an email is sent by a buyer using Ask Seller a Question it will still be delivered to your email inbox, as well as to your My Messages on eBay. When replying to the email it will no longer send it directly to the buyers inbox and you won’t be able to see their private email address. Each message will have a unique identifier and the reply will be sent to them via eBay, using the identifier to redirect the message to their real email address as well as placing a copy in their My Messages.
This is great news as it also means buyers will no longer have the choice of hiding their email address which currently results in the dreaded UseTheYellowButton@ebay.com reply to address. For sellers who routinely use email for replies, rather than clicking through to My Messages, it’s all too easy to hit reply without noticing the email is not the user’s address. Replying to the email gives no warning that the buyer will never actually receive it.
Once anonymised emails are introduced sellers will be able to reply from their normal email program, safe in the knowledge that their answer will end up in the buyer’s My Messages on eBay as well as in their inbox.
Once all eBay communications are via My Messages it’s been announced that sellers will have to remove email addresses from their listings. Where this leaves sellers in the UK who make use of Business Seller Information inserts, which automatically inserts their email address into listings, is unclear - currently the UK Contact Information policy specifically allows for the inclusion of email addresses in listings.
Overall I’ll welcome this change, buyers and sellers will have more reliable communications ensuring all emails are routed through My Messages. Also hopefully my personal quota of eBay spam mail will decline as fraudsters will find it increasingly difficult to obtain email addresses.
PayPal isn’t compulsory on eBay UK (if you’re a big enough seller)
July 7, 2008
eBay UK sellers must accept PayPal. It’s the rule. It’s been the rule since 3rd June. And it’s to increase buyer protection and confidence, so that’s alright. Right?
Not quite. Not if you’re one of the really big sellers, whom eBay will keep happy even if it means ploughing up that famous level playing field.
Questioned on the PowerSeller Board about Dell’s lack of a PayPal offering, pink Joe had this to say:
When we made the Paypal change, our seller support teams contacted our largest accounts to discuss this. A very small number of sellers, including Dell, who use a different checkout process were unable to adapt their technologies in time. So we created a new policy such that if a platinum powerseller met certain conditions, we would work with them to migrate their systems. Those conditions include that the seller must offer their own payment protection policies such that buyers have access to the same cover as Paypal would provide and that they migrate quickly. It is that, and not the country, that allows Dell to list without Paypal for a short period of time.
Smaller sellers who want to use their own merchant accounts to process card payments rather than PayPal will be extremely unimpressed with this. As several people have commented on the original thread, not accepting PayPal seems more like to be about “wouldn’t” than “couldn’t” adapt technology. Plenty of other sellers were, after all, expected to change their technologies to ensure that their buyers had PayPal’s protection, and eBay announced the change in March: four months should be long enough for Dell to change a computer system, shouldn’t it?
What’s more, buyers learn that “all eBay UK listings now offer PayPal”. How is it improving the buyer experience if a few of the very largest sellers and the most well-known names are allowed to flout the rule?
Thanks to Whirly for the heads-up.
Sell what you know, or know what you sell?
July 6, 2008
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
July 5, 2008
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?)
Buyers rights highlighted in listings
July 5, 2008
eBay have recently started highlighting buyers return rights on fixed price listings, spelling out that buyers have a minimum of seven working days from receipt of the purchase to change their mind and return it.
While eBay are emphasising the rights of buyers what is less clear are the rights of sellers. In the original business requirements announcement eBay specified that sellers must accept returns “within 14 days of receipt” even though the minimum proscribed by law for a buyer to change their mind is 7 working days.
The explanation to sellers is: “We require business sellers to accept returns for a minimum period of 14 calendar days so that the buyer has enough time to let the seller know about the cancellation and post the item back.” It would have been a lot clearer for buyers if eBay had simply specified business sellers must accept returns within 7 working days, as specified by the law, without allowing for transit time.
