Suchi Mukherjee, Gumtree’s MD said “Reaching ten years old is such a significant milestone for any online business. Ultimately, Gumtree is powered by the people who are posting their goods and services, and the demands of people looking for them”, and that’s pretty much my experience of the site.

I’ve sold my car on Gumtree, bought a beer fridge and listed stock originally destined for eBay but which is either too big for a standard courier or too awkward to pack safely. If you’ve not tried Gumtree for selling I’d recommend celebrating their 10th birthday by throwing up an advert or two.

A deaf woman is suing eBay, saying that the company’s telephone-based seller verification system breaches laws protecting disabled people from discrimination.

Melissa Earll from Nevada, Missouri says that eBay’s identification system breaches federal and California state laws. The system places automated calls to new sellers, requiring them to listen to a PIN given verbally on the telephone, and then enter that into the site, to prove that the phone number they’ve provided is correct. Ms Earll cannot hear the number, and so cannot complete the verification.

Ms Earll has repeatedly asked the company to provide her with another method of verifying her identity, but they have failed to do so. Her attorney says that “at one point, eBay even suggested that she just find someone who can hear normally to answer her phone for her.” She has now filed suit “on behalf of all deaf or hard of hearing persons who have been prevented from registering as sellers with eBay because of the company’s discriminatory telephone registration system”.

Via plaintiff’s press release.

So far, so meh. I question whether those of us who Twitter really need to be given easier ways to do it. There are currently dozens of ways to interact with Twitter: look at the bottom of any TameBay post, the top of any TameBay post, the front page sidebar, the app that’s running in my PC toolbar or the one that’s on my phone right now. Journalists link their accounts from bylines, and papers in turn run feeds of what their readers are tweeting about them. We’re not short of ways to interact with Twitter. Where @anywhere could make a difference isn’t down to how we use it, it’s in how the sites implement it in the first place.

I’m going to take “found this cool thing” and “bought this cool thing” functionality as a given. They are SO basic to the internet these days, those buttons to “tweet this”, that I sometimes wonder if eBay is the only site left without them. Certainly Amazon already has a lovely integration with their affiliate scheme, letting me tweet links in a single click and earn money from doing it. If only EPN had something like that.

Let’s assume that eBay can take this beyond the predictable. Imagine – if you will – that when buying something on eBay, you could read a Twitter feed from people who’d already bought that item. Not the calculated emotional blackmail that feedback so often turns into, but the unadulterated spewing of thought, positive and negative, that happens on Twitter. The joy of shopping. Wouldn’t that be a great thing?

I don’t know, and neither do you. Real integration with Twitter has the potential to take eBay and shopping and publicity and customer service somewhere it’s never been before. Some of that could be great: sellers who are currently complaining about eBay’s unreliable messaging system might welcome another way to ping a quick message to buyers (though they might prefer something more reliable than Twitter). But Twitter is even more real time than email, even more always on than “sleep? never heard of it” eBay sellers are used to. Do we want to raise buyer expectations of instant responses further? Do we want to do that in public?

Because as much as we make this about what we want as sellers – publicity, branding, conversation, connection – what it will be first of all is a point of contact for a customer who has a problem. It may be a problem of our making, or a problem that they’re angry or drunk or crazy. People who have problems want to be dealt with. Now. And if they’re on Twitter and you’re not dealing with them now, the situation has the potential to blow up in your face, in your pocket, in your bank account. Just ask Southwest Airlines, Vodaphone, Rentokil, Paperchase, companies with customer service departments and lawyers, a long way from one-person-band eBay traders, who still got burned on Twitter. Isn’t it better not to promise this instant communication, than to offer it and then not be able to deliver?

