Sellers may (at the moment) opt out of this programme: if you opt out, you will neither have other sellers’ cross promos shown on your listings, nor have the opportunity to appear in cross promos yourself. This one is all or nothing.

The roll-out follows a test begun in January which added cross-promotions to the bottom of some live listings. The new announcement doesn’t specify where exactly on the listing the other items are to be displayed (if anyone sees it, please leave us a comment), but it does clarify that cross-promoted listings will be from the same category: previously, they were just “relevant”.

It’s a tough call: do you opt out and miss out on the extra promotion, or stay in and deal with the extra competition? It would be helpful to know exactly how eBay are choosing the listings that get cross-promoted: does everyone have an even chance? do sellers with more listings appear more often in cross-promotions? is it limited to TRS? We just don’t know. And eBay, of course, aren’t saying.

As the trial’s been running for so long now, eBay will be running with some version or other of this: the trial now will be more about the minutiae of the wording than the general form. The sliding scale of 1-awful to 10-outstanding feels better than the current DSR labelling, where 4 is called “good” when in fact, it’s not. Of course, 1-10 is a big change from 1-5 or negative-neutral-positive, that could well encourage buyers to abandon the usual habit of “top marks across the board” which for so long has been the norm on eBay: it’s hard not to start imagining a storm of “I did everything right so why 9 and not 10″ threads on eBay forums, but what will really matter is how eBay use the new system as part of their range of carrots and sticks for sellers, and that – obviously – we don’t yet know.

I haven’t blurred the details of this transaction out of the image because the seller was superb. Go buy their stuff.

eBay UK has announced that it is to launch a new fashion sub-site for branded clothing. Mark Lewis, eBay UK’s MD, made the announcement at the Retail Week Conference.

The new site, at fashion.ebay.co.uk, will offer more photography and a browsing interface in place of the normal eBay “list”. From the RW report, it seems that the new site will be limited to major retailers, as in response to a question, Mark Lewis said that the new site would focus on “sellers able to sell branded items in volume”.

Smaller sellers in the CSA categories, meanwhile, are likely to wonder when a public announcement of this change is likely to be made. It’s a major threat to any smaller business who will be excluded from the site, and should have at least had a follow-up announcement made where every eBay seller could read it.

It seems likely that fashion will not be the last area targetted by eBay in this way, as Mark Lewis spoke of the need to offer a more “segmented user experience” on eBay. The new site is due to roll out in around two months: more details when we get them.

Update 05/03/2010
Don’t get too excited. We’ve been told by eBay that this is basically a rebranding of Outlets. The “Outlets” tab will go, and be replaced with “Fashion”. Any outlets which aren’t fashion-based will be linked from an “Outlets” tab from the fashion site.

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

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

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

We’ll obviously have more on this when the ads actually start running. But if I were a betting man, I’d put several quid on a call that this “test” won’t – in the long run – be limited to private sellers who are getting free listings.

we are in the process of exploring whether to establish a default minimum standard return policy (that reflects the minimum legal standard) for all Business sellers in the CSA category (with a view to roll out to other categories). In addition to the minimum standard, we are also considering offering additional flexibility to sellers to enhance select return policy components by adjusting set variables (e.g. – # days of cancellation, seller pays return costs when buyers change their mind). This would allow sellers who choose to go further than the minimum requirement to keep offering this type of service to their customers.

She then asks for feedback from sellers on this: do we like the idea, do we like the idea of a policy slightly more generous than the legal minimum, do we want to be able to specify who pays returns costs, and – bizarrely – how should eBay roll out this change?

Having argued myself that eBay should enforce the law on returns, I start off being in favour of this change – but when I see them even considering not allowing sellers to specify who pays returns, and how many days cancellation buyers can have, my heart sinks. I’ve lost count of the number of times over the past decade I’ve thought “this was almost a great policy, but eBay screwed it up”.

Please, Elisabeth, don’t let this be another case of that. Enforce the law, but beyond that, let sellers run their businesses. Put a couple of radio buttons in to choose between “buyer pays return shipping” and “seller pays return shipping”. Put a “how many days” box in that can’t be set to fewer than 7 days. It’s not complicated.

