The purpose of The Portas Review was to identify what the Government, local authorities, businesses and others can do together to promote the development of new models of prosperous and diverse high streets. In brief the review’s focus is on putting the heart back into the centre of our high streets, re-imagined as exciting social hubs for shopping, learning socialising and having fun.

The main recommendations of The Portas Review are to:

• Get town centres running like businesses: by strengthening the management of high streets through new ‘Town Teams’, developing the Business Improvement District model and encouraging new markets
• Get the basics right to allow businesses to flourish: by looking at how the business rate system could better support small businesses and independent retailers, encouraging affordable town centre car parking and looking at further opportunities to remove red tape on the high street
• Level the playing field: by ensuring a strong town centre first approach in planning and encouraging large retailers to show their support for high streets
• Define landlords’ roles and responsibilities: by looking at disincentives for landlords leaving properties vacant and empowering local authorities to step in when landlords are negligent; and
• Give communities a greater say: by greater inclusion of the high street in neighbourhood planning and encouraging innovative community uses of empty high street spaces.

One recommendation immediately of interest to online traders is to make it easier for people to become market traders. Mary suggests that removing unnecessary regulations so that anyone can trade on the high street unless there is a valid reason why not is the way forward and that people with entrepreneurial talent and micro-businesses should have a right to sell on high street markets.

Where I believe The Portas Review falls down (but to be fair Mary has mentioned) is the role the Internet has to play. Mary does emphasise that her review is not about stopping other forms of retail but she doesn’t appear to recognise how technology can support and enhance the High Street

The Portas Review states “new technological developments now mean that the internet is one of the key threats to retail on our high streets. Although internet sales currently account for less than 10% of all retail sales some estimates suggest that e-commerce accounted for nearly half of all retail sales growth in the UK between 2003 and 2010″. What this fails to accept is that many retail stores are already supported by the Internet and simply wouldn’t have survived this far without the income from online activity.

eBay’s reaction was to acknowledge that it’s difficult time for retailers of all sizes, and to welcome any recommendations on how to revive the high street. Angus McCarey, UK Retail Director for eBay pointed out that consumers often choose to mix traditional shopping with browsing online or on their smartphones. He also suggested that making the most of online and mobile shopping can reinvigorate your physical store, for instance by allowing you to clear out of season stock or enable a “Click and Collect” service.

The Portas Review has totally missed how the Internet can work with the high street and in truth Angus and eBay’s comments are unnecessarily weak too. My vision of the future of the high street is much more along the lines of Schuh.

Schuh have a fantastic blended online/offline offering. They allow you to buy online and have delivered to home or delivered to your local high street Schuh store for collection in your lunch hour. That’s an example of the Internet not killing the high street but actually supporting the High Street and driving online sales into an offline retail experience. The blending of online and offline technology to drive shoppers to the High Street is missing from the report.

The Portas Review also makes no mention of new Internet technologies coming down the line. Where’s the mention of browsing the Internet for a product with a choice of buying online or being shown offline inventory available for purchase in a store close to your current location? The report makes no mention of making offline inventory available online to drive traffic via properties such as eBay’s Milo.

There’s not even a mention in the report of encouraging High Street stores to offer WiFi or provide Internet Kiosks so that if you’ve found a product you like but it’s out of stock in your size you can instantly order it from another branch of the retailer simply by scanning the bar code. In fact it’s worse than that, there’s not even a suggestion of including QR codes on labels to enable buyers to find inventory in their size from other stores.

Whilst the Internet is here to stay it could have a much greater influence over the high street and preserving the high street giving consumers the ability to buy when they want, where they want, how they want. Smartphones are here to stay and it won’t be long before they’re an essential tool for revealing just which shop in the High Street location your in has the product you want available to take away today.

Accepting that the decline of the High Street needs halting and implementing many of the great plans in the Portas report will do much to rescue the High Street in the short term. However using the Internet to drive traffic to the High Street won’t kill the High Street, but it might just save it in the long term.

There’s little point in trying to ignore ecommerce while trying to rescue the High Street. Lets use ecommerce to work in conjunction with the High Street. Hopefully once The Portas Review recommendations are implemented the government will see beyond the Internet being in competition to the High Street and recognise that soon there will be no such thing as online and offline commerce. There will simply be “commerce”.

photo credit: Caveman Chuck Coker

From today it has become illegal to import or manufacture traditional incandescent 60 watt lightbulbs within the EU. We are now to be forced to buy the so called energy saving light bulbs for which there are plenty of complaints about. They are reported to be more expensive, not as bright, take up to a minute to light up, are ugly and produce unpleasant light. Also much as the EU say you won’t have to change your light fittings, there are plenty of complaints that the new bulbs are simply to bulky for many older design lights.

What was once a 40p or 50p purchase will now be a £3 to £4 cost for the newfangled compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). They’re supposed to last for up to 10 years (I’ve had some blow already so they don’t always) and are supposed to save up to £100 over the life of the bulb. Prices are predicted to rise steeply for energy saving bulbs though, as costs for elements used in their manufacture such as phosphors, which largely come from China, are sky rocketing. Rising manufacturing costs might be real, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see the cost of the new bulbs rise even higher once the manufacturers don’t have to compete with the old style bulbs. Expect to see an end to cheap promotions as they’ll no longer have to try to convince us to switch to the inferior new CFLs.

Personally I’m not a rabid tree hugger and what the EU seem to have missed is the fact that conventional bulbs leaking energy isn’t a problem. My cat (as with most cats) will actively seek out the warmest place in the house, and that’s normally in the kitchen under the spot lights which chuck out an enormous amount of heat. Light bulbs tend to be turned on when it’s dark and cold and the radiant heat they generate can in a well insulated house delay the inevitable switching on of the central heating. Ok, realistically you can’t heat a house with light bulbs, but the heat they generate sure doesn’t do any harm.

So what to do? Well you can still buy conventional incandescent bulbs at the moment, but prices are rising and when the shops run out that will be the end of them. There are currently ample supplies of conventional light bulbs available on eBay and I’d suggest stocking up as soon as possible. Many sellers on eBay have bulk packs of 50 or 100 incandescent light bulbs, which should keep most homes well lit for the foreseeable future.

I’ve already got a stock of CFL bulbs, and I’ve got a bigger stash of incandescent bulbs at home. I’ll be buying another 100 incandescent bulbs for £50 on eBay before supplies dry up – at just 50p a bulb on eBay (delivered) it’s a bargain and I’ll be able to flick a switch and have instant light for the foreseeable future.

What will you do? Are you going to stock up on incandescent light bulbs or do you like the new energy saving CFLs? If you’re in the lighting industry did you stock up on incandescent light bulbs and will you do a deal for TameBay readers?