We’re a while off needing to worry about this. eBay Ink has a post about @anywhere with RBH singing its praises, but eBay – frankly – are hopeless at social media. They have bouts of enthusiasm and then someone realises that employees are talking to buyers and sellers without running everything past legal first and it all gets reined in again. Richard writes:

From what I can tell, the news out of Twitter today is very promising for buyers and sellers on the eBay Marketplace. It represents a growing trend we’ve been seeing over the past year that eBay is willing to knock down what had been until recently, indestructible barriers of entry … I still don’t have the details as to how this will be integrated into the marketplace or the extent to which Twitter applications are coming to eBay.com. Huge questions I realize. For now, I can only hope my excitement is justified.

Me too, Richard. Me too.

Speaking of Mark, Doug said “Under Mark’s leadership, the eBay business has performed strongly. The UK business has maintained its position as the number one e-commerce site, with the number of items bought on the site up by almost 20% year on year”. Doug went on to add “I am personally very sorry to see Mark leave the company he has led with such commitment, but I understand completely his reasons for seeking out a new challenge”.

Mark will be replaced by Clare Gilmartin who returns from maternity leave to become EU Marketplaces Vice President. Clare has been with eBay for six years and has previously held a role with similar responsibility across the UK and German eBay sites.

We wish Mark good luck in his next role and look forward to the future with Clare at the helm.

As well as Facebook connect you can also share threads on Facebook, and the forum integrates Gumtree related Twitter tweets, YouTube video and blog posts. Importantly you can also now follow conversations on RSS for instant updates of topics you’re interested in.

There are some “under the bonnet” tweaks for SEO optimisation and to reduce spammers or abuse of the forums, as well as some moderation tools, but most users won’t notice these. At the same time they’ve fine tuned the layout to make the normal text heavy forum layout a little easier on the eye.

Finally as an introduction to Gumtree forums they have have a cutesy video with some forum guideline and “do’s” and “don’ts”.

Those of us who’ve been around eBay for a while probably remember the story: the bust of a “huge shilling ring” in eBay’s art categories, people who bumped worthless paintings up to hundreds of dollars, and almost-worthless paintings up to thousands of dollars. This is the story told by one of the men who did it.

In an irony that isn’t lost on him, Ken Walton was a bored lawyer when he discovered eBay. It wasn’t long before he’d quit his job to work full time at his new career as art dealer, buying thrift store paintings and reselling them on eBay. You might not think that would be such a lucrative move, but Walton had a few things on his side. Firstly, this was the early days of eBay. Auctions were exciting – people bid for the thrill and for the win, and they bid stupid amounts of money for – frankly – rubbish. But Walton packed the odds in his favour: he and a friend began bidding on each other’s auctions. This was initially permitted by eBay as a way of establishing a reserve price. When eBay banned shilling, he developed a list of new IDs, to bump up his sale prices and those of his colleagues.

It didn’t stop there. Walton developed what he called the “naive seller technique”, listing paintings that could have been (but probably weren’t) by known artists in such a way that art collectors would think they’d spotted something the seller hadn’t. That way, he gained collectors’ interest without ever directly misleading them. It’s one way to salve your conscience.

The genius of Walton’s book is that I end up wanting him to get away with it. I’ve heard any number of sellers make the same unconvincing excuses he makes, and say the same mea culpas when caught. I don’t buy it: if you set out to delude people, even indirectly, you’re a crook. But Walton is such an entertaining crook, I find myself forgiving him. Mea culpa indeed.

The new site will display fixed price listings from sellers who offer shipping to the new eBay countries. The big advantage is that the site will be translated into the local language with prices displayed in the buyer’s local currency. The only parts of the site that won’t be translated is the item title and description. There will also be localised customer support for buyers in their own language.

If you see an increase from buyers in these countries it’ll probably be because they have their own eBay site for the first time.

The two companies have long been rivals, but an alliance could now make sense. Insiders say that merchants, particularly in the US, are unhappy with using Alibaba’s own payment system Alipay, and are demanding the facility to use PayPal. For PayPal, Alibaba could offer the potential for huge expansion in the Chinese market.

