Dear eBay, may I please get on with selling now?

September 27, 2008

So we made it to 25th September. For the second time in a year, sellers are making major changes to the way they do business on eBay, revising listings one by one, struggling to find information on how eBay’s latest round of changes will impact their particular business. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough. I’d really like to just get on with selling now.

Too much change, too often

Major changes are made on eBay far too often. Hardly a week goes by without some policy or other being revised, meaning sellers have a constant stream of new requirements to incorporate into their businesses. The time we’re spending at the moment changing our listings and figuring out new strategies to work around new policies, could be better spent working on our own websites and figuring out Google Adwords: at least then we’d eventually be in control.

eBay need to make it easier to keep up with their changes. Bulk editing is hard work, and when you have a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand listings to change, it’s really hard to justify spending the time to do so, again. There needs to be an easy way to change your shipping fees, or your returns policy, or even your email address on all your listings.

Policies are made, and then retracted, or tweaked, causing yet more work for sellers. eBay need to find a way to consult with their members before they make many of these changes: often as sellers, we understand the implications of what eBay do better than they do themselves. Policy changes need to be communicated fully, in advance, not piecemeal after the event.

Most importantly, eBay need to stop changing things. Let’s have some time to just get on with selling, please.

Lack of transparency

If eBay are sometimes poor at communicating, other times they’re just downright secretive, and this is doing no good to their relationship with sellers. Getting information about how the new search results work is like pulling teeth. eBay staff contradict each other. They can’t answer basic questions. And all this leaves sellers - rightly or wrongly - feeling as though they’re being duped. Getting sales on eBay feels more like gambling than running a business: if we don’t understand how to get ourselves to the top of the search results, we’re not going to hang around trying to figure it out, we’ll just go somewhere else to sell.

And it’s the same with feedback and DSRs: sellers are judged by those five little stars, but eBay won’t give us the information we need to improve. We’re encouraged to keep our scores above 4.8, but if they fall to 4.79, we don’t know if that’s one disgruntled buyer, or a real drop in the service we’re offering. How would eBay staff feel if their bonus depended on a secret target their boss kept to herself?

We’ve been promised “granularity” in DSRs: let’s have it. Let’s at least see how many buyers have left us each score. eBay need to stop using the excuse that we might harass our buyers if we think they’ve left us a 1 or a 2. A few sellers will do that anyway, but why are they punishing the rest of us for it? They say they want to make the site better: give us the tools to make it so.

Insecurity

Dolphins: need I say more? If you’re trading on eBay, you need to have in the back of your mind that eBay can take it all away at any moment, for any reason, with no warning whatsoever. Though eBay UK made an announcement in the summer that “we will be introducing a 1-month warning period for sellers who breach the Seller Non-Performance policy for the first time“, they didn’t quite mean what we all thought they meant. As clarified on the PowerSeller Board, “30 day warnings are given where appropriate. We have not guaranteed that every seller will get a warning.” You can still be stopped from selling, temporarily or permanently, with no notice, and no appeal.

And it’s not just about feedback and DSRs. eBay’s policy changes too can wipe your business out in a matter of days. If you were selling downloadable listing templates this time last year, you’re not any more, thanks to the policy that banned the sale of digital goods. Sellers of designer and brand name clothing are finding themselves suddenly restricted from selling too. Restrictions on particular trademarks are not being communicated to sellers, and so the first they know about it is when they suddenly can’t list any more of the stock they’ve tied their cash up in. Is that a way to do business? It’s safer to go elsewhere, somewhere where you’re in control.

Of course, it’s eBay’s site and they can do what they want, and that includes alienating every seller they’ve got if they choose to do so. But they shouldn’t count on sellers just bending over and taking it much longer.

We have more options now. When I started selling on eBay, setting up a website was difficult and expensive: eBay offered many sellers an opportunity to sell online that they couldn’t find any other way. Now, websites are both easy and cheap: why would any seller not have one? Comparison search engines and search marketing tools like Adwords make it easy and cheap to reach buyers. That easy, cheap connection with people who wanted to buy used to be eBay’s unique selling point, but it’s not any more. eBay can’t sit on their laurels forever. Unless they find a new way to reach out to sellers, to convince us that it’s worth persisting with eBay selling, I fear by this time next year, there won’t be many of us left.

This post was inspired by The Brews News’ “eBay Needs to Find a New Set of Tools to Motivate Sellers in 2009″, which you should certainly also read.

Written by Sue Bailey · Filed Under News | 62 Comments 

eBay.com ban ME page website links

May 20, 2008

As part of today’s policy changes, eBay.com have announced some major changes to the links policy. These will take effect from July, and have been announced for .com; when we know when and if they will affect sellers on other sites, we’ll let you know.