But more than anything, do something about the sellers who are ignoring both the law, and the existing eBay policy. We barely need more rules – what we need is eBay to enforce the ones they’ve got.

If you have a PS login, please go over to the thread and leave your thoughts – and, PS or not, leave us a comment here too.

Image credit: Ale Paiva on Stock Xchng

Starting on 20 January, we will be running a test on displaying merchandise at the bottom of view item pages for a small percentage of active listings. You may begin to see relevant merchandise including merchandise from other sellers on active view item pages during the next couple of weeks.

(Emphasis mine.) Here’s the announcement.

This will be, presumably, similar to the cross promotions that run at other times: when a buyer has bid or bought, in emails and on ended listings. Currently, for example, on an ended listing, there are

• 8 “recommendations”, which are normally from other sellers and may or may not have something to do with the ended item or other things you’ve bought (they’re giving me size 10 strappy tops at the moment, which for anyone who’s ever met me, you’ll know is as much of a “no” as you could ever get for my shopping), plus
• 4 “more from same seller” which does what it says on the tin

There is, it should be said, no way to restrict items that are shown. You either opt in to cross-promotions and have other people’s items shown on your own listings, as well as yours on theirs, or you opt out altogether.

As eBay will doubtless point out, this is only a test on a small number of seller’s listings. But I think we’ve all seen enough tests to know that this week’s test is next week’s roll-out for everyone. If you’re one of the sellers with cross-promos on your listings, leave us a comment (and a link if you like). How do you feel about this? And is it affecting your sales?

Until now, I’ve always plumped on the side of “keep them on eBay” with cross-promotions. I can live with other people’s items on my closed listings. But on live listings, I’m less keen. Going through all that work to get seen in Best Match and to get a buyer to click to the point where they can buy, only to have them distracted by a whole bunch of other merchandise, is painful. What do you think – will you be allowing cross-promotions on your listings, or turning them off?

If you want to change how cross-promotions are displayed on your listings, here are the instructions on how to do so.

We were unable to run the search you entered. Please try again in a few minutes.

eBay.com’s announcement has a few more details together with a workaround:

if you use the Advanced Search option at the top of the page, and type in your search query and click the title and description box and then run the search, the results for the title and description search will be returned. Likewise, if you receive a 0 results page for title search and choose the title and description box and re-run the search, you’ll see the appropriate results.

There were also problems accessing eBay Shops for a short time this morning; it seems from an announcement on eBay.com that these may be ongoing too.

Update: According to this thread on the US PS board (you’ll need a PS sign-in), eBay “is admitting on its customer service line that it will need to give refunds to sellers” for invisibility due to this outage.

I’ll keep this updated as and when more info comes in.

Update Sunday 14.00
Post on eBay Ink, including statement from Lorrie Norrington:

Our immediate priority is to resolve this issue. Once that is achieved, rest assured that we will assess the economic impact of this issue and will be compensating sellers appropriately. In the meantime, we will be issuing full fee credits for affected listings.

As for the actual fix, everything seems okay here now lots of things are back but item specifics drill-down in search has disappeared over many categories. How about where you are?

Update Sunday night
eBay UK announcement says

we will assess the economic impact of the problem and will compensate sellers appropriately. The mechanism and process for issuing full fee credits for affected listings will be announced over the course of the next few days.

I expect there will be some strong feeling on this from eBay sellers, so over to you – leave us a comment.

Thanks to everyone for the many heads up on this!

eBay told us this morning that yes, they have stopped hiding duplicate listings, because they believe these no longer offer sellers any advantage: in fact, they are likely to make a seller’s listings perform worse under Best Match:

Since the full roll out of the latest version of Best Match we believe that duplicate listings no longer give a seller an advantage as we now rate on recent sales divided by search impressions. If a seller makes duplicate listings it will spread their sales per impression score across many items and as a result that listing will drop down in search.

If you’ve been listing duplicates and find your items slipping in search result position, this may well be the reason. However counter-intuitive it feels to list fewer items, listing extra BINs will hurt you under Best Match. And of course, it leaves you vulnerable to reporting by competitors.

