However, the good people of Colombia are about to change my mind for once.Previously the Colombian registrar has sold .com.co, .net.co and the rather lovely nom.co. But this July, .co domains go on sale to the general public. With their similarity to the classic .com, these seem likely to be very popular with name squatters and competitors, so snapping up any that you’re really bothered about might be a good plan.

GoDaddy now has .co domains available for preorder: you can pay $299.99 for priority pre-registration, or the rather more palatable $29.99 for standard pre-registration.

It hadn’t occurred to me up to that point to want a discount, but when I thought there might be one available, of course I went to look. Quickly, I opened another browser tab. Google. Voucher site. 20% off. Happy shopper.

It turns out I’m not alone in doing this. Half of Brits used vouchers for online shopping last Christmas. And earlier last year, a PayPal survey found that “looking for discount vouchers” was the reason that 25% of shopping carts were abandoned. The British love of a bargain is alive and well, and living on the internet.

No doubt at this point, some merchants are shaking their heads. I would have paid €30, so that €6 is money they needn’t have given me. But I don’t think that’s the point. People *do* abandon their shopping carts to look for vouchers. Merchants have a choice: say “tough” and let those customers go, or use that known behaviour to our advantage.

People love a bargain. More than the actual saving money, it seems to me that they love the feeling of having “won”, even of having got one over on the merchant. And people who feel like they’re ahead want to stay ahead: if they’ve got that voucher to use, they’re not going to abandon your shopping cart. So give them the voucher.

There are lots of ways to do this. Many forums have “share voucher” sections where your customers will quite literally do your marketing for you, spreading voucher codes to other shoppers. Dedicated voucher sites are all over the internet, and it seems like more spring up every day – and these, just like eBay, are populated with wannabe shoppers looking for a bargain. Many, like my personal favourites Retail Me Not and its British counterpart Voucher Hub are free to list on. Why wouldn’t you advertise your website to all those potential shoppers?

You can even post voucher codes on your own site to encourage shoppers to complete their purchase *now* rather than wandering off without checking out. French clothing site 3 Suisses, for example, often has a popup on its home page with a code for free shipping which is valid for 24 hours only.

If you’re primarily an eBay seller, it’s worth bearing in mind how much money you can afford to spend on getting new shoppers to your site. eBay’s take is typically 10% or more of your sale price, so you might consider that money better spent on bringing traffic to your website than on eBay FVFs.

Give me a reason…

For eBay sellers who want to move customers to their websites, a voucher is the perfect way to do that. Years ago, a simple note in with a package saying “we’ve got a website, come buy stuff” was enough: people with their own websites were unusual, and the novelty value would buy you clicks. Not any more: retail sites are three a penny, so people need a reason to bother looking at yours. I’ve found “free shipping on my website” vouchers particularly effective with this (even, bizarrely, when my eBay shop *also* had free shipping; there’s no logic in people looking for a bargain!).

Biddy’s top tips for voucher promos

• if you charge postage normally, you can make it free with a voucher (even an on-site one). If everything’s free shipping all the time, you can’t. This discount works better than any other.*
• fixed price discounts work better than percentages. Better to offer £5 off a £50 order than 10%* because people like to know exactly what they’re getting.
• shelf-life: always give vouchers an expiry date. Think about repeat buying patterns to gauge how long they should last: e.g. people probably buy beads or shoes more often than they buy large electricals or furniture.
• plan. If you’ve cut your margins to the quick, you can’t discount without it hurting you. Always leave room for manoeuvre.

* For my customers on my sites. YMMV.

Let us know your thoughts: do you use voucher sites? Do you give your customers vouchers? Does anyone use them? Leave us a comment.

Those in favour of the proposals argue that b&m stores make a significant investment in the brands they’re selling – for example, in staff training and in-store promotional materials – and that allowing ecommerce businesses to piggy-back on this is unfair.

Not so, says Mr Greeley. With customers increasingly using the internet to research all purchases, whether online or off, you might argue the high street’s piggy-backing on the internet. And why shouldn’t retailers with lower overheads pass those savings on to consumers? I’m with Mr Greeley – I don’t think that giving an orange-painted saleswoman a bottle of perfume to shoosh on me as I go into Debenhams represents much investment in a brand, and if I can buy that cheaper or just more conveniently on the net, I will. In any case, I haven’t seen much evidence of trained staff in any of the shops I’ve been in recently: they’re all too busy hangning up banners saying “have you visited our website?”

