Ina
Glad you are having so much fun discovering all the forgotten treasures in your house. I have things that have not seen the light of day in 19 years. And will most likely be another 10. Well, maybe they will cover my retirement fund. LOL
Have you noticed the latest email changes Ebay has made? Hide senders email address, post and reply to question showing on the listing.... Looks like they are narrowing in on closing the system. As I have always said, they will make it like Yahoo that no one will know the buyers email address thus, unable to do deals off of the system. Also the talk of Ebay making Paypal the only way you can pay for anything on Ebay is directed towards this. I hope they implement what Yahoo has in the posted warnings about possible deceptive listings. Those who notice something wrong with a seller's listing may leave a note on that listing to draw attention. If 5 or more leave an alert Ebay looks into possible violations and decide if the alerts placed by lookers are legitimate and with merit. Sounds like a police state to me. Guess we just have to go with the flow or pack our bags.
Have a great summer.
Jim
********
Re:Your story about eBay not being hacked..
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y04/m07/i27/s02
See..
http://www.computerweekly.com/Article131507.htm
Still think eBay weren't hacked?
You were had. The silly buggers are even running Windows servers!! (Ask your sysadmin).
Its not the first time they were hacked. They'll say anything to protect their stock price and also to avoid prosecution for not informing their users their information has been compromised (illegal in California).
They have ongoing security issues. For the past six months, even though they have been made aware of the situation approximately 100 times, banned sellers are still able to list their non-existent products through eBay's "Turbo-Lister".
If you ask them officially they will deny it. If you read the eBay.com forums and speak to their customers, you can find out for yourself.
********
Regarding AuctionBytes Newsflash article, "Online Auction Seller Objects to eBay Advice" (7/30/04)
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y04/m07/i30/s02
Hi Ina,
This really doesn't surprise me at all after my experiences with the eBay TurboLister CSV format.
I find it hard to believe that a company like eBay would have software and usability engineers who are so incompetent as the end results of their efforts would seem to indicate. So do others, leading to the widespread belief that eBay is playing a passive-aggressive sort of game in which they pretend to support something, but really want to discourage things like "third party tools" and "refunds on final value fees on transactions that have failed to be consummated".
Consider the case of Turbo Lister. It is a good tool that lacks certain key features because it is designed to encourage the use of paid add-on features like eBay-designed html templates and more advanced subscription-based tools.
Of course, even paying for eBay's advanced tools is no solution unless you buy in to the concept that eBay is the center of your online shopping universe. Of course for multi-channel sellers, the more likely case is that either their own site or a site on a place like TIAS is the "single source" with which a listings on other sites should synchronize.
My solution is to write my listings in XML on my own site and then to write XSL transforms to other formats (usually CSV or Tab-delimited text) such as Froogle, Shopping.com, Yahoo!, iOffer, Amazon, etc..., and eBay Turbo Lister.
As a software engineer, I was horrified to learn that when I coded my transform to match the CSV format published at: http://pages.ebay.com/turbo_lister/csv.html?ssPageName=CMDV:ICOUT, it didn't work. So I did an export on a sample listing that I created and "reverse engineered" it to produce correct results.
I was NOT impressed that eBay engineers had failed to define a more robust data format, probably leaving some extra slots throughout to accommodate future expansion. Failing this, in my opinion, old fields should simply be deleted, and new fields should be added to the end of the format, thus ensuring backward compatibility.
Obviously, at some point it may be a good idea to do a major overhaul - but this should be rare. Further, I would expect that any published "specifications" would be updated and that as a courtesy, changes to the data format would be announced by eBay.
Thinking that the out of date specification was simply an oversight, I posted on the eBay message board and was informed (I don't recall whether it was by an eBay employee) that "reverse engineering" was what you have to do.
So my transform worked for a while, but the last time I tried to add an item to my store, it did not. So, I decided that I didn't feel like figuring out the changes at the time, so eBay will just have to wait for my listings. With luck, I'll sell them directly and avoid the fees entirely!
Your article inspired me to checked today and found the following deviations (see export below) from the published CSV format (see the link above):
7 fields inserted in the middle
13 fields deleted from the middle
All fields after Multi-shipping discount are new
Of course more experimentation and reverse engineering is required to determine the allowed settings and behaviors of the new fields.
It is a possibility that in the future, I may productize some of my tools, but I certainly do not want to support something like this when the rules would change under me at Ebay's whim and with no prior notice to me. Rather than implying fault on the part of "their partners," eBay needs to look inward and radically improve the way they handle their public interfaces. Or at least be honest about what is and is not a public interface.
As an eBay buyer, seller, and stock holder, I consider this situation to be OUTRAGEOUS!
