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May be interested to know eBay's planning major
changes besides the fee increase that starts on the 20th. (yes it's an
increase, the fee they charge when your item sells was raised as much as 60% of
what it was before, while the fee to list it drops very little).
The subject of eBay is a huge can of worms in
itself, but I did want to pass on that a lot of people are boycotting this week
2/18-2/25 mostly because they plan sometime in May to remove the ability to
leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers. It seems that they've
deemed "retaliatory" negative feedback by sellers a problem - even though if
anything it's more a problem from bidders, particularly those who choose not to
pay for the items they win.
They will also change how things show up in
searches - everything will go to what they call "best match" and be sorted by
who has the best DSR rating - those stars that you see now on the feedback
page. Except that when you click on them as a buyer, it comes up
where 3 = acceptable, 4 = excellent, and 5 = beyond excellent - those aren't the
exact terms, but they all work out in that manner, so as to lead the bidder to
mark someone with 3's or 4's on a perfect transaction. But the standards
they hold the seller to don't match the ratings scale - if your
average rating as a seller is less than 4.5 in any category, you're considered
bad and will drop to the bottom of searches. Which can only take one
ticked off bidder mad because he got a speeding ticket this afternoon or
whatever else, if you don't sell enough things over a 30 day period.
And, they already have a deal going where if your
feedback stats are less than 90% positive over 30 days they can restrict your
ability to sell things. Neutrals count against that percentage also -
only on eBay is neutral the same as negative. But the stated goal of John
Donahoe, the new CEO, is to eliminate the flea market nature of eBay - they seem
to want to turn it into another Amazon.com, only a half-assed version, rather
than remaining an entity with virtually no competiton. If I owned any
stock in eBay, I'd dump it now, the way this is going in 12 months it will be
more valuable as toilet paper.
Since a lot of us on this list use eBay, I just
wanted to share in case their announcement email never made it to you, into a
spam filter or just never turned up. There's lots of places on and off
eBay you can check out to find out more about it. So far about 98% of the
people who've become aware of it are pretty upset by it all. When
you get into the details of it, it's mystifying to try to understand why they
would do this. It would sort of be like if in the early 80s Chrysler had
started building mid-60s Imperials, New Yorkers, Furys and Monacos again instead
of the K-car and minivan.
If anyone needs to know more, drop me a note off
list and I can send you some links to visit to check it out, along with some
alternatives to try listing things with -
Bill K.
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