“One tool I have been using for the past 4 month which is wicked is this Yahoo Pipe. This allows me to monitor via RSS feed my positive neutral and negative feedback on a drop down on my browser. Useful for eTRS and general monitoring of your status. I can also access this information on the go with my Blackberry RSS feed syndicator”.

The tool is a Yahoo! Pipe, which are tools to allow you to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. This tool has been set up to monitor feedback simply by entering an eBay User ID and eBay site.

What you can also do with this tool is monitor a competitors feedback via RSS. If you want to know how much feedback your competition is receiving and want to monitor multiple competitors accounts you can set them all up as RSS feeds in your RSS reader. From then on, whenever any of those competitors is left feedback, you’ll be notified of it in your RSS reader.

Essentially it’s a site offering cash payments for solutions, creative work, artwork or practically anything that you want someone else to do. There are two winners to each competition – one chosen by the competition creator and the other winner is whichever entrant gets the most votes from site users.

To create a contest you’ll need to purchase some credits which are available via PayPal or credit card. If you’re a competition winner then cash payouts are via PayPal.

That’s a bit of a surprise to me, Google Checkout has long been a competitor to PayPal and Google are toying with NFC (Near Field Communications) mobile phone payments. Using PayPal is yet another indicator that much as Google would like to be a major player in the payments business they’ve a long way to go yet.

If you do need some work done, a utility written, or even translation of your eBay listings for foreign language sites Google Prizes might be worth a try. If you do post an entry in a competition let us know in comments so that we can all vote for your submission.

Google say that it’s still unclear what the FTC’s concerns are but go on to emphasise in detail that they put the user first and that their ultimate aim to to return the most relevant information to their customers, both for information and in displaying adverts.

Google do of course dominate the search market and the vast majority of their income is derived from adverts placed alongside those search results. They do of course also own a number of other properties such as images, video (YouTube), News, shopping, and maps and these services also feature in Google search results.

The question has to be asked if Google favour their own services above those of their competitors and is this what the FTC are looking into? Of course the corollary to that question is are Google’s other services what users really want to see and if they are the most relevant results then what’s the problem?

A Top Level Domain is the last part of a URL, like “.com”, “.net” and “.org”. ICAAN, the body which coordinates the Internet’s naming system, has voted to allow anyone to set up their own Top Level Domain. All you need is enough cash and to demonstrate that you have the finances and technical infrastructure to run your part of the Internet.

Costs start at $185,000 just to apply for a name when they go on sale in 2012. That’s just the start though, any questions about your application will set you back at least another $50,000 and if someone else wants the same domain then it could go to auction where the sky’s the limit on costs.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see eBay buy the “.eBay” domain though, they have the finances and they have the technical infrastructure. In the future eBay microsites could be hosted on their own domain so for example instead of “http://www.eBay.co.uk/charity” we could simply type in “charity.eBay“.

Of course eBay would probably have to buy “.bay” as well to prevent companies setting up “www.e.bay” and a host of similar sites. Once the number of domains are limitless it introduces an infinite number of variations and companies are likely to want to protect their trademarks.

Which Top Level Domains would you like to see and would you buy a new URL for your website if it became available?

As a part of the Internet & Economic Growth Panel, Donahoe had the opportunity to talk about the role eBay and the Internet as a whole play in creating economic opportunity for millions of people globally. The panel conversation revolved around the Internet’s impact on the economy and society via economic growth, job creation, and value creation.

There were some interesting stats about eBay – 17,000 employees, 100 million people use eBay or PayPal each month, 25 million people sell something on eBay each month and 1.3 million people worldwide make their primary or secondary income on eBay.

Even more interesting was the conclusion that government regulation of the Internet should be light to avoid stifling innovation.

The panel discussion was broadcast live on Facebook and is now available to replay on YouTube.

If you haven’t installed the Google Goggles app on your mobile then you should. Google Goggles allows you to take a photograph of almost anything from a bottle of wine to a landmark and Google will attempt to identify it for you. Once identified if the photograph is of a product you have the option of finding ways to purchase that product either online or by searching for a local shop close to where you are. Google will even lead you through to Google maps to get directions to the nearest local shop.

Whilst many people think of mobile commerce as simply using a phone instead of a computer the future of mobile commerce will be new and innovative ways to use a mobile. The use of smart phones won’t be primarily because of their computing power, but more because they’re a device which people carry at all times and bring an immediacy to the shopping experience.

