• Welcome from Brian McGregor
• 1. Thought for the Day
• 2. Could you Lend eBay $1 Billion?
• 3. Why Not Try the Best Offer Facility?
• 4. News & Views:
  Free Flights on New Super Jumbo
  Quiz with a Purpose
  Learn from the Best
  Doing Their Bit
• 5. Someone's Auctioning What???
• Back to Newsletter Archive

There’s a very interesting class action against eBay currently in the courts in California. If the plaintiff succeeds, it will be a huge blow for eBay. Possibly to the tune of $1 billion in payouts.

The issue is about when a newly submitted auction is made available by eBay to be searched upon. I don’t know if you’ve ever tracked this, but when you submit your auction, you’ll know it instantly appears in you’re My eBay. You’ll also know that your auction duration countdown starts instantly too.

However, it can take several hours for your auction to be made available for searching. It could be an hour delay, it could be 2 hours, it could be 6 hours. The longest duration I found in my research was an auction which took 21 hours before it went live. That particular member lost nearly a whole day of auction duration. I hope it wasn’t a one day auction!

It certainly used to be the case that as soon as you submitted an auction, it was virtually always made available immediately for bidders and buyers to find it.

What has changed?

One of the reasons is that eBay have introduced a greater degree of auction checking in some categories before they will make an auction live. Which is probably an acceptable reason. Unfortunately, eBay don’t tell you about this when you submit your auction.

The other issue which this brings into question relates to the specified start time of an auction. For an additional fee, you’ll know that you can specify a start time for your auction. There’s quite a science in judging when the target market for your item might be most active on eBay. But even these times are being missed by eBay, due to the delay in commencing auctions.

I won’t quite call this a scandal – yet! But it could easily turn into one.

I found the complaint document produced by the plaintiff to be very interesting. If you’d like to see it, you can download it from here:

http://www.workwinners.com/nl280707.htm

Also, you might like to check your own auctions, and make sure they’re starting and ending when you thought they were.

Any sale is welcome when you’re selling on eBay.

One way you might get a quicker sale is to include the Best Offer facility within your auction. It enables you to invite a best offer from potential buyers on fixed price 'Buy It Now' listings.

This can be useful if you’re unsure about what your item might fetch, and you don’t have the time to try a normal auction to find out. This option allows interested bidders to make an offer, which you as the seller can decide to accept or refuse.

There could be the danger that buyers make silly offers, way below anything that you’re likely to accept. This can be avoided when you set up the Best Offer facility. When you’re listing your auction, a link appears just beneath the 'Buy It Now' button.

The number of offers is limited depending upon which category the item is listed in. If only one offer is allowed, buyers will see this message “Make this offer your Best Offer. You can only make 1 offer on this item.” This tends to sort out the serious bidders.

If you as the seller find the offer acceptable, you can take the offer and make the buyer the instant winner. The auction is concluded and the buyer would then be notified that they have won. Any other interested buyers who made offers will be notified that the auction has concluded. From then on, you proceed the same way you would with any other completed eBay sale.

If you’ve never tried Best Offer on your auctions, perhaps you’d like to test it now.

Free Flights on New Super Jumbo

Seats on the first commercial flight of the world's biggest passenger plane - the Airbus A380 super jumbo - are to be auctioned on eBay.

Singapore Airlines will operate the first flight of the 555-seater double-decker aircraft from Singapore to Sydney in October this year, and have said the proceeds from ticket sales will go to three charities.

ExxonMobil Aviation will donate the fuel for the flight to Sydney and for the return flight to Singapore . All passengers on the first flight will get a personalised ceremonial certificate.

The exact date of the flight will be fixed soon. You can pre-register for auction details here:
http://www.a380.singaporeair.com/register.html


Quiz with a Purpose

Do you always know which e-mails are legitimate? Can you tell a fake web site from a real one?

Antivirus software company McAfee, have an excellent onscreen quiz in which you can test your skills of observation in relation to fraud.

The quiz is very useful as it fully explains the answers – both right and wrong!
http://blog.siteadvisor.com/2007/07/phish_or_fake_take_our_phishin.shtml


Doing Their Bit

When it comes to helping members to transact safely on their site, eBay UK have two new videos in their Safety Centre.

One is about phishing and the other about buying safely on eBay.
http://pages.ebay.co.uk/SafetyCentre/


Learn from the Best

If you’d like to check out the most successful eBay sellers, you can do this all in one place here:
http://www.topsellerlistlive.com/

This isn’t to say these top sellers have all the answers, but you WILL find common threads. Such as they all have an About Me page. They all have their website address on their About Me page.

It’s worth spending a little time looking through these businesses, after all they are the cream of the eBay selling crop!

Nothing surprises me when it comes to internet auctions. Amuse yourself with some of these beauties in our monthly trawl through eBay's auctions.

Are you for the high jump? I’m not!

Do you think this new seller understands that the idea on eBay is to sell it?

Get a grip, as they say…

Now that’s what I call a miss spelling! Want a bargain?

Is this wishful thinking, the height of optimism, or has this seller some inside knowledge?

Disclaimer - I have no association with any of the sellers of the above items.