Our TameBay eBay account hasn’t been used for buying for a couple of years but eBay haven’t given up on us – they’ve just sent us a 10% off voucher for anything between a £40 and £100 purchase on eBay.

Rather annoyingly I just purchased a USB 1 Terabyte Hard Drive for £64.99 from the weekly deals yesterday – if the voucher had been 12 hours earlier TameBay could have saved me £6.50 (grrr ).

It is good to know that eBay are tapping up dormant accounts to get them spending though. The UK is one of the most highly penetrated eBay markets in the world and there are only so many new buyers that they can bring to the site. Getting dormant buyers returning to the site and spending again is almost more important (and probably cheaper!) than recruiting a brand new buyer.

Did anyone else get a voucher? If so what did you spend yours on?

This is how eBay has worked for years, but the complainant asserts that the buyer’s highest bid should be placed immediately and not to do so is stealing from the seller. They think that the seller should automatically have a bid placed for as much as a buyer is willing to pay, not as much as they need to pay to be the highest bidder.

To me this is daft, the chances are that without automatic bidding buyers would bid the minimum bid increment and auctions would end up with much lower final selling prices. Buyers would also have to be sat at their computer screens in the dying seconds of an auction to place their bid and would then have no time to increase their bid before the auction ended.

Perhaps buyers would place higher bids, but I don’t believe many would be willing to bid the maximum they’re willing to pay in the knowledge that they might be able to secure the item at a lower price.

Apart from the culture of litigation in the US I see little merit in this case. Sellers and buyers alike know the rules by which eBay auctions are run, so to participate in them and then sue eBay because you don’t like the rules is bizarre. If you don’t like the way eBay run the site and the rules for bidders why would you offer items for sale in the first place?

In fact, the Get Safe online report published at the beginning of November showed that a staggering 51% of the UK population has been a victim of cybercrime in their lifetime. That said, many online fraud schemes follow a typical pattern, so if one knows what to look for, scams can be avoided.

Here are uShip’s top 5 tips to safe online buying this season

1. Seller in sheep’s clothing. Firstly, scammers pretend to be legitimate sellers, advertise items through online classifieds sites like Facebook and free-ad sites, advertising an item that is particularly desirable at a very low cost, sometimes even free. This bargain price tends to make people act before they think things through properly.
2. Read the fine print. If the person selling to you purports to be from a legitimate company, then check that the email address that you are receiving emails from is the proper corporate email account. Visit the website, and check that the details match, for example, does the head office address match? If there is a phone number call it, and verify the details of the transaction – no legitimate seller will ever have an issue with this.
3. Moneygram, moneyscam. Scammers will usually ask for payment in a non-typical payment manner. In the UK we are all used to paying cash on collection for items bought through classified sites, or perhaps we’ll use PayPal or maybe even cheque. Scammers and fraudsters tend to ask for money to be paid to them via Moneygram, or Western Union – something that hides their proper identity.
4. Pet unfriendly. Sadly, there are very few legitimate companies selling items in the UK that are based in Cameroon. So, if you see a Camaroon address your alarm bells should start ringing instantly, especially if they are selling pets.
5. Seek answers, use logic. And finally, take a few minutes to apply the same thought and consideration to an online transaction as you would an offline transaction. If you feel that something isn’t quite right stop and think, ask a few questions, apply a bit of common sense and logic and ask yourself if this is the way that people normally behave.

uShip’s Safe Shipping Guide contains lots more information about staying safe online, and with particular advice and information about buying and selling items over the internet and having courier deliveries. So when you’re hunting for your online bargains this year take a few minutes out to think about the seller and check the details – Stay safe online this Christmas.

The introduction of catalogues in May 2011 makes searching for specific items easier for buyers and helps sellers to save time when creating and adapting product listings. The main advantages are

• To provide buyers with a positive shopping experience: The eBay catalogue provides buyers with a user friendly way to find specific electronic products both quickly and easily
• Help to maintain and drive sales: Sellers need to ensure they always list an item against a matching product where one exists, to avoid listings being removed. Start preparing today by listing and relisting relevant products to avoid losing out on potential sales
• Save time: Sellers can now save time spent on listing items by taking advantage of the pre-filled product information and stock photos when matching to the eBay catalogue
• Increased visibility: The best deals from Top rated sellers will prominently appear at the top of the product page, with best offers from other sellers showing below

The new categories where sellers should list against the eBay catalogue are: Apple Laptops; Apple Desktops; iPads, Tablets & eReaders; Printers; Routers; Hard Drives; Monitors and Televisions.