Alibaba’s PR department has said that the company will decide whether to adopt other payment tools based on user demands. Merchants outside China are likely to favour PayPal over many alternatives: Alipay is unfamiliar, and bank transfers to China are expensive and the costs are borne by buyers. PayPal, on the other hand, offers the cashflow-speeding possibility of spending your earnings directly on new stock, something that newer and smaller traders value intensely.

The announcement says “This agreement, if accepted by the members of the CWU, will secure the future of the business and allow the Royal Mail to become a profitable and successful enterprise. At the same time it will secure jobs in the long term and allow for employees to be properly rewarded”.

Hopefully this marks the end of disruption to Royal Mail services and the start of improved relations between them and the CWU. For those of us buying and selling online we can look forward to a future without the danger of disruption to the postal service and customers can order goods with the certainty that they’ll arrive in a timely fashion.

Industrial action in the second half of last year hit online businesses and other service users hard, before an interim agreement was reached in November saw action called off until talks resumed after Christmas.

Sky is now reporting that the two parties have reached an agreement on modernisation and new working practices, which the CWU will take to their executive later in the week.

54% of those surveyed expected their sales to increase over the next year: with 70% expecting profit margins to increase or stay the same, the mood is generally very bullish.

But eBay’s findings do suggest that merchants are working harder to achieve the targets they’ve set themselves. Only 10% (down from 12% last year) said they had “considerably” failed to achieve the requisite number of sales, but only 31% (down from 45%) said they had achieved them “easily”: most (38%, up from 27%) had reached targets “with difficulty”.

The cost of supplies and consumer demand remained the two biggest barriers to growth cited, though sterling’s recovery meant that problems with exchange rates were mentioned by only 38% (down from 52%) of merchants. The number of people citing access to credit or finance as a problem also fell substantially, suggesting that credit is starting to be available again.

Happily, only 9% of those surveyed described themselves as pessimistic about the future, down from 15% this time last year. 65% of those surveyed said they were “confident” about the outlook for their businesses. Check out the full survey in eBay’s PDF.

Do you agree with the merchants who talked to eBay? Are you expecting your sales and prices to increase this year? What’s the biggest barrier to growth in your business? And are you feeling confident, or pessimistic? Leave us a comment.

You are bidding on this Cold War nuclear bunker, complete with panoramic view over the Derbyshire Dales as well as desk, chair, siren box, enamel bucket, rope for hauling heavy items up the shaft, sump grill and sump pump, cupboard with some domestic items. Access is via a metal hatch and 15ft ladder, which lead to two rooms: one for the chemical toilet. The other is a 15 ft x 7½ ft room formerly intended to be used as a monitoring post in the event of a nuclear attack. Best of all, there is no Council Tax to pay on this property.

In all seriousness, this is a wonderful bit of history. The bunker was opened in 1959, and was fully operational until 1991, run by three personnel working in shifts. It comes with a small piece of land and its own stile for access. I can’t imagine who’ll buy it or what they’ll do with it – the seller suggests “limited living accommodation for short periods or adventure holidays” – but if the eventual winner is reading, please do get in touch!

The BBC estimates it could go for £25,000, but with seven days left, bidding is already up to £17,389, so I’d guess this could go a lot higher.

It appears to be a classic eBay story – thinking that the game would be worth around $10,000 the seller said “I am selling because I didn’t think I had anything of value. Then I saw that one lady sell her system and games for what she did. Upon checking the boxes that had sat in my basement for nearly 20 years, I hit gold!”

If you missed out on this one there’s another sealed version of Stadium Events on eBay with bidding up to a miserly $13,100.00 with two days left to run. Suddenly it makes buying a Wii and a copy of Wii Sports look like a bargain!

If you’re in Europe and have a copy laying around sadly it’s not nearly as valuable. The going rate for a PAL version appears to be around $1000.00.