By informing buyers that they have up to 14 days to return an item, many will interpret this as notifying the seller they wish a return after two weeks (not including transit time), especially as a 14 day returns policy reads “Item must be returned within: 14 Days of receipt”, not “Returned item must be received by the seller within: 14 Days of receipt”.
eBay have effectively increased a minimum requirement of a 7 working day returns policy to a 14 day returns policy. Many sellers have routinely offered returns policies longer than the minimum required by law and if eBay want to insist that all sellers offer extended returns policy, in principle, it’s arguably a good move. What I do disagree with is the confusing messaging as 7 working days, 14 days and no mention of transit time leave buyers without clearly stated, easy to comprehend, returns rights.
It’s time to stop disputing unpaid items
July 1, 2008
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.
eBay will challenge French protectionism
July 1, 2008
Unless you’ve been asleep for the last 24 hours, you’ve probably heard that eBay were fined €38million yesterday by a French court, for not doing enough to stop the sale of counterfeit merchandise on their site. Le Monde trumpeted that “eBay will be forced to change its business model”, and I’ve seen a disturbing number of sellers saying that the fine made their day.
What seems to have been missed in many of the reports, but is potentially much more significant for sellers, is that eBay have also been banned from allowing the listing of four perfume brands. Kenzo, Guerlain, Dior and Givenchy had sued eBay, not over the sale of fakes, but because genuine merchandise sold on the site was not sold through the manufacturers’ official distribution channels.
The court cited the need for specialist knowledge when selling these products, just as Lancome did when they decided to sue both eBay and unauthorised sellers of their produce. This, frankly, is nonsense: we’re talking about perfume you can pick up off the shelf in Boots, not pharmaceuticals. It’s restriction of trade, and shouldn’t be allowed under European law. By getting their case heard on the back of the LVMH counterfeiting issue, these perfume brands have managed to neatly obscure that their case is all about protectionism. If you get a bottle of Poison for Christmas, and you’d really rather have a bottle of Flowers, you can now forget selling one on eBay and picking up the other at the same time: French law now apparently thinks this is illegal. This cannot be good news for sellers or or buyers: it can’t be good news for anyone but the perfume companies, who can now keep their prices as high as they like.
eBay have said they will appeal the decision. In a statement published on eBay Ink, they said
today’s ruling is about an attempt by LVMH to protect uncompetitive commercial practices at the expense of consumer choice and the livelihood of law-abiding sellers that eBay empowers everyday. We believe that this ruling represents a loss not only for us but for consumers and small businesses selling online, therefore we will appeal … The attempt to use the ruling to confuse the separate issues of counterfeit and restrictive sales suggests that counterfeit suits are being used by certain brand owners as a stalking-horse issue to reinforce their control over the market.
It’s crucial that the two issues are kept separate, because they are different: fakes destroy buyers’ trust in eBay; bargain branded goods are what keep them coming back. However much as sellers we might want eBay to do more to keep fakes off the site, no seller should be supporting the perfume houses’ attempts to control their markets.
Let’s talk about communicating
June 28, 2008
If there was a theme to this year’s eBay Live, it was “talk to us”. “We want your feedback.” “We could have done a better job of communication; we’ll try harder in the future.” “We crave information about what people think.” (John Donahoe, Brian Burke and Jamie Ianonne respectively) By the time that Ryan stood up in the PowerSeller Panel to tell us about his innovations for Customer Service, and in particular about some changes which should match eBay customers with agents who can answer their question the first time, without multiple irrelevent cut and paste emails beforehand, eBay was sounding like a company that had really changed: I thought they not only wanted to speak to their customers, but they were busy figuring out just how to do that.
By coincidence, that same day, I received an email from a PowerSeller (who we’ll call Mike). He wrote
I have been a loyal and trusted e-bayer for over 4 years with 1340 positives and just 3 negatives (one of which has now been resolved) with an average feedback % of 99.6 !!
Despite numerous e-mails back and forth I have not been able to resolve the problem, or indeed find out exactly how I have breached their policy.
I took a look over the account and unless there are some PayPal issues he’s not telling me about, I don’t see why Mike’s been suspended. But more importantly, I don’t see why eBay haven’t told him why he’s been suspended.