At the end of the 90s, the first Internet bubble was inflating nicely thank-you very much and I found myself in San Francisco riding the roller-coaster. I was working for a small start-up trying to categorise the web. This was long before anyone outside Stanford had heard of Google: it was the days of Netscape, Alta Vista and Excite. We were producing the ultimate category-based guide to the web and this seemingly impossible task was not entrusted to vast banks of computers, but to a dedicated editorial team of humans. Each was an expert in their area and built up a category, they worked hard, barely seeing the light of day, summarising and cataloguing the best websites. After all, who better than a vet to introduce you to the best ten sites on the Web for feline health?

Websites were categorised and the library grew accordingly. At the same time, the search engines were emerging – initially searching the category databases, and then fanning out across indexed web content, they filled in gaps in the library. The newly invented portals adopted a policy of combining both together – delivering category results backed up by web searches. As the web grew it became harder and harder to categorise sites – the directories asked webmasters to self-categorise when submitting sites. The editorial oversight was lost and the advantage over the machines broke down. Google won and webmasters were left to build websites, not categorise them.

Fast forward 15 years and we have two dominant e-commerce platforms in the UK. Amazon which has grown from a catalogue, and eBay which is based on free-form listings. One of the great joys of shopping on eBay has always been the chance to find just the idiosyncratic thing that you are looking for – and as a buyer knowing that the listing was created just for you, describing to the best of the seller’s ability the very item you will receive. Perhaps there’s a little scratch on the iPhone case or a stain at the bottom of the Hermes bag – you get to see it and decide before buying.

So I’m disappointed to see such a focus on categorisation emerging again – the eBay catalogue and the proliferation of item specifics reminds me so much of our earlier doomed attempts to have webmasters categorise their websites for the benefit of web directories. It’s early days, so you wouldn’t necessarily expect the catalogue and associated tools to be very good yet, which makes their compulsory nature frustrating – heaping operational problems onto sellers who would rather be selling. At Stuff U Sell, we spent an entire weekend manually relisting nearly 3,000 of our clothing listings to satisfy the new compulsory item specifics, which mostly added nothing to the buyer experience.

The real trouble, however, is that it won’t get much better. The size of the catalogue is just too big: already any brand past the letter “L” had to be typed in manually when we did our update. You don’t read about Amazon becoming more like eBay, because it can’t: the very strength of eBay is that its seller and item distribution has a hugely long tail which it aggregates to become so big and strategically unassailable. The stronger it becomes, the worse any cataloguing attempt will be.I feel like I’ve seen this all before.

So what is the answer? Learning the lessons from the past, it’s all about fixing search. Huge teams are working at eBay on this issue, but noone has cracked it yet – both Amazon and eBay still generate pretty frustrating results – but the prize is worth getting. Google’s aim was to allow readers to find publishers. eBay’s is to allow buyers to find sellers. Their approach needs to be grounded in the same strategy, and not allow internal and external resources to be diverted from the task of selling by distractions.

Sadly eBay have once again committed the cardinal sin of driving sellers to offer the worst possible service to their customers. They have based the new postage caps on where Royal Mail 2nd Class service prices have been increased to more than the current postage caps.

The postage caps are applied to the first domestic service offered, sellers are able to offer premium services at rates higher than the postage caps for additional delivery options. This effectively means eBay are encouraging sellers to offer 2nd class postage and the worst possible delivery time, with 1st Class postage or courier delivery as an afterthought.

It should be noted that by offering 2nd Class postage it will be displayed to buyers as an “Economy” shipping option – faster delivery options will be displayed either as “Standard” or as “Express”.

Pretty much the whole of ecommerce (apart from eBay) offers a “Standard” service as standard. Many also offer options to either upgrade to “Express” if you’re in a hurry or downgrade to “Economy” if you want to save money.

It’s time eBay guided sellers towards offering a “Standard” service as standard and to do this would take one simple change – Keep the postage caps, but please eBay, don’t insist that they apply to the first service offered. Allow sellers to default to at least an adequate or “Standard” service and then let buyers choose to downgrade to a capped “Economy” postage service if they want to save money.

Why eBay would want sellers to provide Top Rated or Above Standard services to their buyers and yet guide them to offering sub-standard or “Economy” services as the default. It just doesn’t make sense.

There are several factors that will impact me, not least of which is the VAT rise. Increased VAT will impact profits – on stock purchases, on costs such as packaging supplies, and most of all will significantly increase delivery costs as VAT is now applied to many Royal Mail and to Parcelforce services.

What was more interesting was to talk to someone who has a much broader insight to the economy than I do. Whilst I speak to many companies who trade in the ecommerce space, either as online retailer or as service companies, my accountant deals with a much broader array of businesses covering the entire economy.

Without exception he agreed that broadly speaking there isn’t a single market sector that isn’t struggling financially. Most of his clients are at best seeing modest increases in business and profits, but many are seeing profits decreasing and in many cases their entire business contracting.

At the same time as rising costs and VAT increases there are increasing price pressures as consumers and businesses alike push for better deals and the best possible prices. In recent years further pressures from eBay, competition and from the consumers themselves, have driven down carriage costs, in many cases retailers have been forced to offer free or subsidised postage rates.

It’s encouraging to know that it’s not just myself being impacted by the economy. Although external factors are affecting my business I am taking steps to minimise the impact, am not totally reliant on a single income stream, and most importantly am fully aware of the parts of my business that need monitoring closely.

For many businesses however the economy is having a much more serious effect. It’s likely that online retail will continue to outpace high street retail and so eBay and Amazon sellers are at least trading in one of the most resilient market sectors.

It’s likely that Interest rates won’t stay at their current low rates indefinitely, in fact some are saying that they’re already too low and need to rise. You need to be prepared for both an increased cost in borrowing coupled with less disposable income from consumers who have become accustomed to exceptionally low mortgage payments.

What factors do you see affecting your business over the course of the next 12 months and what steps are you taking to minimise the impact of the economy on your business?

Are you changing your stock profile and if so have you changed the depth or breadth of inventory you hold? Is virtual stock )where you order on demand or drop ship) a part of your business plans? Have you changed couriers or suppliers? Are you implementing software or processes to automate your business to save money.

We have a 30 day warranty on all items and you can return an unwanted item within that time frame and we shall deduct a 10% re-stocking fee.

The table fan seller with the other Deal of the Day, on the other hand, does at least itemise what you’ll be charged for:

I will however accept returns for 7 days. In the event of a faulty prduct [sic] i will exchange it within the 7 days. If you require a refund it will be after i take off my ebay fees and delivery charges and paypal fees before issuing a refund.

We all know this, don’t we? If buyers are returning goods under their Distance Selling Regulations’ right to return, you can’t charge these kinds of charges. The OFT’s leaflet spells it out:

The retailer must refund the full amount including the delivery costs … You are not allowed to make any further charges, such as a restocking charge or an administration charge.