Mr Greeley concludes

Manufacturers should remain free to determine their own distribution strategies and to choose their retail partners, but only on the basis of objective and non-discriminatory criteria. European policy makers, including the commission, should adopt rules that are neutral to business models and which do not permit arbitrary discrimination against pure-play retailers.

But as many small business owners could tell him, that’s an incredibly optimistic view of wholesale. The harsh reality is that many manufacturers already *do* discriminate who they supply to on the basis of where they’re going to sell it. “Not online” is not so widespread as it once was, but “not on eBay” is still common. And even if you stop discrimination, you can’t really stop it: orders go missing, things are mysteriously out of stock, or you get put on hold forever.

In some sectors, eBay sellers themselves are entirely to blame for this. In the rush to the bottom to be cheaper than anyone, margin on some products has been cut to, or even below, wholesale price. No manufacturer wants to see that happen, and I can’t exactly blame them for saying “no more”. But there are other ways: insisting on a minimum order quantity that cuts out the people who are playing at shops, for example.

And longer term, I think the issue will resolve itself. Online shopping currently accounts for 10% of all retail sales in the UK – and is predicted to grow from £38bn in 2009 to £42bn in 2010. Online is where it’s at, and no amount of protectionism is going to change that.

Image credit: © Marco Lensi | Dreamstime.com

My friend Barry just found this out to his cost and received an email terminating his account and reversing 100% of outstanding commissions. Apparently it’s a breech of the ePN as the user is redirected to an eBay page without their consent. Barry has also been told he’s not allowed to rejoin the ePN affiliate program in the future.

This does open up the question of users who put links onto sites such as twitter and other locations where the full URL needs to be displayed. As an example an ePN link to high value eBay for Charity auctions would be http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/710-53481-19255-0/1?campid=5335837209&customid=&toolid=10001&mpre=http%3A%2F2Fshop.ebay.co.
uk%2Fitems%2F__W0QQLHQ5fCharityZ1QQLHQ5fNOBZ1Q2eQ2eQQLHQ5fPrefLocZ
0QQQ5ftrkparmsZ66Q253A2Q257C65Q253A2Q257C39Q253A1QQ_LH_NOBZ1QQ
_mPrRngCbxZ1QQ_sopZ3QQ_trksidZp3286Q2ec0Q2em14%3F_trksid%3Dp3286.c
0.m1, which is extremely unwieldy. This could be shortened to just 18 characters using a URL shortening service to http://is.gd/5NT4X. That’s a link to the same eBay for Charity page (without the affiliate code so doesn’t break the agreement).

If you’re an ePN partner don’t use URL shortening services on your own website, and if you want to place a link on services such as Twitter make sure they’re not affiliate links. That shouldn’t be a problem if you’re manually posting, but if you use feed services that automatically shorten URLs you’ll be breaking the ePN agreement and risk your affiliate account being closed.

(If you’re unclear about the difference between holds and reserves, then this post has more details.)

Firstly, PayPal will never place reserves on every seller’s account. Some support staff seem to have made comments like “it’s not just you, it’s everybody”. Obviously that gives the impression that reserves are coming to all accounts, but PayPal have categorically denied it. Just because their T&Cs allow for hold on any account does not mean that holds will be applied to every account: they will not.

Reserves are for “the accounts that seem to be statistically the most dangerous”
There are a number of criteria which influence whether a reserve will be applied to your account. These include (but are not limited to):

• how long you’ve been in business,
• number of disputes/claims raised against you,
• negative feedback,
• high priced items,
• risky categories (mobile phones and tickets were mentioned specifically),
• sudden changes in selling activity such as a shift in prices or inventory.

The majority of reserves will be 10% or less, though there is no stated maximum and PayPal have confirmed that holds of 40% are possible.

21-day holds may now be applied to off-eBay transactions. Yes, you may get holds on website transactions as well as eBay ones. The release for these holds will be the same as eBay: proof of delivery or 21 days without a complaint (positive feedback won’t, obviously, be applicable to off-eBay transactions).

Account-based holds rather than transaction-based holds. Rather than looking at individual transactions, PayPal will now be looking at sellers’ overall activity. In other words, they’re looking at you, not your buyers:

good sellers who had one strange looking transaction will no longer see a hold, but sellers who have a bad run of disputes or negative feedback might start seeing holds placed on their account until things calm down.

Previously, sellers with more than 100 feedbacks, who had been registered for longer than 6 months and who had buyer dissatisfaction rates of less than 5% had been told they would never suffer a hold: now it seems that may not be so cut and dried, as a run of bad feedback or complaints could get a hold slapped on your account.