As eBay take steps to clean up the site, most sellers who lose their accounts are going to know exactly why that’s happened: but some, the dolphins, the “edge-cases”, are not going to understand. If eBay are going to suspend selling accounts for a neg or two, or a small handful of neutrals or 1s and 2s on DSRs, they need to be prepared to deal with that properly: they need to explain to sellers exactly what the problem is, and what they need to do to rectify it. We need out-bound customer service calls, not just for those with account managers, but for everyone. And if they are going to put people on a month’s warning, that too needs to be followed up with a phone call, explaining you’ve had too many PayPal complaints, or your DSRs have slipped badly. eBay need to communicate when we need to communicate, not just when it suits them.
Someone, somewhere at eBay is now reading this and shaking their head and asking if I know how many CS agents that would take. No, of course I don’t because I don’t know how many sellers you’ve suspended. But I would respectfully suggest that if it is more sellers than half a dozen agents could deal with in a week, then you’ve suspended too many people. In your rush to do the right thing, you’ve caught up too many innocent sellers in your net. Change the criteria. Get rid of the really bad people first, and then you can look again at your edge-cases and see if they’re really deserving of suspension, or if they just had a bad month last month.
This morning, I had another email from Mike, telling me that his account had been reinstated. Good news, but he still didn’t know why he’d been suspended. Though eBay support had phoned him, they “were totally unprepared to give any explanation as to their actions and flatly refused to discuss the matter any further”.
eBay’s upper management say that they are committed to communicating better with their members. They ask us to let them prove that. But they seem to have a problem themselves communicating this to the rest of their staff, who act in the same Kafkaesque arbitrary way, totally failing to communicate with the ordinary users whose livelihoods are being put at risk by these policies.
Yes, eBay talk a lot about communicating, but where they really need to start doing it, is amongst themselves.
Just two sellers qualify as Diamond PSs
June 27, 2008
eBay market researchers Sellerdome have revealed the qualifiers for eBay’s new Diamond PowerSeller status: just two companies will make the grade: buy and sporting goods retailer poor_fish. Diamond PowerSellers have to have 98% feedback with 4.8+ on all DSRs, and will need to turn over more than $500,000 a month on eBay.
Seller’s Story : why we’re quitting eBay
June 26, 2008
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.
Identity confirmation about to commence
June 24, 2008
eBay have started to prompt users to update their account information with a splash screen when logging in. This is in preperation for when they commence verifying the computer you normally use is the one you’re logged into when listing on eBay.
You can change your telephone numbers on eBay in your eBay account preferences.
Choice listings, anonymous email, but definitely not PayPal only on eBay.com
June 18, 2008
Adam Trachtenberg, eBay’s Director of Product Management for Platform & Services, gave an overview this morning of where eBay is going in the new few months. Though this was aimed primarily at developers, it provides some great news, and some not so great news, for sellers as to what we can expect for the rest of the year.
Project Echo : merchandising API
This will enable cross-merchandising, in the same way that many websites now highlight “people who bought x also bought y” items. Data based on geography, buying and search histories and user profile will be made available, as well as currently popular items.
Four new API calls have been released: most watched, deals, related category items and top selling products. More are on their way!
Improvements for large sellers
eBay aim to become more efficient and responsive to the needs of larger sellers, with a better API and business process support. Processing will be faster and there will be fewer timeouts with an asynchronous bulk interface: in effect, sellers will be able to manage their entire business away from My eBay, and will be able to organise inventory by their own SKU rather than by eBay item number.
Choice listings are coming
Sellers will be able to list variants of the same item: by colour, size, memory, material etc., compressing multiple listings into one single listing offering buyers a range of options. Interestingly, this was presented as enhancing the *buyer* experience by cutting down near-duplicate listings: I think eBay are missing a trick there, because many sellers have begged and pleaded for years to be allowed to offer real choice listings.
Changes to email communications
Sellers will be able to specify more than one email for message-forwarding: for example, customer service emails from buyers can go to one address, and eBay invoices to another.
