Carrots are good for you

This was going to be a comment on Scott Wingo's post about eBay fee changes and the upcoming eCommerce forum. It got a bit too long for someone else's comments: in general, when a comment is longer than the post you're commenting on, it's probably time to stop!

I'll go out on a limb and guess that with the "stick" of the fee increases, we will see a "carrot". I'd guess it will be in the form of some seller's reward program that is geared towards giving growing sellers a break on their fees in the form of some PayPal $, etc.

I really hope you're right with this, because we are long overdue a carrot.

It's not about the pennies here and there on the fees: any seller worth their salt should be able to deal with a 5c increase without much pain. It's the bigger message that these increases give: give us more and more and more and more of your turnover, and if you don't like it, go away because there are a thousand more wannabe sellers queuing up behind you. It sometimes feels like eBay think sellers are a magic porridge pot which will keep spewing out fee payments whatever they do to us.

I'd like to see eBay rewarding seller loyalty. Give us a reason to put other channel plans on the back burner, and make eBay a cornerstone of our business again - whether it be a Paypal-like tiered fee system, the ability to "bulk purchase" listings or upgrades ("buy ten Galleries, get two free"), a certain number of store listings free with your subscription, whatever. Frankly, just about anything that gave the message that we're all in business together, that eBay are there to facilitate things for their sellers rather than just screw them harder into the ground, would be very much appreciated right now.

And ANYTHING AT ALL they want to do to promote Stores is good with me :-D Despite last year's changes, 80% of my sales STILL are from store listings. Stores work. They work beautifully. I just wish eBay could appreciate that. They're so stuck in their old-style auction mindset, I don't think they realise how many of their buyers and sellers have moved on from that way of dealing, that the novelty of the auction format has largely worn off. eBay is now "the place where you can get anything". But if you cripple Stores, you stop that happening. The obscure items we might need to list for a month or two before we find a buyer are no longer worth what eBay will charge to sell them, so we won't bother. Result? A site that's filled with the same crap you can buy on Amazon. This sure as hell affects the vibrancy of your marketplace. Recognise what you have in Stores, eBay, and work with us to promote it.

As for what else we'd like from eBay, well, Mountie already wrote a list.

Want it now

With the first day back at work of the new year I've been thinking about what eBay could do to make my life easier. How could they iron out some of the little niggles that constantly pop up on a regular basis in my life as an eBay seller. It's by no means a definitive list, but if eBay could work on it over the course of the next year I'd more than a little grateful!

Block echeques for eBay payments

eCheques are the worst type of payment for serious business sellers. First PayPal promise the buyer they'll clear in three to four days! Complete poppycock, in the UK they take around ten days to clear. Secondly you're reliant on an email from PayPal to inform you that they've cleared (well email was never the most reliable medium) and finally there is nothing so frustrating for both the buyer and the seller than having waited the requisite ten days just for the darn thing to bounce! Scrap em or give the ability to block them.

Multiple shops on one ID

Many sellers open more than one shop for a variety of reasons, different stock lines or to tailor products to different geographic marketplaces. Life would be so much easier if you could have multiple shops on one User ID.

Account verification for buyers and sellers

There is very little justification for either buyers or sellers not to have fully verified accounts. In the US there has been ID Verify for some time - why not in the UK?

Listing upgrades bundles

Some countries already have the option to buy multiple listing upgrades at a discounted price, if this was offered it would not only gain eBay more revenue but would encourage sellers to use and experiment with more features, e.g. why not offer Gallery, Bold and Highlight as a bundled price?

Biddy's button

When a buyer has bought something from a Shop, eBay present them with two options: "pay now" to checkout, and "continue shopping with this seller". We propose changing the latter from its current unclickable text, to a button that would take the shopper back to the Shop (or seller's other listings), at one stroke making things easier for buyers to buy multiple items and therefore increasing eBay's revenues.Biddy first suggested this on the Power Seller message board over two years ago (and on some now-defunct US board even longer ago than that): it's received support from numerous Pinks from Doug McCallum downwards, but promised action has failed to materialise thus far. It's a tiny change in code, so why on earth has it not been implemented? Go on Doug.... Change it to

PayPal & eBay to learn we're in the UK

What is so difficult about UK address formats? We do not have City_State_Zip on the last line of our addresses! We have City, County and Postcode on SEPARATE lines specifically with the postcode on the final line on it's own. Seven years trading in the UK and they still haven't worked it out! Bit pathetic really.....

Shop listings bundled with shops fee

To encourage Shop Inventory Format now that it's rendered practically obsolete by excessive fees why not include a certain number free with the Basic, Featured or Anchor monthly shop fee?

SIF Fees to be per sale not per item

While we're on the subject of shop fees the biggest gripe with the BIN and SIF final value fees isn't the percentage per se. It's the fact the percentage is applied per item. This means if you bulk sell quantities of low cost product each and every one is charged at the highest percentage rate. Why not apply the percentage to the total sale of that product line purchased in a single transaction, or even better apply it on a pro rata basis based on a months total turn over similar to PayPal merchant rates.

