eBay Vice President of Seller Experience Todd Lutwak told AuctionBytes there would be one more "Seller Update" this year during an interview about the changes eBay announced on Tuesday. Mr. Lutwak talked about a range of issues, including:

• the new way eBay measures seller performance;
• the use of anonymous email addresses for eBay buyer-seller communication;
• automatic feedback reminders sent by eBay;
• new values for specifying Item condition;
• and the new bulk editing and relist functionality.

Well over 90 percent of eBay Top Rated Sellers qualify for the new standards that take effect in September, according to Mr. Lutwak, who spent time discussing eBay's two new metrics being added to Seller Performance standards: open cases and seller unresolved cases. He said eBay will encourage buyers to communicate with sellers before filing a claim, but will not make it mandatory. He also provided examples of when sellers would be affected by open claims, and he answered the question, what if the seller has provided tracking information for a package and eBay has determined the seller has done everything right?

In discussing eBay's buyer-seller communication policy, he said sellers would be able to send image attachments under the new anonymous-email system, including three file formats: JPEG, Bitmap and GIF. Mr. Lutwak confirmed that eBay will provide sellers with the email addresses of buyers once they have made a purchase from the seller.

Mr. Lutwak said eBay has always sent emails to buyers reminding them to leave feedback, and eBay is removing the ability for sellers to customize those emails because of some of the "lobbying" activity sellers conducted when requesting positive feedback from buyers in reminder emails.

He also said the reason eBay would be making payment reminders optional was because some sellers wanted to be able to consolidate shipping. "There were more exceptions in the world of payments and the situations between buyer and sellers whereas with feedback, it is a very, sort of, standard, experience."

On the new Item Condition values, which will be made mandatory in some categories, Mr. Lutwak said eBay had surveyed more than 3 million buyers and sellers, and received back 100,000 responses. The eBay community played a critical role in determining the values for Item Conditions.

Mr. Lutwak said he is excited about the bulk edit and relist tool, stating that from a seller efficiency standpoint, it was an excellent tool. Users of Selling Manager and SM Pro will be able to conduct an advanced search, so they could, for example find all of their listings that don't have item condition specified.

He also said the Excel plug-in has been extremely well received by higher volume sellers who can use the tool to download their eBay listings to Excel, make changes, and upload them back to eBay using File Exchange.

One tip Mr. Lutwak shared with listeners on the podcast was to update shipping information to allow buyers to track their orders. If buyers start to initiate a claim on eBay for an Item Not Received, eBay will present tracking information to them - if the seller has made that information available in eBay. Buyers will still be allowed to file a claim, however.

Mr. Lutwak covered a lot of ground in the interview, which can be heard in full on the Ecommerce Industry SoundBytes podcast on AuctionBytes.

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