Whilst Google demonstrated mobile applications available today, Clare Gilmartin of eBay shared her vision of the mobile shopping apps of the future.

eBay already have shopping apps for today’s smart phones but in the future they will be truly smart. If you admired the handbag of a girl crossing the road in front of you, you will be able to take a photo of the scene and immediately identify the products – in this example the handbag and clothing – and you will be able to make an impulse purchase via your mobile.

In truth I’ve often been sceptical of using a mobile phone for shopping, preferring a full size keyboard and screen to browse online. The truth is much of today’s online shopping experiences are poorer on a mobile device than on a computer, albeit with the advantage of immediacy. ChannelAdvisor EU Catalyst however gave me a glimpse of the future and a feature rich mobile shopping experience, with an immediacy that can only be accessed by use of ubiquitous smart phones.

We won’t simply be browsing for products on mobile phones, the smart phone will be the essential device to connect us with products whenever and wherever we see them.

The clauses causing concern are giving consumers the right to require the trader to deliver the goods or supply the service in another Member State and forcing the trader to refund return postage from any Member State if the purchase price is over about £35 (€40).

The IMRG were one of the first to voice concerns, but they are now joined by the Business Software Alliance and The Forum of Private Business. All three organisations say that the EU proposals will cripple online SME retailers.

It’s disappointing as the proposals are intended to simplify cross border trading within the EU. As Keith Bird, CEO of eSellerPro points out “In reality, we are entering an increasingly global marketplace and online retailers simply cannot remain siloed. Whilst UK online retail is starting to plateau, the European market is on the rise and those UK-based small and mid-sized retailers that do not embrace selling into Europe will lose out to those that do.”

Retailers need to expand and one of the best ways to do this is to sell across the EU. What’s needed is a unified set of regulations enabling retailers to sell across the EU if they choose to and are ready to, that ensures if they comply with domestic legislation that they’ll be in compliance with the regulations in every other EU country.

In reality what appears likely to happen is that the EU draft a set of unworkable regulations which many companies will attempt to adhere to whilst much of the EU carry on as normal and simply ignore the legislation as too onerous to comply with.

Ocado, established in 2000, now deliver over 21,000 product lines including Waitrose goods and a growing Ocado own-label product range.

Ocado chairman Lord Grade (better know as Michael Grade, ex BBC and ITV Chairman) said “I am very pleased to welcome Doug to the Ocado board. His high-level background in ecommerce and IT is a most valuable addition to the skills and experience of the existing directors. He will make a significant contribution to Ocado’s plans for growth”.

Congratulations to Doug and kudos to Ocado for snagging one of the top talents in European ecommerce. The only question that remains is will Doug recommend Ocado open up to 3rd party retailers at any point in the future?

The aim of redrafting the Consumer Rights Directive is to simplify legislation and have one harmonized set of regulations across all 27 EU countries. This should enable businesses to avoid the expense of ensuring they comply with local regulations in each EU country they trade in. However the effect of the legislations looks set to make ecommerce trade non-viable for many retailers.

There are two specific clauses which will undoubtedly trouble all online merchants, returns and obligatory cross border EU trading:

Article 17 – Obligations of the consumer in case of withdrawal
The consumer shall only be charged for the direct cost of returning the goods. He shall not be charged for that cost if the trader has agreed in the contract to bear it or the price of the goods to be returned is more than €40.

Up until now Distance Selling Regulations have allowed merchants to refund the original transaction (including outward postage) but insisted that the consumer pick up the postage cost of returning the items. Many would argue that the retailer shouldn’t have to refund outgoing postage costs but currently both the retailer and the consumer pay for one leg of the postage and both lose equally for a cancelled sale.

If the new regulations are passed then if the item cost is over €40 (about £35) then the retailer would be responsible for paying the return postage as well.

Article 22a Right to delivery of goods to or supply of services in another Member State
In the case of a distance contract, the consumer shall be entitled to require the trader to deliver the goods or supply the service in another Member State. The trader shall meet the consumer’s request if this is technically feasible and if the consumer agrees to bear all the related costs. The trader shall in any event state those costs in advance.

Currently retailers can choose whether to sell to the UK only, whether to ship to selected certain EU countries, to ship to all EU countries or perhaps to sell worldwide.