Emails between sellers and buyers prior to a sale are being anonymised: buyer email addresses will no longer be visible on ASQs, though “reply” will still work as eBay will handle mapping between the anonymised email and the buyer’s actual email. Post-sale, both parties will be able to see each other’s email addresses. This should - say eBay - cut down on fraud: it will of course also limit off-site sales, and many sellers will complain that it will restrict communication between trading partners. They should also note that it will no longer be permitted to display an email address within the body of a listing.
Mandating essential information
eBay are forcing sellers to include information material to the transaction, some of which has previously been optional for inclusion within a listing. For example, on .com sellers must specify at least one domestic shipping service with pricing, as well as handling time, which will be used to display an estimated arrival time to buyers. A returns policy and who pays for the return of the item will also have to be specified, though on .com at least “no returns accepted” remains an acceptable policy (the same does not apply in most of Europe).
A consistant and safe checkout experience
Various approaches are being tested over different national sites: eBay Australia will (perhaps) be PayPal-only from mid-July, and UK sellers must offer PayPal though may offer other payment methods too. The US will “definitively” not be made PayPal-only, though eBay are “looking at data and talking to people” about the way forward on this issue.
New applications for third-party checkouts have now been closed: as a buyer, I can’t help but cheer here. I’ve been buying on eBay for nearly a decade and I still hate 3P checkouts, so how must new buyers feel?
A whitelist approach to HTML
Currently, eBay have adopted a blacklist approach to HTML, CSS and javascript, blocking known-bad code from use on the site. This will change to a whitelist approach, whereby known-good code will be permitted and everything else blocked. For the majority of sellers, this won’t make any difference whatsoever (Adam joked that there will be no block against ugly templates 
) but anyone using javascript and Flash widgets within their templates may be impacted.
In an attempt to limit possible damage from bad code, descriptions will now be served from a seperate domain so that scraping of sign-in information within the eBay site should no longer be possible.
Verification of new sellers
New sellers will have to complete telephone verification and one of either PayPal or Live Chat verification once they have sold their first few listings, or when attempting to list a high dollar amount. This should keep the site a little more secure.
Adam wrapped up with what is definitely the theme of this DevCon: “we want your feedback”. eBay are certainly doing their best to appear to be listening to developers: they need to make buyers and sellers too feel that they’re being listened too. With big hints that “more change is coming”, the rest of this week is shaping up to be very interesting indeed.
Stores shipping prices now editable even after sales
June 13, 2008
eBay.com have made a great change for Store owners: shipping details can now be edited on SIF listings which have already made sales.
Previously, neither shipping price nor shipping services could be edited on a multiple item SIF listing if an item had already been sold. If shipping prices changed or the seller switched shipping provider, the listing had to be ended and relisted. But not any longer: sellers can change shipping details relative to future purchases, though obviously the offered price and carrier will remain the same for purchases made prior to the change.
This should make Stores’ owners’ lives so much easier; lets hope it rolls out to other eBay sites very soon.
Will UK sellers be forced to accept international cheques?
June 10, 2008
eBay UK have just announced some updates to their payments policy, specifically a new section titled ‘Misleading and Discouraging Payments’:
Sellers who state in their listing that they accept certain payment methods must not selectively offer those payment methods to buyers or discourage buyers from using those payment methods.
A similar policy was introduced in Australia last September, where examples were given of sellers saying “I only accept PayPal for payments over $10″ or “I only accept PayPal from overseas customers, not domestic ones”. To this, I think we can add “eBay are forcing me to say I accept PayPal, but in fact I only really want payment by cheque”, as I’ve seen UK sellers start to do recently.
If it were a policy that only related to PayPal, I’d be content: making things clearer and simpler for buyers has to be good for all sellers, and a few sellers having silly bits of small print designed to get around eBay policies is unacceptable.
But the policy doesn’t say “PayPal only”. Does this mean if your payment terms say you accept cheques, you have to accept them from the whole world? Are UK sellers listing worldwide going to be forced to accept cheques in Euros, Dollars and Yen? Many sellers will just not be able to deal with cheques in other currencies, so if the policy does apply to cheques, they will be forced to stop offering them. Is this PayPal-only by the back door?