Indeed, not even eBay’s biggest sellers are immune now: White Elephant Media, one of eBay.com’s biggest media stores with a feedback score of 327,000, has recently closed down operations, due, they say, to being asked by PayPal to hold over half a million dollars in reserve:

Our PayPal/eBay account was closed November 18, 2009, after selling successfully on eBay for almost 6 years. Several weeks ago, we were asked by PayPal to give them a “deposit” so we could keep accepting PayPal payments. … At first PayPal asked for us to pay $212k into this deposit account. They expected it to be funded in about 3 months. On November 13th, … PayPal increased the amount they needed in our “deposit” account to $600k. … They closed our account after we indicated it would be impossible to come up with $600,000 in about 6 weeks during the holidays. Why they wanted more than a half a million dollars and when it would be repaid if ever was exceptionally nebulous and never explained to us. 48 hours after we were locked out of our account, there was well over $230k in the account. That is the money we use to pay for our merchandise and postage. We were denied access to it and therefore we are unable to operate.

If it could happen to White Elephant, it could happen to you.

So what can sellers do about it?

Firstly, bear in mind that it could happen. Many of the sellers I’ve talked to about this have said that their biggest problem was lack of warning. Some weren’t even aware that PayPal *could* put this kind of hold on their account.

Secondly, remember that this is about PayPal’s assessment of the riskiness of your account. Be realistic about that. Some areas *do* have the potential cause more trouble than others (mobile phones and tickets as PayPal said; I’d add software, refurbished electronics and designer clothing to that). If your courier consistently damages goods, or you’re using a less-than-reliable drop-shipper, or your customer service procedures are not keeping up with the level of your business, then you are at risk.

If you want to carry on trading on eBay, dropping PayPal is not an option. But you should (everyone should) consider if and how their business would survive without eBay and/or PayPal. Do you have an alternative? Is it *enough* of an alternative that you could ramp it up to replace eBay if you had to?

And if PayPal put a 10% hold on your turnover, could you trade through that? For those who take their buyers’ payments and use them to pay a drop-shipper, I suspect the answer is no. But – especially after this incredibly difficult year – many more retailers are cutting their cash-flow ever closer, using this week’s takings to buy next week’s stock. This is trimming it far too fine.

Look realistically at your cash flow and consider what would happen to your business if 10% of it were held for 180 days. If you couldn’t survive, then PayPal isn’t your problem – your cash flow is the problem, and you need to reassess it, and build up a cushion to protect you not only against PayPal holds but against any other unexpected thing that might be thrown at you.

“hold”

PayPal put the entire payment for a transaction in reserve, and the seller does not have access to it. The seller must dispatch the goods as normal. The money is released by PayPal to the seller under one of the following conditions:

• the buyer leaves positive feedback
• delivery is proven by trackable means (money released 3 days later)
• 21 days have passed without a complaint, chargeback, reversal or other claim by the buyer

(PayPal have said that if negative feedback is left but there is no claim filed, the seller’s money will be released after 21 days.)

Holds used to apply only to new sellers and to buyers deemed by PayPal to be risky; this, it seems, is no longer the case.

“(rolling) reserve”

PayPal hold a proportion of the seller’s turnover in reserve for 180 days. Typically this is 10% or lower, though we have heard of higher amounts.

Because this is a rolling reserve – in other words, they take a chunk of EVERY transaction you process – this means that PayPal will always hold a proportion of your payments in reserve, unless of course you cease trading or cease accepting PayPal payments. Once you have a reserve on your account, there are no stated circumstances in which it will be removed; we’ve certainly never heard of anyone getting one removed.

If your turnover increases, PayPal support have told one TameBay correspondent that they would actually *increase* the percentage of turnover held in reserve. Go figure that one.

Aside from those 180m new potential new buyers, eBay have made it easier to trade overseas recently. TRS status is dependent on domestic DSRs only, so there’s less danger of slower international deliveries bringing your average down. There’s now the potential to control which countries you ship to more closely than ever before, so if there’s a particular European country you don’t want to ship to, you don’t have to cut off the rest of Europe in order to avoid them.

Apart from eBay, the very weakness of the pound makes British shopping incredibly attractive on the continent: when £1 is more or less €1, it’s often cheaper to buy from the UK and have it shipped over, than it is to buy in domestic markets. If you’re restricting your sales to the cash-strapped British, you might be doing yourself a disfavour.

