Your Lifetime Transactions

You can now view your total lifetime sales for your eBay account – both as a monetary value and the number of transactions. You’ll also see the date of your first eBay sale displayed. You can also choose to split the transactions by “Global”, “United States”, “United Kingdom”, or “Germany”. Generally for the UK or Global (if you’re registered on eBay UK then you’ll see your total sales in pounds sterling. If you select US sales then values will be in dollars or Euros for Germany.

Seller protection actions

The second feature available in the Seller Dashboard when viewed on eBay.com is actions that eBay have taken to protect your account. These include the number of feedbacks buyers left for you that eBay have removed, the number of opened buyer protection cases that eBay have removed and no longer count against your seller standing, and the number of times an unpaid item credit has been applied to your account.

We don’t know if either of these features will be rolled out to the eBay UK Seller Dashboard, but it doesn’t really matter – you can access them simply by logging in to eBay.com.

This is not the normal Markdown Manager sale available to all eBay shop owners on fixed price listings that have been running for longer than 28 days. This is a discount feature that appears to be available from day 1 on listings for a selected few sellers.

As an added bonus the strike through pricing isn’t just displayed on the seller’s listings, it also appears in search results in addition to the added bonus of the Outlet shop’s own logo.

Whether it is a new site feature available to Outlets, or whether it’s a pilot test with just one or two sellers which will be trialled and then may disappear again from the site, we don’t know. However I’m thinking that for any seller offering deep discounts on eBay this would be a very attractive feature to have access to and probably something you’d like to enable on your own eBay listings.

The reasons for this is that they’re going to be upgrading My Messages and not only will it make the message console run faster but will introduce new features such as enhanced search functionality and a new auto-archive function for easy email organization.

If you want to save messages older than six months you’ll need to forward the messages to your own email client, or save the messages to your computer.

Quite frankly I don’t think I’ve ever referred to messages more than a couple of months old – certainly you can’t reply to messages after about 90 days. However if you do need to access your message history for longer than six months you’ve got just over a week to save them for the future.

This solves the dilemma of how to ensure your items aren’t removed by eBay, as well as filling in holes in eBay’s catalogue. If your product is released in a later model or a new colour you can simply add it and carry on listing as normal.

There is of course a word of warning, make sure that if you do add a new product it really is new to the product catalogue. For example just because a device has more memory doesn’t make it a new product if memory can be upgraded. This would then simply be an item specific – if you create new catalogue entries and you are the only person to list against that product then your item isn’t likely to fair well in search as eBay will probably surface the more popular item. Also ensure that the data is 100% correct and as complete as possible to give buyers the maximum (and correct!) information.

We’ll let you know if this comes to the UK or if we see more categories added where you can add new entries to eBay’s product catalogue data.

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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.

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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?

eBay have released the Expedited Shipping Filter which segregates orders which need to be shipped as a priority on next day couriers. It’s in the form of a simple drop down filter and enables you to print out orders with expedited shipping separately.

This might appear a small change, but I’ve missed a buyer who upgraded to priority shipping and sent it standard post in the past. Being able to identify any items which need priority shipping makes a lot of sense.

It’s about time too as the previous list of supported browsers was “Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or higher, Mozilla Firefox 1.5 or higher, or Apple Safari.2 or higher (all of which are defunct out of date versions)”.

eBay now say they support the latest versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, or Google Chrome.

I tend to use multiple browsers so that I can have different eBay accounts open in each. Which is your favourite browser for eBay?

I’m still confused by the disparity between the buyer and seller history period on eBay. With Selling Manager Pro sellers can currently go back 122 days to check on sales. Now that buyers can go back three years it could be highly embarrassing for a customer to have better details of a transaction than the seller including the eBay item number they purchased.

I do like the ability to look back at my history on eBay and see what I’ve purchased over the years. I just wish as a seller I could do the same as easily

In a way this makes sense – fixed price listings are not sorted by Time Ending Soonest, but by Best Match. Those listings at the top of search results may have up to 30 days left to run, and if they are Good Til Cancelled listings may run indefinitely.

eBay say that the change is to simplify the search experience and to enable buyers to identify which items are auctions from those available to purchase immediately.