AutoFeedback

Yes we know it's available in SMP, but quite frankly if any part of eBay is going to fall over it's SM and SMP, just check the community boards to confirm this. Why not incorporate autofeedback into either TurboLister, or even better a standalone option in my eBay.

More cheap listing days

We love em, they save us fees

Scrap cheap listing days

Yeah I had to put these last two in to prove you can't please all the people all of the time. Many sellers detest cheap listing days because they fill the site with junk, so if we're going to have them just don't make them Free Listing Days ever again ;-)

Oh and finally.... just carry on as per normal! eBay is a fantastic platform to run a business on. Don't make it too easy or everyone'll be doing it!

Spam me, eBay, one more time

I know it's not like me to complain that eBay communicate too much: normally, it's exactly the opposite. But this week, I've had a bunch of communication from them that's gone beyond pointless, deep into 'completely infuriating' territory.

Firstly, we have the "you've changed your email" alert. Actually, I have two, because my main email account went down on Friday, came back Sunday, and so I changed to an alternate and then changed it back again. eBay put alerts in My Messages, great. And then they tell me I can't delete those alerts for ten whole day. WTF? I've read the messages, I made the changes, it's all legit, why do I have to have that stupid red blob at the top of my screen making me think that my seller account is overdue or some buyer has filed for non-something or other? I don't need it, eBay, I really don't.

Secondly, there's eBay's neat trick to double your spam. For some reason, rather a lot of Chinese wholesalers think that my gothy jewellery-selling ID might wish to invest in their electrical products. In fact, they're so sure that I should become a customer of theirs that on Christmas Day, they sent me spam ASQs from a dozen different accounts with the same enticing message. I know there's nothing eBay can really do about spam ASQs; I've been getting them for seven years, and I can deal with them. On Boxing Day, I duly clicked the "report" link beside each one in My Messages and grassed them up as spammers. So far, so good.

But then I received back, for each spamming ID, a "Communication Partner Warning" from eBay, informing me that a member with whom I had recently communicated had now been excommunicated from the site. These were not people from whom I'd bought, or to whom I'd sold. They were people who had sent me ONE email, whom I'd reported. And gotten a whole bunch more spam back from eBay as a result. Thanks. Thanks SO much.

Finally, and perhaps least expicable, is the "Notification of Change to my Feedback":

Dear biddybidbidbid,

A member with whom you've recently transacted has been indefinitely suspended from eBay within 90 days of registration. We have removed any feedback they left for you or others.

eBay removes feedback when a member is indefinitely suspended for certain policy breaches within 90 days of registration. eBay believes that members indefinitely suspended soon after registration shouldn't be able to permanently affect another member's account.

To see your current feedback score, go to your Member Profile.

Thank you,
eBay

They obviously liked me because I got fifteen of those messages: musta been a nice big order. But do eBay tell me who it was? Nope, not a clue. So what was the point of that? They don't tell me who the dodgy buyer was so I can look out for them when they re-register, or suggest that I keep an eye on their Paypal payment as a potential chargeback. Maybe they want to to make phishers lives easier by encouraging clicking of links in emails (which it does - I get this message from phishers too)? Who knows.

Please could someone who designs this rubbish for eBay actually start using the site, get rid of the stupid over-communication when it serves no purpose, and start communicating with users about the things that actually matter.

Code soup

Yesterday's problems with Paypal continued this morning with many sellers reporting problems with eBay's Checkout. These problems made a welcome change from last week's Paypal problems, when new payments were not flagged as new, and from the week before, when eBay's auction management software, Selling Manager Pro, failed.

Despite being widely reported as if it were actually news, this kind of breakdown in site functionality is something that eBay sellers deal with every day. And it's about time it all got fixed. Properly.

Go on any eBay message board these days, and you'll find that "PNR" is some kind of in-joke. It stands for "page not responding", eBay's error page in case of server failure. And it's something that every eBay seller knows well, just as well, in fact, as they know that ten days after a cheap listing day, the site will grind to an over-burdened halt. Recent CLDs in both the UK and Canada had to be extended because their initial implementation was faulty. One has to wonder just what their programmers are doing, and whether they actually have a test server.

But it's not just the site architecture that's below par: its front end is horrible code soup too. With a recent report critising 97% of websites for failing accessibilty guidelines, eBay might be forgiven for thinking they can get away with the multiple nested tables, single pixel shim layout they've got at the moment, but it can really be only a matter of time before someone, somewhere decides to get the lawyers involved.

When was the last time that eBay's site got rewritten from the ground up? Not in the last seven years while I've been using it. I can understand that with literally millions of lines of code, this is a major task. That's why it needs to be done now. The current state of affairs, where each new feature breaks something and needs more bodges to hold it all together, cannot go on much longer.

For Cobb's sake, can we get this fixed?

Post and Packing Banned!!

Fee avoidance has always been an issue that eBay have struggled to combat. Fee avoidance takes many forms but the latest drive is to eradicate items with low prices but unreasonably high shipping charges - eBay have committed to crack down on this practice. eBay appear however, to be removing auctions with reasonable postage through ignorance of actual costs whilst ignoring auctions in categories where fee avoidance is habitual and blatant.

