From early next year there will be maximum postage rates set for media and mobile phone categories. Richard Ambrose from eBay stated that some of the maximum rates will be below actual cost and for DVDs they will insist sellers offer free post, although upgrade to priority services and overseas postage can still be charged.

Other changes to be announced will include:

Feedback Revision

Feedback Revision will be live on the site in about a weeks time. Sellers will be able to request buyers revise negative or neutral feedback upwards with a limit of 5 revisions per 1000 transactions, which is roughly the rate of negative feedbacks left across the whole site.

Identity Confirmation

eBay have already announced they’ll be protecting seller accounts by checking they are creating listings from the computer they habitually use. This is already turned on in TurboLister but will now roll out site wide by the end of October. If a seller tries to list from an alternative PC they’ll be required to confirm their identity before continuing which will prevent fraudsters from listing on hijacked accounts.

Annonymisation of emails

Similar to Australia eBay will begin to hide email addresses between eBay users until they have transacted. When buyers and sellers communicate eBay will create a temporary email address which can be replied to from email clients such as Outlook or webmail without the requirement to log into the eBay account.

This will be a great assistance for sellers trading on multiple eBay IDs to save time having to log into the relevant account just to answer a simple buyer enquiry.

Postage and Packing maximum charges

eBay will begin to set maximum postage costs from January, begining in the media and mobile phone categories with free post enforced for all DVD listings.

DSR transparency

eBay will increase visibility of DSRs to enable sellers to improve their businesses. Users will begin to see a breakdown of DSRs by category to establish if particular product lines are dragging their overall scores down and enable them to target areas for improvement.

By early 2009 great DSR transparency will appear in the Seller Dashboard, but will be available to developers through the API by the end of the year.

eBay Priorities

eBay are focusing on the three top reasons why buyers stop buying on eBay

1. Losing money on eBay
2. Getting a negative feedback
3. High postage and packaging charges

They have already made progress by banning sellers from leaving negative or neutral feedback for buyers, in 2009 they will be focusing on buyer safety - it’s simply not acceptable for buyers to be able to lose money on the largest ecommerce site in the UK. This is why changes such as anonymous emails and seller identity confirmation are being introduced. If fraudsters are unable to list on the site or contact potential buyers there is no way they can take their money.

Postage and packing charges will be next target area for eBay in order to meet buyer objectives. Although maximum or free postage charges are being introduced in media and mobile phones first, don’t be surprised if they come to your category next.

Post Office Post & Go Kiosk

Royal Mail have started to introduce new automated self-service kiosks in some Post Offices with the first two units installed in a Bristol Post Office on Wednesday this week.

The Post Office Post & Go Kiosks aim to be the quickest and simplest way to send mail and buy stamps. Customers can purchase stamps that can be used immediately or taken away for later use.

All customers need do is place their item on the scale and follow the step-by-step instructions to send their item paying with cash with the option of card payments for transactions over £2.00.

The initial roll out will see 175 Post & Go kiosks in 80 Post Offices spread around the country.

Royal Mail Market Research

Want to take part in some market research for Royal Mail? If you’re a PowerSeller shipping 300 items or more per month and can be in Marylebone, London on Tuesday 21st October 2008 at 11.00am for a couple of hours they’d love to hear from you - and of course, there’s a cash incentive too!

Please contact Clare McGoran mcgoran.c@proximitylondon.com for details and let Clare know how many items you send each month.

UK sellers that wish to get visibility on international eBay sites are currently disadvantaged to their overseas competitors. It’s not currently possible to use the International Visibility Feature (IVF) on UK fixed price items. This allows overseas sellers to list on their own sites and pay a minimal fee for visibility in the UK.

It isn’t just fees though, there are two other factors which need addressing - search advantage and product suitability.

Search Advantage

Sellers listing on non-UK sites are getting huge advantages in search visibility. Many have a Recent Sales advantage, but not from sales on eBay UK. A listing on eBay.com with IVF will appear on eBay UK, but if it attracts sales on eBay.com it appears to get a corresponding boost from Recent Sales in search results. The listing may never attract UK sales but still appear right at the top of Best Match, which pushes UK sellers lower in search results and isn’t great for buyers either.

Listing enhancements that haven’t been paid on eBay UK appear to carry over to the UK site. Listings with UK visibility from IVF get to the top of the page with the Featured Plus listing enhancement. Highlight, Bold and Subtitle also carry over to the UK site even though the features were paid for on another site.

A corresponding advantage isn’t available to UK sellers as IVF is only available for auctions. A UK seller can’t get to the top of Best Match on eBay.com through Recent Sales and listing enhancements gained on the UK site.

