Personally, I’m having serious second thoughts about continuing to endorse them (and there’s a slight irony in that, too).

I agree with “SavvyPaul”, above. Good post.

Chris Dawson on April 2nd, 2009 10:21 pm #12 Unfortunately I think you’ll find that store breaks the new eBay rules

Hi Chris, Our solution was approved by eBay in advance of the changes applied on January 8th and all client sites including the above mentioned site have been upgraded to meet NSE rules by eBay. We were notified along with other solution providers back in October of last year and our new solution has been signed of by eBay. In the interest of thoroughness if there is anything in particular you feel is in breach of eBay rules I would apprecaite you getting in touch.

It does seem Frooition have chosen the easier option as there must be more work in restyling the category pages, a major business decision error, but as Liz says in #32 “Category pages can be styled, checked with eBay at Catalyst. Just got to be within thems rules…”. I think Frooition must be seriously regretting the model they have chosen. They need to fix the bugs, apply the design to all pages and begin to look after their customers as a matter of urgency.

“Taking over the eBay global header” – the store changes the eBay global header and restyles it to a fixed width.

…”or changing the appearance of the in-store search items list” – the line “Preferences: Title & item description [ Edit preferences | Clear preferences ]” is missing and the boxes around the item gallery view is restyled (Me – I like the curvy corner boxes much better than eBay’s straight lines….. are you reading this eBay? Can you change your site default to curvy corners please? )

There are a few more questionable bits (of what I think is actually a pretty good looking effective shop) but eBay specifically call out those two instances as conflicting with the site interference policy at http://pages.ebay.com/stores/newstore.html#n1

As I said I think it could hardly be considered as something that detracts from the buyer experience, but that’s the new rules.

we click like demented grass hoppers ,there are so many clicks and processes to go thru when listing
this is why blackthorne is king with us its worth its fee for
drag and drop of pictures and ftp upload alone

We dropped AddItem functionality (used to create an eBay listing) nearly a year ago now, as it is the most complex set of eBay API calls available, and requires constant maintenance and updates, which are both time consuming and expensive in programming terms.

The income has to match or be greater than the expenses incurred, and as I said earlier, the eco climate for eBay developers blows a chilly wind!

Pardon? We drown it out with our own dodgy music lol

Their homepage music is a lot worse than anything on the actual app. You just get a quick blast of the ‘Superman’ theme when your listing is submitted. We’ve kind of come to like it in an ironic retro sort of way.

As sellers of one-off items we find it saves us untold hours, and the unlimited free image hosting is a real bargain. It does have a few downsides – item specifics aren’t always updated as quickly as we’d like – but overall we wouldn’t be without it.

Category pages can be styled, checked with eBay at Catalyst. Just got to be within thems rules…

#30

Oh yes, Marketworks really does need an overhaul. I would suggest using the merchant version on inventory uploading and getting rid of the random ‘marketworks number’ method.