I’ve said it before: I’ll keep saying it. These are supposed to be eBay’s flagship listings and yet they are being allowed to include terms like this. Why is eBay not having someone check over the listings before they go live?

Why does using eBay and PayPal feel a bit like going back in time? I’m no tech snob, I’m not an early adopter. I’ll always value substance over style. But selling on eBay feels unpolished and unexciting.

Turbo Lister is “crap” and “arduous”. PayPal “needs a massive shakeup”. It’s hard to argue.

There’s a comment on Dan’s post from Marnie de Vanssay, who recruited for eBay from 2002 to 2006. Marnie calls eBay a “tired, heavy machine”, and comments:

the first two years were exciting, all the people hired were highly creative on top of having a substantial university and business background. Then, the profiles requested moved towards the standardized powerpoint/excel diskjockey and the entrepreneurial spirit was gone, like a balloon without enough helium.

Marnie’s right that this happens to all companies, as they move from the start up phase to being an established business. In the start-up I work for, we know we prefer creating a business to running one: every other day there is a conversation that goes, “we’ll need a stationery cupboard/office manager/dress code”…”the day we get that is the day I quit”.

But I wonder if that changeover has to happen quite so badly as it’s happened at eBay. It’s still possible to run a company with vibrancy, imagination and style. And that’s what eBay lacks right now.

Richard Brewer Hay, the official eBay blogger, interviews John Donahoe, eBay’s President, during eBay OL in Dallas. I love that JD is making the effort to video the people he’s talking to, so that he can pass on their exact comments to the appropriate people at eBay. That’s a really neat idea and one that plenty of us could borrow.

But I’m pretty stunned by the rest of the content. We’re used by now to eBay saying “sellers are happy with the changes we’ve made”. I think we all know that’s partially true: any change that eBay makes is going to be good for some sellers and bad for others, and the second group are the ones who make the most noise. It’s just disingenuous to try to cover this up.

But the real problem is when JD starts talking about things sellers have complained about. First, he only mentions one example: I’ll bet that “abusive buyers” isn’t the only thing that sellers in Dallas were unhappy about. If that weren’t dismissive enough, he goes on to say that the issue around abusive buyers is one of seller perception: that sellers aren’t understanding what eBay are doing about abusive buyers, rather than that eBay have set up a system where a couple of abusive buyers can ruin your online business. eBay have to accept responsibility for their part in this. And if they want to say that some “dolphin” sellers will get caught up in a system designed to make buyers feel better, and that that’s a price worth paying, then they should stand up and say it, not hedge it round with guff about seller perceptions.

Then there’s the section at the end about how eBay is working with smaller sellers to protect them and their businesses against predatory large retailers who want to push them off the internet just like they pushed them off the high street. Can this possibly be the same company that’s pushing Fashion Outlets all over its own site and just about every London billboard I’ve seen in the last week? That looks like the exact opposite of supporting the little guy to me.

Dear eBay, sellers are not stupid. No, honestly, we’re not. We know you’re in business to make money and we know that what you’ll always do will be what suits your bottom line best. So – can we now quit with the Meg Whitman-esque touchy feely community stuff? You don’t care about us, we know you don’t care about us, we don’t care about you much either. Wheeling out the CEO to say “we care about you” when your actions suggest the exact opposite of that is a really bad idea. You make things worse when you do this. If we could all just go “we’re in it to make money” and think about the best ways of us all doing that, life would be so much easier.

eBay don’t publish any figures on rates of feedback, so it’s difficult to figure out what’s going on. Then a couple of people reported that the screen that says “are you sure? please contact your seller before leaving non-positive feedback” had disappeared from the feedback flow.

There’s been no announcement of any change, so you’d think this was just another glitch in eBay’s glitchy site, and that it’d be back shortly, and in the meantime, sellers would just have to spend their time explaining to buyers that it’d be really rather nice of you to revise your feedback, if you wouldn’t mind, thankyouverymuch, if you could just not destroy my business with your random clicking… But if you thought that, you’d be wrong.

It’s not a bug. It’s deliberate.

The eBay UK Community Manager has now confirmed on a PowerSeller Board thread (you’ll need a PS sign in to read the thread, though the number of removed posts makes it close to incomprehensible) that:

The removal of the page presented to buyers attempting to leave negative or neutral Feedback is not a bug. The Feedback team have found is that this message was not effective and discouraged buyers from leaving Feedback. In fact, the majority of the buyers who encountered this page abandoned the Feedback process altogether. This page was removed from all eBay’s global sites during the month of March. By removing this page, we aim to encourage use of the Feedback system and enhance our ability to differentiate and promote sellers who consistently deliver the best experiences on eBay.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the Feedback team that discouraging people from leaving non-positive feedback was exactly what this page was designed to do. Buyers who neg are unhappy buyers and won’t come back. Buyers who contact their seller and get their problem sorted possibly *will* come back. That’s what we want, isn’t it?

eBay have trained buyers for years that “negative feedback protects them”. It doesn’t. It might protect the next guy – the one who’d've bought and not got their thing if they hadn’t been publicly warned off. But the buyer leaving the neg – it hasn’t helped them.

You’d think eBay would figure this. Whatever we think of some of the detail of the new buyer protection policies, the fact that the company themselves are putting cash on the line to refund some buyers – that speaks to me of them taking a new responsibility to make all transactions have a happy ending. But this – this “go ahead and neg, we’re not going to stop you” – this does nothing to help anyone. It leaves buyers out in the wilderness, thinking they’ve done all they can to make their complaint known. And that’s a huge disservice.

eBay: you already acknowledge that hasty negs are bad, right? That’s why buyers have to wait a week to neg PSs. Please, put this page back. You can make it more helpful if you like. “It looks like you’re about to leave non-positive feedback. If there’s a problem, here are some other things you should try first: contact your seller; contact eBay; contact PayPal. Here is an outline of your legal rights under the Distance Selling Regulations and Sale of Goods Act. And if you clicked the wrong button, please just stop.” How can that do anything other than help to create happy buyers?

photo credit: x-ray delta one

In March, eBay announced that they’d be adding cross-promotional advertising to fixed price listings on eBay UK. Today, they’ve announced that as of 17th May, they’ll also be testing these links on UK auction listings.

I think that the seller arguments about this have been pretty well rehearsed. If you want to opt out, you can (at the moment):

• Log in to your eBay account.
• Under “Account,” select “Marketing Tools”
• Under “Item Promotion,” click “Promote Similar Items”

What I want to talk about here is how this works for buyers. In short: it sucks.