Should it make a difference to purchases whether or not the time left is displayed for fixed price items? The chances are if they’re not sold they’ll be relisted anyway but some sellers believe it gives an additional incentive to buyers if they think they’ll lose the item if they don’t purchase immediately. However unless the buyer choose to sort listings by time ending soonest they’re probably not seeing fixed price listings about to end in any case.

What do you think about the change? Do you believe it will affect buying behaviour or will it not make any difference to sell through rates?

Many thanks to TameBay reader Joe for the heads up on this site change.

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Part of the reason for the wider page width is the larger left hand side navigation column, but one of the advantages of the new SMP layout is the ability resize the column widths to save space.

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One change which has slipped in is the look back period available in SMP. With the old SMP you could select a Custom Period to show items for last 122 days, in the new SMP this has been reduced to just 90 days. With eBay.com now enabling buyers to see purchases for up to three years ago it would make sense for eBay to extend the same look back period to sellers.

One thing I especially like is the new colour for highlighting notes from buyers, which makes them stand out more. However one trick that eBay have missed which I had been hoping to see, is the ability to highlight shipping methods in SMP. Other than the ability to display a postage cost column there doesn’t appear to be a way to indicate which courier orders are to be shipped by. If a buyer upgrades their postage to an expedited shipping method it would be really useful to have this highlighted in SMP.

Overall it’s a much cleaner slicker feel to SMP which will match the new My eBay look and feel. It’s definitely more of a facelift than an upgrade so, apart from the wider display, there’s little to upset most sellers.

The most significant change is the ability to view up to three years buying history, all you need do is to click the new “Purchase History” on the left in My eBay and select the purchase history period that you’re interested in.

This is a fantastic feature, so many times I’ve purchased something on eBay and wished I could locate the same seller to make a repeat purchase, but if it’s outside the last 60 day period unless I can locate the transaction in my feedback it’s gone forever. Now I can simply check the current year, previous year, or even two years ago buying history to see exactly what I’ve previously purchased.

I can also see this being useful for some international purchases of items shipping via sea where conceivably on occasion they could take longer than two months to arrive.

At the same time eBay have improved payment and shipping reminders. If you’ve yet to pay for an item you’ve won, you’ll see a reminder that identifies purchases not yet paid for. If you’re selling an item, you’ll be alerted when your buyer’s payment has cleared, so you can go ahead and ship their purchase. Both types of reminders show a picture of the item in My eBay.

On the down side for some sellers who use their My eBay summary selling information has been removed, but the full information is still available in the selling tab or of course in Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro.

The final change is to your watch lists, you can now sort them by recently added items so that you can locate the latest items of interest.

If sellers on eBay.com still want to see the old My eBay views they can of course log into eBay.co.uk and sellers on the UK site can get a preview of the changes on eBay.com if they want to research their past sales and access three years of their own purchase history.

The categories affected are: Books, Comics & Magazines, Clothes, Shoes & Accessories, Computing, Consumer Electronics, Mobile & Home Phones, Photography and Video Games. In some categories the changes are fairly minor renaming of categories, but in others you’ll need to totally recategorise your listings. There is a full schedule of category changes at http://pages.ebay.co.uk/categorychanges/index.html
Sadly as well as changing the category of your listing you’ll probably also be forced to manually update the item specifics for each item. When you change category normally you’ll find that the specifics don’t exactly map.

It will also cause problems for buyers in the short term. Until sellers update there listings they will for example be led to believe that there are only 17 pairs of boots, 10 shoes and just a single pair of slippers available on eBay. That’s not correct of course, it’s just that 23,419 pairs of Men’s Shoes and 61,162 pairs of Women’s shoes have been dumped into the “Other” category.

I do feel for the sellers who have hundreds or thousands of listings to edit and revise. I’ve been affected by eBay category changes in the past and it’s never fun, especially when you find that the Item Specifics you so carefully entered have been wiped out and need re-entering for each listing one by one.

If you sell in Clothing, Shoes and Accessories then you’ll also need to ensure your listings have as a minimum the new mandatory item specifics which in general are Brand, Size and Style. You have until 16 May 2011 to revise the item specifics in your listings to ensure visibility for your products.

