ChannelAdvisor - Yes to PayPal, No to Google Checkout

ChannelAdvisor have been pondering when (not if) eBay should allow Google Checkout for payments. I don't hold with their argument that eBay dismiss it as an "unproven system" but view checkout as an e-wallet rather than an e-money payment system. They have fundamentally different ways of operating and e-wallets just don't offer the same levels of buyer protection that e-money providers such as PayPal and Nochex do.

Setting that aside as ChannelAdvisor appear to be championing Google Checkout I was looking forward to giving it a spin whilst signing up for the ChannelAdvisor Catalyst event to be held in London in April of this year. Strangely there were only two payment options offered - PayPal or Mastercard / Visa. No sign of Google Checkout.

I guess it goes to show that for the market at large it really is PayPal Preferred!

Marketworks thrown off eBay

You'd think a sizeable service company could keep it's affairs in order but it appears not. Marketworks (previously known as Auctionworks) forgot to renew their domain name leaving users without pictures in their auctions. Anyone that uses the Auctionworks hosting service (mainly those loyal customers that have been with Marketworks the longest!) were affected.

On Saturday morning (1/13/2007) the auctionworks.com domain expired. This was the cause of image URL's not resolving correctly in auctions. We were able to re-register the domain on Saturday morning and that fixed the root cause of the issue.

There really is NO excuse for this - how hard can it be to manage your domain names and renew them in good time, especially for a company that specialises in Internet eCommerce management services?

The domain was renewed within hours and according to an email sent to an affected Marketworks customer they now plan to phase out use of the auctionworks domain entirely.

via Fruity

Sellathon acquired by Auctiva in first major merger of 2007

Auctionbytes reports that Auctiva has acquired Sellathon. Sellathon products were previously available as a third party add on to Auctivas tools.

Adaptations are already being made to Sellathon with an auto-insert being promised rather than sellers having to insert the HTML code themselves. This is one change we'd suggest that you do NOT use. Auto-inserts are not the most reliable and sellers should retain control of their auction code to ensure stability.

Past problems have included the Squaretrade auto-insert changing £ signs on UK auctions to $ signs. PayPal auto-inserted logo allows buyers to pay for an auction without winning it - not a problem if you have plenty of stock but for unique items an off eBay sale with an on eBay buyer paying legitimately at a later date causes real problems. Andale had an issue where all their images were replaced with "Thanks for looking" images covering entire auctions (see below). We'd strongly recommend inserting any code you want yourself.



If you're tempted to test Auctiva's products bear in mind if you sign up for auto-inserts of features like Auctiva Store it will insert it in all your auctions automatically. There is no roll back, once it's in, it's in until the auctions finish, you're much better off inserting the code manually.

Sellathon has traditionally provided fantastic data regarding how users access a sellers auctions including what keywords buyers searched for, what category they browsed, how they sorted their search results, if they're watching your auction, if they're planning a snipe, how much time they spent on your auction, the best time of day to sell and all in real time.

Similar data is available from eBay Market Research, but this is historical and for the site as a whole. A hit counter in conjunction with Traffic Reports (Omniture) give you some indication, but Sellathon is the Rolls Royce of auction tracking software.

Auctiva have traditionally given most of their products away for free. In practice many sellers have preferred to pay for reliable solutions such as Vendio and Sellathon - you get what you pay for - so it will be interesting to see how this acquisition affects products of choice.

If we pay you enough will you sign up?

Marketworks announced that in conjunction with Google they have released twelve new standard templates for ecommerce websites. Customers can select from 12 new professionally designed storefront templates to instantly transform the look of their Google Checkout enabled storefronts. Previously, customers only had two choices for their storefronts; use a simplistic template that was obviously pre-designed or contract a designer to develop a professionally designed site. The new templates are highly customisable to match the owners own brand.

Nothing particularly surprising there, but what is amusing is to see that Marketworks are practically sucking up to Google

After Google recently approached Marketworks regarding developing a solution allowing it to extend Google Checkout to its customer base, Marketworks jumped on the opportunity. Marketworks immediately began developing a strategy for building and launching professionally-designed storefront templates that were pre-enabled with Google Checkout.

So does this mean they'd never have thought of customisable templates that were Checkout enabled if Google hadn't contacted them? Well so much for Marketworks, a more interesting read today is "Google Checkout's No PayPal Killer" which slates Checkout declaring "How unsurprising: Bribe people heavily, and they'll use your service." That pretty much sums it up, and Marketworks have fallen for it too

Just check my feedback

Via Molly's Diary, we found this rather cute widget to allow you to display your feedback on a non-eBay website. Great for building confidence in your website shoppers, or just showing off on a personal site!

Fraud tracking software hasn't got a clue

Engineers at Carnegie Mellon University have come up with software that is supposed to reveal fraudulent behaviour on eBay:

Sites like eBay rely on users to warn others if they have a bad experience with a seller by rating their transactions. But the CMU researchers said savvy fraudsters get around that by conducting transactions with friends or even themselves, using alternate user names to give themselves high satisfaction ratings - so unsuspecting customers will still try to buy from them. The CMU software looks for patterns of users who have repeated transactions with one another, and alerts other users that there is a higher probability of having a fraudulent transaction with them.