Via Video Game Price Charts

Users in these new countries will see all of eBay translated into their own language, with the exception of the seller’s item titles and descriptions. They’ll be able to search across all eBay sites globally, but will only see search results from sellers willing to ship to their location. Prices will be displayed in local currency and they’ll be able to access customer support in their own language. You can see the new site at http://global.ebay.com/.

If you want to translate your listings to make it even easier to attract new customers Gumtree might be the place to go. Gumtree currently has over 6,000 ‘Skills & Language’ adverts live on the website, and has seen a 15% increase in the number of people looking for language lessons since the end of 2009. There’s a range of offers from lessons and interpreters, to simply translation services which would enable you to add shipping information etc in the new eBay users mother tongues.

It’s becoming increasing difficult for eBay to increase sales in existing territories, especially in the UK which is one of the most heavily penetrated eBay countries, so cross border trade will become increasingly important for growth in the future – however a potential 180 million new customers should do the trick in the near future.

An insider told the LA Times: “Stephanie will be leading our efforts to develop digital content and commerce in the cloud and will be our point person for everything commerce related — including product search and payments — an area where we see tremendous opportunity for growth.”

Stephanie was head of global product and North America until last September when eBay’s senior management was streamlined and her role was absorbed into Lorrie Norrington’s responsibilities. She said at the time that “now was the right time for her to pursue other career ambitions” and that she’d be leaving in early 2010.

There are three measurements that ROI reports on:
Bids Bids & BINS that are attributed to clicks within 30 days of when the click occurred

Items Sold Total units sold as a result of your Ad. This is not the number of listings, rather the units. If you have one multi-item listing and sold 10 units as a result of an ad, 10 will show up in Items Sold

Sales Amount The total final sales value of the Items Sold

Sales/Cost The Ratio between Sales Amount and the amount of advertising spent

From experience AdCommerce doesn’t work for all types of eBay business, but if it’s working for you let us know what sort of ROI you’re getting. Are there some keywords that work exceptionally well and do you have any that you now know are underperforming?

Many thanks to Karl of Wholesale Clearance for the screen grab of AdCommerce ROI Metrics which was first published at “First look at AdCommerce ROI metrics“

photo credit: geishaboy500

eBay has been fined again in its ongoing legal dispute in France with LVMH. Reuters is reporting that a Parisian court has fined the company €200,00 (approx. US$274,000 or £175,000) for using misspelt versions of the trademark “Louis Vuitton” as part of its search engine advertising. eBay was ordered to pay another €30,000 in legal costs.

LVMH accused eBay of “harming the trademark and domain name of Louis Vuitton”, and of misleading internet users with keywords such as “Vitton,” “Viton” and “Wuiton”.

eBay claimed they were simply using the misspellings to direct people to the site to buy genuine LV merchandise, and accused LVMH of trying to exercise “total control” over where goods were sold. The MD of eBay France, Yohan Ruso, told Reuters he was “disappointed” by the fine: “we recognise the facts but we think the sanction is disproportionate.” LVMH had been asking for €1.2million.

In December eBay was fined €1.7million for failing to comply with a 2008 injunction to block French eBay users from buying or selling LVMH Group perfumes and cosmetics on any eBay website.

With Shop Inventory format ending on eBay.com at the end of March, and all fixed price listings appearing in core search results it’s an ideal time for sellers to experiment with auctions. From experience they not only get guaranteed visibility when the item is about to end, but can also increase sales on similar or related fixed price items.

There aren’t likely to be many more cheap or free listing days in the future. For casual sellers auction listings on eBay.com will be free, and business sellers will cease worrying about insertion fees as they have in the UK

To qualify for the 99p offer you’ll need to register at Parcel2Go.com and use the Parcel2Go eBay upload tool which links to eBay. This enables you to upload delivery information from your eBay ended items and imports it into Parcel2Go ready for you to select the 99p offer and book a collection date which can be from Tuesday onwards.