So here, with my buyer’s hat on, are my top tips for selling to non-UK buyers:

Know what the postal options are, and what they mean
If you’re going to list items as available outside the UK, you need to be able to advise your buyers what shipping is likely to cost. For most sellers, that will mean airmail small packets: Royal Mail rates are here. There are two tariffs, Europe, and the rest of the world (here’s a list of what’s included in Europe). Airmail reaches most countries within 5 days.

Surface mail is cheaper but is much, much slower than airmail, e.g. RM estimate up to six weeks to North America. Unless you really like PayPal chargebacks, this is a false economy.

If you sell anything that could be time-sensitive – e.g. car parts or computer spares – know what an overnight courier would cost, and if you could make that available.

Insure appropriately
If insurance is needed, you can add International Signed For to any Airmail or Surface price for £3.70. Some sellers add this to every £5 t-shirt or 99p CD they sell. This is offputting not only because of the expense, but because it tends to read as “I don’t trust you, I don’t really want non-UK buyers”. If you wouldn’t send it special delivery in the UK, it doesn’t need to go ISF.

Tell us what postal service we’re paying for
If you’re going to charge me £7 to post a t-shirt or £25 to post a pair of shoes (both real examples), let me know what postal service I’m paying for. If you send everything by courier or ISF, I want to know; if I’m paying five times stamp price because you want to “put foreign buyers off”, I want to know about that too.

Communicate about delivery times
Either alter your standard dispatch email to take account of overseas deliveries, or send an extra email to foreign buyers. Under-promise. A buyer who’s been told delivery could take 1-2 weeks will be delighted if their parcel arrives in 4-5 days. A buyer who’s just had your standard domestic dispatch email telling them the parcel will probably arrive tomorrow is going to be disappointed.

They’re all about duty (and customs)
If you’re shipping within the EU, you won’t normally need customs documentation.

Outside the EU, you’ll need a CN22 form for goods up to £270 in value, and the more complex CN23 for more valuable parcels. These can be picked up from post offices, or downloaded from RM. The following EU destinations *do* need a CN22/CN23: Channel Islands, Andorra, Canary Islands, Gibraltar, San Marino, Vatican City State.

Royal Mail has more advice about customs documention.

If you ship by courier, they will advise you exactly what paperwork they need from you (there’s normally a lot more than if you just ship by post!).

Buyers outside the EU whose countries have low import thresholds will often ask you to falsify customs paperwork to help them avoid import duties. Don’t. If you’re caught, it’s you that’s made the false declaration, so it’s you that takes the rap. Remember to include a note that buyers may be charged import duties on your listings in line with eBay’s policy; that way if you receive non-positive feedback over customs issues, it can be removed. If you do this, it’s also worth saying even more prominently that EU buyers won’t be charged customs.

PayPal n’est pas mon ami
Though eBay likes to think that PayPal is the one size that fits all, different countries have their own preferences for payment, based on the quirks of their banking systems. The French like cheques. German, Belgian and Dutch buyers like bank transfers. You might think you can’t help, but check with your bank whether you can accept these payments, and what it would cost you.

If your bank won’t cash non-sterling cheques, then Auctionchex will.

If you shout loud enough…
Be prepared for some ASQs in other languages; Google Translate will help you turn them into English. If your listing is in English, it’s okay to reply in English too. It’s always easier to translate *into* your native tongue, so let your buyers do that rather than sending them Babelfish-mangled communications in their own language. Learn “sorry I don’t speak…” in a few languages, and send the translate link with your message. Keep responses to short, simple sentences and your potential buyer should be able to translate them easily enough.

Be clear
If you’re excluding countries from shipping, say so. On eBay (or your website), block purchases from countries you don’t ship to. Don’t let people buy and then refund them with insulting messages about their postal services (yes, it happens). And finally…

No one thinks of themselves as foreign
Don’t refer to “overseas” buyers on your listings. I learned this one the hard way:

US buyer: … and I’ll be sending you a personal check.
Me: Ah, no, my listing says overseas buyers have to pay with PayPal.
Her: But I’m not overseas!

Spell it out: US/Canadian buyers, European buyers, and so on. The more clearly you can communicate, the more you make it look as though you’re used to dealing with buyers from all over the world, the more attractive your listings will be to those buyers.

It’s a pretty attractive-sounding process for private sellers who need to get rid of their unwanted items, but can’t be bothered with the eBay process of photographing them and crafting descriptions – or even with the Amazon process of having to find a jiffy bag! But Glyde’s real innovation is in how the site looks to buyers. Buyers see only one listing for each product. They never learn the identity of the seller; there is no feedback to assess or to leave. When a buyer purchases an item, Glyde itself decides who gets that order based on calculations of best price and quickest shipping time, plus a seller’s previous reliability.

