Scheduled maintenance…
September 17, 2008
If you can see this message, you’re looking at the new server.
Both the domain name and the site may be a little erratic today, as we are moving servers. I apologise for any inconvenience this causes anyone. I’m also aware that avatars are not working on the forum…
Going Live
June 14, 2008
So like the rest of the eBay-blogosphere, today I’m writing a post about how I’m leaving for eBay Live in rather less than 24 hours. I’m getting a little concerned at the number of people who’ve said things like “I’ll miss you”: we’re only going to Chicago, not up the real Big River, and besides, the whole point of Chris’ and my going is so that we can blog it. The blogging will not stop - though the time difference might make it seem a little odd.
If TameBay isn’t enough for you to stay in touch, here are some other ways to keep up to date with what’s happening at Live:
- point your RSS readers at the eBay Live 2008 Yahoo Pipe I just made, aggregating lots of feeds from bloggers who will be there, including eBay’s official coverage
- watch the Flickr group which will have photos from Live (assuming I defy tradition and remember to take my camera lead)
- lovely Monique reminds us that Friday’s keynote and Saturday’s town hall will both be webcast
It’ll be almost like you’re there!
PS If anyone knows about the Twitter API and has ten minutes for me sometime today, I will shower you with gratitude and eBay swag/French chocolate…
TameBay gets a new look
May 17, 2008
If you’re a regular visitor to TameBay you’ve probably noticed the site has just changed as our sparkly new design went live at a minute past midnight today!
We’ve listened to loads of our regular readers and what they want from the site and how they use it so you’ll notice things like featured posts which keep top stories on the front page for longer. The page is a lot shorter but you’ll still find the latest news stories in the center column, and there’s more space on the side to display you, our readers comments.
The navigation bars at the top will help you find the topics you’re interested in and of course the link to the TameBay forum.
As most of you know Sue and I jointly run TameBay, but what you may not know is that it’s Sue who does all of the techie stuff behind the scenes. It’s taken her many many hours of work to create the new site and the result speaks for itself.
Many thanks to all the readers who have let us know what you wanted from the site, but most of all a huge personal thanks from me to Sue, as she’s the one that has designed and built our fantastic new site.
Have your say with Skribit
May 12, 2008
Our more scrolly readers may have noticed that for the last few days, there’s been a new widget in the sidebar. This box from start-up Skribit allows you to post questions or topics that you’d like to see covered round here. You can also vote up other people’s suggestions, so we get an idea of which suggestions are more popular.
So have at it. Normal rules around here apply: anything spammy or abusively sweary will be deleted.
And if you have more to say than just a question, pop over to the forum for help, a chat or a rant.
An apology
April 3, 2008
Well, that was a fun twenty-four hours. I apologise to anyone who’s tried to get in here in the last day or so; as you saw, TameBay was down. Commenting is currently disabled on all posts. We do hope to restore that as soon as possible, but in the meantime, please come and talk in the forum.
Editing comments
February 9, 2008
Just a quick note to say that as requested by Lynne, Jade and others, it’s now possible to edit comments. You have two three minutes (approximately) from leaving your comment in which you can edit it: after that time, the edit function will not be available.
Please feel free to have a play with this function in the comments on this post 
If you have any problem with it, PLEASE PLEASE leave me a comment including what error message you got, if any, and exactly what you saw and how that differed from what you were expecting to see. Also let me know what browser you’re using. (Mac people, that goes double for you; my current Mac testing facilities are horribly out of date, so I’m relying on you 
)
Avatars for blog comments
December 14, 2007
Amongst other bits of fiddling about today, I’ve installed support for gravatars, that is, avatars to go with your blog comments. Gravatars can appear next to your comments on any site that has them available, not just on TameBay - and if you have multiple online personae, you can even configure different avatars to use with different email addresses.
As well as being a bit of fun, I know we have a few commenters on here who share the same name, so hopefully this might help distinguish between them! If you want to sign up, all you have to do is go to gravatar.com and upload your image. If you want your website logo or something commercial, that’s fine by us, but we do ask that your avatar conforms to a “PG” rating or lower.
And if you want to see how it looks, I’ll leave a comment below. Hope to see your avatar there too!