The EU want to take away the right to choose which territories you are willing to supply to. The draft regulations insist that consumers from the entire EU have the right to purchase from you and you have to ship to them if possible, regardless of where in the EU they are based.

This will have drastic effects for many sellers. Unless you routinely ship internationally you may not have an international courier contract. Some of the products you sell may be too heavy for Royal Mail and so you would have to spend time sourcing one-off couriers whenever an EU citizen takes up their right to purchase from you.

Both of these changes taken individually will have significant impacts for many online retailers. However when taken together a seller could end up in the position of being forced to ship to a far flung EU country to a buyer who then changes their mind. If they requested a return and the item cost was over €40 not only have you lost the cost of the outgoing shipping but you also have to pick up the cost for the item to be returned.

Even for sellers who have international Royal Mail or Courier contracts these are generally one-way with discount volume contract prices negotiated for sending items out from the UK. Arranging courier contracts to recover goods from any of the 27 EU countries at a reasonable price will be beyond the resources of most businesses. The alternative will be refunding buyers the rack rate price for whichever shipping method they decide to use to return the unwanted goods.

The IMRG estimates the draft regulations will cost online retailers an additional €10 billion per year in delivery charges, which amounts to a staggering 4% of the estimated worth of the e-commerce industry in 2012. They added “We believe that retailers must remain free to identify the markets that suit their business model, allowing them the opportunity to carry out the necessary work to enable a successful entry into that market. Forcing businesses into markets they do not understand will damage, not stimulate growth”.

There are some sections of the draft regulations which make sense, such as retailers not having to refund additional postage costs if the consumer opted for expedited shipping. However there is little point giving retailers any protection if the regulations force them out of business, or result in price increases to cover the additional cost of complying.

The draft Consumer Rights Directive in it’s present form would, if ratified, change trading on marketplaces as we know it. eBay features such as blocking countries you do not ship to would become illegal across the EU, with sellers forced to ship to and then pay for return shipping costs from countries they didn’t even want to trade with in the first place.

Amazon was sued first and that’s been followed by a suit against Google. However these two cases may be the tip of the iceberg, as a raft of other companies including household names such as eBay, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo all use the same auto-complete search suggestions.

This will be an interesting case, although the patent was filed in 2004 it was granted on 6th July 2010 and covers the technology which allows Web servers to act on string input on a per character basis, thus enabling intelligent auto-completion and complex lookups using server side data. The possible outcomes, if MasterObjects win their lawsuits, are licensing deals or the removal and redesign of how websites return search results to their users.

Magento is a professional open-source ecommerce solution that offers retailers complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. As it’s open-source developers can add functionality and tailor the software for a retailers specific requirements. This enables them to add in every business process and flow required to integrate into existing back end accounts and inventory management solutions.

eBay’s commitment to Magento may seem at odds with their aim to be the premier marketplace and payment provider on the Internet, but it makes sense. eBay are becoming much more open to the reality that retailers will not use eBay as the only venue for selling, but that it will be one of a number of avenues to retail. With the addition of major high street retailers their mindset is moving towards becoming an integral part, but not the entire retail operation for merchants.

Magento is a much more solid proposition than eBay Prostores and is already used by many major online retailers. By investing in Magento which is one of the premier ecommerce solutions available they are cementing their position in wider online retail than marketplace business.

They’ve also announced that later this year Google Shopping will be launched in Spain, Italy and the Netherlands, and to achieve this they have opened the Google Merchant Center for these countries early. This is to give retailers time to set up their product feeds and submit products ready for launch.

As a retailer if you ship internationally you probably already sell to the major EU markets such as the UK, Germany, Ireland and France. However Google’s latest move should be a strong indicator of the next biggest marketplaces and where you should look next for growth.

If you sell on eBay or Amazon you should consider listing on the German and French sites for both marketplaces, but don’t ignore smaller countries. Watch where companies like Google are expanding and consider localised sites in those languages and currencies. Whilst growth might not be as strong as in the major territories the potential for establishing yourself is greater as competition is less.

Amazon leads the way up an amazing 84.5%, eBay growth was 5.8% with paid search turning in a healthy 22% growth. What is disappointing is the 1.9% growth rate for Comparison Shopping Channels. Whilst that’s still growth it does tend to suggest that comparison shopping may have run it’s course.

