Entries Tagged 'eBay Announcements' ↓

After a great outcry from loyal eBay Pulse users - it appears eBay has rolled back the changes to make some adjustments. I posted twice about the changes on this site, and the eBay discussion boards have been lit up with complainers. Dennis G. (Dennis Goedegebuure, eBay Marketing?) posted this comment on my most recent post about eBay Pulse:

Based on community feedback, we have rolled back the old pulse for a limited time. Until the application is live, we will build in the needed functionality for drill down in categories for detailed information in the new pulse pages.

Until then, you can find the new pulse at http://new-pulse.ebay.com

Kind regards,

Dennis

The fresh look is nice. Even the Internet Pulse sounds nice, but most users are upset that the ability to see the top searches within sub-categories was removed. It appears eBay is working to fix that.

It sounds like Dennis listened and is working to make users happy. In light of many unwelcomed changes over the past year - this is really refreshing.

Cheers to you Dennis!!

See the New Pulse at http://new-pulse.ebay.com

Popularity: 36% [?]

"SO"

eBay is having a Town Hall broadcast today at 11:30 AM Pacific Time. They will no doubt be fielding questions on the Fixed-Price 30-Day listing format, the fact that Search is broken, eBay layoffs, and all the other stuff that has gone wrong lately.

There may not be any clear answers, and it will ultimately be frustrating to listen to. I have a little game I like to play during these Town Hall meetings. I keep a piece of paper handy, and I jot down each time an eBay staffer inappropriately starts a sentence or reply with the word "So."

Let me give you some examples from the August Town Hall transcript. It's stunning how the San Jose types fall into this mannerism. I've highlighted the obviously inappropriate and totally unnecessary occurrences, drop the "so" and see how much more clear their replies would be:

Let's start with the boss, Lorrie Norrington:

Lorrie: So let me cover two of the areas, which are Pricing and Finding. And then I’ll ask Steph to pickup on Shipping. So one of the items we’re most excited about is the changes we’re making to fees for fixed price listings. And we’re dramatically reducing the upfront cost for our sellers by lowering insertions fees. And then we’re adjusting or raising the success base final value fee on the back end for fixed price listings.

So what does this all mean? It means a thirty-five cent flat fee on all fixed price listings, regardless of item price, quantity listed, and it’s good for up to a thirty day duration. So this is a big change; one flat fee, thirty day duration. And you can list as many identical items as you want in a multi-quantity listing for the same low insertion fee. So we simplified insertion fees, we’ve lowered insertion fees, and we’ve extended duration and enabled multi-listing. So in addition to that, we have introduced a fifteen cent insertion fee for media items; which are books, movies, music and video games, and a five cent insertion fee starting on September 16^th. And through the end of the year, when you sell media items using the prefilled item information or the catalog. So some big changes there.

Stephanie Tilenius is one of the worst offenders:

Stephanie: So buyers have told us time and time again, that shipping costs on eBay are just too high. In fact, excess shipping is the number one reason buyers say they’ve had a bad experience on eBay. So this is causing buyers to move to other channels and make their purchases elsewhere, which of course, ends up hurting our sellers. So we have decided we need to work with sellers to create a marketplace with free and reasonable shipping. So today, or Wednesday, we actually announced we were setting maximum shipping caps based on historical data of what buyers told us is reasonable shipping. And this will keep more buyers satisfied and help sellers drive more sales.

So let me explain what that means. We’re introducing limits on shipping and handling charges in media categories. So we’re starting with media, where items are generally more consistent in size and weight and where we believe the buyer expectations are particularly heightened for free and reasonable shipping. And we’re gonna learn a lot in the media category and then work to rollout reasonable shipping in other categories as we see fit and as we hear from buyers.

Jamie Iannone, VP of Buyer Experience loves the "so" word a lot, but for no apparent grammatical reason:

Griff: Thank you, Keith. Let’s take a question that came in earlier. This one is about best match and duplicate items. “Since eBay implemented the new search criteria, starting July 31^st, limiting the display of duplicate items shown in search from the same seller, our sales have plummeted. Is eBay aware of what a drastic effect this has had on many sellers?” And Jamie, I think this one is for you.