We all know that buyers ought to read everything before they click anything. We all know that they don’t – that *we* don’t. There are conventions on the internet, just like there are for every other media channel – and one of those conventions is that the “you might also like” section has items that you can add in to your order without really thinking about it. I’ve been buying on eBay for over a decade now: I write about eBay, I comment on eBay, I’ve written blog posts about how ridiculous this very change is… and yet in the last month, even I have been caught out twice buying items from the cross-promo section assuming that they’re from the same seller… only to find out later that they’re not, and I’m stuck paying two lots of carriage where I was only expecting to pay one. If I’ve done it, then what hope for the newbie buyer?

A chum who sells in the Crafts category told me of a new buyer she dealt with recently, who requested a combined invoice for “the nine items I’ve just bought from you”. Except she hadn’t: she’d bought nine items from nine sellers, and instead of the fiver or so she was expecting to pay in postage, ended up with nine invoices with postage totalling close to fifty quid. As sellers, we can condemn this buyer for “not reading things properly” — or we can acknowledge that she was working by conventions that benefit us all by making internet shopping feel comfortable, and we can condemn eBay themselves for making what should be an easy experience into a difficult and confusing one.

When this change was first brought in, I was ambivalent. I thought the advantages for sellers from the greater publicity might just outweigh the disadvantages of having other sellers’ items on my listings. I was wrong. Think like a buyer. This is confusing, stupid, and you should opt out.

Before ordering the item I had a browse of Buy.com’s terms and conditions, which are pretty comprehensive to say the least. I was almost put off from purchasing from them simply because of how much small print they’ve managed to concoct for eBay buyers to read. The image merely shows their general Terms and Conditions, which is supplemented by their “Learn About Us”, “Dispatch Information”, “Privacy Policy” and “Returns Policy”. However the small print aside their service is faultless.

Trading under the User ID buy_united_kingdom , they are actually based in, and ship from Ireland. Delivery by courier arrived promptly within just a couple of days of the order, and that’s when I started to get annoyed. Albeit it was my own mistake in ordering the wrong product, but I was more than a little annoyed when faced with the cost of returning a product Internationally which I’d purchased from a “UK seller”. I was wrong though, upon requesting a return Buy.com issued an RMA number along with instructions on how to return the item with DPD couriers at their expense. Not only did they pick up the return carriage charge but the refund was prompt as well.

Buy.com might be based in Ireland, but they’re a pleasure to trade with, and though it pains me to say so are highly recommended. I’d much rather trade with a smaller independent seller, but Buy had the product I wanted and their service really is superb. If all the eBay Outlets are offering as faultless and comprehensive service as Buy.com, I can understand why eBay believe that big brand names will go some way towards upgrading their reputation as a potentially dodgy place to trade. It’s certainly been an eye opener and made me question whether my own service is up to the standard it should be.

Have you bought from an Outlet or a big brand retailer on eBay? If so what was your experience? Was the service as good or better than Buy.com, and are the big brand retailers performing as well as independent eBay traders?

Clothes and shoes were the first things I sold on eBay, back more than a decade ago. And I wouldn’t go back there if the stock were free and there were no DSRs. I have serious admiration for those who can sell any kind of apparel on eBay, because personally, I just don’t have the patience to deal with all the emails saying “well I’m always a size 12 normally but I can’t squeeze my fat bottom into these jeans you’re selling and so that must be your fault”. By the time I closed down that Shop, I swore that I would never again sell clothes to anyone that they couldn’t try on before they bought.

Of course, if you’re a great big catalogue company selling off its returns and end-of-line, things are probably a bit different. eBay creates a new market for you that just doesn’t exist if you’re trying to sell those same goods instore: as one Outlet-owner said to me, “eBay’s made our end-of-line actually profitable”.

John Donahoe has said many times that the “secondary market” is where eBay sees its future. Clothes make sense: everyone needs them, so the market is huge. The “secondary market” itself is huge, because online clothes merchants always do have huge quantities of returned stock to shift. And perhaps most importantly, Amazon doesn’t yet seem to dominate this huge sector.

Amazon UK does have a “Clothes, Shoes and Watches” section but it’s still in beta, and it’s not what most Brits would associate with Amazon’s product range. If I were eBay, I’d grab this opportunity with both hands.

I’ve seen a lot of smaller sellers complaining bitterly about the preferential treatment being given to Fashion Outlets at the moment. I don’t have any good news for you: quite the contrary, I expect eBay to keep pushing these merchants, to push them harder and to add to them with any other big name retailers they can sign up. They will get better deals on fees than you get; they’ll get great leniancy on feedback than you get; they’ll get more promotion to more buyers than you could ever dream of. And they will kill off a lot of smaller sellers.

But for those who can survive it, who can diversify beyond eBay and yet still maintain an eBay presence, there’s an opportunity here. eBay is positioning itself as a destination site for fashion lovers. And some of that traffic will, inevitably, filter down from the Outlets to other clothing sellers. For those who can take advantage of that, there may yet be something to be gained from Fashion Outlets.

Today’s deal of the day is a choice of three Top Shop bags – slouch, over-body or clutch. Very nice they are, and unsurprisingly, one has already sold out. I just wish I’d thought of this when I was selling beads: I could have just had one listing for “choice of beads”, and then 3,000 variants of size, colour, shape, country of origin, what they were made of, and so on. Silly me

Being serious for a moment, eBay’s rules on MVLs seem slightly vague on where we draw the line between variants of one product, and different products entirely:

What items cannot be combined in multi-variation Buy It Now listings?
Different brands and different functional products can’t be combined. In most cases this would be a breach of eBay’s Fee Avoidance policy. For example, you could not create a listing that combines different brands of fine gauge cotton cardigans into one listing. You could not create a listing with the traits Article, Size, Colour, where ‘Article’ refers to shirt, pants, and jacket to make the single listing include an entire outfit.

I’d have assumed that these three entirely different “Top Shop bags” were “functionally different”: that a variant can be colour, or size, or trouser leg length… but not “shape of bag”. Was I wrong – or is this another example of one rule for DOTD sellers and another for the rest of us?

It’s an interesting discrepancy, because on the face of it, none of these scores should be affected by payment method. Most listings on eBay UK must now offer PayPal as a payment option, so if payment’s made by cheque, that’s by the buyer’s choice.

Frankly, I’m not surprised to see the “dispatch” DSR lower for cheque payments: buyers, often, think of “dispatch” as “the time between clicking the Buy It Now button, and receipt”; they don’t think “oh but it took me a week to put a cheque in the post”, they just think “I had to wait ten days for delivery”. No, it’s not fair – but as my old granny said, whoever told you life was going to be fair.

I can *just* about understand for the difference on the communication score too. With a cheque payment, there is so much more to go wrong. Cheques can not get posted or go astray in the post or be untraceable to a transaction or just not fit into the normal automation of business – so I can understand that communication might be more fraught, and get marked down.

But item description? How does payment method affect whether my item’s like I described it or not? Answer: it doesn’t. It can’t.