Now I'm all for making fraud easier to detect and harder to perpetrate on eBay, but it seems to me that the manufacturers of this software don't have a very good idea of how eBay works.

For example, I have customers who buy beads off me at least once a week, every week. I hope I don't have to say here I'm not buying my own stock, but for the record: I'm not, these are genuine customers. They're also buying regularly off a handful of my closest competitors. But there's more: my competitors and I also buy off each other. Most of us make beady things ourselves, so we buy to make. And inevitably there's the odd stock control problem, when we have to buy off a competitor to fulfill our own orders.

This can't be particularly unusual. Many collectors and dealers in specialist items would show up similar trading patterns, whether it be in china or classic cars. I have no idea whether such activity would be flagged by CMU's software: perhaps it's subtle enough to take the category being examined into account.

Johannes Ullrich, an Internet fraud expert with the SANS Institute in Bethesda, MD., said the CMU researchers must find a way to screen out false positives.... being wrongly flagged as high-risk for fraud.

I can't help feeling it says something rather sad about their perception of eBay that they would take repeat transactions as a sign of fraud, rather than a sign of excellence.

Channel Advisor now available for Irish eBayers

Channel Advisor have made their auction management software compatible with eBay's Irish site. Channel Advisor software helps to automate aspects of online selling across the online spectrum, so for example can help sellers trading on multiple platforms.

Though eBay.ie was only launched in June last year, at that time there were already 200,000 Irish registered members using other sites. eBay's figures show that an Irish seller sells something every minute, and Irish buyers buy an item every 20 seconds: clearly there's plenty of scope for domestic sellers to keep buyers closer to home.

We'd also like to congratulate CA on their seriously impressive $10m GMV day on Monday.

PAYG research for eBay sellers

Do you want to check out a new stock line, find the average sell-through rate or the best day to list for your category or find out how a competitor is doing? eSeller Street is a new pay-per-search service which can analyse ninety days of eBay results: much more useful than the unanalysed fourteen days you can get from eBay's completed listings. eSeller Street is designed for sellers who perform fewer than forty searches a month: above that, eBay's own Marketplace Research facilities will probably work out cheaper.

One sample search showed me a lot, even in a category I thought I knew backwards. I know that Sunday and Monday are my best days to sell, and that Wednesday is my quietest, but I was astonished to learn that 1-day listings have the best sell-through rate of any listing duration, delighted to see that the sell-through on SIF listings is only 6% lower than auctions (I thought it was just me!), and intrigued to learn that one related category has a 50% better sell-through rate than the 'natural' one for what I'm selling. eBay's own advice to avoid "other" categories is bourne out with real figures, but Gallery doesn't seem to make nearly as much difference as I thought it did: 46% sell with Gallery, 40% without. (I sell beads, if you didn't already know: why not check it out for your own categories?)

Sadly at the moment, it's restricted to US categories only, but site owner Michelle Waldorf has given me a sneak preview of the UK service she plans for early next year. I'm glad, because this useful tool shouldn't just be restricted to US sellers.

It's easier to give

Feedback: we all love to get it (the positive kind, anyway). But leaving it can rapidly become a chore. How many A+++s do you want to cut and paste in one lifetime anyway? That's where Merlin Instant Feedback can help.

Instant Feedback can work in one of two ways, according to the way you like to leave feedback. It can automatically check your feedback and post positives for those who have left them for you, choosing from a selection of comments you input. It will also warn, via a heart-stopping screen pop-up, of negative and neutral feedback. If there are those for whom you don't want to leave any feedback - troublesome buyers, or those strange people who request no feedback - they can be added to a 'blacklist' and ignored.

Alternatively, manual feedback functions allow you to select from items paid for over a set period of time, either to leave them feedback or to email buyers asking them to leave it for you.

IF is unique in being a stand-alone feedback processor: all other similar products that I know of come as part of an auction management bundle, which are often costly, may not suit the way you run your particular business, and probably have a fairly steep learning curve. You can be up and leaving comments with IF in just a few minutes. And at just US$19.95 to download, it's money well spent.

Developer Jason Novak told me that there are more than a thousand eBayers currently using the software. Leaving feedback manually would take me on average twenty minutes a day, so in the two years I've been using it, that's ten whole days that Instant Feedback has given me back. Life really is too short to spend it pasting feedback.

Creativebay acquired by Frooition

Love em or hate em the creativebay shops have proved popular for punters that want to get away from the standard eBay look and feel so much so that UK services provider Frooition has acquired them. This gives Frooition a new base of customers to tap for solutions and may give them a boost against the more established well known services providers such as ChannelAdvisor and Marketworks.

Is the UK market big enough for more than one player in this space? Only time will tell but ChannelAdvisor has been making ground over it's competitors in the last year especially with the release of Channeladvisor Pro for smaller or new eBay businesses!