Jamie: Sure. So let me backup and talk about why we did this and what we’re seeing. So the goal of this was about a month ago, we relaxed our 15 Item Rule, so sellers could actually list more on the site.

here's another:

Griff:Thank you. 877-474-3302. Let’s go back, this is a question I hear a lot too. You know, we talk about we want more buyers to come, and a lot of sellers are asking this very question, Jamie. “So your changes are well and good functionality wise but what exactly are you doing to bring buyers here? How will they know about this new buying experience?”

Jamie:Yeah, thanks Griff. So obviously, a key part is marketing to our buyers about a lot of the changes that are coming on the site today. So we have a pretty extensive product marketing plan to let buyers know about some of the exciting changes that they’ll see. Frankly, I think it’ll be pretty obvious to them when they come to the site hopefully, that there’s a lot more great inventory to shop through, etcetera. But over the course of you know, this month and the next few months, we’re continuing to put a lot of dollars to work out there on the web, buying traffic to bring buyers into the marketplace. And we’ll be doing a lot of product marketing around the new features that we have on the site. One of which that’s launching this week actually makes the product experience a lot easier when you’re buying a specific catalog item. So if you’re surfing the site today or probably starting tomorrow, you’ll actually see we have a new implementation of shipping via catalogs or products. That’s actually really great and much, much easier for buyers to use.

Here's Kristina Klausen, Dir. of Shipping

Griff: Um, actually, it does have it built in.

Kristina: So Frank, just to clarify. It’s Kristina, from the Shipping Team. Are you offering free shipping on, you want to offer it on all the items in your multiple item listing?

Caller: Yes, that’s what I’ve always been doing.

Kristina: Okay. So you can do that. Um, I’m just trying to understand what the problem is.

SO. Get the point? So while most people begin a sentence with "So" in response to a question, or to logically connect one thought to another, eBay people just use it instead of "ummm" to fill space.

Play the game! Make a mark every time the word is used inappropriately and let me know your counts! Listen to eBay's Town Hall meeting live today - or catch the archived version when you need some painful fun.

By the way, if you'd like to see the proper ways to use the word "so" in a sentence, check out the Merriam-Webster site at: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/so%5B1%5D

Popularity: 37% [?]

How would you, as a seller, like to know what the top search terms are in your favorite top category? Great idea huh? Well, how would you like to drill down into a few sub-categories to see even more detailed info on what to sell on eBay? Finally, how would you like to use this tool to find niche products so you could sell what people really want? Sound good? Well, sorry you missed it.

The new version of eBay Pulse was released today with a small announcement by Dennis Goedegebuure of eBay Marketing. Dennis may be a great guy, and I hate to jump on new releases right away, but this product is pretty bad.

Evidently, they have taken away the most useful part of eBay Pulse, which is the ability to drill into several leaf categories to find more detailed information. The only top searches shown are for the main or "meta" categories. If this is just a test or beta or whatever, then they shouldn't have released it with such incomplete information. If this is the final version, it's basically useless. Based on the announcement, this is intentional. One of the new features is that:

New modules that display the most popular searches in each of our main categories, as well as the biggest movers.

The newest feature is "Internet Pulse" which according to the eBay Ink blog contains:

RSS feeds of online influencers, pull the keywords from these expert blogs, and build links to search pages on eBay. This methodology gives eBay a scalable way to get the hottest product keywords linked from the Pulse page and indexed by the search engines.

Couldn't I just use Google Trends or Google Insights to find out what's hot? Yes, as a matter of fact, I already do. eBay picks the "online influencers." Why would I rely on them? Who knows who they pick for me? Another example of "we know what's best for you."

The New eBay Pulse

Popularity: 19% [?]

eBay has release the monthly change list, and it's a big one. I'm not going to rehash the announcement. You can read that for yourself. But here are my gut reaction predictions, pros and cons.