And more than anything, how can payment method push the always-worst DSR, P&P, down from a safe-ish 4.74 to a downright dangerous 4.6?

I’ve said it before and I’m going to keep saying it: eBay feedback is a farce. Specificially, the DSRs are a farce and do not do what they were designed to do.

Once upon a time, eBay talked to some buyers and what they found was that those buyers were afraid to leave negative feedback. Some buyers asked for a way to say “the P&P was a rip-off” without the seller seeing the red dot and knowing what they’d done. Others said they wanted to be able to say the P&P was a rip-off without leaving a neg when they were otherwise happy. And so the DSRs were born.

But what PayPal’s figures show is that this granular marking isn’t what buyers are doing. Someone who is annoyed that their cheque payment delayed delivery by two weeks is marking down on *all* the criteria. Someone else who’s annoyed they got a UID before they posted their payment is marking down on *all* the criteria. It’s quite clear from PayPal’s figures that buyers who pay by cheque are generally less happy – but it’s equally clear that some of the things that they’re marking sellers down for cannot possibly be related to the payment method. Buyers are using these very specific scores to reflect their feelings about the transaction in general.

Sellers should take these figures to heart. The pro-cheque argument is often made that buyers should be allowed to pay how they like: well, not at the expense of my TRS badge should be the response to that. If nothing else, cheque buyers need extra help, careful handling, nurturing through the transaction.

But eBay should take these figures to heart too. They show, quite obviously, that the feedback system is not right.

I’m rather surprised that eBay UK has chosen to promote this deal, as there are a number of potential problems for buyers choosing to purchase:

1. Delivery from outside the EU (Singapore). Goods worth more than £18 are liable to import VAT. Delivery takes 5 to 9 business days after payment has cleared. Most buyers won’t read this page, and will expect their item in a day or two. Buyer perceptions of the quality of this transaction are likely to be low.
2. Then there’s the question of returns. If you change your mind or the item is faulty, it’s going to cost a lot more to return an item to Singapore than it would to Ireland (where the seller is registered). It’s not clear from the returns policy where you’re going to be returning the item to.
3. That returns policy…

   We will only accept remorse purchase for a refund or faulty product for a replacement within 14 days upon receiving the item. Remorse purchase should be in an unopened and re-saleable condition. Please understand that an administration fee of £5 will be charged to process the refund.

   If the product or box has been opened, the returns are subject to a 10% restocking fee or a fee of £7, whichever is higher. The product must be returned to us in the original box, with manuals, cables, disks and any free software items.

   

   Again, this is not going to make for a good buyer experience. And a seller shipping from within the EU would not be allowed to set such terms. Why would eBay choose to promote this?

   Plus, of course, these terms should be on the listing page itself, not on a separate shop page.

4. Links in the listing to the seller’s Twitter feed, Facebook fan page and YouTube channel. eBay’s links policy is pretty clear: anything not specifically permitted is forbidden, and there’s nothing in the links policy to permit these links.
5. The two listings are for specific models: black 2gb and pink 2gb. The descriptions, however, talk about a 4gb model, and a choice of other “available” colours. Some sellers using similar wording in their listings have had those listings removed for promoting off-site sales.
6. The RRP quoted for comparison is from August 2008. Small electronics do not hold their value over time, so this is a pretty misleading statement. (Thanks to a TB reader for highlighting this one.)

No doubt someone reading this is getting ready to comment, ‘what are you, the eBay police?’ Does any of this matter? Buyers should read the listing properly, and who cares about a few off-site sales. Two thoughts on that:

1. Buyers *don’t* read listings properly. Anyone who’s sold more than 3 things on eBay knows that. Buyers make assumptions. And one of the assumptions they make is that if they buy something on eBay UK, it’ll arrive in a couple of days, with no accompanying customs paperwork. A buyer who is slapped with a bill for another £11 (I think) in fees is not going to be a happy eBayer.
2. Is it reasonable for eBay to make rules (e.g. off-site links) and enforce them for some sellers but not for all? How about if they actively promote listings that break their own rules?

DotDs are eBay UK’s flagship listings. They should be squeaky clean, beyond reproach, and they should offer the best possible experience for eBay buyers, even those who are too inexperienced to read every word of the listing page. Too often, DotDs do none of this: and not only are they getting the star treatment when they don’t deserve it, they’re not even reportable because by the time Support look at an ordinary report, the listing is over.

We don’t like doing this. We really don’t like calling out other sellers’ mistakes in public and for a long time, we’ve resisted doing it. But enough is enough. Welcome to DotD Watch: see you again soon.

If you’ve spotted something you think we’ve missed, please get in touch or @ us on Twitter.

Updated to add screen grabs of the ended listings and returns info page, and links to the eBay pages:

Click to embiggen

Pink MP3 player | Black MP3 player

As many of you know I’ve traded in second user computer products for many years, but last year was tough economically. Due to the need to maintain my income I set up a totally separate eBay business with a new User ID and a new eBay shop selling 2nd hand clothing. For several months trading was brisk, supply was (and still is) practically unlimited, and I quickly gained PowerSeller status and when Top Rated Sellers were introduced both my eBay selling IDs qualified instantly.

Once eBay started measuring low DSRs it was a different story however. Whilst my computer ID has no low DSR scores, my clothing ID had a couple of low scores and quickly lost Top Seller status. These were low DSR scores from July 2009, well before eBay announced that they’d start measuring low DSR scores.

Now I’m faced with the predicament that as of April 1st, based on the DSRs from July 2009, the account will be below standard and be demoted in search, because of the DSRs received before eBay changed the rules.

There’s only really three options open to me:
1) I could up my number of sales to be measured over 3 months, but that would mean doubling a revenue stream that’s already proven to be difficult to manage. For sure I won’t be selling low value items at no profit just to make up numbers to reach 400 transactions a quarter!
2) I could use one of my many dormant eBay User IDs, switch the listings and be a Top Seller within a month. I’m not keen on this idea because I don’t know how long it would be before eBay change the rules again and ruin that ID as well.
3) I could suspend the business until July when the old DSRs drop off the trailing year and start selling again.

None of those options are attractive so the account will be dropped and it’s eBay shop closed.

There’s a couple of lessons to be learnt though, the most important of which is the need to diversify. Don’t rely on a single eBay account for all of your business as you don’t know when they’ll change the rules. Fortunately I’ve a couple of new revenue streams coming online this year so closing one business won’t impact me financially and I’d recommend all eBay sellers diversify off-eBay to protect yourself from site changes which could close your eBay business.

The other lesson is one that eBay need to hear. Different categories appear to attract customers with different expectations. Whilst my DSRs on one ID suggest I give superb service, DSRs on my other ID (trading identically apart from the product) suggest otherwise. I suspect it would be very revealing to see average DSRs on a category by category basis, and also on a new goods vs 2nd hand goods split.