Buyers have complete peace of mind with an overt returns policy (you have 48 hours to change your mind) and transaction policies that spell out exactly what will happen in case of loss, item not as described or counterfeit. Buyers pay Glyde, and sellers don’t receive their cash until the buyer is happy: that way, they say, it’s much harder for anyone to game the system.

The one issue I do have with the site is that it only seems to let me buy one item at a time: that would get annoying quickly, and discourage me from buying multiple items. If I were in charge of Glyde, I’d have everything listed postage-inclusive (no complaints about combined shipping that way), and allow a multi-item checkout; I think that would boost sales quite considerably. But Glyde’s founder is eBay Motors’ founder Simon Rothman, so you’d think he knows what he’s doing.

So the million dollar question: could Glyde threaten eBay? In their very narrowly-defined target market, I think the answer has to be yes. They look to have overcome most of the problems associated with eBay right from the start. For sellers, everything is simple, clear and fast: items can be listed in a few clicks and the steep learning curve associated with selling on eBay or Amazon just isn’t there. For buyers, because Glyde are owning the transactions themselves, there’s more security right from the beginning; customer service and returns polices are set out clearly and are uniform across the site. Granted, the uber-controlled process probably won’t appeal to sellers running their own sales’ empires, but that’s not who Glyde is aiming at: the target market is sellers who can’t be bothered with more complex ecommerce: “We want the middle-aged Midwestern soccer mom to easily be able to buy and sell her stuff,” says Rothman.

US media sellers (Randy?), what do you think? Does that “one at a time” style of selling put you off, or will you be listing items on Glyde? US buyers, does it look good or will you be sticking with eBay, Amazon and the hundreds of other media sites out there? And sellers everywhere else – is this the sort of marketplace you’d list on? Leave us a comment.

Prostores, eBay’s solution for “off-eBay” ecommerce sites are running a competition to giveaway three Jump Start packages which are designed to help you get your ProStore up and running and profitable in next-to-no time. The package normally retails at $799, and includes synching with your eBay Store, set up of all comparison shopping site feeds, store settings training and more.

All you have to do to enter is leave a comment on Prostores’ blog telling them why you should win.

To use the Jump Start package, of course, you’ll also need to open a Prostore. I don’t mind admitting, this is where I would normally start making disparaging noises. What’s the point, I would say, of having an “off-eBay” website which is actually run by eBay and where you still have to pay eBay fees? Except that Prostores recently have got a lot better. If you’re a Gold or higher PowerSeller, there’s no monthly fee to pay. Transaction fees are 0.5%, but more importantly, there’s inventory management across eBay and your Prostore – so you can’t sell the same thing twice in two different places. If you’re in the US and only selling on eBay at the moment, Prostores are certainly worth considering – at the very least, use the month’s free trial and see if they’re for you.

For sellers, the news was generally not bad, though frankly nothing to set the world on fire. Marketplaces revenues fell 1% in comparison to the same quarter last year, but rose 9% on Q2 09. GMV was up 10% on the same quarter last year, and sold items increased 30%: we’re selling more, albeit at lower average prices. eBay’s take rate (the percentage of the average transaction which goes in fees) has fallen and is expected to continue to fall due to fee restructuring which has taken place throughout 2009.

Some numbers:

• Fixed price sales now represent 56% of eBay sales, up from 46% a year ago. There is considerable variation though between categories, with collectables predictably strong still for auction sales.
• Around 30% of listings offer free shipping: this has stabilised even though the fee incentive for sellers has now been removed.
• US Top Sellers see their sales increasing by an average of 15%, way ahead of ecommerce generally.

For the future, US holiday marketing will be an integrated mix of online and offline advertising: free shipping will not be emphasised during this campaign. JD sounded close to enthusiastic about eBay’s plans here, so I can’t wait to see what holiday fun eBay has in store for us.

Predictably though, PayPal and now Bill Me Later are the stars in eBay’s heaven, now supplying 66% of eBay’s profits globally (from 60% last year). Total payment volume (i.e. how much money they processed) is up 35%. Next year will see an integrated product with BML a part of PayPal’s normal payment processing offering, so merchants will only have to integrate one gateway to benefit from both payment methods.