If buyers can’t find the products they want to buy it’s bad news for sellers, so if you are in an affected sub-category the sooner you can get your listings revised the sooner buyers will find your items… and of course the longer your competitors take to recategorise their items the greater the advantage you gain by getting the work done sooner rather than later.

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 will also be some changes to Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro sold items view. These changes will be minor and shouldn’t affect how you work (at least I’m hoping not!) but will mirror the changes already in place in the Active Items and Unsold Items views. The biggest change that I can see is that each item will take up less vertical space on the page. The changes will roll out gradually during March, so don’t be surprised when you wake up to a different looking screen one day.

Updated to add: The changes to Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro will now roll out in May (not March)

Flexible discounts for buyers

Currently on eBay the only discounts you can give are on the postage costs. eBay are working on a concept to allow you to offer “Spend £100 and get 10% off” or “Buy 3 items and get the cheapest one for 30% off” type promotions to your buyers.

This should be welcome news for sellers who offer “free” postage (or as we all know list with prices including postage ) as they will be able to offer discounts to buyers for multiple purchases.

This new feature will allow you to offer discounts over and above discounting the postage charges and eBay expect to launch a first version of this in UK in the second half of the year.

Product bundles

eBay are working on a feature to allow sellers to create product bundles and associated item discounts. We spotted product bundles being tested on eBay.com back in April 2010 and is the best cross promotion tool I’ve seen on eBay.

Product bundles will enable sellers to set up cross-selling relations between their items and attach discounts to bundles and for buyers it means you can purchase accessories direct from the view item page you’re about to buy the main product from.

A UK pilot for product bundles will start in a few weeks time and eBay hope to launch the first version of this tool for all sellers at some point in the late Spring this year.

The paper entitled “A Study on the Impact of Product Images on User Clicks for Online Shopping” by Anjan Goswami, Naren Chittar and Sung H. Chung, describes experiments to try and augment eBay’s search ranking function with features derived from the images of an item.

Examples of image features include the amount of illumination, contrast, dynamic range and the characteristics of the background. eBay’s results show that better images result in better clicks and sales.

The research builds on eBay’s “More Like This ImageSearch” technology and improving the quality of sellers’ images and the way they use image information are important topics for eBay.

What this means for sellers is that it’s likely in the future that the quality and clarity of your images will begin to be reflected in your Best Match ranking. Dark pictures, images where the product isn’t centred and in the foreground of your picture, blurred images, and images without contrasting backgrounds may soon mean that your eBay listings isn’t shown to potential buyers.

Product shot before and after processing by Fluid Mask

The new eBay.com DealFinder compares the current selling price on eBay to the lowest price they can find the item offered on alternative sites. The sites for comparisons include Amazon, Walmart, Target, BestBuy, Newegg, NeweggMall and Barnes & Noble. eBay say that when they find a better deal on eBay they display it on DealFinder and display the percentage saving based on the best next price they find.

Of course it does mean if the item you’re searching for isn’t on the DealFinder site there’s a pretty good chance it’s either not available elsewhere, or that it’s available at a lower price on another site. It also appears that you’ll have to be a Top Rated Seller for your items to be included on DealFinder.

Even though you’ll only find the item you want if it’s cheapest on eBay it’s still rather cute and DealFinder currently has almost 20,000 product deals live spread over almost 4000 pages. You can narrow your search by category and only then will a search box be displayed which searches DealFinder – on the home page only a general eBay search box is displayed.

Buyers should appreciate this new shopping comparison feature and eBay are even including live links to click through to competitors sites to verify the savings available. I’m not sure how pleased Amazon et al will be at being used as a comparison to eBay prices, especially as their item prices will only be highlighted when they are more expensive. It’s also worth noting that the price comparison does not take into account any shipping or handling fees.

Anything that increase buyer activity on eBay is good news, so if the new DealFinder encourages shoppers to spend more on the site it should be welcomed by sellers.

Previously although fixed price items were hidden in search results if a buyer had them on their watch list or had previously purchased from you they could still see and click the buy now button. Now even if they can see your items you can choose to block them from search.

One obvious advantage is that if you’ve built up a good position in Best Match search results you don’t have to cancel and relaunch your listings to ensure buyers don’t purchase for the few days that you’re unable to ship. If you’re away for a week or even if you have a family emergency and need to stop selling just for a couple of days you can easily stop selling and restart from where you left off as soon as you’re back at work.