This does create some dilemmas though. Firstly what do you do when your item doesn’t match the catalogue information and secondly what do you do if the catalogue information for your item is incomplete or worse the catalogue data is incorrect?

Listing if your item is not in the catalogue

If your item simply isn’t in the catalogue you can select the “Continue listing without a product” link and list the item as you normally would.

Listing if your item is not an exact match with the catalogue

If the catalogue information isn’t an exact match for your item the situation is unclear. I sell printers and often there are several different models available, e.g. an HP 4000 printer, an HP 4000N (with a network card), an HP 4000TN (with a network card and extra paper tray), and an HP 4000DTN (with a network card an extra paper tray and a duplex unit). Suppose I have a 4000DTN but it’s missing it’s duplex unit and the extra tray (which isn’t an unusual situation) – should I list it as a 4000N even though the product code on the printer is DTN, or should I list as a 4000DTN and hope the buyer reads the description to find that some parts are missing? This is a call that each seller will have to make on a case by case basis.

Listing when the catalogue data is incorrect

The worst situation are the many instances where the catalogue information is simply wrong. For example the eBay Catalogue Information for the HP LaserJet Mono 4000TN printer has the description for an HP LaserJet Colour 4500 Printer! One would have to excuse a buyer who thought that they were purchasing a colour printer if you listed against this catalogue data.

If the catalogue data is incorrect you have two choices – list without catalogue data and there is a chance your listing could be ended, or list with the incorrect data and call out the errors in your listing description. It is also worth highlighting the errors to eBay support so that they can be corrected.

Should sellers be able to edit catalogue data?

Is it time for eBay to open up the catalogue data to allow users to correct misleading or incorrect information? Would you like the ability to edit catalogue information or to add new entries to the catalogue data? What would happen if you listed against catalogue data which another seller subsequently edited?

How will you handle instances where your product isn’t an exact match or where the catalogue data is incorrect?

Click to embiggen

In search results you’ll see a blue arrow when you mouse over a listing and clicking anywhere in the item information (apart from title or picture) will open up a sidebar showing gallery images, pricing, seller details and in some instances a Buy It Now button.

I have to say with a few reservations I like this new Preview Pane. When I’m buying consumables like printer toner or jiffy bags I don’t necessarily need to see the View Item page. I don’t need to read reams of information that the seller may feel important such as about their company or their detailed terms and conditions of trading – I just want to buy the product and get on with my day.

Click to embiggen

Buyers may choose not to purchase from the search results page and so this may never roll out site wide in it’s current format. However it will still be useful as eBay can display information buyers often visit the View Item page for such as Item Location and Seller Feedback. These details can be displayed in the Preview Pane enabling buyers to rule out a particular search result or decide that the product is indeed worth further consideration.

The new feature will also alter the basic search results page layout. The information will no longer be presented in columns, but details such as Price, Bids, Postage and the Top Rated Seller icon will appear in a triangle beneath the item title.

There are some interesting considerations for sellers for example eBay gallery pictures will be displayed in the Preview Pane. In Clothes Shoes & Accessories up to 12 gallery images are free, but there’s a charge for gallery images in other categories. Many sellers have a sidebar embedded on the left hand side of their product descriptions or large headers, sellers will need to evaluate their usefulness compared to having item information prominently displayed in the Search Results Preview Pane.

The tests will run for several weeks while eBay evaluate the results. Whilst you can’t opt in or out of the test if your account is included in the tests you’ll be able to give feedback comments from a link in the Preview Pane.

Don’t wait to give eBay feedback though, tell us what you think in comments below – Will you purchase direct from the search results page and do you want your buyers to have the ability to do the same?

DVDs maintained its top spot from last year as the favourite gift to purchase on “Super Sunday”, with women’s shoes in second spot and CDs in third. Unsurprisingly given the prominence of the Fashion Hub on eBay, clothing, shoes and accessories made up eight out of the top 10 most popular items bought yesterday.

