Just like with anything, when it gets too big, it gets screwed up. Still, there are new internet users everyday, who will become ebay users, filling the slots of the people leaving. I think ebay figures this as well, so they just do whatever they want, figuring they’re the only show in town.

Where’s googbay?

http://ebayinkblog.com/2008/04/02/ebay-at-channel-advisor%E2%80%99s-catalyst-conference/
(I was actually looking for a transcript of that specific speech when I first found Tamebay, who briefly reported it)

It really appears that part of Ebay’s strategy is to stop any businesses that use their services from utilising a business plan. Living under the threat of price rises “at any time” does nothing for seller productivity, nor does trying to adjust to constant change.

The points made by Sue above are entirely valid, but I don’t think that Ebay has any intention of slowing changes or co-ordinating them to benefit sellers. Incredibly no buyer that I have spoken to face to face has appreciated the changes either, most of them find having to constantly adjust, just makes Ebay too much work, and they reduce the amount they buy there accordingly. All of that said, I echo Sue above, I am achieving strong sales and very buoyant prices overall – that is the ONLY thing which keeps me active on Ebay. As a seller I feel like I have been treated with contempt this year – my overall fees as a percentage of my sales have risen by more than a third this year, and being in Australia I subsidise the discounts of UK and USA sellers (I would qualify for the top tier discounts if I lived in the UK or North America), and all the while my right to set the fair and reasonable terms of MY business are being undermined constantly (allegedly to protect me, and my buyers).

There are still good sales being made on Ebay, but it is in SPITE of Ebay’s management, not because of it. However, this year, the Ebay brand has been damaged, and brand loyalty is fading among those who I speak to face to face. In my opinion the short term goals are adversely affecting the long term health of Ebay.

Disgruntled (oinkless? ), Kevin

My very best wishes to you.

to my shoebox in the loft

Oh goody more sales for me

How are we protected from buyers buying loads from a seller, not paying and then mutually agreeing the sale void

is the item still search ranking improved.

with #4 “preventing reverse-engineering by fraudsters” – it worries me that eBay let this priority dominate. You punish all the thousands of good sellers you have, because of a few fraudsters. For example, you’re currently stopping many decent sellers from listing genuine branded goods, with a secret listing limit that they only know about when they hit it. How is this going to stop fraudsters, who’ll just open another account to sell fakes?

and regarding #6, the paper payments policy – if a buyer chooses to pay with a cheque, that’s in spite of all the publicity all over eBay saying that PayPal is safer. At some point, you have to let buyers make their own decisions. If they choose to post a cheque, that should be up to them.

I can’t comment on all of them – but I hope other staff might, if not necessarily here. 2, 3, 4, 6 and 7 fall more or less within my purview; here are my very brief thoughts on them:

2 – Yes, makes sense. Although sellers can glean more from DSRs than they could before DSRs, I understand the hunger for more transparency as we build more benefits and sanctions on them. This is in plan, but it’s not likely we’ll see changes in 2008.

3 – Also makes sense. We’ve made changes to the SNP system already this year to give all but the worst-performing sellers warning before we take action against their accounts. There are appeal routes now but I agree they could be made easier. From our point of view, the great majority of appeals that we handle now are from sellers who are ‘bang to rights’ – the close-calls and sellers with legitimite excuses are the ones who make the blogs.

4. We’ll try to get as transparent as we can – I accept the current forest of policies and consequences are difficult to follow. Some areas may need to remain somewhat opaque despite this, either to prevent reverse-engineering by fraudsters or because some policies (like fraud risk management or SNP) are by their nature ‘model-based’ and hence difficult to communicate clearly.

6. The ban on paper is a US move – we have no plans to replicate it in the UK, where the payments landscape is very different. You may scoff, but these moves aren’t to promote our bottom line. We’re pretty clear that they cost us about as much in lost buyers and sellers as they gain us in PP fees. They’re made to try to stem the flow of buyers (and, to a lesser extent, sellers) who experience financial loss on eBay. The paper ban is unlikely to be rolled back in the US.

7. This is coming soon – at the very end of October. We’ll be trying to strike a balance between allowing sellers to get ‘unfair’ comments removed and not moving back to a world where buyers are harassed if they leave negative feedback.

Regards
Richard

One of these days my teacup is going to go through the computer screen in frustration.

Selling on eBay has always been a time consuming chore but more importantly buying has now become a chore and surely that can’t be right.

Not only have I missed out on all these changes and constant hoop jumping but the company is doing better without it!

When it happened and we relied on ebay 90% I thought that’s it, it’s over! But picked myself back on and forged on with the websites.

Our website sales alone are more than we took on ebay 6 months ago (it was our 6 month anniversary on the 19th sept) let alone anything else we are doing:

Unit spend is up

Overheads are down, ebay is very time consuming

Stupid emails and questions are down!