You can also display a message on your shop front to reassure buyers that although you’re away for a few days you are still trading and of course let them know when they’ll be able to purchase from you again.

My first impression of the tool is that it’s quite good at highlighting performance differences for your own listings. It highlights listings that are performing well against listings that aren’t attracting as many impressions and sales. What the tool doesn’t do is highlight the reasons why some listings that aren’t performing so well. It’s still down to you to determine which keywords top performing listing titles contain that aren’t in you listing titles and what keywords you do have which aren’t attracting clicks and sales.

There is a link to some tips on how to interpret the data and steps you can do take increase your listing’s performance, but these are basic housekeeping rules that all sellers should be following when they list their items.

Where the tool is less useful is comparing your listings against similar items on eBay. It’s only possible to drill down to the top level eBay categories (for me that’s “Computing”) and so when looking at my listings for items such as “Printers” I’m comparing my listings for printers against competitors listings for printer cables, printer toner & ink, printer paper, OHP acetates and every other printer accessory on eBay. That means the click and sell through rates aren’t really relevant to my listings, the tool would be much more useful if I could drill down the category structure to ensure I am comparing like for like.

One of the most useful features of the tool is a quick and easy way to see the position of your listings in search results. If you’re rank is under 50 then you know you’re on the first page of search results and you should be getting plenty of impressions. If you’re not getting clicks then your title or gallery picture isn’t attracting buyers. If you’ve got a high position in search results and are attracting clicks but not converting the clicks to sales then it’s probably your listing description or T’s & C’s that need attention.

As the Listing Analytics tool has only been intermittently available today I’m sure there are plenty of other features and information to assist sellers. If you’ve subscribed let us know what your first impressions are and what the Listing Analytics tool has revealed to help you increase your sales on eBay.

One thing in the press release struck a chord with me, eBay say “We’ve actively diverted millions of users from our mobile website m.ebay.com to our iPhone, Android and BlackBerry apps. However, despite us diverting traffic, mobile web revenue growth is increasing at the same pace as our mobile app business“. I guess I’m one of those users, I don’t tend to use apps, but just open the browser on my mobile phone to browse the Internet.

Mobile websites are often limited compared to the full site experience (take a look at http://m.ebay.com/ for example). However with the new mobile website eBay are promising a host of features such as auto-complete, expandable swiping galleries, remote content for galleries that don’t require additional download and a floating menu bar that keeps the most important controls always on the screen. Of course the normal site features such as the ability to browse categories, save and refine searches, sort results by price, time, and location, and find similar auctions or other items listed by the same seller will also be included.

The development of a new mobile site is all about giving the buyer choice. Buyers can choose whether to browse the full eBay site, whether to use a mobile version of the site, or whether to download an app to make their purchases.

When you’re use your mobile for the Internet what do you prefer? Do you use an App, do you like mobile optimised sites or do you tend to visit the full site on your mobile phone’s browser?

Clicking Fashion now takes you to a page where you can shop for Women, Men, Kids or accessories. These are further split into popular categories on a bright page which mixes links to Outlets amid more generic search of all fashion sellers on eBay.

Each category within fashion has received a makeover with a Style selection with thumbnails to indicate the type of Suits, Shoes or Bags available.

More importantly at last eBay have provided logical ways to search for clothing. Gone are the “Large Suits” and “Medium Jeans to be replaced by chest and waist/leg measurements – we can now buy and sell clothing in the same way we would select sizes on the high street.

This does of course make it imperative that item specifics are completed when sellers list items of clothing. Over the years eBay have suggested a mix of now outdated item specifics for clothing. Attributes such as S/M/L, W34, W34/L34 and 42L are still widely seen on eBay, but sellers should update listings to the current sizes that eBay now use(e.g. “42 Long” as the chest size for suits). Failure to update your item specifics will mean that your items aren’t shown to buyers when the search the new Fashion pages on eBay.

eBay have added the ability for buyers to create custom profiles for buyers to enter their own sizes and favourite brands which will be remembered each time they visit the site.

Profiles can be either for women or men, and different sizing options are shown for each so women can choose from dress sizes 8, 10, 12 etc whilst men will see collar sizes for shirts.