International sales were up 11% as buyers from overseas headed to eBay UK. With the exchange rate in their favour sellers willing to ship overseas are cashing in and if you don’t currently ship outside the UK it’s time to strongly consider doing so. With UK still in economic turmoil making the most of the weak pound and overseas markets is one of the easiest ways to increase sales.

It’s good to see eBay going from strength to strength and with the freezing temperatures and the stress of busy high street crowds eBay is still the place to shop especially in the run up to Christmas.

All you have to do is tap in your item along with it’s make, model and condition to receive an instant cash offer for your unwanted item. Rather than leaving it sitting in a draw gathering dust. If you accept the offer you can print out a shipping label and as soon as your item is received you’ll get the money in your PayPal account.

Beware though, this really is for the ultra lazy – I decided to check out an old iPhone 2G 4Gb in good condition with a charger and the offer price was $50.00. A similar iPhone listed on eBay with a start price of $50.00 currently has bids of $112.50 with seven hours left to go before the auction finishes.

Of course eBay Instant Sale gets rid of the worries about unpaid items and you don’t have the bother of creating a listing, but if you want the real money that your item is worth sell it on eBay, use Instant Sale as a guide to what a business would pay for your item. A business expects to make a profit so use the offer as a start price guide for selling it on eBay.

eBay Instant Sale isn’t for everyone, in fact it’s for the lazy buyer who would prefer a simple environmentally friendly way to recycle their unwanted consumer electronics and receive a token payment along the way. However if it frees up some cash in PayPal accounts which buyers can then re-spend on eBay I’m in favour of encouraging people to dig out their old unwanted items and turn them into instant cash.

As you go through the process a sliding sidebar showing your order total is on the right hand side of the page with contact details for the seller should you run into any problems.

I spoke to Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor to ask the question why hasn’t the checkout been updated in the past? He told me this is something ChannelAdvisor have been looking at for over two years since eBay first indicated that 3rd party checkouts would be abolished. Due to uncertainty, making changes to the ChannelAdvisor checkout wouldn’t have make sense and this was proved correct when eBay delayed and changed their mind over the future of third party checkouts on eBay.

Since then eBay have announced the final retirement date for third party checkouts and with more fixed price items than ever on eBay there are more opportunities for combined shipping. ChannelAdvisor decided that for the 2010 holiday shopping season they wanted to give their customers the best checkout experience available on the Internet.

The developments won’t be wasted when eBay retire third party checkout, the technology behind the one page checkout will be used in a variety of products including the ChannelAdvisor webstore platform in the future.

The other question I had to ask Scot is why keep the third party checkout at all? The reason is that eBay still don’t provide functionality that many sellers need and has been added over the years. eBay have committed to building the checkout features that sellers use into the eBay platform before 3rd party checkouts disappear for good in June 2011.

Functionality still missing from eBay that can be provided by a 3rd party checkout include:

• Tax/VAT calculations – This is essential in the US where sales tax varies by State and even for the UK where VAT is chargeable for EU sales but not for the rest of the world. Also VAT may or may not be chargeable on shipping depending on the product(s) purchased. Sellers need the flexibility to charge VAT/sales tax correctly.
• Shipping capabilities – Sellers want to be able to offer different shipping methods based on multiple purchases to offer buyers the best service available.
• Promotions – Offering discount coupons, free shipping, buy two get one free and combining orders just isn’t easily available on eBay but sellers still want to offer incentives to buyers to increase order size.
• Shipping and tracking – eBay are pretty much exclusive with UPS/USPS in the US and Royal Mail in the UK. Sellers want flexibility to ship with Fedex, Interlink, Citylink and other carriers and to inform buyers at checkout which carrier will deliver their item as well as providing tracking numbers to customers.
• Payment options – eBay allow a variety of payment options including the sellers own merchant credit card processing, but they don’t provide the ability on eBay to do this.

Whilst I’ve never been a fan of 3rd party checkouts, I’ve bought a couple of items from ChannelAdvisor customers recently and I have to admit that the checkout flow is a vast improvement. On past experiences where I’ve had up to seven pages to click through to complete a purchase but now it’s simple, straightforward and, unless you want to change any details, it’s pretty much a four click process.

Changing delivery address in ChannelAdvisors checkout is easier than it is on eBay (an improvement eBay could make immediately is to make the “Change” link much more prominent to encourage buyers to enter the delivery address that they want rather than email the seller to request a different delivery address).

