• Welcome from Brian McGregor
• 1. Thought for the Day
• 2. Countdown September 22, 2009
• 3. Best Match - What a Waste of Time
• 4. eBay UK 10th Anniversary
• 5. A Gift From Me to You
• 6. News & Views:
  Sell Up Your Street?
  UK Mobile Phone Freephone Savings
  General Motors and eBay?
  Item Available by Pick Up Only
  Take Your Anger Out On This!
• 7. Someone's Auctioning What???
• Back to Newsletter Archive
  

Do your friends, family and colleagues a favour, and share this eBay Auction Newsletter with them. Why not email them a copy NOW?

Or tell them to grab their own copy free from:
http://www.auctioninnercircle.com

Lou Holtz

Here we go again! eBay have recently announced a myriad of changes to take place over the coming months, with the majority occurring on 22 September, 2009.

I thought it would be useful to precis the announcements and place them in chronological order so that you could take timely actions for your eBay activity.

Here is the list:

July 2009
Tracking of DSR 1 and 2 ratings starts. The ratio of DSR 1 and 2 received are to be used to determine if sellers qualify to be categorised as a Top-rated seller - see 1st October. Sellers can check their DSR 1 and 2 counts in their Seller Dashboard from the end of July, and updated monthly. Note that only domestic transactions count towards the new DSR tracking.

August 2009
Ratio of Auction and Fixed Price listings shown in search results for the Women’s Clothing category revised to show more fixed price items in search results.

20th August 2009 to 30th September 2009
20% FVF discount for sellers offering free P&P in any Media (including DVD) category, Clothing, Shoes & Accessories category, Video Games category and any Technology sub-category.

September 2009
Changes to Best Match roll out -
Introduction of performance score based on the listing’s recent sales in relation to the number of recent impressions.

Buyer communications upgraded -
eBay is taking over the automated production of certain emails to Buyers. Selling Manager email templates will be carried over but Selling Manager Pro email templates will be lost.

My Messages will be upgraded -
This is to support threaded emails where you can see the history of an individual Message exchange. The best advice is to start using My Messages instead of your email client to respond to buyers.

22nd September
Featured Plus, Highlight and Bold will no longer be available. Features will be removed from live listings with fee credits if applicable. Featured First only available to Top Sellers.

Tickets category on eBay will require the date of the event to be included as a custom item specific.

Listings bulk editing function introduced. Edit up to 200 listings even if they have already had sales.

Optional/Compulsory postage insurance option removed from listing flow.

Category changes to Books, Comics & Magazines, Home & Garden, Tickets & Travel, Property.

October 2009
New design for Seller Dashboard to be introduced, includes daily update of DSR 1 and 2 counts.

1st October 2009
Top-rated seller status introduced within the PowerSeller programme.

Minimum criteria to become a PowerSeller changes - to qualify, seller needs to conduct at least 100 transactions in the past year, and meet DSR requirements.

To qualify as a Top-rated seller, PowerSellers will need to keep their DSR ratings at 4.6 and higher, plus their number of transactions with DSRs of 1 and 2 at 0.5% or lower.

PowerSeller logo will no longer be displayed to buyers. Top-rated seller badge will be displayed to buyers.

Selling Practices Policy applies to Top-rated sellers.

19th October 2009
Final date to remove optional insurance from live listings (including from item descriptions).

Free P&P mandated for additional media categories.

31st October 2009
Make sure all listing including Good till cancelled specify dispatch time.

2010
Selling Practices Policy applies to all sellers.

January 2010
Above Standard PowerSeller status introduced.

15th January 2010
Old PowerSeller program discount structure ends.

16th January 2010
New PowerSeller discount structure starts.

The major announcements are covered in detail - for the UK:
http://pages.ebay.co.uk/sell/sellerupdate/

And for eBay.com:
http://pages.ebay.com/sell/July2009Update/Overview/

Last month in this newsletter, I wrote about Best Match. I talked about how you might be able to take advantage of a couple of changes to Best Match.

And then - BAM!

Last Monday, eBay announce their monster Seller Update and, guess what?

Yes, that's right, Best Match is changing again!!

They're updating the Best Match search algorithm beginning in September. Todd Lutwak, Senior Director of Seller Development, spoke of a listing performance score based on "recent sales" divided by "recent impressions." An "impression" is when a buyer sees a search results page that includes the listing.

"This helps small and medium sellers get their listings started on eBay," Lutwak said. "Now, if you put an item up on eBay, and it's well-priced, and the buyers are interested in it, it can have a higher average, kind of a listing performance, than something that's been on the site for a lot longer."

eBay hopes that the listing performance score will be a more accurate measure of how buyers perceive a listing than recent sales alone. They say that with the new Best Match, a listing with 100 recent impressions and 10 recent sales can score higher than a similar listing with 1,000 recent impressions and 10 recent sales.

The concept is that new listings will be allocated a certain number of initial impressions based on the relevance of similar listings. eBay say this is designed to improve the exposure of new Fixed Price listings that are relevant to buyers.

Lutwak added, "When an item is listed on eBay, we'll be doing a listing performance analysis. We will look at the category, the keywords, if it's listed with the catalogue, we'll look at the specifics, and the item attributes that the seller selected as well as the price and the shipping, and we'll give it a listing "score" if you will, and then, based on that score, we will give it different levels of impressions, based on our assumptions of how high-quality that listing is, in order to test our assumption, and then, if it performs through the test, we'll give it more impressions, and if it under performs, we'll give fewer impressions. This is very beneficial to sellers coming onto the site with new listings."

It should be noted that Top-rated sellers will get promoted in Best Match for Fixed Price listings. (see the article in this newsletter "Countdown September 22, 2009").

eBay also announced a new Search Visibility tool which will enable sellers to monitor the performance of their listings in Best Match.