Yet again, this new policy seems to have been introduced by people who have absolutely no experience of trading on the site. It needs clarification, and it needs it now.
eBid to offer eBay import tool
June 7, 2008
Here’s an interesting little snippet from this morning’s eBid newsletter:
With a large influx of new users joining us from other auction sites, we have been asked many times for a way to import auctions from these sites. This is something we have decided to follow up and will soon have the facility ready for use.
Like many eBay sellers, my own objection to trying some eBid listings has mainly been the time I would have to put in to list on another auction site; while I’m unconvinced the sales will justify the effort, I simply haven’t bothered. Offering an easy import tool would undoubtedly encourage me and many others to try some eBid listings, so we’ll be interested to have a look at this when it launches.
eBid also say that May 2008 was “our busiest month ever in terms of sales made by our sellers”. I’m really happy to see them talking about sales made, rather than items listed. It will be interesting to see if the trend continues.
Meet the new feedback hub…
June 4, 2008
… same as the old feedback hub.
When eBay promised to implement “a dedicated hub for sellers to report malicious or unfair feedback from buyers”, I think many of us imagined something rather magnificent, a magical interface which would, by the power of eBay, protect us from buyers who want something for nothing or they’ll neg us out of business. We certainly imagined - or at least I did - that it wouldn’t be the same old report form going to the same old support people, with - presumably - the same rather patchy results.
But it is.
Pinkie James has just revealed on Q&A that the “report a problem form we spotted the other day is *it*, the long-awaited hub.
All snark aside, right now eBay need to be working to restore seller confidence in them. I’ve been shocked more than I can say over the last week or three, at the depth of calm anger that serious business people have expressed at eBay. The people threatening to leave now are not those who just sell the odd item they pick up in a car boot sale; these are people with employees and warehouses and serious businesses, and they cannot, they say, risk trading on eBay any more.
Promising something “dedicated”, and then that turning out to mean “email custard support as normal”, is not the way to counteract that. I can only hope that James has been misinformed and that something more robust and responsive is on its way soon.
Thanks to Denny for the heads-up.
Why SNP restrictions need reviewing
June 4, 2008
Looking back over the years eBay have on numerous occasions been hammered in the press for the conduct of sellers on the site. Watchdog in particular have an almost annual pop at them (watch out for another program in the Autumn or early Winter, they’ve had one for the last two years running at that time of year).
eBay have had to take steps to clean up their site, and those steps have inevitably involved setting a bar for acceptable seller behaviour.
eBay had to set the bar somewhere, and no matter how high or low it might be there would always be some borderline cases or “dolphins“. Lower or raise the bar and it’ll simply result in a different set of sellers being borderline.
The big question shouldn’t be “Are the wrong sellers getting caught in the net”, it should be “How should eBay handle borderline cases”.
I have no problem at all with eBay taking action against accounts which are blatantly giving abysmal service and removing them from the site. However being an innocent victim of an over-enthusiastically applied policy and having your income removed for 30 days seems more than a little harsh to say the least.
It would appear fairer if borderline cases could be handled more gently by applying an alternative “speed bump”. Some eBay sites still use different penalties such as a 14 day listing restriction without cancelling any live listings already running, so there are options that could be considered.
I’m aware of the argument that in the past sellers undergoing a selling restriction may have abused the grace period, making as many sales as possible and in some cases giving even worse service than before. Borderline cases such as those with non-positive feedback from a single buyer, or those with only neutrals and no negatives in the last 30 days are the ones most likely to take positive action in my opinion.
eBay have to take a stand to protect buyers and the future of the site for the thousands of sellers giving superb service, but eBay must protect good sellers from becoming victims of the maths of their new policies, especially low-volume sellers who can easily be damaged by one random, rogue bidder.
We spoke to eBay and they have this message for sellers: “We appreciate the situation you’re in. Firstly we’d emphasise that many of the 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. And we’re doing what we can to encourage buyers to communicate with sellers at the point of giving potential negative Feedback.”
