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.

Seeing as you can’t run affiliate links on the eBay site that means those “free” apps will either appear as cut down apps to tempt users into paying for the full blown incantation or will be charged for instead of free.

Therein lies the problem, SM apps will only be available to SM users, 270,000 of them according to eBay, and how many of those will want to use your app and pay for it, its the ‘paying for it’ that creates the low take up of any paid for app.

If you get 1% of ALL SM users thats only 2700 users, is that enough paid users to sustain the app and its maintanence and future developement, considering the eco climate for eBay developers has never really been a pot of gold, in eBay land FREE is good, paid for is not !

(Xmas decs will work as I still use the same images Phew!)

I would give Tradebox a big shout as to being a very helpful & attentive supplier of a third party solution.

PS Have you checked if your Xmas decorations will work?

I’ll do an honest review of NSE so long as you guys promise not to knock me for “another Froo plug”

Do you fancy doing a guest post on Spoonfeeder? We’ve not really covered that much – if so contact me – Chris at TameBay dot com

apologies for going off topic . Maybe you could post seperately about the latest issues around NSE? As more than half the posts on this topic refer to the Frooition upgrade, you could cover that at the same time. I’m sure a balanced report on the debates so far would attract plenty more interest!

Companies *I* like? Aimco, Spoonfeeder and Interparcel get my vote every time! Straightforward products that save me time and money, plus excellent after-sales service.

All the best, Paul.

Anyway given that people have said who they don’t like, how about telling us a few of the providers that you do like that haven’t been mentioned but would be a great Selling Manager service?

Time for someone to give some positive input – give the companies *you* like a plug

Frooition have told me ‘we don’t like it but there’s nothing we can do about it’. I’m not so sure though. For custom pages they could have done HTML design that is just dropped into the ebay Manage Shop system in the normal way. They could also make much more use of the header area – our header looks pretty silly without the flash text that should go in the big ‘black hole’ in the middle. Frooition say they can’t do anything about this, either. Unless they can improve quickly, their offer is looking significantly downgraded.

Hi Chris, I’d agree that most people find the shop from the listings (rather than the other way round). As many of those will land straight onto a ‘plain’ category page, this means that the incentive to invest in a Frooition type ‘advanced’ shopfront is significantly reduced. As you say, the listing is most important. It will be interesting to see how Frooition and other companies respond to this. I quite understand that ‘the game’ has changed in this respect and that it’s not all within Frooition’s control – however, I do object to being bombarded with marketing that talks about an enhanced customer experience only to find that, after stumping up my cash, the result is ill-looking and poorly functioning (see my earlier post). I would not have paid for the (so-called) upgrade if these issues had been communicated transparently in advance. Several other Frooition customers have told me the same.

Re the issue with categories displaying in Frooition shopfronts and listings – it’s true that Frooition have implemented a manual solution for updating categories in the shopfront and for creation of listings. However, that solution can’t be applied retrospectively to listings created before the manual solution was implemented. I have this in writing from Frooition. eBay’s standard shopfront pulls in the correct categories in the correct order automatically. Frooition charges us extra for manually updating the information ourselves!

Chris, I usually enjoy reading your posts, but I really do think you have a blind spot here. Have you considered that you might just be getting special treatment from Frooition – whether you like it or not, Frooition think of you as a blogger in their pay. When you agreed to let Frooition design your store, you rather cutely said that ‘Frooition have offered to redesign my shop and all I have to do is blog about it’.

Ho hum, indeed.