"After we launched Best Match in the past, a lot of people called up and asked Best Match-related questions," Lutwak said. "Where is my Listing. And why is John's listing above mine? So in this new visibility tool, you'll be able to look across your listings, and it'll actually say, here is your listing performance across all your listings."

Lutwak added, "Sellers will be able to drill down to the listing level and see how many listings there are on eBay for that item, and see their own listing's performance score. At the bottom of this analysis, you even have an update link that you can click on, and you can go in and update your listing and change anything that you want in order to improve its visibility."

Included in the tool are a seller's recent sales - "it tells you at the listing level how many items you've sold on that listing, how many impressions it got and what its listing performance score is."

Here is eBay's new announcement about Best Match:

In the UK:
http://pages.ebay.co.uk/sell/sellerupdate/bestmatch.html

On eBay.com:
http://pages.ebay.com/sell/July2009Update/Details/index.html#2-1

The first successful bidder on ebay.co.uk was on July 30, 1999 - exactly 10 years ago today.

Nowadays, UK eBay has around 10 million items for sale at any point in time and has over 15 million registered users.

It's used by people from all walks of life.

For example, here are the transactions of some celebrity members:

Prince Charles revealed that his wife Camilla is a keen eBay user. The Duchess of Cornwall regularly shops on the site and buys items for children.

Singer James Blunt auctioned a date with his sister using the title "Damsel in distress seeks knight in shining armour". Some sisters would be against it, but not Emily, she ended up going out with the highest bidder - and she married him three years later in 2007.

Noel Gallagher's ex-wife Meg Mathews sold the couple's belongings on eBay after divorcing the Oasis rocker in 2001. Among the £14,000 worth of items were a Gothic-style PVC sofa and a Gucci dinner set.

Scots actor and keen biker Ewan McGregor put his prized 1971 Moto Guzzi 1064cc motorbike on eBay. Bidding began at just 99p, and the machine went to a mystery bidder for £22,100.The cash was donated to children's charity UNICEF.

Cherie Blair purchased a Winnie the Pooh clock for 99p on eBay for her youngest child Leo's nursery. She also spotted some pink sandals and treated herself.

Actress Keira Knightley raised £4300 for Oxfam after auctioning off an Oscars dress designed by Vera Wang. The silk gown was worn by Knightley at the 2006 awards ceremony where she was nominated for Best Actress.

Multi-millionaire businessman Duncan Bannatyne admitted that he is addicted to eBay. The Dragons' Den tycoon, worth more than £300million, once bought a hotel in Hastings off eBay and sold an old piano and machinery he "couldn't get rid of".

Singer Sophie Ellis Bextor is a huge fan of the site and has made a number of purchases, including pinball machine and a huge plastic ice-cream cone.

Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher auctioned a handbag on eBay. It fetched £103,000 for Breast Cancer Care.

Actress Scarlett Johansson sold a handkerchief on eBay after revealing that her co-star Samuel L. Jackson had given her the cold while filming new movie Spirit. The tissue raised £4000 for charity.

Finally, the last ever bag of pic-n-mix purchased from the collapsed high-street chain Woolworths fetched a staggering £14,500 on eBay. Now that's one buyer who must have a "sweet tooth".

Sell Up Your Street?

Thirty iconic London street signs have been sold for a total of £18,092 on UK eBay.

More than 500 people took part in the auction with bidders from as far away as Australia and America.

It was Westminster City Council that put up for sale the world-famous street signs that included Leicester Square, Shaftesbury Avenue and Strand.

Two Leicester Square signs sold for the highest prices at £1,260 and £1,125 followed by one for Shaftesbury Avenue at £870.

What price your street name sign?

UK Mobile Phone Freephone Savings

If you're a mobile phone user in the UK, you'll probably know that to call a Freephone number from your mobile can be costly.

However, if you have a mobile phone tariff that includes free calls to land lines, here's how you can get your mobile Freephone calls for free too!

On your mobile, you call 01205 710800. A message will ask you to enter the Freephone number you wish to ring (0800, 0808 or 0500 numbers), followed by a # (hash sign).

That's it. You're connected to the Freephone number, and your mobile phone call will be at no charge.

General Motors and eBay?

Here is another sign of the times, and in particular how it is impacting on the motor industry.

In the USA, GM recently announced it had formed a new partnership with eBay with a view to selling more of their brands - Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick and GMC.

This will commence with a sales experiment in California. GM's dealers there will put cars online and people would buy them either by bidding or using the "Buy it Now" feature. It will allow consumers to easily compare and leverage cars across a variety of dealerships.

If this works, GM is considering using eBay as a sales channel for their Chevrolet Volt electric car due to be launched in November 2010.

Item Available by Pick Up Only

Imagine the scenario. Paul Martin was bidding for a freezer on eBay. Then he got that congratulations email - he'd won! Yippee!!

Paul wanted to collect the freezer, but found the seller was a little cagey about the address from where the freezer could be picked up.

Paul entered the Post Code into his sat-nav. He found the address was the Royal Mews, Buckingham Palace!

It turned out that the man Paul bought the freezer off was in charge of the Queen's horses and carriages.

So Paul and his daughter were given a private tour and sat in the Queen's Gold State Coach.

Not bad for an eBay purchase!

Take Your Anger Out On This!

Here's a coffee time game for you....

It's great with the sound turned up!

http://armorgames.com/play/3194/roly-poly-cannon

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

Here are some auctions I've spotted as I trawled eBay recently:-

Talk about "Take a running jump".

Now you see it....

I just like the saying on the photo!

That's what I call optimism. Sorry if you live there...

Now this takes me back.


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