The service offered at 99p is HDNL Standard 24 – 72 hour delivery, which normally costs £5.99 + VAT. Although the offer is for bookings made on Monday only, you can arrange a collection date for any day during the week. There’s no limit on the number of parcels you can send using the offer, but it’s strictly a jiffy bag or box service, letters will not be accepted.

This has to be the best delivery promotion I’ve ever seen, 99p is an unbeatable price and if you want to take advantage I’d recommend you register with Parcel2Go and get your eBay account linked ready for Monday morning.

Disclosure: Parcel2Go advertise with TameBay

We regret to inform you that SpoonFeeder will cease business operations immediately. Although some parts of the system may remain operational for a very short time, we cannot guarantee how long.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience our sudden shutdown may cause.

I’m 95% certain it’s not a spoof: I’ve received it on both the email addresses I had registered with Spoonfeeder, and an awful lot of other eBay sellers have also received it. If, of course, there’s a follow-up email from another listing software provider, I might reconsider that thought.

At time of writing, there doesn’t seem to be any further information on Spoonfeeder’s website, and listings using their hosting still appear to be working. How long that might last is anyone’s guess: it’s a reminder, if we needed another one, to host your images somewhere that stays under your control.

More info if we get it.

Update: email confirmed genuine. Sorry to see Spoonfeeder go: they were a life-saver for me.

One of the key changes is the ability to drill down into local areas. For example rather than searching “London” for a flat, you can drill down into the specific part of London you wish to live in.

If you prefer to start with a localised search you can now either enter your full or partial Post Code, or by typing in your area name. Previously there was a drop down with a fixed set of major cities, but now if you live in Shoreditch, and want to find an item close by, you can simply type “Shoreditch” into the location search.

I live 25 miles from Reading and Oxford – my two nearest Gumtree sites, so the ability to search the RG18 Post Code where I live is brilliant. Instead of having to search either Gumtree Reading or Gumtree Oxford I can now search my local area. I have to say that for the long term success of Gumtree outside London Post Code search is key.

A common complaint was that pricing wasn’t visible from the Gumtree search results page – you had to click into an ad to discover it was out of your price range. An extra column has been added to the search results to display pricing. Also to help buyers and sellers the category structure has been tweaked.

Finally Gumtree have been fiddling around with their code to make pages load faster. Even with broadband I’m incredibly impatient when surfing the web and getting results faster is a sure fire winner in my book.

If you’ve not checked out the Gumtree beta site it’s well worth a browse, especially if you’re based in the City.

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

No, said their CEO Phillip Molloy. There’s been a management buyout of the old company by Phillip and their previous MD, Grenville Whelan. The old company was closed down by an administrator, which is how you close companies, and that’s why people are seeing notices of that company being “in administration”.

The reason for the buyout is about control: Phillip says that they wanted the freedom to invest and develop the business and the old share structure didn’t allow them to do that.

There is no suggestion that the business is anything other than profitable and doing well; any debt or liability held by the old company has been taken over by the new company, which is looking forward to expanding into the USA this year. In addition, existing customers should find the platform more stable as they’ve now moved to Amazon’s web hosting (AWS) to speed things up.

Here’s Frooition’s press release on the same subject. I hope that sets people’s minds at rest.

Disclosure: Frooition used to advertise with TameBay. They no longer do so.

The advert will appear on all TameBay single post pages (the pages where you read an article such as this one). That includes not only the articles written while your advert is running but also every article published in the past.

The advert is 468 pixels wide by 66 pixels high and can be for almost anything you want within reason. Maybe you want to advertise your ecommerce business (either on, or off eBay), or it could be an advert for services or products of interest to ecommerce businesses.

If you want to support the Haiti Earthquake Appeal you can bid on the auction on eBay, and next month your ad could be on TameBay. 100% of the bid price raised will go to the appeal.

A huge thanks to Small Business 2.0 and The Conference People for their generosity in donating the ad space to support the people of Haiti.