The list of features that eBay need to build into checkout before June next year is extensive, but it needs to be completed to ensure that it’s a world class platform and to enable sellers to provide the best checkout experience on the Internet.

Disclosure: ChannelAdvisor advertise with TameBay

The search experience rolls up listings into product pages, similar to the single product detail page you’ll find on Amazon. Once on the page buyers can select the type of buying experience they’d like choosing from memory size and colour as well as New, Refurbished or Used items.

The new product page also introduces the “Value Box” reminiscent of Amazon’s blue Buy Box, where Top Rated sellers can vie for prime position to sell their new items. This position gives some prime real estate to the sellers lucky enough to win the position.

To win this position your item needs to be brand new, you need to be a Top Rated Seller, Offer your item on Buy it Now and of course to list using eBay’s catalogue. From then on eBay are likely to surface the product with the best price.

The success of these pages will depend on sellers complying with eBay’s new policy that MP3 players and GPS units should be listed using eBay catalogue. From browsing listings currently in these categories many sellers (including Top Rated Sellers) still aren’t using catalogue. This is something you should address as soon as possible to ensure your products receive exposure on product pages, and if you’re a Top Rated Seller revise your listings today as there’s a high chance if you’re the first to do so then you’ll be winning the Value Box position.

Don’t forget if you list using eBay catalogue in the GPS & MP3 categories you’ll also be taking advantage of the free insertion fees, free subtitle and free supersize images until 9th January 2011.

There were two main areas he spoke of – one the lessons to be learnt from large mail order companies and the other of how shopping on eBay is and will continue to change.

The main lesson from mail order companies is the end to end customer service that they provide their customers. When buying from the likes of Next and Littlewoods consumers are accustomed to simple straight forward ordering, speedy delivery and importantly a simple straightforward returns process.

Mail order has paved the way for ecommerce, especially in fashion where typically consumers would try on clothing in a retail outlet before purchasing. Without the heritage of distance selling of mail order fashion businesses it’s unlikely that consumes would have found the confidence to embrace buying fashion online at the speed it’s being adopted today and eBay are benefiting from this which is why you’ll continue to see the fashion outlets pushed so heavily.

The other important change coming to eBay will attempt to satisfy the different buying needs across categories. We’ve already seen this in Fashion with “more like this” for colour and shape. When a buyer on eBay sees something of interest in clothes shoes and accessories they can click to see a wider selection of items in that style and drill down with options for size and colour.

According to Rafael eBay are looking to break the paradigm of a consistent shopping experience across all categories and are looking at ways to tailor the shopping experience to appeal to the different types of buyers that use the site.

It’s unlikely that a tech buyer will choose a product based on the same criteria that a fashion conscious buyer will shop, so expect eBay to be making changes over the coming months and years to introduce new innovations to more categories.

What changes would you like to see on the site in the categories that you sell in? What would make it easier for buyers to find your products, and as a buyer what would you like to see introduced to make it easier to find the items you’re interested in purchasing?

Waist 32 or size 32?

It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon; what better to do than a little eBay shopping? I need a couple of new pairs of jeans… Well, good luck to anyone else who wants to buy female jeans on eBay today, because eBay has just made it a whole bunch more difficult. The “waist size” item specific has just vanished from search options. You can search by dress size – but as we all know, dress sizes and waist sizes don’t always coincide, either on the jeans or on the ladies inside them.

I mentioned this to Chris as he’s been listing jeans recently. And it gets worse. For sellers who are listing jeans, there’s no indication that the only place their ISs will show is on the individual listings – but the item specifics themselves have been limited. eBay jeans now only exist in even numbers: if you want to list a pair of 31″ leg jeans, you can now choose between saying they’re 30″ or saying they’re 32″. Same with waist sizes.

Yet again, eBay seems to be suffering from the disconnect between the people who code the site and the people who use it. Women’s jeans come in 29 inch waist, 31 inch leg sizes – trying to stuff us all into even numbered sizes just won’t work. Moreover, distinguishing dress size and waist size on female jeans is crucial – there’s a whole world of difference between a waist 32 and size 32, which eBay – by only showing one set of measurements – now obscures.

It’s a shame, because jeans was one of the areas where item specifics made searching so much easier. I don’t want to have to go back to complex search strings and trying to second-guess how sellers will write their titles. I hope this is just one of those oversights that can be fixed in a day or two. In the meantime, I’ll be over at La Redoute. Sorry, eBay sellers.

