Some of eBay's top sellers are meeting in New York next month with the goal of creating an ongoing problem-solving mechanism between eBay and its top performers. The group, calling itself the "eBay Elite," will discuss issues they feel are critical to their continued business success.
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y04/m04/i07/s01
eBay Elite members makes it clear they don't want to cause trouble for eBay, rather, they want to continue to grow their sales on the site. It's an interesting development in the industry, and one worth closely monitoring. We will keep you posted.
Yahoo Auctions is offering certain sellers free listings in exchange for 10% of the final auction price. This offer applies to sellers in "verifiable good standing." I asked a Yahoo spokesperson for more information, this is what I've managed to get out of her so far: "We have a number of different programs in place to attract sellers."
She went on to talk about a new feature similar to eBay's Catalog, or Pre-Fill Item Information. "We have recently launched a new feature on Yahoo Auctions that allows sellers to enter in ISBN and UPC numbers to submit products. By using this feature, called "Quick Submit," sellers also have access to our product catalog information, and a product image and description are supplied for each ISBN, UPC entered. This feature is currently available for Books, Music, Movies and Video Games."
Yahoo's Quick Submit feature was likely put into place to attract Half.com sellers. eBay is closing Half.com in July. Half sellers are looking for a similar model to Half.com, and many marketplaces are courting them, including Abe.com and eBay itself. (You can view archives of a Townhall forum on the Half.com transition at http://pages.ebay.com/event/halftransitiontranscript.)
I'm pleased to announce our friend Julia Wilkinson has authored a new book from Wiley Publishing entitled, eBay Top 100 Simplified Tips & Tricks. I was pleased to work with Julia on this project as Technical Editor and saw first-hand the trials and tribulations of publishing a book of this nature. Julia shares our philosophy of learning about and utilizing third-party tools whenever they can make online trading easier. So unlike other books about eBay, you'll be clued in to services like U-Pic, Vendio, Froogle, Gutcheck and lots more.
The book is part of Wiley's "Visual" series and is heavily weighted toward screen shots as opposed to text. In some cases, it was challenging to present a topic in this format, but the overall result is a book that clearly demonstrates the task at hand. The book is most useful for those who are anywhere from beginning seller to intermediate eBay user. (If you've been selling on eBay for some time, many tasks will be familiar to you, but you'll probably learn a thing or too just the same.)
Congratulations to Julia for a tremendous accomplishment and to the pros at Wiley for making it happen.
In case you haven't been to the AuctionBytes home page in a while, it's worth a visit. David recently added a feature that links to the five most recent discussion threads that are going on in the forums. Now when you visit the home page you can get links to recent news stories, the current articles from this newsletter, and links to pertinent discussions relating to online auctions. As always there are links on the left navigation bar to "Cool Tools," which are resources for online users, including charts of auction sites, tools, online-payment services, consignment services, Buyers Market classifieds and even fraud resources.
Sometimes we have a jam-packed issue like today. To keep the size of this email manageable, I'll link to some articles on the Web site where you can read the full text rather than trying to fit everything in here.
I'll leave you with this thought, which Mark O'Neill sent to me:
"Junk is something you've kept for years and throw away three weeks before you need it."
About the author:
Ina Steiner is Editor of AuctionBytes.com and author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). She has a background in marketing and research in the high-tech and publishing fields. If you have story ideas, comments or questions, send them to ina@auctionbytes.com.
