His definitive statement was a little lacking in the details…. U.S. sellers who ONLY offer items to U.S. buyers will not have not have to offer Paypal if they are NOT a new seller or if they are NOT a seller in a high risk category or if they do have a merchant account, etc. If the eBay.com seller or the seller’s items do not fall within that narrow window then it is PAYPAL ONLY for the U.S.

eBay and Paypal are great at putting a really good spin on things as long as they don’t have to delve into the details. They promise the moon and deliver cheese instead.

*ignores the mean children*

Goodness only knows why couldn’t they have said it in English in the first place!

Was it tempting? Nooooooo of course not!

now get out there and look at the Lake!!!

But I’m still a stats junkie and the more detail the better as far as I’m concerned. I have all the Terapeak, Omniture, Sellathon statistics, plus the access_log from images loaded off my own domain.

While it might not change how I do business I’m still nosy enough to want know how each viewer found my item, what keywords they searched for, what order they listed the results in, what os they run, what browser they use, what other items (of mine) they looked at, and every other bit of information I can get!

This information may or may not be commercially valuable, but I still want it just to satisfy my own curiosity.

They’re also opening up the DSRs with an API, so that third party developers will be able to make tools to display the data in different ways. I think that should lead to some exciting developments.

this refers to radio, rather than eBay listings, but the principle is the same… you will get to guess at all sorts of spurious reasons why people are doing what they are doing, but it won’t help a jot in making them do what you want them to do.

as he says:

“Don’t take my word for it, or Jonah’s. Listen to what this guy has to say:

“Of what value is he who, in order to abbreviate the parts of those things which he professes to give complete knowledge, leaves out the greater part of the things of which the whole is composed? Oh, human stupidity! You don’t see that you are falling into the same error as one who strips a tree of its adornment of branches full of leaves, intermingled with fragrant flowers or fruit, in order to demonstrate the the tree is good for making planks.”

Not my words. The words of a famed engineer, artist, sculptor, architect, athlete, scientist, anatomist, and radio industry consultant.

The words of Leonardo da Vinci.”

(p.s. from me, don’t really know what Leo meant, but it reads good don’t it! )

Ebay have placed such a massive responsibility on buyers to give accurate and honest ratings so that the sellers they buy from can stay and keep selling, and they don’t even know!

Creating high buyer confidence is good but not at the expense of seller confidence.
I think ebay are forgetting that sellers are people too, not machines or programs that can be “optimised”

groan…

information is only useful if it can be used,
there is bugger all I am going to alter now ,
I have tweaked and twitched everything I am going too,
whats after grains, soon we will all need a microscope to conduct our ebay business

Oh Sugar!

We’re trying to find a way to stop most people leaving straight 5s.

wassat mean??

Is granularity another Simpneologism?