Friday maintenance
December 14, 2007
If it all goes a bit wonky round here, it’s because I’m just upgrading Wordpress. Please go play in the forum for a while.
Update: Everything working *except* what happens when you leave a comment. The comment posts, but the pages don’t behave correctly..
No, apparently I made you feel shiny and new
50,000 reasons to congratulate Sue
December 5, 2007
It’s a busy time of year and most sellers are run off their feet packing orders, but imagine packing 50,000 orders on your own. That’s what Sue has just achieved, and at the same time has just received her 10,000th unique feedback becoming a Shooting Star on eBay!
I’m totally in awe of Sue. Most sellers on eBay that are Shooting Stars work for a company with employees, but Sue has packed every one of those 50,000 orders on her own. 10,000 separate customers have purchased five times each on average, and that’s a tribute to the service she gives.
I always think I know eBay pretty well, but Sue has ten times the experience that I do. I’m immensely proud to be her co-blogger and can’t thank her enough for the times she’s helped me over the years.
Sue has a truly amazing record on eBay, her repeat sales have long been the envy of many sellers, her feedback is outstanding, and 50,000 feedbacks is probably the highest number anyone has ever had at the time of achieving their Shooting Star.
I should point out that Sue forbade me from doing this post dismissing it with the comment “Feedback doesn’t pay the bills”. I’m probably in big trouble now but she deserves recognition for her fantastic eBay business, so…
Sue I salute you, you’re amazing!
Have you got something to say?
December 3, 2007
Have you got something to say? Something you want to tell the rest of the eBaying world? Now you can. We’ll shortly be introducing a new, regular feature on TameBay: “Have Your Say”. Like our guest posts, this gives people other than Chris or myself the chance to.. well, have their say.
We’ll be looking for thoughtful, insightful, passionate and/or funny pieces about any aspect of your eBay life or ecommerce in general. Though we don’t require you to be positive, we will ask that you’re rational: “eBay’s rubbish” won’t get published; “eBay’s rubbish and this is why” just might.
In return, we offer absolutely no money, but we will send as much traffic as we can your way. 
If you’ve got something to say, then do mail Chris or myself (remove “REMOVE” from either address). We look forward to hearing from you.
The Small Print
The editors (that’s Chris and myself) reserve the right to edit for length and clarity. We reserve the right to refuse any submission. We will not accept anonymous submissions or requests for anonymous publication.
Move over, Scorsese
November 13, 2007
TameBay’s 1st Birthday Party
November 11, 2007
Thank you vzaar for a fantastic party!
Last night TameBay held their first Birthday Party in Manchester, following a great day at eBay University. I didn’t manage to count how many people turned up, but the bar was pretty full and it took about ten minutes to fight my way to the bar for my first drink. The venue was superb, Bar 38 is a fantastic venue for a party and top marks to Sue for finding such a great place close to the eBay University.
As well as loads of eBay buyers and sellers some eBay staff took the time to relax after a busy day. For those that know him MoggieX put in a surprise appearance, great to see him again after so long!
The raffle winners were delighted with their eBay related goodies, none more so than Karen from patterns*2*sew, who won the limited edition gold pin set from eBay Live! in Boston this year. Her son collects pins and she can’t wait to hand them over.
A real surprise was the birthday cake ChannelAdvisor were kind enough to make. Sue and I were both really touched by their kindness.
We’d like to thank everyone who came to the party, everyone who’s supported us and TameBay over the last year, but most especially Emma, Adrian and Dan from vzaar for putting on such a great event to celebrate our first year of blogging.
TameBay are having a party!
October 11, 2007
It’s coming up to a year since TameBay launched so we’ve decided to throw a party, and everyone who reads TameBay is invited.
The venue is Bar 38 in Manchester, the date is 10th November, the time is 6.30pm onwards. TameBay will be providing drinks, some nibbles and a free to enter raffle with some great eBay-related prizes. If you’re after a coveted mug, this could be your chance.
The party is on the same day as the last eBay University of the year, so if you’re attending the Uni come straight over to the party afterwards. If you’re not going to the Uni just come to Bar 38 and make your way to the Mezzanine Floor which is reserved for TameBay.