If eBay don’t start measuring average DSRs on a category by category basis I suspect they’ll drive many more sellers off the site, or at least force them to change the products they supply.

Wouldn’t it be cool, I thought to myself, if Best Match was clever enough to see that I hadn’t specified a season, even though tWW has seven, and to figure out that what I’m *probably* looking for, then, is the complete complete set, rather than any one season, and show me those first.

And then, coincidentally, Adam Nash wrote a post about the same thing. If you don’t know Adam, he used to work for eBay, and he is exceptionally smart, so when his colleague Ikai unfavourably compared the prices of Deep Space 9 DVD sets available on eBay and Amazon, he set out to figure out why eBay looked like such a bad deal.

Here’s what he found (republished with permission).

TameBay chum Whirly had just such an email this morning. He duly mailed his buyer to say that the echeque wasn’t due to clear until 10th to 12th February. But, came back the reply from the buyer, PayPal have told me it’ll clear on the 9th, and I need my item for the 12th.

But the messaging gets worse: PayPal’s website states that echeques can take 6-9 working days to clear – meaning that Whirly’s customer’s echeque wouldn’t clear until somewhere between the 12th and the 17th. How’s anyone supposed to make an informed decision when the information is so inconsistent? Someone needs to learn to count.

We’ve been here before. PayPal are supposed to have cleaned up the messaging around echeques, making sure that buyers understand exactly what they’re doing, and that they should really update the card they have on file before payment, so that echeques don’t happen.

However much PayPal try to “improve communications”, the simple fact is that buyers don’t understand what an echeque is. Why should they? Who wants to learn the ins and outs of the British banking system just to make one simple payment? It’s time something radical was done.

This shouldn’t be down to sellers. We’re not party to what cards the buyer has on file with PayPal. We can’t see electronic transfers between buyers’ banks and PayPal. We’re guessing, in the dark, and it makes us look terrible. It’s time PayPal stopped making us do this. If it wishes to continue to offer echeques to buyers as a payment method, then *it* should fund the risk. Take the echeque – give the seller the money. And if, in the “rare” instance, it bounces, PayPal should be chasing the buyer for payment. Think how much that would improve the buyer experience. Think how much it would improve the *seller* experience.

And if PayPal isn’t willing to do that, then it’s admitting that echeques are dodgy, and it shouldn’t be asking sellers to deal with them.

Photo credit: © Grzegorz Kula | Dreamstime.com

The deal for a dozen red roses for my dear old mum on Valentines day would have been perfect, but because she lives on the Isle of Wight (not “Isle of White” as per the listing!) I’m not allowed to buy them. The seller is offering free delivery, but is being selective as to where they’ll deliver and are excluding huge chunks of the UK with a list of over 200 prohibited Post Codes.

I know many sellers have battled this dilemma for years, some couriers charge different rates for delivery to the far flung reaches of the UK, but is it really fair to discriminate against buyers based on where they live? Why would a seller want to ban 100s of 1000s of potential customers?

There are a number of solutions – work out your average cost to deliver across all UK Post Codes and charge that – over the course of a year it’ll average out. Choose a different courier – Yes that might be a radical solution but why wouldn’t you want to deliver to everyone that wants to buy from you?

So as a seller, how do you handle deliveries where the courier may surcharge for certain areas? Do you bump the price to some of your customer? Do you average your delivery charges over the course of a year? Do you use a different carrier for some deliveries or do you simply swallow the difference and absorb it?

As for the Weekly Deal on eBay – I’m surprised eBay let it through. Why would eBay promote a listing that a ton of their customers aren’t allowed to buy? It’s hardly what I’d call a good buying experience to have your order canceled, especially when it’s themed around flowers and Valentines Day. I’d recommend boycotting the listing, visiting Arena Flowers via PayPal offers and giving them your custom instead.

This shows just how far we’ve moved from where we started. In the olden days, a neg was shameful. Sellers worried about how non-positive feedback would make them look to future buyers. That’s how it should be: it’s feedback doing what it’s good at. One neg: meh; 100 negs: bad. Let the buyers be the judges.

That’s not to say that eBay shouldn’t be concerned with buyer protection and seller performance, but they’ve believed their own hype too much. Marking a seller down for excessive P&P charges does nothing to help the buyer who’s been overcharged. Negging a seller for non-receipt of your parcel doesn’t get you your money back. We need real customer service for buyers.

Most of the time, this should be and is provided by sellers. eBay aren’t helping here, I have to say: their ugly clunky messaging system and confusing seller FAQs page should be replaced with something that actually works.

But there are times when, for whatever reason, buyer and seller can’t or don’t resolve the matter between them. And that’s when eBay should step in: unlike almost any other site on the net, they’re an automatic third-party who can resolve issues that otherwise would end in stalemate. eBay have almost got this idea. They’re edging towards it with new policies like the no-fault refund, where they stand the refund when neither seller nor buyer is at fault. But then they undermine it by allowing the appalling customer service offered by some Outlet sellers – and by not enforcing basic legalities on all their sellers.

While the site is full of listings that say “I’m not responsible for items lost in the post”, of business sellers illegally claiming to be private sellers, and of even eBay’s own policies being flagrantly violated on the site, we won’t achieve this, of course. But these things could be easily resolved too. eBay France can flag up sellers who are listing too much (either in quantity or money) to be private sellers, so eBay UK can do it too. If eBay can spot sellers using certain brand names or the phrase “as new” or rude words and flag those listings for review, it can also spot sellers saying “I am not responsible for items lost in the post”. And if it can introduce a policy saying that all books have to have free postage, then it can damn well enforce that policy instead of letting sellers get away with saying “it says free postage but the real P&P fee is a fiver” (and even if that example turns out to be out of date in the next few days, the principle still stands).

In the first draft of this post, I wrote this:

eBay have lost their way. They’ve over-complicated things to such an extent that I’m not sure they can find their way back to doing what they should be doing: bringing buyers and sellers together. I think they’ve forgotten that part of their raison d’etre. The site now is like one of those listings written by a seller who’s determined that no bad situation will go un-covered by their terms and conditions, and you see great archaeological layers of every single problem they’ve ever had, taking up a foot of more of scrolling down the screen.

Then in the earnings call last Wednesday, John Donahoe used the phrase “bringing buyers and sellers together” two or three times. I start to think there’s hope that we could – not go back to the old-style marketplace of Meg’s twice-yearly fee increase, seller strikes, feedback blackmail and the rest, but move forward to a new way of eBaying, where we celebrate the simplicity of excellence.

We need to go back to basics. Dump DSRs. Enforce the law (not the eBay version, but the actual law). Help buyers when they need it. Stay out of the way when they don’t. And maybe that way, we can go on for another fifteen years.