Buying Experience

While there are many buyers happy to purchase from overseas (and sellers willing to ship to or from the UK), there are products rising to the top of UK Best Match that are either not attracting UK sales or shouldn’t be available in the UK in the first place.

photo credit:
edkohler

Some products are simply incompatible, electrical products listed on eBay.com with IVF appear at the top of UK Best Match but have US power cords. Products such as computer keyboards do well on Best Match but, if they aren’t UK layout, UK buyers simply don’t wish to purchase them. There are countless examples of non-UK items at the top of Best Match for which it’s highly unlikely a UK buyer would consider purchasing.

Other items are illegal and simply shouldn’t appear on the UK site at all. Throwing knifes are banned on eBay UK, but there are knives available, appearing on eBay UK but listed on eBay Italy and eBay.com. It’s illegal to export items manufactured pre-1930 from China, but in the collectibles category there are many “Chinese Antiques” shipping from China - these products must either be fake, or shouldn’t be shipped outside mainland China.

The two main issues with search results are first the advantaging of products listed on overseas sites and gaining search advantages not gained on the UK site. (A specifically different situation to overseas sellers listing directly on eBay UK, gaining search advantages from UK listing enhancements and Recent Sales to UK buyers). Second the raised visibility of products which either aren’t compatible, or are illegal for sale in the UK. UK buyers simply don’t want to buy these products, or will be disappointed with them when they arrive.

eBay are continuing to optimise Best match which is still a relatively new system. Doubtless they’ll be looking at which listings are appearing on the UK site and if listings are being unfairly advantaged or simply aren’t relevant and shouldn’t be appearing at all.

It’s been said that in recent times eBay has relied too much on data-driven decisions and not enough on reality. Hopefully that’s changing and will start with showing UK buyers not just the most “data-relevant” products but the ones UK buyers actually want to buy.

My own experiences since Best Match was introduced are encouraging, especially the boost listings gain from Recent Sales and resultant purchases. Although it’s working well for me, sales are up, and I’m optimistic for the future, it’s still tough competing with listings that have gained huge UK visibility advantages with search benefits inherited from overseas sites, not from UK sales.

Edited to add: While this article was being edited eBay have blocked throwing knives listed internationally from being visible on eBay UK

On Saturday, at the New Connaught Rooms in London’s Covent Garden, attendees will have the opportunity to quiz eBay executives, meet folks from Amazon, Microsoft, PayPal and dozens of others. Needless to say, I’ll be there as well as TameBay’s very own Sue and Chris. If you’ve been wondering whether it’s time to diversify your ecommerce activities, improve your website or have a go at SEO, there’s something for you on the day.

You can register here. And if you enter this promo code, you won’t have to shell out: free.

And because it’s Saturday night,  we certainly can’t rule out a few nourishing beverages after the show. So come and join us for pint at the pub across the road.

All things being equal the lowest price will win the price war, so the only effective way that sellers can make themselves stand out is to differentiate themselves from the competition.

HammerTap suggested four ways to take yourself out of competition with other sellers and differentiate your products:

1. Change the product itself, make your product different to the competitions. This could be as simple as branding the packaging.
2. Market to a new audience, e.g. Instead of selling a Wii to gamers, market it as a fitness product with the Wii Fit
3. Add on value, e.g. Make your laptops stand out buy adding on a free laptop case or add a memory card with a PDA
4. Bulk - Buyers will often want to purchase larger quantities, experiment with different quantities on a single listing.

Non-price competition is usually more profitable than selling for a lower price and avoids a price war. If you can make your product stand out from the crowd you can still attract buyers whilst retaining healthy margins.

Currently there are four sets of legislation (Unfair contract terms, Sales and Guarantees, Distance Selling and Doorstep Selling) which would be simplified into a single set of rules known as “The Consumer Rights Directive”, if the European Parliament and the 27 member states approve the proposal.

Some of the highlights are an increase from a 7 day cooling off period to 14 days (currently covered by Distance Selling Regulations), the right for buyers to choose between repair, replacement or reimbursement for faulty goods and confirmation that sellers are responsible for loss or damage in transit. The proposal also calls for clear pricing information and any additional costs, to encourage shoppers to compare prices across the whole of the EU.

Currently there are around 150m EU citizens who purchase online, but only 30m make cross border transactions. According to the report 2/3rds of Europeans think there are more potential problems in making cross-border purchases rather than domestic purchases. 56% of Europeans think that sellers from other EU countries are less likely to respect consumer protection laws than suppliers from their home country.

The new proposal aims to boost cross border trade enabling and encouraging all Europeans to buy from the seller offering the best deal regardless of which EU country they’re located in.