There are also a couple of cheering signs that eBay are dragging their site in the twenty-first century. Expect to see catalogue data in more categories. For those categories which don’t naturally have manufacturer data (e.g. cameras or DVDs), user generated tagging might serve a similar purpose. There’s also a diamond ring builder being trialled on site: were I a Freudian, I’d wonder why JD took about three goes to get his words out about that. But there was still no mention of a shopping cart.

The second will look at potentially misleading pricing practices:

• “drip” pricing, where prices are incremented through the buying process (some airlines should be worried, I think)
• “baiting” sales, where only a few products are available at an advertised low price; customers lured in by promised low prices are diverted to full-priced items
• “relatively high reference prices” in comparison to sale price, e.g. “was £50, now £20″. No mention is made of *false* reference prices here, only of a large difference.
• time-limited offers
• complex pricing where it’s difficult for the customer to assess an individual price: an example given is “three for two” offers, which doesn’t seem particularly complex – but I have seen much worse, for example retail sites that exclude VAT from their headline prices.

The OFT’s announcement adds that it will investigate price comparison sites that may use some of the practices described above.

The studies are expected to be concluded in spring and summer 2010 respectively. Possible outcomes range from “giving the industry a clean bill of health” to “investigation and enforcement action against companies suspected of breaching consumer law”. Most likely seems something in the middle: internet merchants should probably expect to see at least new guidelines for online pricing, encouraging companies to take voluntary action and probably a new industry code of practice.

OFT press release, via the BBC and the Times.

The announcement was made in an email to Amazon UK affiliates. At time of writing Amazon’s “help” section isn’t working correctly, but I’ll update the post with an official link as soon as it’s available.

Amazon deliveries were in the news last week too, as managers made contingency plans to continue deliveries through the national postal strike.

Is this just what the eBay-watching world has been waiting for? Pierre Omidyar’s comment on Twitter has an air of “at last” about it, and eBay Ink writes

believe it or not, there has never been an official corporate website that represents the corporate information regarding eBay Inc. and all of the people and businesses behind it.

Well, maybe. There have been a number of disparate bits of site – About eBay, press office, investor news and so on – which are targetted very specifically, and very well, at different groups of readers. There have been a lot of blogs, some of which have great content and some of which (eBay UK’s Trust and Safety blog, I’m looking at you) never managed more than a couple of posts. It’s just never been all collected together quite so visibly.

eBayInc.com crucially doesn’t promise any new content, only a new platform to collect everything that’s already out there. Right now, it’s hard to see the point. This is a broadcast site: it’s all about what eBay want to tell us, not what we want to talk to eBay about. It doesn’t promise any new accessibility, any new conversation, any new openness: it’s just another place to read the same old same old from eBay PR. If you’re interested in this stuff, you’re already reading it: and if you’re not, eBayInc.com doesn’t bring anything new to the table.

But maybe the point comes later: eBay’s official social media guru Richard Brewer-Hay writes:

…please let us know what you’d like to see added – what do you like most about it? Least? This is by no means a final product, it’s a launching pad for us to communicate and interact on a higher level as a company of individuals and I look forward to enhancing and expanding on this platform over the coming months.

If you don’t want to pop over to eBay Ink and leave an opinion, feel free to leave a comment here.

Amazon told sellers “Charge When Ship follows the current industry standard for processing buyer payments and will also help keep buyers informed about the status of their deliveries. All new orders you receive must be processed using Charge When Ship.”

Sellers on Amazon need to be aware that they are required to confirm despatch of each order. If sellers don’t begin to confirm their shipments, Amazon are likely to temporarily suspend their listings to prevent customers from receiving orders they have not been charged for.

Amazon expects sellers to despatch within 2 days of order confirmation. Any orders which are not confirmed as despatched within 30 days will be canceled without the customer ever having been charged.

Murray Newlands interviews Will Martin-Gill, eBay’s Director of Internet Marketing, about the eBay Partner Network affiliate program. Will talks about advances in comparison shopping sites, a new widget which (as Murray says) sounds a lot like Google Adsense, and recent rule changes for EPN. Worth a listen.

photo credit: William Hook

Silicon Alley Insider is reporting “Wall Street gossips” saying that Apple are considering extending iTunes so that it can be used on third-party sites as a payment service.

iPhone users can already use iTunes to purchase some virtual and subscription goods in iPhone applications, though that service charges developers 30% of the transaction, so in its current format, it’s not something that retailers of actual goods are going to rush to embrace.