Is that it? No, not quite….

eBay invented feedback. Pierre Omidyar’s idea for a way to drive out the dishonest from his site was unique at the time, and still remains counter-intuitive for many retailers: if you’ve ever tried to explain to a CEO why, yes, she should let her customers slag off her company on her own website, and no, she shouldn’t delete their comments, you’d know just how counter-intuitive it still is.

eBay feedback has an additional factor that makes it so much more powerful than a standard “product review” on any other ecommerce site: it’s on eBay. The person or company for whom it was left doesn’t get to edit. They don’t get to delete stuff they don’t like. There isn’t even the perception that they might do so. They just have to sit there and take it.

How powerful does that make a buyer? We forget this, when we’ve been trading on the site for a while, but stop and think about it for a minute. There’s nowhere to hide. If you got bad service or shoddy goods, you can tell the world – and it’s right there where the merchant’s still trying to trade. Isn’t that going to ensure that they get it right for you, or if they don’t get it right, they at least put it right?

And by and large, it works. Where else do you have 99%, 99.9% customer satisfaction rates, not as the exception, but as the norm? eBay should be proud of this. They should be shouting it from the rooftops. But they’re not.

eBay has done almost everything it could have over the last few years to undermine the feedback system. Once the possibility of a seller negging a buyer had been removed, buyers were protected from bullying to influence the feedback they left, and were free to leave honest feedback. That should have been the full extent and the end of the system changes.

Buyers currently score sellers five times – for one transaction, is it worth the trouble? It looks more like a census form than a feedback form. Increasingly, buyers say they can’t be bothered. The happy buyer doesn’t click the boxes – and because they think they have to click them all, they don’t click any. Only the unhappy bother with feedback. That’s sad.

But if the system is too complicated for buyers, it’s too consequential for sellers too. We’ve all seen, over and over again in the last year, the nonsense of DSR scores down to a tenth of a point being used to control sellers’ trading ability. You shouldn’t be chucked off eBay or demoted in search or lose a discount because one buyer thought you overcharged on P&P. That’s not what feedback should be for (and if anyone talks to buyers, they don’t think it should be for that either).

Feedback is too blunt a tool to use in the way eBay is trying to use it now. If dolphins taught us anything, it was that. Let’s dump the DSRs and have feedback used for what it’s good at: expressing buyer opinion. If they think I’m rubbish, let ‘em say so – but let me use that as a tool to improve, not as a stick for eBay to beat me with.

Last bit, coming up tomorrow…

Ebay needs to quit their corporate paranoia. We’ve seen this for fifteen years or more in the ways they’ve sought to interrupt buyer/seller communication. We’ve seen My Messages become more and more useless – to the point now where if you request a reminder of your eBay ID, that doesn’t go to your email address, just to My Messages – where you can’t see it until you sign in. How pointless. What a ridiculously closed system it has become.

We saw it too with Skype – that I still maintain could have been a great purchase for eBay if they’d made it the basis of an integrated communication system. But they didn’t. They spent $2.6 billion on it, and then for months told sellers they couldn’t include their Skype ID in their listings. Again, pointless.

Most especially, eBay need to consider that they have information which would be amazingly useful to sellers, and that sellers should be given that information.

We saw this with Adcommerce, which was running for close to a year before we even got a beta version of conversion data. Only eBay could think that their customers would be daft enough to buy advertising for which they had no measure of success. Their closed-lippedness about how the EPN affiliate scheme pays out is another case in point.

But nowhere have we seen this more clearly illustrated than with the free postage issue.

eBay have at least the virtue of consistency with this policy (until now) – that they’ve insisted that “buyers like free postage”. And they’re basing this on *something*. More than one ex-employee has mentioned to me that eBay are “obsessive” about collecting statistics, and there is surely a huge collection of data relating to postage prices on eBay, sell-through rates, where the pain points are, and exactly how much free postage makes it more likely that a buyer will buy.

Where is this information? And why do we not have it too?

All eBay need to do is post some blog or forum posts saying “look, isn’t this interesting, the sell-through rate on free postage items is double what it is on paid-for postage items, oh and by the way, we’ll give you this FVF incentive if you list with free postage”, and sellers would be queuing up to list with free postage. They didn’t need to get sellers’ backs up. But they chose to, because their secrecy level is set somewhere around Kremlin 1955, and no one seems able to break that.

Break that secrecy barrier, and we’ll all work better together.

Because that’s how it should be: if buyers and sellers are working together to achieve successful sales, then sellers and eBay management should also be working together to extract every last possible penny from our buyers. Data would help us do that. Better communication all round would help us do that. Let’s have it, please.

Have I finished? You bet your little cotton socks I haven’t finished. Part three coming up shortly….

Outlets are held up by eBay as the creme de la creme of their sellers, with a highlighted link from the top of every page on the site, special ads on the home page and pushes from other areas of the site. You’d think these big, heavily-promoted names would be offering the best service possible, but as we’ve seen again and again in recent months, many of eBay’s favourite sellers are offering a second-rate service far inferior to their smaller competition. You’ve seen them, the 97%s, the DSRs sliding towards 4.0, the literally hundreds of negatives left for people who are still trading on the site, still labelled the cream of the crop. By every convention of the 15 year history of the site, some of these Outlet sellers are TERRIBLE. What can eBay be thinking of?

My guess is this: they’re thinking “wow, our buyers are demanding”. And they’re right. eBay buyers are the most demanding people on the internet, and if you need proof of that, go read those Outlet sellers’ feedbacks again, this time imagining it’s your business. Most of them say things like “item out of stock, seller refunded me”. If you run your own website too, you know that happens: stock control isn’t an exact science, and when you’re trading across multiple channels, it can become a truly dark art. On your website, you apologise, refund, the matter is over. On eBay, you get negative feedback.

Rather than lamenting this craziness, we could try rolling with it. eBay is the only site on the internet where everything you see is guaranteed to be in stock, you could say. If we’ve got it, you can have it. Yes, eBay will hold some of the biggest names in UK retail to account, for you, and make sure you get treated the way you want. You send them an email, they mail you back. And yes, we’ve checked their terms and conditions are legal. Shop on eBay and you’re guaranteed a pleasant experience.

This would take work, though. My guess is, it would take more realism from eBay’s business development team than is currently happening. It would certainly take more guts than eBay’s management are currently showing, to say to these huge, huge names: get off our site. You’re not good enough. You’re not offering the kind of customer service that tiny little one-person companies in back bedrooms can offer, who manage to keep 100% of their buyers happy. So go away. Come back when you want to play by the rules.

eBay’s uniqueness isn’t about format or fees – it’s about feedback. It’s time to take feedback seriously again. We should stop messing about with ridiculous tenths of a star controlling fees that make no difference to the quality of the site. Bring back the power of the red dot: too many negs and you’re off. And I don’t care how big you are.