Tradebox have been nominated for both the Sage Innovation Award 2008 and Sage Developer of the Year Award 2008. These are the only two awards available for members of the Sage Developer programme and reflects just how much work has gone into their accounts solution - Finance Manager.

They’ve already won two awards this year at the North East Digital Awards. They’ll be exhibiting at Small Business 2.0 on Saturday this week so if you’re attending don’t forget to wish them luck for the 5th November when the awards will be announced.

I’m guessing if they win that they won’t mind missing out on fireworks while they attend the Sage gala dinner

What’s worse is that sellers who have made use of the new 30 day listing format get zero visibility in core search results. 30 day BINs act as SIF listings in the old search and for many sellers this means they now have very few, or even zero, listings appearing on the core site.

It’s possible to opt back into the new search experience, but the big question is how many buyers will? Threads are starting to appear on discussion boards including Q&A and the PowerSeller board suggesting large numbers of users have been switched back to the old search experience.

If eBay are running tests with small numbers of users still showing the old search experience that’s one thing. If vast numbers of users have been switched back it has serious repercussions for sellers who have switched to 30 day listings as buyers simply won’t see their products.

I’m hoping that eBay move most users back to the new search experience in the very near future. In the meantime sellers who have worked to get to the top of Best Match with Recent Sales are reaping no rewards, but are actually being disadvantaged against sellers who blindly re-listed 10 day BINs.

Payments service Bill Me Later has been purchased for approximately $820 million in cash and approximately $125 million worth of outstanding options. Bill Me Later is the second-largest online-focused payments service, offering flexible payment options to shoppers without the need to use a credit card online, though sadly it’s only available to US customers at the moment. eBay CEO John Donahoe called BML “a company that belongs with PayPal”: though PayPal already has various credit options available to shoppers, the acquisition of PayPal’s strongest competitor will certainly secure eBay’s hold on the online payments market.

eBay have also entered the Danish ecommerce market with the purchase of Den Bla Avis and BilBasen, two leading online classified ads sites in Denmark, for approximately $390 million. Both companies began as print publications but have successfully transitioned to online advertising as well, generating more than 180 million page views per month between them.

There is not yet any detail as to exactly where staff cuts will hit, though eBay UK and eBay Italy have both said that there will be no visible consequences for their site or customer service personnel. These announcements mention reorganising internal-facing teams throughout Europe, “with the aim of ultimately making eBay simpler, safer and more consistent to use”.

The original announcement was contained in a press release concerning eBay’s acquisition of payment service Bill Me Later and two Danish classified ads sites. But somehow, I don’t think this bad news is going to stay buried.

The company also stated it expects to hit the low end of its Q3 2008 revenue guidance; Q3 figures are due to be announced on 15th October. An investor call on today’s announcements is taking place any minute, so more information may emerge from that. We’ll keep you posted.

The good news is that PayPal and My eBay appear to be working so sellers will be able to get some work done

There have been reports of lasers being used to blind both commercial airline pilots and police helicoptors. Laser under 1mW are considered safe for use and are ideal for use in presentation, but some laser pointers for sale on eBay are up to 240 times as powerful, one listing on eBay even offers a laser supplied with balloons for testing - the laser beam is so powerful it simply shining it at a balloon will burst it.

The Donal MacIntyre programme is due to be aired on Radio 5 Live at 7pm this evening.

Some experimentation over the last week has revealed some great strategies to ensure your listing is at, or near, the top of search results. Best of all many of the tactics won’t cost you a penny to implement.

Recent sales are the surest way to gain exposure for your listing. The big question is how do you kick start sales to get to the top, especially if other seller’s listings have had sales already? Here are my 7 top tips to gain Recent Sales including two ways auctions can be used to boost a BIN listing’s visibility in search results:

1) Featured First

Featured First is the only sure fire way to the top of search results but it’s going to cost you (£44.95 for up to ten days, £134.95 for up to 30 days). Featured First is a great way to buy exposure but, as it’s success starts to be seen, more and more sellers are starting to use the listing enhancement.

If you’re one of just two sellers to use Featured First in a category then you’ll always be at the top, but as more sellers start to use the feature you listing will appear in a rotation and the exposure starts to fall.

This is a feature that should only ever be used once on a listing with good run rate, and then recent sales should be keeping you at the top of search. However, for slower sell through rate, high value items, Featured First is definitely worth considering on an ongoing basis.

2) Auctions to drive sales

Yes auctions are old hat, as a seller you probably prefer to know you’ll get the price you want and many buyers want to buy instantly rather than bid. Well that might be the case but auctions are still sorted using Ending Soonest and are still a great route to getting your listings to the top of search results.

