Best Match on the Canadian site has for some time given a boost in search to domestic items, in the belief that buying from your own country is a better buying experience than a cross border transaction. This will be suspended if you’re in one of the test groups so that eBay can gauge how much the item location affects buyer behaviour.

For sure it’s often a simpler quicker buying experience to buy from a domestic seller but I’m constantly amazed when I buy from overseas just how quickly items are delivered – often faster than some UK sellers appear able to despatch.

We know that many TameBay readers are based overseas, but sell into the UK. Also many sellers based in the UK make a large proportion of their income through selling outside the UK. How important is cross border trade to your business? Would you prefer equal visibility for yourself and sellers from other EU countries, what about the Far East or sellers from the US where customs charges come into play?

Back in August we took a first look at the new My eBay Beta and found it good for buyers but lacking in functionality for sellers, but many of our complaints addressed with added functionality. There are a few differences worth calling out:

Best Offers

Items with outstanding Best Offers aren’t as visible as in the old version. Whereas they’d be highlighted at the top of the selling tab in the classic eBay, in the new version they only appear in “Selling Reminders” on the “All Selling” summary view. If you’re on the “Selling Tab” you don’t get selling reminders and so won’t see any prompts to accept, decline or make a counter offer.

Even in Selling Reminders Best Offers could be handled better, if you counter offer to a buyer it still displays as “1 item with offers from buyers”. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve gone to respond just to find out I’m waiting for the buyer to make a decision.

Unsold Items

Another major display change to be aware of is with unsold items. The quantity displayed will now be the starting quantity, regardless how many items have been sold on a listing. In the classic version of My eBay the unsold item view displayed the quantity remaining when the listing ended. It’s a minor change, but a frustrating one for those who rely on these numbers for stock control.

Sort Options

The old My eBay was highly configurable with sort options for almost every attribute displayed. The new My eBay is severely limited with sorting limited to just the Watchers, Bids, Price and Time left columns.

In the past I’ve used sorts such as for highest/lowest shipping charges, to look for listings with outstanding questions to answer, or even available quantity. That’s no longer possible which makes managing your eBay listings that little bit more difficult, and TurboLister that little bit more attractive.

The biggest change facing most buyer and sellers is that the focus of the new My eBay shifts to the listing title rather than the User ID. This is somewhat perturbing at first although in fairness I soon got used to it when using the Beta.

Currently those who use Selling Manager Pro will escape the worst of the changes, but we’ve managed to get a sneaky preview (shown left) of what the new SMP tabs will look like when they get a minor makeover in the near future.

If you’ve been using the new My eBay let us know what you think of it. If you’re still using My eBay classic today is the last day it’ll be available on many eBay sites.

There’s great news for private sellers who might list just a couple of vehicles a year: on .com Motors, the first four listings in a 12 month period have no insertion fees at all, a saving of $40 per listing. The catch – and you knew there’d be a catch – is that the Successful Listing Fee (Motors’ fixed-price equivalent of FVFs) will increase from $50 to $125 (or $100 for motorcycles). Still, you’ll only have to pay this if you’ve sold your car, so it reduces the risk of listing on eBay Motors to pretty much nil.

Once you’ve sold four vehicles in a year, insertion fees are $20 and SLFs $100 ($15 and $80 respectively for motorcycles): the total fees payable on a sold vehicle thus increase from $90 to $120. I’d suggest that if you’re a business, you’re probably keeping a pretty close eye on your sell-through rate; you won’t want to pay $40 a time to list something that won’t sell, and you’ll list accordingly. So this new “you’re better off when you don’t sell your car” fee structure is going to hurt. Of course, the really huge dealerships like GM’s network have already negotiated their own fee structures with eBay, so the people who are really going to be squeezed are the small dealerships, who’ve just seen their fees jump by something like 33%.

If you think that’s bad, spare a thought for the poor Canadians: they’ve got the same new fee structure, but their old fee structure was much nicer. Insertion fees were only CA$4.25, so even for the four “free” listings, that’s an increase of $70.75 per sold vehicle.

Generally, I support eBay’s trend towards putting more of their fee onto sold items, and less upfront. But I can’t help feeling this hasn’t got the balance right. It seems rather to reward not selling your vehicle, because that’s where the big money savings are – and surely that can’t be what eBay want?

For the sake of clarity, these changes apply only to Motors’ sales on eBay.com and eBay.ca, and no announcement has been made for eBay UK or any other eBay site.

Up until now Best Match has promoted items listed on eBay Canada which means items listed by Canadian sellers on other sites were disadvantaged in comparison. eBay have added in the ability to give higher priority in search for all items listed by Canadian sellers regardless of which site they are listed on.

Best Match will continue to take other factors into account such as price, shipping cost, DSRs and listing ending time. Higher priority will be given to domestic items in search on eBay Canada, but now that will include items listed by Canadian sellers on other eBay sites.

Best Match is still undergoing testing, and eBay Canada will be adding in the Item Location criteria which should see Canadian sellers listing overseas get greater visibility. This is one to watch on all eBay sites in the future if you list on eBay sites other than your home site.