Scot doesn’t break out Comparison Shopping results by venue – it would be interesting to see the figures if the free channels such as Google Product Search were excluded. If you use Comparison Shopping to promote your products which ones are still performing for you?

The likes of Shopping.com, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, NextTag, and Kelkoo all used to feature heavily in Google search results, but that hasn’t been the case for a number of years. Is it simply the loss of high profile search positions that has caused the slowdown or is there another reason for customers abandoning these sites?

With ecommerce growing at (using Scot’s figures) 13.4% year on year there is no shortage of customers on the web, they’re just not increasing their use of comparison shopping. So are your buyers now using alternatives such as social media to research products? Are they going direct to retailer or manufacturer websites? Are they no longer performing product (or more often simply price) comparisons, or have they simply found new ways to do their research?

When you have a purchase to make which methods do you find to locate the ideal product at the best price with the service you want. Do you use Comparison Shopping sites or have you found more convenient ways to find what you’re looking to purchase?

Back in the summer of 2010 Google were checking search results for an unusual misspelled query “torsorophy” (the correct spelling is “tarsorrhaphy”). At the time Bing had no results for the misspelt term, but later in the summer they started to return Google’s first search result without offering to correct the spelling.

Google naturally wondered how this could happen and having spotted similar unlikely results introduced some temporary code as a honey trap. They created about 100 search queries such as “hiybbprqag”. These were search strings that a user would never be likely to look for and Google manually injected search results at random which had no connection with the search terms.

They then got 20 engineers with freshly installed laptops including Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 with the “Suggested Sites” feature enabled and got them to enter the artificial search terms click on the manufactured search results.

Sure enough within a couple of weeks Bing started to return the same fake search results showing that somehow Microsoft were duplicating Google’s search.

It appears likely that Microsoft are learning what users click on and not directly copying Google’s algorithm or pages. This is in some ways similar to how eBay’s Best Match works – The more a user clicks and buys from a particular listings the more relevant it is deemed. As an eBay listing becomes more popular eBay promote it higher in search results.

Microsoft appear to be doing the same “learning” as eBay, but with the exception that they’re capturing user’s clicks in search results from other search engines and using them to improve their own Bing search engine.

Learning to improve search from users of Microsoft software to improve the overall user experience of other Microsoft products does on the face of it appear reasonable. The question is did you know that you’re sending this data to Microsoft? Is it a legitimate way to improve Bing’s search experience or is it simply plagiarism?

Google have emphasised that they don’t normally have the ability to manually insert results into search queries and that they have removed the code which allowed them to create the honey pot queries.

There’s a problem though, when the Internet was first conceived it used 32bit IP addresses. An IP (Internet Protocol) address is what’s used to identify every computer, website and email server on the Internet. Every single device connected to the net has to have a unique IP address to be identified, and routers then talk to each other to route information from one device to another.

In recent years there has been an explosion of Internet connections. If you look around your own home you’ll probably have a computer and maybe a laptop, but increasingly other devices such as Wii, xBox, and even televisions are internet connected. Even your Internet enabled mobile smart phone needs to communicate with the net.

The problem is that there are a limited number of IP addresses – 4.3billion. That might sound like a lot, but it’s predicted that we’ll run out of IP addresses some time this year. We currently use IP version 4, but if you’re purchased a new computer running Vista or Windows 7 you may have noticed it also support IP version 6. IPv6 moves from the 32 bit addresses of IPv4 to 128bit addresses which add trillions of new IP addresses.

Currently even if you have an IPv6 enabled computer it’s unlikely that your router and ISP are support IPv6. That might change soon though. On 8th June, 2011, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks are some of the major organisations that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test drive”.

World IPv6 Day will be the biggest ever test of IPv6 and has never been deployed on such a large scale before. The aim of the day is to help the Internet industry prepare for the new protocol, find and resolve any unexpected issues, and pave the way for global deployment.

As an Internet user you shouldn’t be affected by the tests, even if you’re still operating (like me) on IPv4. Although many major sites will be testing IPv6 they’ll still run IPv4 in parallel so you should be able to access all services as normal. However there may be some users who experience connectivity problems (estimated to be 0.05% of Internet users).

They intend to solicit information from manufacturers though an intermediary, Edgenet. Edgenet’s Ezeedata service will enable manufacturers to submit high-quality product data and images to Google.