Auctions at an attractive start prices will get buyers looking, strong links from auctions are a great way to kick start some sales on your main BIN listings. Look at the auction as a loss leader to gain attention and drive traffic from the auction to your BIN. Also consider trying an auction with a BIN price for an instant sale because….

3) Auction to Recent Sales Advantaged BIN

… It’s possible to gain a Recent Sales advantage in Best Match from an auction and this is the main reason sellers should be experimenting with the listing format. If your auction sells at a final value price that you’d be willing to sell at (or below), relist it but convert it to a BIN.

In testing it appears that Recent Sales advantage is transferred from a sold auction to a new BIN listing and can propel the BIN towards the top of Best Match at best, and above an identical BIN listing with no sales at worst. Auctions can be used to actively gain a head start for a multi-quantity BIN.

4) Best Offer

On your first listing of a new product always add Best Offer. It only takes a few sales to make a huge difference in search results standings. Some experimentation with this tactic has thrown up some interesting trends, the most significant of which is that early sales will tend to be Best Offers, but once an item reaches the top of search results buyers start to buy at the full price rather than making further Best Offers.

It’s well worth accepting the first one or two offers at less than you’d normally consider, in order to boost your listing in search results. Offers are worth accepting even if you make a slight loss on a couple of sales - it’s still probably still cheaper than paying for Featured First, to get to the top of the page.

5) Email Marketing

Get smart about your email marketing, use it to drive traffic to the listings you want to sell. Use emails to highlight new listings that you need to gain Recent Sales to increase Best Match placement.

Combine email marketing with your other initiatives such as Best Offers. Tactics such as “We’ll accept best offers of just £x.xx from email subscribers” for a particular item work really well - giving an exclusive deal (even if it’s not) is a great way to get some quick sales and boost your search standing.

6) MarkDown Manager

Have a sale! What better way to boost your search rank than to give a discount. However this is getting harder to implement in the UK as only GTC BINs will ever qualify. If you’re almost anywhere bar the UK you’ll find it much easier to hold a MarkDown Manager sale (listings in the UK have to be 28 days or older before they can be included in a MarkDown sale).

This is a tactic that can also be used on older listings which have fallen from the top of Best Match as a way to regain recent sales.

7) Listing Enhancements

So you’re seeing some success but you can’t get right to the top of search results. All is not lost as, once you’ve got to the first page, you can add some enhancements to make your listing stand out.

Featured Plus will get you to the top of the page (£14.95 for up to 10 days, £44.95 for up to 30 days), but there are other low cost enhancements such as Bold, Highlight and Subtitle which are also good value. They might not get you to the top of the page but they’ll catch the eye of any buyer who scrolls down looking for a good deal.

It should be remembered that Recent Sales is just a part of Best Match. You should also be using best listing practices including optimising your listing titles, using item specifics, listing in appropriate categories and consider pricing strategies for both the item and postage costs.

If you’ve found some other ways to get to or near the top of Best Match with Recent Sales, tell us in comments below.

Valleywag asks why a website would need 15,000 employees. eBay and PayPal have rather more support staff than your average website, so we might speculate that an overall reduction in staff would hit them hard, so directly impacting already disgruntled sellers. Others have suggested that layoffs are unlikely to affect sellers at all. I guess we’ll find out tomorrw (or not).

If any ex-employees want to get in touch and give us the inside information, particularly on how this will affect eBay users, we’d love to talk to you.

Tradebox are well known for their eBay accounts software, and are set to develop and launch a new series of post-sales solutions for online sellers, as well as a brand new website which went live today.

They will be launching the new product range this month and you can see them at Internet Retailer on the 7th, Small Business 2.0 on the 11th, or E Commerce Expo on the 28th-29th October.

Stephen Bales from Tradebox & Nick Edgar from NEL

eBay give some advice for sellers to take advantage of this:

• sellers should list single multiple-item listings instead of running many listings just for one item
• sellers should relist sold items within seven days to take advantage of their established popularity
• sellers should use longer listings - 10 days - to gain greater visibility for their item
• sellers listing auctions needn’t make any change: their listings will continue to be sorted by ending soonest

It’s good to see this change announced openly, and in detail: other eBay sites could certainly learn something from eBay.fr here. But even more than on eBay UK, I think this goes against buyer psychology on eBay France: I’ve done some fairly extensive testing of multiple listings versus single item listings, and my own experience is:

• single item listings are more likely to sell than not
• two items listed together have about an even chance of selling one of them
• more than two items are unlikely to sell anything.