Update: As per Mr Munden’s comment below, this was apparently a glitch: it’s now been “fixed” in so far as the search options are back; sellers who’ve listed with incorrect item specifics because they were forced to do so will, unfortunately still have to edit their listings by hand.

I received the email from eBay’s Loss Prevention Department informing me that the listing had been removed and went to start the chargeback process from within PayPal. As the listing had disappeared from My eBay I thought PayPal was my only option, but I was given the choice to participate in eBay’s trial resolution service by telephone.

As soon as I explained that the seller was NARU they put me on hold for a minute while they checked, and instantly came back to offer an eBay funded refund. The only snag was that instead of refunding to my PayPal email address they will only send the funds to your eBay registered email.

It’s not a huge problem, it’s the work of 30 seconds to add an additional email address to a PayPal account, but as a seller I already have several attached and there’s a limit to how many you can add (seven if I recall correctly).

Overall it’s a great improvement over the PayPal chargeback process and I’d recommend any buyers offered the service take up the option of dealing with eBay rather than PayPal. In my case it was only £4.98, but knowing eBay will underwrite a transaction does nothing but add confidence in trading on the site. The one and only improvement would be for them to refund to the email address I made the original PayPal payment from rather than the one registered on my eBay account.

eBay Most Popular Items

Although the eBay Most Popular Items tool can be used to research the most popular items on eBay by keyword search and listings which attract large numbers of sales are worth examining for tips to improve your own listings, the real benefit of this tool is for buyers.

If you’re about to bid on an auction enter the item number into the eBay Most Popular Items tool. This will reveal how many buyers are watching the item you want, which can then guide your bidding behaviour.

If there are few or no watchers you’ll know there’s not likely to be much competition on that particular listing but if there are a number of buyers watching be prepared for a bidding war. As well as checking how many bids the item has already attracted, the more watchers the item has the closer to the end time you should place your bid and be prepared to pay slightly more for the item than a similar product that has no watchers.

If you find two or more items suitable for your needs, consider placing your bid on the listing with the fewest watchers, you’ll probably win it for a lower price.

A company is looking to set up their first shop on eBay and like everyone else have started out with zero feedback. They need to open a shop (minimum 10 feedback or PayPal verified) and want to make use of fixed price listings (minimum 10 feedback and PayPal verified) so the quickest way to achieve this is from buying.

Needless to say when I advised them to get a budget from their manager and go spending they had no hesitation in doing just that. A spending spree on office funds, what could be better? I suggested mundane items such as paper, ink, toner and staples but they had much better ideas. £700 for a new CCTV system? Not a problem, we’ve been meaning to get one for ages!

Two hours and well over £1000 later and they’ve already got their first two feedback from sellers that leave feedback on payment. Just another eight to go which in all likelihood will come from sellers with automatic feedback left on receipt of feedback so it might take a couple of days. They’ve bought more than 10 items to make sure they get more than the 10 feedback needed

Buying is fun though, even when it’s at third hand it’s still exciting. Most sellers spend all their time on eBay selling – if you’ve not been on a buying spree for some time then Christmas is just the excuse you need to go spending.

There’s a good business justification for buying on eBay as well – how will you know the pitfalls your buyers have to face and how search works unless you genuinely use the site yourself as well? Buying is the perfect way to spend a morning and it’s justifiable as “work”.

eBay’s announcement says that the feature had very little use, and sadly I think this was predictable: for buyers who are savvy enough to use such tools, there are plenty of third-party offerings with better features. Bid Assistant never offered the ability to “snipe”, or bid at the last minute so no rival bidder had the chance to go higher. Perhaps it’s understandable that eBay couldn’t offer this: the whole point of sniping, after all, is to keep auction prices as low as possible. But without this essential feature for buyers, Bid Assistant was never going to take off.

However when it comes to using it, it’s not nearly as feature rich as the old My eBay. While the aesthetics have obviously been given a high priority, it doesn’t appear that enough thought has been given to how people use the site.

My eBay beta positive changes

The entire My eBay look and feel has been updated; the graphic designers really have done a good job in making the page easy on the eye with newly designed icons and section headers.

