September 2010

£1/2million frozen in Minecraft PayPal account

If you’ve ever had a little problem with PayPal account limitations spare a thought for Markus Persson. His only fault was to create a game called Minecraft, which is so new it’s still only in Alpha, and not even made it to a Beta release. That’s not stopped people from raving about it, so much [...]

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Free auctions for private sellers this weekend

Time to break out the private IDs again: there’s a free listing weekend for private sellers coming. On 11th and 12th September, private sellers can list auctions with any start price for free. Only items listed through one of the SYI forms are eligible, so don’t plan to upload a pile of stuff through Turbo [...]

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Rakuten launch website aimed at UK buyers

If you’re looking for a new place to shop then check out Rakuten, they’re now shipping to the UK. It’s no real surprise that they’re flexing their muscles and trying to attract business from the west. They’ve already bought Buy.com and Priceminister in France. “Rakuten Ichiba” is Japan’s largest Internet shopping mall and they have [...]

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PayPal’s Michael Barrett joins NCSA board

PayPal’s Chief Information Security Officer, Michael Barrett has added to his responsibilities and joined the US National Cyber Security Alliance Board (NCSA). The NCSA is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to educate Internet users on how to stay safe online and protect their digital assets. The UK equivalent would be Get Safe Online. NCSA [...]

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Advertising Standards to cover merchants’ own websites

The Advertising Standards Authority has announced that its online remit is to be extended. From 1st March 2011, the ASA will cover marketing on companies own websites and on non-paid-for sites like Twitter and Facebook. Currently, it only covers paid-for advertisements such as banner ads, paid-for search listings, commercial classified ads and paid-for listings on [...]

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Some surprising numbers about emailing your customers

How often is too often? Many of us worry about emailing our customers too frequently: will they think it’s spam? But maybe we’re worrying unnecessarily. For about a year now (in fact, since I started), I’ve been sending out a monthly email newsletter to our clients at work. A few months back, due to a [...]

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Community update delayed, Groups content lost

eBay have delayed the restructure of the community hub (new discussion boards, videos, social media integration and updated answer center and groups) for two weeks due to technical difficulties. For those who were mourning the loss of their favourite forums it’s a temporary reprieve, although we now don’t have a definite date for the change [...]

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Simple green shipping with the eBay Box

100,000 reuseable, recyclable boxes are eBay’s latest foray into environmental friendliness. The eBay Box is the star prize winner from the Innovation Expo eBay holds each year, which gives employees the chance to put forward concepts and prototypes that will benefit buyers and sellers. Voted on by eBay employees and execs the eBay Box is [...]

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Automatic 5 star rating for free post items paid with PayPal

From today any items offering free postage that are paid with PayPal will automatically be awarded a five star rating for the P&P option. Items must be paid for with PayPal so that eBay are certain that no postage was paid. It’s worth remembering that free postage qualifies you for a small boost in search [...]

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eBay fine in LVMH case slashed by €33million

photo credit: Gavin Gilmour eBay have just had the fine payable to Louis Vuitton reduced from €38.6million to just €5.6 million by the French appeals court. The original fine was set by the Paris commercial court based on claims by LVMH that eBay had not done enough to prevent the sale of counterfeit goods via [...]

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