We’ve seen many things touted as “PayPal killers” over the last few years: Google Checkout was going to be the end, so was Amazon Payments. The probable next contender, Facebook payments, is still in alpha testing. But to be a real PayPal killer, any new service would need to offer buyers something that PayPal doesn’t already: the rise and rise of PayPal was, after all, down to eBay buyers demanding to use it. Could Apple bring something new to the table? SAI suggests that

maybe this is Apple’s first step toward becoming a way for people to pay for goods offline. As consumers, we’d love this. No more waiting for the bartender to ring you up!

Paying a bar or restaurant tab by clicking a button on an iphone does sound a lot more attractive than the interminable wait for the bill, I have to admit. Wrong-footing PayPal? – there could be an app for that…

If you’re linking from a third party site to eBay, the only way to do that now is to have your own site as a middle stage between – say – Twitter and eBay. It’s a clunky way to do it, and it’s going to lose a lot of your traffic. People with free-hosted blogs (and those who are on WordPress.com ought to be aware they’ve been breaking WP’s ToS for a while now!) need to move to self-hosted versions: it’s a pretty easy job to do, but give me a shout if you need assistance (or WordPress hosting or customisation ).

New accounts will also have to verify the domain listed on their account; while this isn’t yet being required for existing affiliates, I would bet that it will be in the future, so anyone deriving a significant income from this program might like to get themselves verified sooner rather than later. They also might like to consider whether such a precarious business model – these sweeping changes have been introduced with ten days’ notice – is really a good idea.

If you need clarification on the new policies, eBay has set up a thread for that, though it must be said, at the moment, there are more questions than answers.

photo credit: avlxyz

PayPal have published the results of their second annual Checkout Abandonment Survey, looking at why website buyers don’t complete purchases. Just like last year’s survey, an excessive shipping fee was the number one reason for shoppers walking away. It’s clear that if sellers are able to offer shipping-inclusive prices, this is something that buyers like, however counter-intuitive that might be for those of us who typically sell more than one item at a time. And even if your site charges separate shipping, making that cost transparent at the beginning of the checkout flow – or earlier – is essential.

There’s some suggestion, though, that buyers are getting more savvy with their online shopping: the second most popular reason for abandonment was that buyers wanted to comparison shop, and 25% cited leaving the site to look for a coupon or discount voucher. Sellers should be using this behaviour to their advantage: if you’re not currently listing website coupons on voucher sites, you’re probably missing out on some valuable free advertising, and a fair number of sales.

But there’s some reassurance: a third of shoppers who abandoned their carts later returned to the same site to purchase. Sellers should consider:

• making it easy for shoppers to bookmark their site and specific items they’re interested in,
• using social bookmarking tools as well as traditional browser bookmarks/favourites
• extending the life of shopping cart cookies so that buyers who return later can find the items they’d already added to their cart,
• and offering a wish-list facility for longer-term use.

PayPal are running a video presentation later today to discuss their findings further.

“Let me get what I want”
So to answer Mark, here’s what I think: shopping on eBay is too damn difficult.

eBay is the only site on the internet where you can be told off for changing your mind. If I’m buying from Amazon, I can

• put an item in my shopping basket and take it out again
• get halfway through checkout and decide I don’t want it
• go to pay, and decide I’m not going to
• pay, and then decide I prefer something else, and cancel in the click of a button so long as my item hasn’t been dispatched yet.

I can’t do *any* of that on eBay. eBay should join the 21st century, and get a shopping cart and a buyer-initiated “cancellation before dispatch” process, before all buyers quit in frustration and go somewhere else where it’s easier to shop.

Every time I suggest eBay needs a shopping cart (and yes, I say it a lot ), a seller tells me that it wouldn’t work because buyers would leave things in their carts, and those items would be stuck in limbo. Funnily, Amazon Marketplace has made this work just fine: the item isn’t yours until you’ve paid for it and someone else can still buy it from under your nose. So in fact, you’ve got *more* incentive to buy now, *more* incentive to get on and check out – rather than doing the eBay thing of popping that BIN item on your watch list and forgetting about it. If we made it easier for people to shop, they would shop *more*.

Of course, a shopping cart would require one other change to the eBay system: the much-needed addition of instant payment required for multiple items. It’s utterly ridiculous that this hasn’t be implemented, meaning that those of us who commonly sell multiples have to sit on unpaid eBay orders for sometimes weeks at a time. If eBay needs an incentive to make these essential changes, think about the extra PayPal-funded sales that multi-item IPR would bring in.