I was asked a few weeks back, what I’d do to improve eBay. This is it. I would make it the best damn place to shop on the whole internet. Because everyone would play by the same rules. Buyers would know that whomever they bought from, they’d have a magnificent experience on eBay. You could call it, oh, I don’t know, a level playing field or something…

Part 2 of this post will follow Monday-ish

Image credit: © Avesun | Dreamstime.com

1) DSRs replaced with scores out of 10
eBay have been testing this one for months now; they’ll finally take the plunge and introduce feedback out of ten. Classic green/grey/red feedback will remain for nostalgia’s sake, but will be totally sidelined when measuring seller performance.

2) More outlet sellers
eBay UK’s business development team will continue to do their job, recruiting big high street names to the site with promises of a captive audience and favourable placements. They’ll neglect to mention exactly how demanding eBay buyers are…

3) More outlet sellers will screw up
We’ve seen more than one outlet seller go into meltdown this year; we’ll see it happen to more than one next year too. eBay will continue to ignore the issue; the eBay community will continue to be incensed by it.

4) Headline feedback will change in favour of outlet sellers
We’ve had a sneak preview of this already. Outlet sellers, incensed that their image is being damaged by negative feedback, will demand something is done about it. eBay’s response will be to highlight a seller’s total number of sales, and to hide the number and percentage of classic feedback. Buyers will see a Great Big Number and feel reassured.

5) The rise, and rise (and rise) of PayPal
eBay earnings calls, shareholder meetings and analyst days will be dominated by PayPal, with Marketplaces relegated to a “we don’t really talk about it” corner. Bill Me Later will roll out to Europe. PayPal will make lots and lots of money. Amazon will be the only top 100 online retailer not accepting PayPal.

6) The fall and fall of auctions
Auctions will continue to slide, with Buy It Now reaching around 70% of eBay sales. Some media commentators and many sellers will continue to insist that eBay should “go back to doing what it does best”; buyers will continue to vote with their feet.

7) Free auctions for private sellers
All auction listings, regardless of start price, will be made free for private sellers. A multitude of business sellers will threaten to list on their private accounts. eBay UK will therefore slap a maximum listings’ value on private sellers (as eBay France has already done).

8 ) Free listings in Media for everyone
In their continuing efforts to leech off a little of Amazon’s success, eBay will abolish insertion fees for everyone in Media categories. This won’t actually make much difference to listing numbers, as the categories are absolutely flooded already.

9) More Amazonification
Amazon-inspired features will continue to spread across the site. “Product pages” will dominate search results, especially in Media and Electronics. Someone in Richmond will try to get user-generated content (like Amazon’s reviews) reinstated as a prominent feature on eBay; that person will find themselves Punishment Pinking on Q&A in fairly short order.

10) eBay struggles to define itself for another year
And this is the one that really breaks my heart.

A decade ago, almost to the day, my boss walked into my office and said, “oy internet girl, have you heard of eBay? I’ve got this *great* business idea…” I didn’t know it, but it was a life-changing moment.

Ten years later, and I look at that site that changed my life, that changed so many lives, that I thought was brilliant, and I see just another ecommerce corporation run by people with MBAs.

I see a company that doesn’t know what it is, what it has or what it wants to be: a company that pushes auctions one minute and buy it now the next, that promotes big box retailers and ignores its best resource: its wonderful, loyal, long-tail-grabbing smallest niche retailers.

I see a company that stifles the brilliance of its employees under a bushel of bureaucracy.

I see a company whose CEO’s grand vision appears to be “let’s stop looking like a car boot sale”, yet day after day, he allows illegal terms and conditions to go uncontested on his site, often from those very big box sellers that he’s touting as his top outlets.

I see a company that was at the heart of the start of ecommerce, that utterly squandered its advantage. When it figured out it had screwed up, it wanted to be Amazon. Now, astonishingly, it seems to want to be Overstock.

I see no vision. I’d love to be proved wrong. But I’m afraid I won’t be.

And you? How do you think 2010′s going to pan out for eBay? Leave us a comment.

Hat tip to Auctionbytes for permission to use the feedback screenshot.

photo credit: Gavin Gilmour

Strike another one for LVMH. As m’colleague’s posted, the Jarndyce and Jarndyce of ecommerce, eBay vs. LVMH, has seen eBay fined some more pocket money for allowing, or not stopping, the sale of products LVMH didn’t want sold on the site.

eBay have made this case about economic freedom, about the ability to trade in any goods which you legally own, anywhere in a common market. Most of us can support that idea. LVMH have made the case about a brand’s right to own itself, about who gets to use your good name, about who controls how you’re seen by your customers. Most of us can support that idea too.

But this case isn’t about the ideas. It’s not about the principles. Once you get past the posturing and the lawyers, it’s about two business giants fighting to decide who controls the little guy.

A cosmetics seller told me recently, “it’d be easy for the big houses to stop sales on eBay. All they need to do is stop sending their overstocks and ends of line to clearance houses, and none of us would have the stock to sell. There’d be a couple of bottles of perfume for sale the week after Christmas, and that would be it. They only need to stop the supply, and we couldn’t sell it.”

But of course, cosmetics companies, like any other manufacturer, have to do something with their unwanted stock. They could bin it. They could sell it on their own counters at deep discount (but that would harm the sales of their new ranges, so they don’t). Or they can send it to clearance stockists, who sell it on to traders and party planners and eBay sellers. Cosmetics houses like eBay sellers’ money.

eBay too like eBay sellers’ money. So much so that they don’t publish a list of manufacturers and brand name owners who don’t permit their items to be sold on the site. How many sellers have fallen foul of VeRO for selling a perfectly legitimate item, just because the brand name owner doesn’t want it sold? How many sellers have been allowed to list a tiny proportion of their stock, only to come up against eBay’s unannounced, unpublicised limits on branded goods?

eBay blame the brand name owners, of course, but eBay itself is equally culpable: it sees the VeRO reports, it imposes the limits, it knows where the trouble lies. It could tell sellers, don’t buy X, Y and Z because you won’t be able to sell it on here. But it doesn’t.

LVMH and its subsidiaries have had some vitriol from those who’ve been prevented from selling their products – but eBay deserves at least a half-share in that. LVMH might be seeking to do sellers out of what many see as legitimate sales, but at least they have stuck their heads above the parapet and publicly said, we don’t want our stuff sold on eBay. What about those brands who work in secret, in collusion with eBay’s Trust and Safety team, taking down sellers’ listings, threatening to cut off their livelihoods for no other reason than that they bought stock that eBay didn’t warn them they wouldn’t be able to sell?

No, let’s not see LVMH as the winner in this case. Let’s instead take it as the first step to eBay sellers being given proper commercial information. eBay needs to publish its VeRO list. We need to know which brands are prohibited. Because not all of us get to play with lawyers.