French buyers, in comparison to their British counterparts, really do lack a sense of urgency: I had an email this morning regarding an item I sold in June, asking if I had another one. So I really don’t want to start telling buyers I have plenty of stock of anything: I want them to think I only have one and if they don’t buy it now, they’re going to miss out. Hammering home the scarcity message really seems to be the way forward on eBay.fr. I’ll be using the seven day relist window as much as I can, but I’ll also be running some tests to see if eBay’s multiple item listing suggestion really does work. Can they overturn more than a decade’s worth of buyer psychology in one little site change? It’ll be interesting to find out.*

* or it would be, if half my income wasn’t riding on it

Parcel2Go have doubled their business since this time last year. In September 2007 they handled 21,000 parcels, but this September that increased to 55,000 for the month. Steve Kramer, Parcel2Go Director said “People have realised that they can get better value and have parcels - big and small - collected from their door”.

If you’re selling a larger item on eBay they’re worth considering, especially if it’s going to cost more to deliver via Royal Mail. For Parcel2Go to double their business in a year they’ve got to be getting something right.

The Aussie site has recently launched a new Free Postage Hub and qualifying items will be included in the hub.

eBay point out “We know this may not work for everyone, but if you’ve never tried offering free postage before, this is the perfect opportunity to test it out on a few items and see how you go. Who knows, you could just boost your sales and soon be listing all your items with free postage!”

Free post is definitely a selling tactic all sellers should experiment with, it can produce great results, especially if your competitors aren’t offering free post.

With the introduction of Best Match in the UK and recent sales often pushing the lowest price products to the top of search results this workshop couldn’t come at a better time.

Talking about price wars Amy Kendall of Hammertap said “Price wars are based on the fact that ‘All things being equal…the lowest price always wins the war’. “The trick is to make things unequal and add value to your listings so you can avoid the war altogether.”

The webinar will feature HammerTap software, but is open to all eBay sellers, you’ll need to reserve a place and the seminar starts at 6pm MDT on Wednesday.

(I believe 6pm MDT is 1am Thursday in the UK, so one for the night owls to attend… If I’ve got the time wrong please let me know in comments and I’ll edit )

• Sellers will need to initiate the process by requesting buyers revise their feedback, within thirty days of feedback being left.
• Buyers then have ten days to respond to the request.
• There are limits to the number of revision requests which can be sent. All sellers will get a minimum of five requests per year, but higher volume sellers will get five requests per thousand feedbacks received.
• Requests which are ignored or declined by buyers will still count towards the total, so sellers need to ensure their buyers understand the process and are willing to change their feedback before they waste a request on those who want the original comments or score to stand.
• Feedback can only be revised upwards: positives cannot be changed to neutrals or negatives.
• Sellers cannot ask buyers to revise positive feedback.

There’s more information about exactly how the system will work on the FAQs page, though the inevitable question of how eBay will deal with multiple negatives from one combined transaction, apparently hasn’t yet been answered.

eBay Australia also say that the Dispute Console is, from 21st October, to be known as the Resolution Centre. It’s about time this was done: the change of name alone should make the process a little less antagonistic for all parties. eBay Australia promise a streamlined reporting process and simplified management of open cases too.

At first glance, it looks like this has been implemented the right way. By making the process seller-initiated, and by the “only way is up” rule that prevents positives being turned into negatives, the revision process cannot be used to blackmail sellers post-transaction.

On the sellers’ part, the limits on the number of requests that can be sent are low, but not excessively so (eBay Germany allows two requests per month, regardless of sales volume). Non-positive feedback left in error can be edited, and prematurely-left feedback can be corrected once the buyer’s problem has been resolved, but no seller is going to be able to use this process to cover up multiple, ongoing issues with their service, which was always a problem with mutual feedback withdrawal.

As eBay Australia is the testing ground du jour for eBay’s new ideas, I can only hope this is going to roll-out elsewhere by the end of October as promised.

For UK sellers it’s probably best to disable the counter or consider an alternative, Kickitback discounts are only available for some purchases on eBay.com with cash back paid in US$. Nothing sold on eBay UK will qualify for cash back so sending your UK buyers to the site just doesn’t make sense.

Sellers who still have the old Sellathon hits counter displayed on their auctions will find that the link has also changed to the Kickitback website. It would make sense for Auctiva counters placed on sites other than eBay.com to link to a relevant site, or simply not to be linked at all. In the mean time it’s a great way for Auctiva to promote their new site for free.

eBay President John Donahoe met US President George W Bush earlier this week at a ceremony at the White House in which eBay was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. President Bush cited eBay’s pioneering technology which supported online trade and encouraged global entrepreneurship.

eBay Ink has a post from two eBay employees who accompanied JD and three eBay sellers to the ceremony.