A couple of other points while we’re on this topic: last week, we were contacted by a seller who had been told by his account manager that eBay had “for legal reasons”, discontinued the automatic removal of duplicate listings. We were pretty surprised by this, as we’d never heard either from eBay or from sellers that this was being done. eBay have said that duplicate listings aren’t and never have been automatically removed: the only time they are removed is when they’re reported, and this is done manually.

It’s worth also saying that eBay point out a large number of reports on duplicates relate to auction listings, not to BINs. Sellers may run up to 15 identical auctions, so don’t waste your time reporting them unless there really are more than that number.

More info from eBay UK and eBay Ireland respectively.

Buyers will now receive the following mail automatically:
• an order confirmation email when an item is paid for.
• an “order update” whenever a seller prints a shipping label, adds a tracking number* or marks an item as dispatched.
• a payment reminder 48 hours after the item was purchased if it is not marked as paid.

(* Or so eBay say – I can’t currently find a way to add a tracking number in eBay itself, so presumably this is a feature that’s coming soon – but if anyone knows different, please leave us a comment!)

The emails cannot be turned off, though sellers subscribed to SMP can add their own message to the bottom of the emails. It’s tempting to recommend the addition of an apology for the terrible spelling and grammar, for this is the worst set of emails I’ve seen in a long time:

There are a few pitfalls sellers need to be aware of too: firstly, that crazy 48 hour payment window. If you take cheques or typically have buyers spending a few days putting larger orders together, warn them in advance that eBay will be sending this mail and you can’t stop it. There’s nothing worse as a buyer than being hassled for payment when you’re still shopping, and this eBay email is the online equivalent of the pushy assistant following you round the shop.

Secondly, if you already had customised dispatch emails in SMP, these have been deleted. If you had information about how to track an order, which couriers you use or how long delivery should take, that information is gone, and you’ll need to add it again.

Thirdly, these emails communicate nothing useful and so, at worst, are just going to confuse your buyers. Do you think a newbie buyer will know how to “track your order at the order detail page in My eBay”? No, me neither.

Finally, if you take payments outside eBay’s checkout and don’t mark items paid for in My eBay or SMP currently, you need to start doing so, or your buyers will continue to get reminders about them even after they’ve been paid for. Of course, if you’ve got three months of orders in SMP that now need to be marked paid, it looks like three months’ worth of “order updates” will be sent out, so you’ll most likely have a confused buyer or two to deal with anyway.

It’s almost impossible to know where to start criticising this system. If you’re managing your eBay orders off-eBay – and not bothering to mark as paid on-eBay because that’s being dealt with elsewhere – that will probably need to change: I certainly don’t want my buyers getting reminders for items they paid for two days ago (note that you can’t add your own text to this email – so telling your buyers “ignore the above” isn’t even an option). Insisting that “mother knows best” and not allowing sellers to turn these emails off is ridiculous.

But the badly written and essentially useless content of the email is the biggest insult of all. There’s no useful information in these emails: buyers will rapidly come to recognise them as auto-generated, and ignore them. Sellers will feel forced to send their own, useful communications… and all that eBay have done is add two or three pointless emails to every transaction.

Dear eBay, we know you want to be Amazon. We know this is you trying to own the transactions… but you’ve got it wrong. Let us opt in and out of the mails: we know our buyers better than you do. And please, let us edit ALL the text – otherwise you know, you just know that some of us are going to use that “add your own message” space to apologise to our buyers for the nonsense you’ve just sent them. And that will make us all look stupid.

If you need more precise timing than that, eBay give AM/PM in their version of the list, though going by past rollouts, expecting to tie it down to a 4 hour timeslot is vastly over-optimistic.

Currently there’s no date listed for the launch of the streamlined unpaid items process, though it will be taking place in the afternoon, apparently.

Earlier this year eBay UK’s MD Mark Lewis promised to limit changes affecting sellers to two tranches per year. I’ll admit that at the time, I applauded the announcement. But it seems that rather than two lots of change, what we have is two announcements of change, and then two months of implementing those changes, piecemeal, little bit by little bit. September and October should be the time when eBay sellers are ramping things up for Christmas, not dealing weekly with site changes and features coming and going. These changes were announced in July, so why on earth it’s taking until the end of October to implement some of them is beyond me.