Pros

Fees are generally going to be lower. I've already closed my eBay Store. That'll save me $15.95 per month.

Visibility for fixed-price listings will be greater. They will last longer, and if a seller sells multiple items with the new 30-day duration, they'll get indexed by search engines. This will hopefully bring some organic search visibility for your eBay listings.

Another positive, the more recent sales an item has had, the higher that listing will appear in Best Match results.

Cons

Lower upfront fees, and longer durations will likely mean more items on eBay. More items essentially more competition, both in a literal way, and due to eBay's new "Finding" system. Sell-through rates will likely fall across the site.

Small sellers of one-of-a-kind items will benefit the least from these changes. The bigger sellers with multiple items will get the benefit of greater visibility over time.

Automatically suspending sellers with less than a 4.3 DSR. There's not much screaming about this yet. But it will likely lead to more sales of Selling on 'the River'.

Bigger media sellers will be affected by the new fee structure / fixed shipping. Ultimately, it will cost buyers more to buy media items. These large sellers make a little bit on shipping, which they'll now pass on to buyers.

Summary

It's a little harder to pick on these new changes. Overall, I think the changes are positive. I still disagree with some of the other changes made this year, but this set is more positive for the masses.

Maybe eBay's Q4 2008 will not be a bust after all. Time will tell.

Popularity: 19% [?]

It appears one of my 5 predictions may be coming true already. As Randy Smythe mentions, it could be that eBay is already moving toward a single listing page with multiple sellers on that page, similar to Half.com and similar (once again) to Amazon.

eBay's recent announcement may pave the way for this. If it happens, it will get harder and harder to list an item without a bar code or some identifier that allows eBay to categorize it. Could it be that, in the end, the only category left for unique items is the Collectibles category? Could the Collectibles category become "eBay Classic"?

Read the full announcement from eBay on the changes here.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Lorrie Norrington, President, eBay Marketplace Operations announced today that eBay Live! in Chicago this year, will be the last one until 2010. She said management wants to get more up close and personal with the eBay community.

To quote her exactly:

In 2009 we are focusing our energy on smaller venues to facilitate more face-to-face interactions with our customers and community. While I can’t yet name all of the places we’ll be visiting in 2009, I can say that we intend to spend more quality time with more of you in 2009 than we have in recent memory. So while eBay Live! will not be held in 2009, we will be back with eBay Live! on August 12-14, 2010 in Orlando, Florida at the Orange County Convention Center.

Okay, I'm going out on a limb here and predicting this will be the last eBay Live! - and although there may be another event called eBay Live! this will be the last one in it's current form. With every other thing changing about eBay, it doesn't make sense they would have an event:

1. for sellers
2. for "flea market" people
3. for people who like crazy outfits and collect pins

I think the days of the homey, aw-shucks eBay seller are over. Any thoughts?

See the entire announcement.

Popularity: 11% [?]

eBay affiliate sites were given an 30-day extension on the deadline to update their links to the new eBay Partner Network. eBay recently announce they were taking their affiliate program in-house. Commission Junction has managed eBay's affiliate program for several years.

This is welcome news to those who've been worried about being early adopters. It appears the bugs are getting worked out though and the new system is working. Here's what eBay had to say:

We’re off to a great start and we are happy to report that in the three weeks since launch, more than two thirds of our affiliates’ traffic has already moved over to the new system.

Several of you have asked for a bit more time in migrating your links. Because we know there are some special circumstances that may require this, we have arranged to extend the migration deadline until May 31st. This will apply to Half.com and all eBay countries migrating EXCEPT Belgium, Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Singapore, which will still expire on April 30th).

If you haven't looked into eBay's (generous) affiliate program, one of the best places to learn about it, and actually make some extra money is Build a Niche Store. I've had a couple for about a year and a half and regularly make a little extra money with each site. It's really a great little program, buy it once and use it on as many niche sites as you'd like. Go check out Build a Niche Store.

Popularity: 6% [?]