Overall I’m pretty impressed with the updates to the fashion pages. Instead of guiding buyers directly to the Outlets, products from all sellers are included. Sizes are relevant to the way that people buy clothing and the new ways to choose products by style and size are a vast improvement in narrowing down a search to the items of interest.

If you’re an avid fashion buyer will the new pages make you buy more on eBay? If you’re a fashion seller are your items ready for the new fashion hub and have you updated your item specifics to ensure that they’ll appear in search results?

eBay say that in tests the less obvious position reduced questions from buyers with no impact on sales. Basically eBay are doing you a favour by (hopefully) reducing your workload. At least buyers will now have to scroll past your full description, even if they still don’t read it, before they can ask a question already answered in your product description.

I have to say on this I tend to agree with eBay that pre-sales questions make little difference to sales. A friend of mine once tested the impact of answering questions across two eBay User IDs selling identical product. On one ID he dutifully answered every question from buyers, and on the other he deleted every pre-sales question unanswered and only replied to post-sales questions. It made no difference to sales whatsoever (although that was before today’s communication DSR which may have been impacted).

What do you think of the new position? Do you answer questions anyway or have you turned off the ability for buyers to contact you direct from listings and rely on Auto-Answers and Customised Questions and Answers?

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.

eBay are basing the standardised delivery information on the couriers official transit time so Express is for next day deliveries, Standard is for 1-2 working days and Economy is for 3-5 working day transit times.

This doesn’t however take into account how many working days the seller has added in for handling time. It opens up the bizaare situation where a seller with 3 days handling time prior to despatch but using a next day courier will have an “Express delivery” shown taking 4 days, but someone with a 1 day handling time and a 48 hour courier will have their delivery labeled as “Standard” but only take 3 days to arrive with the customer.

eBay need to take into account handling time as 4 days (or longer) can hardly be considered an express delivery. Customers are rightly likely to be disappointed at longer delivery times if they’re led to believe their being offered a premium service.

If you haven’t already it’s time to go through your listings and update your delivery methods to take account of the new delivery information. If in the past you used options like “Sellers standard service” or “Other Courier” check what they’ve been mapped to. Consider changing them to “Other courier 24 hour” or “Other courier 3 days” to ensure that your items aren’t displaying an economy service when you’re offering faster delivery times. If you do have a longer despatch time but use a 24 hour courier it may even be worth displaying a shorter handling time but switch to “Other courier 3 days” to avoid displaying Express shipping and disappointing customers.

What do you think of the new delivery options now that they’re live? Do you like the new standardised delivery information or did you prefer the old method where the courier or Royal Mail service was displayed?

Edited to add: Oh joy of joys – have you seen what happens if you have two delivery options which take the same length of time but one’s tracked and the other isn’t?

They both show as “Standard” although in this case one is “Royal Mail 1st Class” and the other is “Royal Mail 1st Class Recorded”. I’m not sure how customers will tell the difference though, unless they’ve figured out to click the postage tab lower down the listing to identify the actual service being offered.

Cases that will count against sellers are item not received or significantly not as described (opened cases) and cases that were not resolved by the seller, and either eBay or PayPal have issued a refund under the buyer protection policy (unresolved cases).

What won’t be counted are cases opened to return an item or to cancel a transaction. In addition eBay say that they won’t count cases where the buyer abused or misused the eBay or PayPal buyer protection process.

What still infuriates me is the order of options in the drop down a buyer sees in My eBay. This still has “Resolve a problem” as the third option (which pretty much ensures any opened cases will count against the seller), whilst “Return this item is 9th, right down at the bottom of the list of 12 options.

Seeing as cases where a buyer merely wishing to return an item aren’t counted against the seller (and seeing as the Distance Selling Regulation proscribe no fault returns as mandatory) why isn’t this option right at the top of the list? Offering the option to resolve a problem can lead to buyers claiming items are “Not as described” instead of simply requesting a return.

eBay still need to make the process of selling, buying, customer service and returns as simple and straight forward as it is buying from big retailers such as Next and Littlewoods. Whilst responsible sellers do their best to fulfil their responsibilities simply moving the “Return this item” link towards the top of the list and above “Resolve a problem” would go a long way in avoiding unnecessary opened buyer protection cases.