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eBay have announced a total revamp of the eBay community pages to include new discussion boards, videos, social media integration and updated answer center and groups. The new community hub will go live on the 8th September for eBay UK and Ireland.

Be prepared for the discussion boards be “restructured and compressed to reflect the key topics of discussion by members”. Reading between the lines that implies that some boards are likely to be closed, merged or combined into the new boards.

One feature of the new functionality will be the ability to create user profiles with avatars and signatures as well as a public profile. In the answer center users that participate will accrue points to gain levels starting at Apprentice and moving through Junior, Senior and Graduate with the top level being Professor.

One major change will be limitations for posting IDs, if you have a feedback score of 10 or less you’ll be limited to ten posts per day on the new discussion boards. If you’ve got a current posting ID with less than 10 feedback it’s time to make some quick trades on eBay to ensure that you can carry on participating from the 8th September.

Threads on the current forums will be migrated across to the new boards so long as they’re not more than six months old. Groups inactive for six months or more will be deleted but questions and answers in the answer centre will be kept from the last three years.

If you want a sneaky look at what the new boards will look like it appears that the eBay Germany community pages and forums have already been upgraded. The German pages should be a good indicator for how the new UK community pages will appear as the new community pages will be launched to all EU sites including Germany, UK, France, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium

CLD

There’s a free listing weekend on Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd August 2010, but only for sellers specifically invited by email to take part.. The free listings only apply to auction listings at any start price listed on the 21st-22nd with the normal category exclusions.

The landing page for the free listing promo leaves a lot to be desired though. After stating it’s for users invited by email only, the banner at the top of the page contradicts this saying it’s “Open to all users except business sellers). Also the dates “Sunday 21th and Sunday 22nd August 2010″ should I guess read “Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd August 2010″. Someone at eBay should get a new copy writer in to check their pages before putting them live, but it does at least give us something to write about on TameBay

eBay.com have a whole month of free auction listings for sellers who haven’t got an eBay store subscription. Running from today (3rd August) until the 7th September there will be no insertion fees for auction style listings regardless of start price.

It’s worth remembering that the first 100 auctions starting at 99¢ or less are free anyway, so it’s a great time to list items for which you want to have a higher starting price. There is also a limit of 100 auctions for this promotion and as normal there are a few excluded categories so check the details before listing.

Free listings, free subtitle and free supersize images are available to all sellers in the MP3 and GPS categories right through the Christmas and New Year selling seasons to January 9th 2011, so long as they are listed using eBay catalogue data.

A promotion originally ran from 5th to 31st July with free subtitle and supersize images but the addition of free insertion fees should attract a few more sellers, especially as the length of the promotion won’t mean revising all your listings a few weeks later to remove the features when they become chargeable again.

The promotion is running on eBay UK and eBay.ie, and there are the normal exclusions including accessories (so watch out for sellers switching accessories into the MP3 and GPS categories to avoid paying fees).

eBay.com are running a promotion specifically for sellers with an eBay store to encourage auction style listings. For today and tomorrow (27th-28th July) auction insertion fees will be reduced to 10¢ regardless of start price.

To qualify for the promotion sellers must have an eBay store subscription and DSR ratings of 4.5 or above on all four criteria.

Site Changes

Following on from last week’s request from PayPal for additional verification, to comply with EU law, they’ve now decided my name is not my name.

Addressing me by email with my PayPal registered name “Chris Dawson”, they say “After reviewing your PayPal account, we noticed that the registered name is not an individual, personal contact name. Please note that at least one of your first names as stated on your passport/driver’s licence needs to be registered in full on your PayPal account. Therefore we ask you to complete a name change.”

I’m not sure what I should change my name to, but it needs to match the documents I provided as proof of identity. The trouble is different companies address me in different ways and none of them match the “Christopher Ian Dawson” which is on my Passport and drivers licence – The passport alone isn’t sufficient evidence that I exist, PayPal also want a matching proof of address.

My phone bill and utility bills are addressed to “C Dawson” and my bank statements go to “Mr C I Dawson”. I have a couple of other documents which PayPal don’t accept (VAT Registration, Mobile Phone Bill) with “Chris Dawson”, but I don’t have a single acceptable proof of address with my full name on them.

I was on the phone to PayPal this morning and they’ve told me that the compliance team don’t accept incoming phone calls but that they do need a proof of address in my “real name”. I pleaded my case with the PayPal rep I was talking to and just have to cross my fingers that the compliance team will let me keep my name. If not I’ll let you know if I have to become “‘C’, formerly known as Chris”.

If you’re also having trouble providing the proof of ID that PayPal require let us know in comments below.

Selling Tips

We get this a lot. The question goes something like: “I’ve had enough of buyers holding me to ransom over DSRs. eBay charge me too much money for the amount of grief. I’d like to quit selling, but I need the money. Where else can I sell?”

The problem people have with wanting to leave eBay is that they want something to replace eBay. There is NOTHING like eBay. You will not find another site that supplies a stream of buyers like eBay does. There is nowhere so easy to sell as eBay.

If you can sell on Amazon, then do. That probably only applies to media sellers… if you can deal with the price competition. The race to the bottom can be fierce on Amazon: as John Jantsch says, “there’ll always be someone willing to go out of business quicker than you.”

Other marketplace sites don’t even hold a candle to eBay. Some sellers will tell you they’ve made a success of Ebid. What they mostly mean is that they’ve sold a couple of things (if anyone really has made a business success of Ebid, I want to talk to you. I’ve been asking that question for two years and still no one’s volunteered). If you make-to-sell, Etsy is worth a look, but as far as I can see again, doesn’t offer anything like the volume of buyers that eBay does: if you’re trying to earn a living from this, it probably won’t cover it.

There’s a reason those two sites have four letter names beginning with E-. eBay is it. You might be lucky and your niche might offer a specialist site (Just Beads is one example) – but again, they won’t offer the traffic that eBay does. If you’re going to make a success of those sites, you’ll need to be prepared to put in a lot of work pulling in buyers for yourself.

Sellers who don’t like eBay any more have a pretty stark choice at the moment:

1) suck it up and deal with the DSRs, the policy changes, and so on. Restructure your pricing if fees are hurting you. But you’ll be able to keep selling.

2) quit eBay and be prepared for a long hard slog. Get your own website and be prepared to market it hard. If you’re like most of us, there are about three zillion competitors of yours hanging out in Google buying PPC and going after the same traffic. You’ll need to be clever. You’ll also need another source of income while you get it going.

Sensibly, you’ll do a combination of these two. Your income should never rely solely on one site. Get your own website and start working on it. Market it to your eBay customers: a little flyer inside every parcel with a coupon for free shipping, for example, will help massively.

But don’t expect to be able to turn off eBay and turn on something equally effective, because it doesn’t exist.

Shamelessly repurposed from Auctionbytes’ comments.

photo credit: papalars