It’s impossible to attain the flawless service eBay aim for all of the time - even a brand new product can be faulty, or a delivery go missing en route. Whilst sellers aim for perfection, sometimes they (myself included) fall short.
There is light at the end of the tunnel though, eBay also said: “With regards to the new criteria for account restrictions we’re well aware of the uncertainty some sellers are feeling and are continuously fine tuning our policies to be ever more effective in targeting the right sellers. We’re also reviewing the nature of some of these restrictions and how best we communicate the policies.”
Hopefully that will also include reviewing those sellers already classed as borderline and unable to currently trade.
How much communication is too much?
June 3, 2008
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
June 3, 2008
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.
How I increased my P&P DSR by 2 points
May 30, 2008
It’s been over a year since DSRs raised their head on the eBay landscape, and I have to admit to start with I treated them with pretty much the healthy contempt I treated feedback with.
I never used to look at my feedback, and remember with horror the morning I woke up to a message on the PowerSeller board saying “Sorry to see you got negged”. It wasn’t so much that I’d got a neg that caught me off guard (and yes it was undeserved 
), it was more the fact that someone else noticed before I did.
There really wasn’t much cause to look at feedback in those days, so I never did. Taking the attitude that if I gave customers great service feedback would look after itself it was one of the least referenced pages of my eBay real estate.
DSRs didn’t make much difference either. Sure eBay were banging on about how they would become relevant in the future but mine were ok, or so I thought.
Then one day eBay introduced seller discounts and the possibility that competitors could be advantaged in search compared to me. Overnight DSRs and feedback had became very important.
My DSRs weren’t that bad though, but what gave me a jolt was that my Postage and Packing DSR was 4.6, any lower and I wouldn’t qualify for seller discounts.
I immediately set about examining how I worked, with the sole aim of improving my P&P DSR without impacting any of the others which have consistently been in the 4.8-4.9 range.
The big question is “Was I one of the fee avoiding postage gouging baddies”, and in truth I have to admit that I was. Certainly I’d never considered myself in that light, and to this day my postage costs are higher than many competitors due to two factors: Everything I ship goes on a priority tracked service and that costs, and I’m VAT registered so have to charge VAT in addition to the basic packing and shipping costs.
That aside I always rounded postage up to the nearest £1 for Royal Mail items, and for courier items the heavier the item the more I charged, even though I was invoiced a flat rate up to 30kg. I figured that buyers would be more than willing to pay a higher price to have a 25kg printer delivered than they would a 2kg docking station. Plus in truth on a lot of items I simply guesstimated the cost with a healthy margin of error - pure laziness on my part.
Ruthlessly I went about cutting postage, on the heaviest items by as much as 25% and it’s paid dividends. Some items I have switched to cost effective Royal Mail, instead of shipping via more expensive couriers, but that’s been a slow process as next day delivery is not guaranteed - Protecting my dispatch DSR was a priority and buyers don’t rate sellers on how quickly they ship, simply on how long it takes the parcel to arrive.
As a result of the changes my P&P DSR has risen from 4.6 to 4.8 with my other three ratings all remaining at 4.9. One of the most useful tools has been the Seller Dashboard (even though it was the lite version), as it enabled me to monitor changes over a short period of time. A change in postage prices could be seen in DSR ratings within about two weeks of making the change.
So what does this mean for me, and what does it mean to eBay? Well in truth I have to say that DSRs have made me a better seller, or at least have made me act like a better seller. Whilst profits are down very slightly it’s not much, I’ve simply lumped the difference onto the selling price and the difference in fees is more than covered by Seller Discounts.
My aim now will be to further increase my P&P DSR from 4.8 to 4.9, again without impacting my other DSRs. Whilst there may not be any immediate benefit, when Best Match fully rolls out in the UK those with the highest DSR scores will benefit most.
Another one bites the dust
May 30, 2008
Stuart had three PowerSeller accounts; he was on target to meet his goal for 2008 of £250,000 in turnover, and was paying eBay the equivalent of £30,000 a year in fees. He had no warning at all of a possible problem, until one day, in the middle of listing, his account suddenly stopped working.