It is undoubtedly a poor buying experience to find an item you want at a great price just to discover that the postage cost is many times the bid price. This is especially bad when the postage price isn't shown in search results and a great argument for eBay to present total price, including shipping to the buyers location, instead of the item price. At the same time the practise disadvantages buyers who list the true selling price with realistic shipping charges as buyers are likely to home in on the lowest cost items bypassing the more expensive. This undermines the marketplace for both buyers and sellers.

Sadly their drive to rebalance the marketplace seem to be targeting the wrong auctions. Rather than concentrating on prolific fee avoiders they have been removing listings which have legitimate postage charges commensurate with the weight of the item and method of shipping. Recent examples of removed auctions we are aware of include

A heavy hardback book with postage charge £5.50
Actual cost £3.85 for standard parcels
Actual packaging materials £0.85
Total £4.90 leaving £0.60 for handling and sundries

Telephone equipment weighing 8kg with postage charge £12.00 (specified as courier delivery from a VAT registered seller)
The lowest cost on the ParcelForce rate card for 8kg would be £14.25 (plus VAT) so £12.00 is reasonable.
As an alternative a 3-5 day delivery actual cost £9.97 for RoyalMail standard parcels
VAT on £9.97 = £1.75
Total cost £11.72 leaving £0.18 for packaging and handling. (NB This is the cheapest method available)

In these two examples if eBay were familiar with actual shipping costs quoted by Royal Mail or couriers perhaps they wouldn't remove these auctions. To demonstrate just how poor eBay's understanding of shipping methods and costs are you only have to look at the examples they provide in the Excessive Postage & Packaging Charges Policy.

The Matrix Reloaded DVD
BIN: £3.99
Domestic Postage UK £2.00 Royal Mail Second Class
Explanation: The seller is sending the item via Royal Mail First Class parcels and is charging actual postage prices plus a reasonable fee for packaging and handling.

In this example just what postage are they looking at? Second class? First class? Standard Parcels? If eBay can't research shipping charges sufficiently to write their own policy it's unrealistic to expect their customer service reps to implement the policy with any understanding.

To make the situation worse statements from eBay to sellers whose auctions were ended have been "We want each seller to have a balance in their listings, between the price and the shipping cost. So therefore I urge you to adjust them" or "relist the auctions with a postage cost below the original costs to show you've complied with the policy" (How much below?) "Just a little lower". Such messages have naturally been treated with the contempt they deserve when actual or close to actual postage costs have been charged. Instructing sellers to incorporate shipping costs into the item price whilst others don't is not providing a balanced marketplace.

Removing auctions for sellers where postage is high in comparison to the item cost, but where weight is significant and suggesting that sellers reduce postage below cost and incorporate it into the selling price also raises accusations of profiteering on eBay's part. eBay make fees on final value prices (and on listing fees if starting prices are higher). They do not make fees on postage. It's worth noting sellers will simply increase selling prices to take fees into account degredating the buyer experience yet further.

There have been calls in the past for the postage to be incorporated into the item cost removing all ambiguity. This naturally raises difficulties when shipping costs vary between domestic and overseas destinations.

If eBay really want to start reducing fee circumvention they should look at categories such as MP3 players with shipping regularly ten times the cost of the item! Fee avoidance is sadly just the tip of the iceberg, sellers that resort to it often have grossly unfair and often illegal terms and conditions of trading. Examples include

"All items will be sent by Registered Air Mail and mark as "Gift"" (which is illegal and breaks Customs regulations)
Quoting shipping and in the small print plus "required insurance for the each item" (gouging even more money from the buyer without paying eBay fees)
"All sales are final, no return or refund will be issued" (so if it's faulty they won't help you)
"We reserve the right not to refund S&H when the item has been posted" (meaning if the product is defective they don't refund you for the grossly overcharged postage - just the couple of quid for the product)

Muddying the water further some fee avoiding overseas sellers with low price high postage products have started to incorporate Union Jacks in their gallery pictures to trick buyers to thinking items are located in the UK.

- Unhappy buyers who fall for outrageously high postage charges and compulsory insurance
- Unhappy buyers snared with illegal or unreasonable terms and conditions
- Unhappy buyers who have a poor buying experience trying to wade through auctions with unreasonably high postage charges
- Unhappy sellers who feel their auctions are removed unjustly whilst seeing many others remain
- Unhappy sellers unable to compete against those trading unfairly

eBay desperately need to get a handle on fee circumvention in general and excessive shipping charges in particular. In their own words "Listings that include excessive P&P fees lead to a poor buying experience and unlevel the playing field by putting sellers who charge reasonable P&P charges at a disadvantage. These listings undermine the trust and legitimacy of eBay’s marketplace." Trust and legitimacy works both ways, it doesn't include removing sellers auctions that have reasonable postage costs whilst the site is infested with auctions that not only blatantly avoid fees but have darn right illegal trading practices.