Edgenet tout the service as the way to “Optimize and certify your product data for search engines and comparison shopping engines like Google and improve product visibility and sell through”. What Google didn’t mention is that the service appears to come at a cost of $.03 to $9.99 per product per month.

However it doesn’t appear that FireFox is gaining in popularity but it’s holding it’s market share. What is happening is that users who haven’t already ditched IE for FireFox are now dumping the once ubiquitous web browser in favour of Google Chrome. Chrome now has 14.58% market share in Europe compared to 5.06% a year ago.

Chrome’s rapidly growing market share does beg the question why don’t eBay support it? Currently the browsers supported by eBay are Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or higher, Mozilla Firefox 1.5 or higher, or Apple Safari.2 or higher (all of which are defunct out of date versions). It’s now time that eBay fully supported Google Chrome in addition to IE and FireFox.

Google will retain the number 1 slot as the default search engine on installation of Firefox 4, Bing will now appear 3rd in the drop down list after Yahoo! (Bing already power much of Yahoo! search anyway). Amazon, eBay and Wikipedia all retain their placement in the search options but Answers.com and Creative Commons are to be dropped.

Whether this will result in more users choosing to search with Bing remains to be seen, but for those that prefer Bing to Google it’ll be a welcome addition to Firefox. The big question for ecommerce merchants is will it drive more traffic to Bing Shopping and how will that translate to sales?

It’s worth remembering that Microsoft Bing commenced powering part of Yahoo! searches starting on 24th August. However the Yahoo! search results powered by Bing were counted as Yahoo! searches in the Nielsen data. If they were counted as Bing searches then Microsoft’s search share would rise to 26%.

Bing has come a long way since it’s launch and Microsoft have made considerable investment including their cash back program which was retired in June of this year.

The next big target has to be closing the gap with Google, and of course increasing adoption of Bing outside of the US. For US online sellers Bing Shopping is definitely a shopping comparison engine that shouldn’t be ignored, especially as like Google it’s free.

• How not to pick a domain name
• How to pick a domain name

1. .com or .co.uk?
   People will argue about this, but here are my thoughts: .co.uk is fine if all your customers are UK based, and always will be. .com says global. It also says bigger business. And it’s what lots of people type by default. So I’d never buy a domain name where I couldn’t have the .com in addition to whatever geographically specific extensions I wanted.
2. Misspellings
   Have you built some easy misspellings into your domain name, and if so, are you prepared to buy all the alternatives? Jewellery/jewelry and accessories are words best avoided!
3. Readability
   If you tell someone your URL on the phone – or on the radio – are they going to instinctively understand what you’ve said? 4U, 2U and similar “numbers for words” tricks can also cause confusion. And if you’re going to need to spell it out, at least keep it short.
4. Hyphens or underscores
   If you’re going the multiple keyword route, you’ll want to separate keywords so that Google sees them as different words. Google used to see hyphens as word separators, but not do the same with underscores. Google talked about changing this (and then didn’t), but for human readability, hyphens are still better: underscores are hard to read with underlined link text. (A name that needs neither hyphens nor underscores is still, of course, better.)
5. Check the history
   Domain names are recyclable. If someone’s owned it before but not renewed, you could be buying a name with a whole bunch of history – and that might not be something you want. Check
   • if it’s been registered before: a whois tool will tell you this
   • what Google has indexed (search for “site: http://domain.com”)
   • if it’s listed as serving up any malware: append the URL to
     http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=
   • the Way Back Machine will show you what the site’s previous incarnation looked like

1 thing everyone forgets

Best Match might be the norm on eBay, but alphabetical order still rules the universe at large. Where will you show up in that list? zoopermarket.com might be the perfect name for your new pet supplies business, but alices-alligator-addiction.com, birmingham-bird-boutique.biz and the-krazy-kat-kartel.kr are all going to show up before you do.

Consistent branding

If you like your eBay ID, then that’s what you should be using for your domain name. But as lots of us get into this by accident, we start off with eBay ID’s like “sueb1234″ while we’re selling off our own old tat, and only later come to the realisation that our ID ought to match what we’ve decided to sell as a business.

Sellers who are in the fortunate position of wanting to change eBay ID at the same time they set up a website can check for availability of both eBay ID and domain name at the same time. Your buyers should know that you’re you, whichever channel they’re looking at. The chances of someone looking at your ID, wondering if you have a website, and typing it in +.com are small – but if they do, it should work for them.