At first, he thought it was a glitch, but then the email arrived: his account had been linked with another which was NARU, and so was itself suspended from trading for 12 months. The account, it turned out, was one that Stuart had not touched for two years and was not in fact registered to him at all. It belonged to a former business partner, who had closed down the business after Stu had left, and owed eBay £120 in fees.
£120 seemed a small amount to pay to be allowed to carry on trading, so Stuart paid off that bill. He then contacted Trust and Safety, informing them what he’d done and asking them to reinstate his own account. He told me, “their responses were robotic, it’s really frustrating that you can’t speak to anyone to get it sorted,” and as for PowerSeller Support,”they talk to you like you’re a scam artist.” Despite the fact that the account that wasn’t his didn’t owe any money anymore, no one would reinstate his account.
In April, Stu attended Channel Advisor Catalyst and managed to speak to an eBay employee face to face. He felt a glimmer of hope that someone would see that his suspension was ridiculous, someone would take pity on him, someone would make a business decision that his £30k a year fees were worth having.
Four weeks passed by. Stu chased up eBay. And chased them again. And then he had a letter, telling him that eBay “cannot make exceptions on a case by case basis on a marketplace of this size”, and his account would stay suspended for the full 12 months. Computer says no.
His two employees have unfortunately had to be let go, but Stu remains positive. He’s making a go of his websites and trading on Amazon. His gardening website has done more business in the last two months than in the previous two years, but things are nowhere near the level they were on eBay. He’s building things up again from the bottom, and that takes time.
I really admire Stu’s guts. Plenty of people would have thrown in the towel and gone and got a job, but he still sounds cheerful. “What will you do next March,” I ask him. “Will you apply to have the suspension lifted, when you can?”
He laughs. “I feel like never going back. But it’s easy to say that now. I probably will ask them to reinstate the account, but I won’t be selling on eBay at the same level, I’ll never rely on eBay again.” Stu was, he says, always one of the people who promoted eBay, to his friends, family and work colleagues, but not any more: “they don’t appreciate how what they do affects peoples’ lives,” he says.
Tomorrow, we’ll be looking at what you can do to protect your business against a bolt-from-the-blue eBay suspension.
Expanded Seller Dashboard goes live on eBay UK
May 28, 2008
The expanded Seller Dashboard has gone live on eBay UK, and it is the all singing all dancing version showing DSRs to 1/100ths.
Their only appear to be two differences to the US version - Search Standing is only “Standard” or “Lowered”, with no “Raised” (To get standard visibility your DSRs need to be all 4.4 or above, in the US it’s 4.6 on P&P for standard and 4.7 on all 4 DSRs for raised). The second difference is that there’s no Buyer Satisfaction rating on the UK version. Buyer Satisfaction is measured from your DSRs, your overall Feedback rating, and any buyer protection claims against your eBay account.
I’m not sure why Buyer Satisfaction ratings aren’t included in the UK dashboard, as the help pages state they are used to calculate whether you have earned Standard or Lowered Search standing. This part of the Seller Dashboard on eBay.com is blocked for UK registered users.
Overall the Dashboard is a great utility for measuring your eBay performance, and now it’s like on the UK site I’m guessing there will be a lot of users visiting the utility over the next day or two and a lot of threads on discussion boards 
Recent Comments
- Whirly: #3 you don’t deserve one after having a 1p listing festival you jammy blighter.
- Chris Dawson: #1 I didn’t get a voucher either
If anyone has one and wants to spend it with me... - northumbrian: the only fault with that bling thing is if anything it makes the item look to good
- faculty-x: us techies are honoured at the mo from ebay or the ones that have dropped off ebay the most, us...
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- Whirly: No voucher for me which is a pain as I need some stuff I know a buyer who will get one, he likes...
- Whirly: #2 If you build the fee’s into your sale price I think it’s a justifiable expense, we regularly...
- Trish Connolly: I need to dissagree with part of your statement. You say, “I’ve met many buyers who are more...
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