Likely to most affect sellers is the ban on About Me page links to a seller’s ecommerce website:

The new Links Policy prohibits linking from a seller’s listing or other content on eBay–including eBay Store pages, About Me pages, eBay Blogs, Reviews and Guides, and forums–to any site that offers a product or service for sale off eBay.

About Me pages have traditionally been the one place on eBay that sellers could legitimately link their website; eBay Blogs have - until now - been quite relaxed about the external links that were permitted.

Other links once permitted within listings have also been banned: pages which expand upon the item description or include terms and conditions not expressed on the listing page are no longer allowed. Sellers are permitted only the following links:

  • to third parties supplying solutions and services directly related to the listing (e.g. listing tools, hit counters, etc.)
  • up to five links to “eBay property” pages (i.e. eBay, PayPal, StubHub, Half.com etc.); quite where this leaves scrolling galleries of sellers’ other products, I wouldn’t like to guess
  • embedded links to videos, so long as the videos comply with eBay’s policies themselves
  • links to photos of the item for sale, “as long as the page displaying the photos doesn’t offer, or link to a site that offers a product or service for sale off eBay”.

Many sellers have, for years now, used eBay as a customer acquisition tool, directing prospective buyers to ecommerce websites by way of About Me pages and “further photographs” pages. This is going to be a very much more difficult process from now on, with eBay tightening up the opportunities for promoting off-eBay sales on-site. Sellers will perhaps have to accept that the first sale must be through eBay now, and work more on bringing returning happy customers back to their websites for subsequent purchases, rather than trying to funnel traffic from eBay to their own sites directly.

Written by Sue Bailey · Filed Under Site Changes, eBay.com | 28 Comments 

JupiterResearch survey available for download

May 14, 2008

The survey carried out by JupiterResearch for ChannelAdvisor is now available for download. 98% of online sellers market their products through at least two online channels - With eBay accounting for about 25% of the online market and growing slower than the online market diversifying is essential.

The report looks in detail at the benefits and the challenges of multi-channel selling, where to start, when to outsource and how to measure your revenue potential across channels. As the data was drawn from businesses currently trading across multiple online channels it gives a real picture of why multi-channel expansion is important to your long-term business growth.

Written by Chris Dawson · Filed Under News | 9 Comments 

Feedback: some more thoughts

January 29, 2008

This post was written in January 2008; specific information contained within it may be out of date.

On the internet, reputation is everything. Buyers want to know that merchants are trustworthy, and merchants want to demonstrate their trustworthiness. If someone’s had bad service, it’s easy for them to disseminate their bad opinion to anyone who cares to Google it. So it’s not surprising that online retailers who’ve begun their career on eBay often ask how they can port their reputation between venues: most frequently, they want to show their eBay feedback on their website.

A while back, we covered a widget that did just that: Auctionfb’s eBay feedback display shows your total and your percentage, and displays it’s daily ‘last checked’ date. Great idea, don’t you think? Not quite. While visiting another auction site recently, I spotted a seller using just this widget, so I clicked it. eBay say he’s NARU. But the widget gives no indication of that: just the total, 100%, and today’s date. Is this intentional, or a glitch? I asked Auctionfb for comment, but they haven’t come back to me. I just hope no one’s relying on this tool as a real indicator of seller reliability.

The user agreement currently says:

you agree that you shall not market or export your eBay feedback rating in any venue other than an eBay website. We do not allow you to import feedback from other websites to eBay because such feedback does not reflect your reputation within the eBay community.

which would make me question the legality of Auctionfb’s widget anyway.

But this “feedback is only for eBay” attitude also makes me think eBay are missing a big trick. “Feedback” is, after all, practically synonymous with “eBay”. It would be easy for them to become the de facto supplier of reputation across the entire internet: all they would need to do would be to allow sellers to allow their buyers to leave feedback for non-eBay transactions. It’d be a pretty easy job to add “leave me feedback on eBay” to my websites - and I’d do it like a shot. Leaving it on eBay, after all, assures other buyers that I’m not just deleting any bad comments: it preserves the integrity of the system. And really, with their current emphasis on social networks and Web 2.0 and off-site eBaying, you’d have thought this was something they’d have already done.

In fact, there’s a hint that they’re thinking about it, not for eBay, but for PayPal. Scot Wingo notes that Meg hinted at a reputation system for PayPal, and he’s right that this would be a great move for them, to tie merchants to the PayPal system more strongly.

I’m not convinced that PayPal’s quite the right place for this. It is, after all, a *payment* system, and I think that most buyers would view that as the end of the transaction; they want to know about reputation at the beginning. Tying that in with eBay itself would only help to make the eBay brand more prevalent across the net, and of course would give sellers an incentive to stick with them, if only for the sake of their reputation.

What do you think? Is this something you’d like to see eBay do? Or would you prefer to keep all your trading venues seperate?

Written by Sue Bailey · Filed Under Featured | 1 Comment