Sue and I hope to see you there, and would like to thank vzaar who are our fantastic sponsors for the event.
Watching them, watching us watching them
September 7, 2007
Yay, those lovely people over at The Chatter just linked us! Thanks, Renee!
You and Yours and yours truly
September 6, 2007
Today I went to the BBC to answer questions on “You and Yours“. I went because I disagree with the court case which the program discussed. At times I’ve had plenty of niggles with eBay and I’ve often voiced my concerns quite vociferiously. This isn’t one of them.
The court case concerns whether a listing appears on the site the instant you click the submit button. The real answer is that it hardly ever does! It doesn’t matter how much computing power you have, it takes time to index ten million listings and to make sure every word, in every title, appears in default search results. It’s even worse when you consider how many words there are in a typical eBay listing, that have to be catalogued for “Title and Description” searches.
Now eBay do a pretty good job but even at the best of times it may be a couple of hours before your listing is correctly indexed. If you’re worried that your listing isn’t on the site you can search to make certain that it is. eBay have a facility to tell you exactly where you auction is, just enter the item number and select “Find location of item”.
Back to the court case, eBay are being sued because of the delay between submitting an auction and it appearing on the site. No one has been able to indicate just how this harms a seller, John Fabry, the Houston lawyer leading the prosecution when asked what actual harm is occuring avoided the question and instead talked about California’s strict auction laws. When asked what damages he hoped to win he simply said for eBay to either deliver the exact time period offered or to clearly explain there may be a delay before the auction appears on the site.
It seems trivial to me, there may be a delay until my auction appears in search results on the site but does it really matter? Suppose Fabry wins his case and eBay run all auctions to the second, I list at 8pm Sunday evening for seven days, there’s a delay of six hours so eBay tack six hours on the end to give me my full seven days - Do I really want my auction finishing at 2am Monday morning when all the bidders are asleep in bed? I think not!
Due to delays sellers will claim Fixed Price listings may have missed out on sales, which is a very valid point. Fixed price listings are a seperate matter and aren’t addressed by the current court case. The few hours delay at the start of an auction don’t in my opinion have any major impact as most bids come in the closing minutes. It’s at the end of an auction that visibility is critical.
There could be a case for eBay to make partial refunds or extend auctions where the delay is more than a couple of hours. Partial refunds (especially for auctions with low starting prices hence low insertion fees) would be negligable. Listing enhancements are not charged according to the length of an auction so no refund would be due. Extending an auction by a day may be a suitable option, but that in itself would cause problems - if Thursday evening is your best night for sales would you want your auction finishing on a Friday instead?
The best option for sellers is to list items knowing exactly when their auctions will end. Time them to maximise on buyers placing bids. Accept that there may be a delay and choose your start times accordingly, but don’t call for eBay to tamper with an auction finish time.
One of ours on You & Yours
September 6, 2007
Make sure you listen to Radio 4’s You & Yours today, which will be featuring a certain Chris Dawson not unknown around here. It’s on today at 12.04pm: you can listen live via the Radio 4 website, or “listen again” if you miss it the first time round.
Listen Again will be available after 3pm.
VAT on Paypal fees?
June 10, 2007
I like looking at the Google search strings that have led people to TameBay: it’s interesting to watch the trends come and go, seeing WAGs hoodies replaced with Webkinz at the moment, for example. Then there are the questions that come up again and again, and I’m going to make a conscious effort to answer some of them. One common one that’s shown up again today is about VAT on Paypal fees. I see this question on the eBay boards too, typically “how do I find out the VAT element paid on my Paypal fees”.
The nice simple answer is that there *is* no VAT element paid on your Paypal fees. Financial services, including Paypal, are exempt from VAT, and therefore none is charged.
Don’t you wish all questions had such a straightforward answer
Media tarts
May 2, 2007
Mountie and I, and TameBay itself, along with our chums from Postal Supplies, are all featured in the Telegraph this morning as part of Dan’s “How to eBay” series. Many thanks to Dan for an excellent series.
Introducing TameBay’s forum
April 11, 2007
We’ve had more than a few people ask over the last months why there isn’t a TameBay forum to go with the blog. We’re happy to be able to announce that now, there is. We hope to have a frank and positive discussion about the online auction industry and ecommerce in general, and a place you can ask other eBayers for advice.