The introduction of lists is a great new tool. You can create lists for gift ideas, products you want to research, a wish list of items to buy, in fact a list for pretty much anything. The only drawback is that you can only add items to a list if they already appear in My eBay. Do I really want to add things I’ve already added to my watch list or already bought? Apart from that the only items I can add are those I’m actually selling – not a great source of gift ideas, but I’d hope it’ll be expanded to enable items to be added from elsewhere on the site in the future.

Shortcuts replace the links section of My eBay, but they’ve been expanded so that you can now add your own links to this section. Do you want instant access to your blocked bidder list? How about a link to the PowerSeller board? You can even add links to sites off eBay: maybe a link to your online banking would be useful?

The ability to customise My eBay to display the information that’s important to you has always been great and the new My eBay allows you to do this. The new My eBay takes customisation even further to the extent of allowing changes the colours of the page headers.

Sidebar adverts have been removed from My eBay: no longer are they slowing down the page load and hopefully it’s not a temporary move. Adverts in My eBay have largely been irrelevant to users and leave parts of the page unusable until they have loaded.

My eBay beta neutral changes

The summary page is simply a summary of summaries. It adds nothing and doesn’t give enough information on anything to be useful. This is a page that might as well not exist bar the fact that it displays buying and selling totals and they’re no longer available anywhere else. The only thing it might do is scare buyers into curtailing their spending as it highlights how much they’ve already spent.

In lists of items the focus has been shifted to the item title with the User ID and item number displayed in a relatively small font. If a buyer contacts you regarding a purchase they’re likely to give you their User ID and the item number – this is going to make it visually harder to locate transactions in the future. You’ll need to have already customised the page to add in the item number and buyer ID, or you’ll have no way of distinguishing between identical sales.

If buyers don’t customise the display to show their sellers ID alongside their purchase, they’ll simply be shown the item title and purchase date. I don’t know why eBay haven’t added the seller ID with a clickable link as standard, which might encourage buyers to revisit sellers they’ve purchased from.

One of the most useful sections of My eBay has always been selling and sold totals. Selling totals gave an overview of likely income over the next week and sold totals was an instant check on whether business over the last month was up or down.

My eBay beta negative changes

There are some changes made in My eBay beta which make it less useful for buyers and unusable for sellers. Essential features for managing listings have simply been removed, and without them basic listing management is impossible.

Most of the sorting options have disappeared in My eBay Beta. You can no longer sort by number of bids, available quantity, high bidder ID, postage cost or item number: there are times when each of these is essential. The only sort options remaining are by price, time left or number of bids, along with the listing format filter.

Even worse is that you can no longer display items by shop category; when checking stock or bulk editing items from one shop category to another, this is an essential sort option.

The helpful drop down boxes with a suggested next action have been replaced with a “Take action” dropdown; adding an extra click-and-select to every transaction, this is a massive backwards step in usability. In the old eBay sellers would be presented with “Send Invoice” when an item was sold – not only simple to click but a visual indicator that they needed to take action on that listing. Buyers would be presented with reminders to pay or leave feedback, or even the suggestion to visit a seller’s shop.

“Take action” sounds great in principle, but “Send Invoice” or “Pay Now” is a much stronger call to action. There’s room under the “Take action” button for the 2 or 3 top actions, so it would make so much sense to display them.

Conclusion

The new My eBay beta is pretty; it’s just a shame it’s also pretty useless. The designers have done a great job making My eBay look swish but the usability people have forgotten it’s not just looks that count. My eBay is an essential tool but if it’s rolled out to all users in its current format, the best advice for sellers is to stop using it and upgrade to Selling Manager Pro. In comparison the old My eBay which is feature rich and works, My eBay beta is simply not good enough for managing selling activities.

I searched for a “Laser Printer” with the brand “HP” in the “Computers & Networking > Printers” category and was presented with 813 printers to choose from, except I wasn’t shown 813 printers.

Closer examination shows that with the default 50 results per page and 12 pages there are a maximum of 600 items returned in the search – less than 75% of the available items. The remaining 25% plus items are hidden from view and can only be seen by clicking the “To view all identical listings” link.

Other searches produce similar results – searching for media such as writable “dvd disks” displays 923 items with less than 600 viewable.

Many large sellers have in the past relied on prominence in listing results to achieve sales. They’ve scheduled listings to ensure that they will always have items ending soonest, and the largest sellers literally have items ending every hour of the day in the categories they trade in, especially in consumable and commodity products.

