Bruce Weinberg, a professor from Bentley College, is conducting an auction-related survey in conjunction with his colleague from the University of Alabama. They hope the results will be useful to online-auction users, and they are giving away six $50 prizes in a drawing of respondents. This is an academic survey, and Bruce has kindly offered to write up a summary of the results for AuctionBytes readers. The survey is online now at: http://www.cba.ua.edu/~ldavis/auction. It takes about 8-10 minutes to complete.
I've received several letters from readers expressing dissatisfaction with eBay's new Non-Paying Bidder procedure, now called "Unpaid Items." One letter I received on Friday reads in part, "eBay's new set up for dealing with "dead beat bidders" is very vague, and I screwed up, according to them, over trying to get credit for one of my auctions. After emailing them over this mishap, I received their reply: that because it now shows up that both parties are satisfied, I'm just out of luck! To me this is no way to run a big operation. Plus as I've written to you & ebay before, their new systems seem to be making everything more complicated and time consuming. Hopefully, that is not their goal!"
Please be careful in filing for credits for auctions with deadbeat bidders. Here's a link to our original article about the new procedure: http://digbig.com/4bmwn, and here is a link to a workshop eBay held on July 15 about "Unpaid Items" (http://digbig.com/4bjya).
I've gotten some positive letters about the Custom Headers feature for eBay Stores. In today's issue, Mark O'Neill discusses this feature and his decision to open up an eBay Store of his own.
I also review Scot Wingo's new book in today's newsletter. Scot is President and CEO of ChannelAdvisor, and he has just written a book called "eBay Strategies." Look at the bottom of the review for a link to an excerpt and a chance to win a free copy.
I came across a wonderful tool for news-junkies called Bloglines, and I'm including an article about how you can use it to access some online-auction related Blogs and newsfeeds (including the AuctionBytes daily news articles).
The "This & That" column is always worth at least a skim. I include new tools and services and interesting articles you might want to check out! We've also got our regular Collector's Corner column and Letters from Readers feature in today's newsletter.
Enjoy the remaining days of August. We have one more month of real summertime, then it's time to kick into the fall selling season. On the agenda for David and me: some house projects, a street-wide yard sale, barbecues and watching some baseball. Speaking of baseball, David was watching the Boston Red Sox baseball game on TV when they were playing the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and noticed a billboard for online-auction site BidVille.com behind home plate. Who says other auction sites don't do any marketing?
Thanks for reading.
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.