Please come and join us. If you want to use your eBay ID, that’s great (for security’s sake, please choose a different password though): if you prefer to stay anonymous, that’s fine. We hope it’ll be a fun and informative place to visit whether you’re a buyer, a seller, or just interested in what’s going on around the eBay world.
New payouts for eBay Affiliates
February 20, 2007
If you’re an eBay UK affiliate, you should have received an email today notifying you of some major changes to affiliate revenues, starting March 1st. For most people, these should be good news, as the old flat fees, starting at 10p for a bid and 12p for a BIN, are being scrapped, to be replaced with a new “revenue sharing model”. In other words, send eBay buyers of expensive items, and you’ll be rewarded for that.
Details of exactly how this will work are yet to emerge. It’s not clear whether affiliates will still be paid for unsuccessful bids, for example, nor exactly what the “revenue” on which payments are calculated is - FVFs are the obvious assumption, but this may not be strictly the case. I’m hoping to see an end to what I think is the biggest con in the current payment structure:
The eBay.co.uk programme compensates for one bid or Buy-It-Now (BIN) per click from your website. Therefore, your site links must be used as navigation to the eBay.co.uk site prior to every bid or BIN transaction in order for you to be compensated.
Other affiliate programs, notably Amazon
At the same time, payments for ACRUs (new account sign ups) have been reduced:
| Monthly total | Old Rate | New Rate |
|---|---|---|
| 1-49 | £7 | £7 |
| 50-149 | £9 | £8 |
| 150-500 | £11 | |
| 501-1000 | £12 | £9 |
| 1001-1500 | £13 | |
| 1501-2000 | £10 | |
| 2000+ | £14 |
I suspect this will affect some affiliates much more than others: here at TameBay, unsurprisingly, we get very few new registrations, because almost all our readers are already eBay members. If you have a site that’s specifically designed to capitalise on this previously most generous part of the program, though, you might be a little more bothered at such a huge slashing of rates.
So, how is it for you? Are you dancing all the way to the bank tonight?
Four comments about comments
February 20, 2007
I want just to mention a couple of things about comments on TameBay. This isn’t a “comments policy” as such: I don’t want to do anything so formal. But when the gentleman from eBay Motors Suck accuses us of “sensorship” because his post got held for moderation, it’s time to be a little more explicit than we have been.
1. We believe that comments are basically good… Most people who blog like comments, just like eBayers like feedback. Chris and I are no different. Whether you want to put “good post” or “you’re talking rubbish”, or post a long critique or response, that’s all good.
2. Linking to commercial websites is okay. Most people who read TameBay are involved in online commerce in one way or another. Linking your website or your eBay shop in the “website” section of the comments is not only permitted, it’s actively encouraged. But…
3. Commenting JUST to post a link is spam and it will be deleted. Links to sites which promote illegal and eBay-illegal activities, such as the purchasing of feedback, or comments which do this directly, will also be removed.
Furthermore, pretending to be one of your own customers telling us how wonderful your product is, is spam. If you think your product should be featured on TameBay, then do it the honest way: contact us and we can talk.
4. Comments which contain two or more links (this was you, Mr E.M.S.) will be held for moderation (i.e. we will check to see if it’s spam), simply because posting long lists of links is what comment spammers often do. Relevent content will, of course, be approved.
Hope that makes things clear. If you have any comments, you know what to do
Edited 27th March 2007 to add: Comments containing hate speech will be removed.
Edited 4th September 2007 to add : Comments making personally antagonistic remarks about named eBay staff, who are unable to respond here, may be removed.
Moving from Blogger to Wordpress
February 1, 2007
Well that was surprisingly painless. For those who care about such things, TameBay is now running on Wordpress. I wanted to move to gain a variety of fun new functionality, most of which I’ve now forgotten, but there is a search box over there on the right, in case you’re looking for wise words buried in the depths of the archives.