And another eBay UK promo announced today, multiple BIN items in the Tyres category listed by business sellers from 20th August to 31st December will receive 20% off the normal FVF rate.

Firstly, there’s a reminder from eBay UK that sellers in the Music, Books, Video games and DVD, Film & TV categories can get 20% off their FVFs when they offer free domestic P&P. This offer runs from 20th August to 30th September. This is of course in preparation for all sellers in media categories having to offer a free postage option by 19th October.

eBay.com, Motors and eBay Canada are offering up to 12 eBay-hosted photographs for just 25c from today until September 18th, saving sellers 50c-75c per listing. (I feel compelled to say at this point, if you regularly pay a dollar for picture pack, please please get your own image hosting or at least sign up for a free Photobucket account.)

eBay.com has announced various changes to subcategories and item specifics which will roll out in the week commencing 22nd September. Lots of categories are affected, and a full list of changes can be found here.

eBay UK has announced that there will be changes in Books, Comics & Magazines, Home & Garden, Tickets & Travel and Property.

A definitive and detailed list of the category updates will be available by the end of August 2009.

It didn’t take long for the “two lots of announcements a year” promise to slip, did it?

Ticket sellers must list date as custom item specific

We do know already that sellers in the ticket category will have to list the date of their event as a custom item specific.

The listing frame really is back

It’s been officially confirmed that the listing frame (aka categories down the side of the view item page) is back, and not just a glitch.

Multi-variation limits

There are some limits to what sellers can do with MVLs:

• Maximum 5 variant criteria per listing: if you’ve got waist size, length, colour, button/zip fly and cut on your jeans’ listings, you won’t be able to add in stitching colour as a sixth variable.

• Maximum 30 options per variant.
• Overall maximum 120 variants per listing.

If you’ve got a lot of size and colour variations of the same line, I’d advise splitting them up by colour, especially if you’re using the clothing category’s free Gallery Plus to highlight your listings. I will be testing, though, if size-specific, colour-varying listings increase multiple purchases; I’ve a sneaky suspicion they might.

“More than 10″ now an optional setting

A few months back, the quantity display on multiple item listings was changed, so that buyers saw “more than 10 available” rather than a huge quantity: it seemed to push them into buying now rather than thinking they didn’t need to, and sellers liked it. With the new view item display, however, the actual quantity available seemed to have returned to listings.

Pinkie James has now confirmed on the PowerSeller board that this has now become an optional setting. Sellers can choose to show “more than 10 available” or the actual quantity: the option can be found under My eBay > Site Preferences > Selling Preferences.

Note, though, that if you’re signed in as a seller, on your own listings you’ll be shown the real quantity available on the listings page.

ME’s back!

About Me page links have returned to view item pages.
Updated to add that the UK Community Manager has now confirmed on the PS forum that About Me links are to return to the UK view item pages (though what I and others were seeing previously was not the return of the Me page link… anyway, mind the patronising doesn’t hit you on the way in ).

photo credit: Annie Mole

eBay UK have announced today that they’re to expand the eBay for Charity program which asks some buyers to donate a pound to a random charity as they checkout.

This program’s been running since November 2008, and eBay have labelled it a “great success”, having raised three-quarters of a million pounds. They’re now expanding the program to all transactions, and to add a new option to enable users to make larger donations.

At the risk of sounding like Mrs Grumpy Pants, I am going to out myself here: I absolutely loathe this program. eBay fail to make it clear to buyers that it’s them asking for money, not the seller, hence it’s sellers who get the complaints from buyers about “chugging” in checkout: admittedly there aren’t many, but why should we have to deal with any when this feature isn’t under our control? Sellers should be given the opportunity to turn charity requests off, and to choose which charities their buyers get to see.

click to embiggen

“If wishing to go ahead with this purchase simply add the £179.95 to your Paypal checkout total.”