Profit is up!!

All I can say is move away, make the jump to your own websites and push at them and it will work, I’m not saying don’t have ebay as part of the plan just make it a smaller part!

stu

With the current “invisibility” of the Best Match algorythm, Ebay can do what they please.

They could favour any large seller as a sweetener to get them onside.

We have already seen Ebay do this with Buy.com with a “special rate” for listing.

Now if Ebay are prepared to give a special rate, who is to say why they would not give a “special” placement in search.

The invisibility of “best match” is a concern, and until it is transparent, there is going to be this distrust of Ebay.

Why keep it hidden other than to benefit someone?

Keeping it hidden does not benefit the seller that is for sure.

Keeping it hidden does not benefit the buyer (if it does I cannot figure out a reason). I know they can argue the best listings can get the best sales, but who defines what the “best listings” are and for who’s benefit?

That is an irrelevant argument for the buyer, they just want to buy something based on their criteria, but Ebay have decided to set the criteria, which ultimately has to be in their best interests.

If it were open, then sellers and buyers would know why there is success in some quarters and not others and respond appropriately.

Keeping it hidden so that Ebay can favour corporate clients benefits Ebay, a wonderful sweetener, if that is indeed happening.

“We will give you the best fees and the best placement if you put all of your inventory on Ebay, are you interested?”

This is the only logical reason I can think of for having “Best Match” closed to scrutiny.

Something that is hidden by nature is trying to hide something.

Have you also noticed that DSR’s calculations are hidden…

Now Buys DSR’s sit there at a comfortable 4.8 across the board.

Could it be that DSR ratings are hidden to benefit corporate clients?

Could it be that Best Match algorithm is hidden to benefit corporate clients?

While it is all so hush hush, how will we ever know?

Now if you were trying to bring a big seller online to replace all the small sellers, without alienating those small sellers, how would you do it?

Would you create a system whereby you could do the following:

1. Move out the small sellers that clutter the site with low value items.
2. Give the corporates lower rates.
2. Protect the corporates from buyer discontent with a weighted hidden feedback system.
3. Favour the corporates in searches.

That would work, wouldn’t it?

And remember, the current changes are just the first year of a three year plan according to J. Donahoe (the MD of Ebay).

A three year plan to achieve what exactly?

The corporate selling hub of the internet?

Thoughts?

Mark

I can only suspect they are still “perfecting” the shopping cart on India.

Remembering India has two heavily used payment systems only available within India (PaisaPay and that one for paying direct to sellers from local banks), and that PayPal is not widely adopted there, there has been a lot of fine tuning and tweaking of the various payment systems there, this year.

I do suspect we will all eventually get it, but also suspect that there are issues with direct bank payments. Oz, SG, and a number of other sites (including Belgium for example) have the option to input seller bank details when listing, and have them displayed automatically to winning bidders as a payment option. The Indian system goes a little beyond this and my feeling is that “eBay Payments” as opposed to PayPal, are having issues getting this to work as fluidly and as fully integrated as they’d like it to work.

Best guess is they’re looking for some sort of API call back from the banks to confirm the payment happened.

The banks globally are working on such systems – refer to the ipcno.com website for one such initiative. Toss in the increasing trend of “mobile banking & payments” via phones etc. and the writing begins to look like it’s on the wall for systems like PayPal etc, for non-international payments. The banks are even planning competing for the (to them, previously) unprofitable micro-payments business now – that’ll yield an interesting (and probably bloody) shake-out of the online payments industry.

I also believe with all this rapid development in the payments world, eBay don’t want to be caught releasing an already outdated cart system, and that’s the prime reason for delivery delays on a global scale. This thought would be confirmed if eBay rolled out a cart to another minor site, with a different look and feel to the cart system, compared to India.

Time will tell.

Ed

Its a joke ’search on ‘GUDEBROD SILK’ … see 380068211688 and compare it with 280269154296

The USA sellers product is currently at position 3 (total price £9.42 – no sales – average DSR’s) whereas my item is at 5 (total price £6.25 – good DSR’s)..

A simple example to prove BEST MATCH is nothing but a piece of useless maths!

Which is a better match? Even a simpleton can see its the latter…

If in such a simple example the search results are clearly wrong what hope is there for the other few million listings???

Reconsider the intention to withdraw the left hand shop navigation and replace it with the links across the top of the listing description (4 catagories plus a drop down box with perhaps 20 more).

Buyers expect to see left side navigation and we should have the choice to use it.

there cannot be any other explanation,, you would have to drop to the very lowest depths of stupidity to stand up in front of share holders and tell them everything is under control given the facts to hand.