The difference between a domain name and your brand

Your domain name is what people type in to get to your website. It’s what they bookmark. Hopefully, it’s what they link to. But it doesn’t have to be the whole story.

For consistency’s sake (see above), your domain name and your site name shouldn’t be different (don’t try running Black Satan Biker Boots on fluffy-kittens.com) – but your site branding can be a lot more than just your domain name. I like SEO-Gold’s take on this:

when we were deciding on a business and domain name for this web site we knew we couldn’t have the ideal domain names (for optimization reasons) because others already owned them. After a little keyword research at Wordtracker and checking various domains we settled on http://www.seo-gold.com and general site name SEO Gold Search Engine Optimization Services (or in short SEO Gold).

You might be able to come up with something snappier, but the principle is sound.

How many keywords can I cram in?

It’s tempting to cram in as many keywords as you can to your domain name: bags-shoes-pashminas-and-earrings.co.uk, perhaps, or beer-sex-chips-gravy.com. Resist the temptation. It looks spammy. It also looks massively insecure: as though the only way your site will get any traffic is by overwhelming Google with your keywordly goodness. And as we said yesterday, it’s not memorable.

One halfway house option is “brand + keyword”. I quite like this. “YooxFashion” isn’t quite as good as “Yoox” – if you have the marketing to back up the brand – but as an instant identifier, it might comfort the keyword obsessed.

Is it all about you?

This is one we see a lot on eBay: Becky’s Bags, Ed’s CDs (and Mr Biddy’s late lamented car spares Shop “Bart’s Parts” which still makes me LOL). I’m not quite sure how you put a possessive into a domain name effectively: EdsCDs.co.uk is alright, but you can’t rely on everyone capitalising it correctly, and edscds.co.uk doesn’t look as good.

For those in need of inspiration

Right about now, someone is saying, but just tell me what to pick. I can’t. Because this is difficult. It’s one of the more important choices you’ll make about your business, and inspiration might take a while to strike. But it’s worth waiting for and working on. If you need help, then these places may provide it:

• Wordlab’s Business Name Generator: click long enough and you might find something you like
• Wordlab’s ACME Namemaker Name Generator finds you a dull, boring, safe name
• Wordroid will find you something natural-sounding (or not) in English, Spanish, French, German or Italian
• Naming.net lets you combine keywords with common words, prefixes and suffixes to throw up a lot of ideas.
• NeedOfficeSpace’s Company Name Generator will be suitably random.

This post is overlong already, so the promised “5 things to think about” will have to wait for tomorrow.

They join a venerable tradition on the net: who can forget whorepresents.com, penisland.net and therapistfinder.com?

If an idea for similar wordplay presents itself for your own domain name, I advise you to take it. Because no amount of Google Adwords, SEO and patient social media marketing is going to get you as much publicity as a million people on Twitter going OMG THEY HAVE SOMETHING RUDE IN THEIR DOMAIN NAME!!!1!.

But it probably won’t. How do you pick a domain name that wouldn’t upset your granny? This question comes up so often on the PowerSeller Board that eBay should probably buy a domain name registrar and sell domain names onsite. The advice that’s usually given is to think about what you sell, and cram your domain name full of keywords: if you sell bags, then you might think about handbagsRus, handbags4u, handbagsinfinity, and so on. The idea is that people will link to your domain with your domain name, and that will give you a boost for your desirable keyword “handbags”.

Don’t bother. Put yourself in a buyer’s shoes. You’re thinking “now, where did I see that great bag last week? was it handbags2me? handbagshandbagshandbags? handbags4eva? ohhh I know it began with handbags but I don’t remember the rest…” and they’ll never find your site again. Generic keywords aren’t memorable.

Do something different. ASOS isn’t called “DesignerClothes4U”. It’s called something short which only means itself. Yoox, same deal. Even the late unlamented boo.com. Work on that.

There’s another reason to avoid generic words as your company’s strongest identifier. If you want to buy your name in Google Adwords, it’s going to be a lot more expensive than if you’re just buying a brand name that only means you. (Real life example: at work, our company name is 4p a click: our nearest competitor, named with two generic keywords, is £2.)

Coming up tomorrow: How to pick a great domain name, 5 things you need to think about before you buy it, and one thing you’ll almost certainly forget.

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

(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.