“But you will change your mind”
The easier shopping = more shopping rule also applies to order cancellation. Buyers – whether we like it or not – have a legal right to change their minds. The current system of UIDs undermines that right. It’s too complicated, it’s too easy for either party to get wrong, it relies on clear and accurate communication when tempers may be getting frayed. And it should be gotten rid of. Lets replace it with:

1. a buyer-initiated “cancellation before dispatch” process: until the seller has marked the item dispatched, the buyer can cancel their purchase. The PayPal payment will be refunded, the eBay fees (all of them, including featured) will be refunded, and the item will be automatically put back “into stock” – either added back into a live multi-item listing, or if on a single listing, made available for relisting to the seller.
2. a seller-initiated “cancellation before payment” process: if the buyer hasn’t paid after a stated amount of time (3, 5, 7 days…? could be seller-selectable) the seller can just cancel the sale and get their fees back. Without arguments, without negative feedbacks, without “disputes”.

And for both of these, I would envisage saying that as no transaction has taken place, no feedback can be left by either party.

eBay will doubtless worry that some sellers would abuse such a system to avoid fees. IMHO eBay are so obsessed with the idea of fee-avoidance that they’re ruining the site because of it. They can see which sellers are potentially abusing the system easily enough, and they can take action against them. And the rest of us can quit feeling like we’re in some Kafkaesque nursery school where childish bureaucracy rules, and get on with buying and selling.

“You’ve got everything, now.”
In last week’s earnings call, John Donahoe said that eBay is outperforming ecommerce in general in every selling format it has, apart from auctions. Fixed price revenue is up 12%. Classifieds revenue is up a massive 23%. Auctions, on the other hand, are down 20%.

So what is eBay doing? Encouraging sellers to list auctions. On .com, auctions’ insertion fees are 15c; BINs’ are 35c. On eBay UK, private sellers’ auctions starting at 99p or less have no insertion fees; BINs are 40p each if you don’t have a shop. On eBay.fr, auctions are 15c and the headline price for BINs is 50c. eBay Germany’s vastly complicated fee structure largely favours auctions. Sellers across all eBay sites are being pushed to list auctions. But (except perhaps in a very few specialist areas) the novelty of online auctions has worn off: buyers don’t want to sit around for a week to see if they’ve “won” – they just want to get on with their shopping: eBay’s own figures show that.

“What eBay does best” is a phrase that’s used often to back up arguments, and I’m going to use it again here. Meg Whitman said that auctions were what eBay does best. John Donahoe seems to think that “secondary market” retailer clearance is what eBay does best. I disagree. What eBay does best and always has done is to provide a marketplace, for everyone, for everything. Amazon, Ebid, Bonanzle, dozens of start-up wannabees: nothing comes even close to eBay’s breadth of inventory, nothing comes close to the huge variety of sellers from the mother selling her kids unwanted toys to the biggest high-street names, nothing, in fact, comes close to eBay.

eBay should stop being an auction site, and reposition itself as a shopping site. Sellers should be encouraged (financially) to list in the formats that work: the fixed price ones. eBay should teach buyers to think of eBay as the site where you can buy everything, right now (not a site where you can “win” that thing you want next week, if you haven’t bought it on Amazon in the meantime).

“I’ve already waited too long”
Given the figures that JD announced last week, I don’t think it would take much to turn eBay around. Not much except, perhaps, some rather radical thinking: to get out of the auction mindset into the shopping mindset. eBay seems to be moving in the right direction – easier returns and multi-variant listings being two such recent moves – but they’re doing it too slowly. We’re due another announcement of site changes in September; rather than the fiddling for the sake of something to do while Rome burns we had this month, let’s next time see some really radical change that will make eBay a great place to shop again.

eBay are to offer Japanese – English translation services for auctions and ASQs. I hope the translations are better than Babelfish sometimes is, or there could be some very amusing misunderstandings!

If you’re gonna sell stolen tickets it’s probably a good idea to make sure they’ve not been reported as missing and cancelled!

The computer virus conflicker worm although widely reported as due to strike today hasn’t wreaked havoc as of yet.

Four feel good stories about eBay sellers done good – nice to know it’s not all bad news out there.

Quite interesting BBC piece on Google from Matt Frei.

Detailed proposal for the Post Office to offer proper banking services to business.

And a selection of Sunday paper froth:

Heathrow boss sold lost luggage on eBay.

“Paypal will be your friend.”

Minder’s Motor on eBay in the Mirror. There’s an Arthur Daley gag here somewhere…

Birmingham man buys a bus on eBay cos he’s homesick.

Please share your impressions, views, ideas and questions here.