As the listing’s still visible, we might guess that it’s been ended by the seller rather than pulled by eBay (in which case it would disappear altogether).

This is not the first instance of eBay’s Daily Deal breaking eBay’s own policies. Recent weeks have seen multiple instances of both eBay rules and UK consumer law breached in these listings:

• sellers charging “restocking fees” for returned retail purchases
• sellers refusing to refund outward postage fees on returned items
• misleading former prices quoted, where these have not been offered by the same seller in the last 30 days
• sellers listing without business contact details
• refurbished items described as “new” in item specifics

Not to mention that eBay’s own stated criteria for inclusion in DotD include “ideally a PowerSeller with min 95% positive feedback”. In order to qualify as a PS, sellers need to have at least 98% positive feedback.

All of which suggests that the problem here is that eBay staff don’t really know what eBay rules are.

“Whatever happened to the level playing field?”

Sellers not included in this major promotion are – quite rightly – asking why DotD listings are not vetted to ensure they’re abiding by the same rules the rest of us have to. Threads on eBay message boards, forums and Twitter have wondered why eBay are so heavily highlighting listings that break both eBay policy and the law: why, if you’re a small seller who breaks eBay policy inadvertantly, you end up with a big red notice on your seller dashboard, but if you’re a big seller with a lot of product to clear, you seem to be able to get away with more?

I’ll admit – I’ve been avoiding blogging on this issue because I don’t want to send the mob after individual sellers. I don’t think this is about the sellers so much as it is about eBay themselves, and the people who are in charge of this promotion not having the knowledge they should have. And if marketing people don’t necessarily know the right bits of the law or of eBay regulations, then they need to bring in people who do. They could hire a seller or two to cast an eye over DotD listings before they go live – we tend to know what eBay regulations are, because our livelihoods depend on it.

Sellers will be able to use several image upgrades for free including Gallery Plus, Supersize and Picture Pack (up to 12 pictures). eBay have promised a “new zoom feature” later in the year, but the real advantage to using eBay-hosted images is that sellers can show multiple images near the top of the listing.

The offer, with eBay’s comment that

If you currently host your photos somewhere other than eBay, now is a great time to start moving them over to eBay Picture Services (EPS)

has led some sellers to speculate that the company may be considering disallowing self-hosted pictures in future. For the moment, though, this is purely speculation.

photo credit: Jon_Marshall

Back at the end of March, eBay UK made their announcement about what would be changing for eBay sellers this summer. The new rules and features launch on June 15th, so here’s our checklist: make sure your listings are ready!

Urgent changes

• Mandatory dispatch time: all listings must show a dispatch time.
• Free postage and packing in some categories: if you list in Video Games, Mobile & Home Phones, Consumer Electronics, Computing, Photography or Clothes, Shoes & Accessories, then check the list to see if your sub-category is affected (not all sub-categories are). If so, you must offer free P&P as one option for your domestic postage, though you may choose to charge for an upgraded service. If you’re a non-UK seller listing on eBay UK, this includes you.
• Category changes, which will mostly affect sellers in Clothing, Home & Garden and the Motors’ categories (not an exhaustive list, so check your own cat.s aren’t listed).

  Some sub-categories are being done away with and all listings will be moved into the parent category: live listings should move automatically, but make sure you update your listing templates or new listings in vanished categories could (in my experience) end up invisible to buyers. And check your Item Specifics too: previous category changes have seen them wiped out.

New features

It’s not going to be possible to plan for these in advance, because they don’t go live til the 15th/16th, but at least be ready for the cool new stuff when it happens.

• Multi-variation listings: time for a little stock-take, maybe, so you can get all those colour/size variants listed as soon as possible.
• Free pictures in Clothing Shoes and Accessories & Home and Garden. Most business sellers will be using their own hosting, but the advantage with eBay’s is that you get the slideshow at the top. Worth considering.
• Custom item specifics
• Easy returns
• Smart FAQs: have a run through your ASQs – do the same questions come up again and again? If so, that information should probably be on your listings… but Smart FAQs may also be useful to you.

eBay have put out a timetable of when the various changes are supposed to go live on the site: we share their optimism that everything launches smoothly