With thanks to Dr Mike for pointing out to me that for Wordpress-hosted blogs, you need to look at the documentation on wordpress.com; if you’re hosting your own, you need to look at the Codex on wordpress.org. Now I’ve been told it, it makes sense - but for an absolute newbie, especially one coming in from Google, there’s little to indicate that what you’re reading might not be relevent to the set-up you’re about to implement. If I were Wordpress, I’d have some big fat indicators (*at the very least* different ‘branding’ in the form of very different stylesheets) to indicate which set of files relate to which product, and I’d make it even more obvious that the two are different.
However, biggest thanks of the day go to Ady Romantika for the New Blogger import plugin, without which, I wouldn’t have sorted it til next week.
Old news is no news
January 8, 2007
ebaypaypalblog reported the opening of Paypal’s new UK office and a reduction in the withdrawl fee for amounts under £50, quoting a Paypal spokesperson’s statement that this would increase trust and comfort for UK buyers. Such a great story was picked up by both auctionforums.org and eBayyer (lacking permalinks, scroll down to 5th January post, identical to source). The only problem? The story actually dates from October 2003. Oops
CLD feed part two : Spreading the good news
November 26, 2006
Yesterday we released our Cheap Listing Day Calendar as an rss feed so that you can stay bang up to date with eBay’s special offers. Today, we’re going one step further, and offering you the opportunity to add the CLD Calendar to your own site, absolutely free, and dead simple to do.
If your webhosting allows you to include files, then all you need to do is to use PHP, Perl, SSI or ASP etc. to get the file http://www.tamebay.com/cld.html. If you want to use CSS to control the appearance of the CLD Calendar, that’s fine! The entire list is a ul with the class “cld-ul”, each item is a “cld-li”, and the links are “cld-link”.
If your webhosting doesn’t allow included files, then you should upgrade your webhosting you can use an iframe to include the same file (though do note that the main document stylesheet will not be applied to a document in an iframe. Sorry.)
One word of caution: sadly, none of these methods may be used on eBay itself: files included from off-site are just not allowed.
The Small Print
We are offering this service free of charge. No guarantees of accuracy or uptime are offered or implied. Our code remains copyright to us, and you may not modify it in any way without our explicit written permission. Play nice, people
CLD feed part one : Keeping up to date
November 25, 2006
You may have already spotted our Cheap Listing Day Calendar over there in the side bar, keeping you up to date with the crazy number of CLDs eBay have offered on their various national sites recently. So that you can get the news more quickly, and without even needing to visit us here, we’re now offering the CLD Calendar as an RSS feed.
What’s an RSS feed?
An RSS (it stands for Really Simple Syndication) feed is a way that we, and thousands of other news sites and blogs, distribute our content. Rather than needing to visit the actual site, you can use a feed reader to check the headlines and see if we’ve published anything new. This is great if you normally read a lot of different sites in a day: rather than needing to click through dozens of bookmarks, you can see at a glance who has new content, and view a short summary so you can decide whether you need to visit the actual site.
What’s a feed reader?
A feed reader is like a browser, but for feeds! Feed readers check your favourite blogs and news sites constantly, and alert you as soon as they’ve updated, so you never miss that all-important story or bit of juicy gossip. Some of the most popular are Google Reader, Bloglines and Newsgator.
Our main blog content is also available as a feed, for all the eBay news you’ll ever need.
Updated to March 2008 to add: More and more blogs including us are now offering full posts in feeds, so you never need to bother visiting the site at all!
Recent Comments
- ebuyerfb: If I had to speculate eBay made the initial policy for the reasons they’ve stated. Now that it seems...
- Sue Bailey: Steve, I don’t know - I can only go by the announcement eBay make (and give em a few days to...
- John Pemberton: #17 Hi Nick - please see my comment made( #11). 99% of our shipping is via Interlink Express. I use...
- Steve: Sue, you mention “ten listings per seller per search results page.” results pages of what size? my...
- John Pemberton: sounds logical to me!
- Sue Bailey: Chris, is two months’ notice enough? The next one’s 15th Jan - see you there.
- chris o'D: Can we have some more notice next time - sounds interesting Chris
- Chris Dawson: #17 All the details are at http://www.meetup.co m/ebayuk/ Well volunteered to take minutes and report...
- northumbrian: makes mental note,
***will need to order more Anoraks*** - Andrea Kennard: Cool, will deffo come along to the next one. Will it be at the same place? Will anyone be...
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