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A few weeks back I was looking for the complete boxed set of all seven seasons of The West Wing on eBay. As you would, I searched for “West Wing DVDs complete” – and turned up hundreds. The problem was that rather than being what I wanted, they were the complete season 1, the complete season 2, and so on.

Wouldn’t it be cool, I thought to myself, if Best Match was clever enough to see that I hadn’t specified a season, even though tWW has seven, and to figure out that what I’m *probably* looking for, then, is the complete complete set, rather than any one season, and show me those first.

And then, coincidentally, Adam Nash wrote a post about the same thing. If you don’t know Adam, he used to work for eBay, and he is exceptionally smart, so when his colleague Ikai unfavourably compared the prices of Deep Space 9 DVD sets available on eBay and Amazon, he set out to figure out why eBay looked like such a bad deal.

Here’s what he found (republished with permission).

CLD

eBay.com are running a 10¢ promotion for fixed price listings10¢ promotion for fixed price listings for store owners from today until the end of March. It’s the end of March that Store Inventory Format listings will cease to exist and migrate to 30 day or Good Til Canceled fixed price listings.

To qualify for the promotion sellers will have to have 12 month detailed seller rating of 4.5 or higher on all four criteria, or be new sellers without a DSR score. Normal insertion fees for fixed price items is 35¢. From March 30th insertion fees will be 50¢, 20¢, 5¢ or 3¢ for no store, a basic store, a featured store or an anchor store respectively.

10¢ looks like a pretty good deal in the interim, and will give sellers the opportunity to test core site fixed price listings prior to the new pricing structure coming into effect.

eBay UK has announced this morning that its promotion for free auction listings for private sellers is being extended. Private sellers who

• list auctions starting at £4.99 or lower,
• in Media categories (Music; Books, Comics and Magazines; Video Games (not including items listed in the following Video Games sub-categories: Coin-Operated, Consoles & Systems and Vintage & Retro Gaming); or DVD, Film & TV),
• before Sunday 7th February 2010

will pay no insertion fees. Other fees apply and as usual there is a bunch of small print so read before you list.

Were I a gambling woman, I would wager a bob or two on this being the forerunner of a more permanent pricing feature. Are we going to see free auction listings for all private sellers soon? Watch this space.

There’s a free listing day for personal sellers coming up this Sunday, 17th January. This time however the rules are tighter than ever to prevent business sellers from getting in on the action.

Firstly the free listing only applies to auctions, but also “professional tools, such as, Turbo Lister” are banned – use a listing tool and you have to pay for the insertion fee and that even includes relisting unsold items in bulk. To qualify you pretty much have to use the Sell Your Item form and do every listing by hand on the day. There are also some category restrictions so check before listing if you want your free insertion fees.

It’s the first year that I can ever recall eBay not having a free (or at least a cheap) listing day between Christmas and New Year. For every year for as long as I’ve been trading on eBay they’ve held a post Christmas promotion to encourage people to list their unwanted Christmas presents on eBay but this year it didn’t happen.

For starters cheap listing days are irrelevant to business sellers. Any seller who has an eBay shop is on a permanent cheap listing day paying as little as 1p to list fixed price items, most are paying 5p with a featured shop or at worst 20 with a basic shop. There really isn’t much more eBay can do to incentivise businesses to list more on the site.

Private sellers also have permanent free listings for auctions with a start price of 99p or less. Being as that’s the best listing format to attract the highest end price again there are few incentives eBay can offer to attract more listings.

It seems a shame though – free or cheap listing days do more than simply bump the number of listings on the site. The very fact that an email arrives in users inbox with a promotion reminds casual sellers that eBay is here and that they should be selling. The bump in listings (although often a pain for businesses) means that there are some great bargains for buyers – I know I’ve often had a browse after a cheap listing day just to see what deals that have attracted few bids I can snap up.

Is this the end of cheap or free listing days in the UK? Or do you think price promotions can still play a part on eBay? Are you relieved that the annual post Christmas listing promotion didn’t happen or would you like to see it revived next year?

Site Changes

If you’ve been waiting for eBay UK to remove free shipping requirements, you may have to wait a little longer. Listing tools and the API are currently still requiring free P&P for those categories, which were due to change to capped postage yesterday. eBay says it is aware of the problem and is working on a fix: expect a new announcement when the situation changes.

In the meantime, the SYI form is working correctly, so that’s one option for sellers anxious to get on with listing.

Selling Tips

I know it’s February already, but I’ve just got my hands on The Independent UK Guide to eBay 2010. The Guide has been around for a few years now – I was made aware of it when they first reviewed TameBay in the 2008 edition. It’s an odd sort of publication: it looks like a magazine, both in size and in layout, but definitely has a bookish price tag.

The Guide bills itself as “The Essential Guide to Buying and Selling | How to make SERIOUS money on eBay” (that latter seems a bit familiar, doesn’t it). And I don’t know what’s happened to it over the last 12 months, but where before it felt patchy, unfinished, almost as though it were written by someone who’d never used eBay but knew how to write a how-to book, this year it’s turned into something a lot more useful.

Mostly this is a guide for sellers, aimed probably at those who’ve sold a couple of personal items but want to sell more, or who are considering going pro. The two longest chapters are “Introductory Selling” and “Advanced Selling”, which cover all the basics, with extensive sections on what can go wrong and how to deal with it, and auction management for people who look at their ever-filling inbox and freak out. There are numerous case studies on sellers who are “already doing it” – from running an eBay business alongside your B&M shop, to (intriguingly) a seller who’s quitting online retail and advises others to do the same.

There’s more. There’s the inevitable “how to buy on eBay” chapter, which in a “how to sell” book is almost entirely pointless: I’ll forgive this one because it jumps on my own favourite bandwagon, asking why eBay has no proper shopping cart. There’s a chapter on PayPal and alternative payment methods, and another on eBay competitors which runs through the basics of selling on Amazon and PlayTrade. There’s a useful “Reviews Directory” of eBay-related software which even experienced sellers might find worth a look.

The magazine format has one huge thing to recommend it: colour pictures. And there are a lot, mainly in the form of screenshots which walk you through how to set up an eBay shop or take a decent photograph, or even how to list on Amazon marketplace.

If you’re a seller newish to eBay, this is worth getting: it pretty much covers the basics, it’s reasonably entertaining and the format is easy to dip in and out of, especially as it’s peppered with “memorable auction” boxes highlighting some of the more unusual listings in eBay’s history, and website reviews, suggesting places you can get further help and information (including – disclosure – TameBay). If you’re a seller who’s already running a full-time business and knows what they’re doing, on the other hand, there’s very little here you don’t already know – and anything you need to check, you’d be better doing online where the information is bang up to date.

And if you want to see what the IUKG2e2010 said about us, here’s their review.

Why the Amazon affiliate link, not eBay? Because the only copy listed on eBay UK at time of writing is coming from Malaysia. And because the Amazon affiliate program makes linking it, with piccie and price, so simple. EPN, are you taking note?