Under Best Match, the default search on eBay.com sellers will no longer be able to rely purely on swamping their categories with listings. Buyers simply won’t see them, it’s time to use new tactics to ensure your items are presented to buyers.

One of the most important factors in Best Match will be listings with sales/bids. Multiple item listings with the most sales or auctions with the most bids will be considered better matched than those with few or none, so longer listing durations Shop/Store Inventory Format (SIF) could become more important and it’s not unthinkable that SIF in core will re-appear on eBay in the near future.

One thing is certain, flooding eBay with listings will no longer be a guarantee of success. New listing strategies will emerge but sellers need to be wary they don’t fall foul of the Search & Browse Manipulation policy. Listing items across multiple User IDs in order to gain more then 10 items per page of search results is likely to be considered manipulation.

Currently there is no indication that the choice and multiple item policies will be implemented in the UK. It’s been stated that eBay UK “don’t have the product solutions implemented in the UK” (PS log in required), to enable the policy changes to take place.

If anything these changes should benefit the smaller seller, as the dominance of larger sellers will be restrained compared to the past. How larger sellers adapt to maintain their market share is yet to be seen, but from now on it’s a whole new ball game on eBay.com

The reasoning behind this is that Finding 2.0, the technology that presents search results to buyers is now smart enough to remove duplicates from search results and limit the number of items from one seller shown to buyers.

This limitation will affect the listing strategies of many sellers who have in the past ensured their listings all finished at peak times, or who listed multiple identical items to ensure they were always at the top of search results.

If you list multiple identical listings only one will show in search results. It doesn’t matter how many identical listings you launch, buyers will only ever see one, although which of the identical listings they see will vary according to how they sort search results.

An important factor to bear in mind is that under Best Match auctions with bids or fixed price listings with sales will be considered better matched than those without. Once auction listings have bids and different prices they will no longer be considered identical.

There will also be a limit on how many different (not identical) listings will be shown in search results from a seller. No more than 10 items per page from a single seller will be displayed, if a seller has more than 10 items the remainder will appear on subsequent results page, still at no more than 10 per page. Removal of the choice policy allows sellers to offer more options than previously so that buyers can still access their full inventory.

One important change which has hitherto not been spelled out is that these policy changes apply to ALL sort orders, not just Best Match. Even on “Ending Soonest” no more than 10 items per seller and only one identical item will be presented to buyers. When listing products sellers will need to space out start times to ensure products aren’t removed from buyers view just as they’re about to end.

There are however still some questions which need addressing. The FAQs state “If you sell computers, you can offer a specific brand and model laptop with a choice in components such as hard-drive size, processor speed, etc.” This however doesn’t explain how sellers should allow for price differences if a buyer selects a larger hard drive, more memory or a faster processor. Whilst the choice policy goes some way towards more flexibility (e.g. for a choice of shoe size, colour) it doesn’t lend itself to products where there is a price differential.

Finally there is a new policy to be aware of – Search & Browse Manipulation Policy. This prohibits sellers from any activity which could be interpreted as gaming the system, including but not limited to keyword spamming, inappropriate titles and “any other activity that eBay deems as inappropriately diverting members to a listing or harming the finding experience for buyers.”. This should be interpreted to include listing identical products on multiple IDs as eBay have indicated their technology is capable of detecting it.

Overall these changes should benefit both buyers and sellers. Buyers will be ensured a choice of products from multiple sellers whilst sellers should be able to save fees by no longer needing to flood eBay with listings in order to compete with other sellers that do.

I’m guessing that either their account isn’t fully verified, or PayPal have put them on hold due to a security risk. I suppose I should be thankful to PayPal for protecting my money but I’m not – in reality they’re only protecting their own money leaving me to shoulder all of the risk.

None of the alternative payment options offered (credit card, cheque or postal order) qualify for buyer protection, buyers are only covered if they pay via PayPal. Buyer protection sounds great when bidding with a nice logo explaining you’re protected up to £500.00. It’s not quite so good when it comes to paying and you find that if you pay you won’t be covered at all.

I phoned PayPal and they definitely advised against giving out card details over the phone – their entire raison d’être is to keep my card details safe. Cheques and postal orders once cashed are pretty much impossible to reverse should the goods not arrive.

Faced with this situation what would you do? More importantly what kind of impression would this situation make on a new buyer who has been told countless times by eBay that PayPal is the safest way to pay online? Other forms of payment might be safe for the seller but with no buyer protection they sure don’t feel very safe as a buyer.

The main changes are adding the ability to negotiate partial refunds and an indication of how long each step in the process will take. Also there is closer integration with eBay which enables the eBay dispute console to show the status of claims as the process progresses.

It’s not all plain sailing however, reports are coming in of sellers trying to view the claims to resolve them only to find paypal keeps logging them out. PayPal have responded to them saying that there “is an IT issue which has affected a few claims for a few merchants.”

As a temporary solution PayPal account managers have suggested “If you have experienced difficulties updating a particular claim then please email the PP reference number for the claim, and your response you would like to submit for that claim. We will be able to forward these details to the department who look after buyer complaints so they may update the case.”

It’s great to see the process updated it needs to work for all sellers all of the time. The technical issue appears to occur on new disputes that the buyer has upgraded to a claim since the new system as been put in place. Once the buyer upgrades the dispute to a claim some sellers have been unable to access them even to offer a return for full refund.

Disputes and claims are something that most sellers will hopefully encounter as a rarity. Most buyers will email sellers asking for help and giving the seller a chance to rectify any issues prior to opening a dispute. For the few buyers that go straight to a dispute or upgrade to a claim the new process should make life easier for sellers and also highlight buyers making an unusually high number of claims to eBay.

We’d recommend providing full contact details to buyers with messaging requesting that they contact you if there’s a problem with their purchase. A PayPal claim or even a dispute is something best avoided and hopefully you’ll never get the opportunity to see the new eBay/PayPal dispute flow.

If you’ve got any hot tips for getting buyers to contact you to resolve issues before they escalate into disputes or claims let us know in comments below.

Coupons emailed to buyers offer £7.50 discount for a purchase of £25.00 or more in Mobile & Home Phones, Computing, Photography and Consumer Electronics. To redeem the coupon the buyer must buy and pay for any single item before 30th July on eBay.co.uk .

eBay appear to be putting a big focus on tech products – great news for sellers who list in these categories.

It’s also welcome news as the school holiday period starts to see coupons being issued to remind buyers to visit eBay and giving them a solid reason to log onto the site.

Parcelforce PM is a next day services promising delivery between 12 noon and close of business. The service enables you to promise an afternoon delivery to buyers who then don’t have to wait in all day for a delivery. ParcelForce already offer services with delivery by by 9am, 10am and 12 noon so sellers can now offer early, morning or afternoon delivery slots if they wish.

Parcelforce 48 Large is designed for oversize parcels which will be delivered within two working days. Items up to 2.5m length and 1.5m width and a maximum of 5m length and girth combined can be sent on this service. (Up to now the limit has been 3m length and girth combined). Individual parcel limits of 30kg still apply, but for those selling larger items this service is a great addition.

As with all Parcelforce services full online tracking is provided and most importantly both new services qualify for PayPal seller protection.

PDF documents describing the services are available for Parcelforce PM and Parcelforce 48 Large, or you can contact Parcelforce on 08708 50 11 50

A member of the Goofbay team received a voucher code from eBay that he believed could be shared amongst all eBay members. He had one of their design team create the newsletter and emailed it to registered Goofbay members.

Sadly the offer was restricted to the eBay users that it was intended for and users soon discovered they’d have to pay full price for the purchases they’d made on eBay. Even the eBay landing page specifies the offer is limited to certain eBay users. Goofbay will have done ok out of it though – the voucher carried an affiliate tracking link

In the email Matt from Goofbay said “I would like to offer my sincere apologies to all who this voucher did not work for. Goofbay is a well established and respected eBay affiliate and we have no intention of misleading you.”

Goofbay have a range of free tools for both buyers and sellers, and make their money through the eBay affiliate program which pays them for buyers and sellers they send to eBay.

(Although we’ve shown the voucher above please don’t assume it will work for you unless it was specifically sent to your eBay account)

It’s an interesting question as a wedding dress is probably the most important dress a woman will ever own. If 73% would consider sourcing their gown on eBay, then for mundane purchases how much higher would that figure be?

Is there anything that you wouldn’t feel happy to purchase on eBay, and what’s the most important/expensive item that you have bought on the site?