********
Thanks for providing a lively site about the online auction industry. There are definitely too many gaps in coverage of what goes on! Thanks for being here. Anyway, I see your regular bulletins on sell through on eBay. I thought I would see what the sell through is for Yahoo, so I looked at their annual report, and found:
Nothing.
I searched the web, and found:
Nothing.
I tried to look up closed auctions, by number of bids, and guess what: it showed every item (that I searched for) as getting a bid!!! Now, I know that is wrong, some items don't get bids, because if they had 100% sell-through, they would be bragging about it.
And I certainly hear reports from people that list items that don't sell, so I am stymied at how to find out their sell through.
Perhaps, with your position in the industry, you could inquire with them. It would be a very useful comparison.
Thanks for your attention to this.
Mike
********
Hi Ina,
I read and enjoyed your article on the Category Rollups. However your article missed a crucial point, which is the real reason sales have declined and sellers are upset.
When the change happened they also modified how Featured Plus listing upgrades were handled through product finder searches. In the art category for instance where Feature Plus listings are extensively used this has had a devastating impact in sales.
The way Product Finder search results used to be returned had "Featured Plus" (aka FP) listings dispersed through out the list. Basically they were listed exactly as the current free-text search on ebay works.
After the change Product Finder searches now lists ALL of the FP listings first if the listing is sorted by time (but not oddly enough if they are sorted by price). This has had a huge negative impact for categories such as art where FP listings are regularly used. Because FP listings aren't highlighted the user believes that only FP listings exist. In order to find the normal auctions they have to wade through 12-20 pages of FP articles. Becouse they don't know they are looking at "featured" listings they don't know that they are only seeing a fraction of the total.
This is bad for both those who use FP and those who don't.
A good analogy is Television. What would happen if all of the commercials (FP listings) where shown at the begining of the show rather than evenly distributed as they are currently?
ONE: Those unfamiliar with the program would assume that the commercials were the program. This would turn off a number of people who would tune out before the normal program started.
TWO: Those familiar with the program would simply wait until the commercials were over before ever tuning in (people now just skip over the FP listings).
There has been quite a roar in the ebay art world about this. Ebay has said that they will be adding two new time sorts to the current collection (time:new today, and time:ending today) that will sort using the "real-time" procedure like free-text searches. Many of the sellers are convinced that this will just muddle the searches (why use time:ending today when logically you would think time:ending soonest would return the same results?) and not solve the problem.
There is a yahoo group specifically formed to discuss this issue. It can be found here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EbayFPFLP
FPFLP = FeaturePlusFrontLoadingProblem.
As I am an artist myself (and silver ebay power seller) I can say that I have personally seen my sales drop in half (even more now that the summer doldrums have arrived).
If there is any more information I can give to you please let me know.
Thanks,
********
I'm the one who was having trouble with Webtv and eBay. You were planning to contact someone. I don't know what happened but I have a promise from webtv that they and eBay are working on it and we should have an upgrade this week (I believe the first since MSN bought webtv!!) We used to get them regularly. Webtv also told me they should have a new unit out by Sept or Oct. That will help I hope. Thanks so much for your concern and help.
********
Hi Ina,
You might want to do a piece on this. Pre-filled info violates eBay's keyword spamming rules. I did a search for "goodfellas dvd new", titles and descriptions, and got many other movies returned. After investigating why I see it is because the prefilled info violates the keyword spamming rule.
Examples produced from search for "goodfellas dvd new" (titles and descriptions)
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6312860856
This came up because the prefilled info contains "Robert De Niro won the New York Film Critics Circle award for his starring performance in this film, and the Martin Scorsese film "Goodfellas," which also opened in 1990."
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6312861048
This came up because prefilled info contains "Martin Scorsese, one of America's most influential filmmakers, returns to the world of mobsters, greed, and excess that he explored so compellingly in 1990's GOODFELLAS"
I can list hundreds and hundreds (thousands probably) like this. I only show the two above as an example and I have nothing against the sellers but with eBay and the way they selectively enforce rules. At the same time eBay allows this keyword spamming via pre-filled info, they will shut down auctions where the only keyword spamming is due to links the seller has to their store pages. Those links help the seller direct traffic to their store. This just isn't fair. Either they have this rule or they don't. If it's a rule they have to apply it fairly and not allow prefilled info to violate the rule.
Their whole justification for enforcing the keyword spamming rule is it is unfair to buyers. Well, as a buyer I am searching for "goodfellas", not these other movies, and having all these other movies come up is also unfair to me as a buyer.
********
Hi Ina,
Better warn your eBayers that a lot of "spoof" is being sent out. They are really on me like crazy - even went so far as sending me a phony bill for the month today - they even had the names of a couple of my items on there - my store and what type of store....now that is getting scary - had all these links to pay the bill by PayPal, credit card, and you name it. Naturally I sent it to eBay and sure enough it wasn't from eBay. I have been selling more on eBay lately - now how do they know that???? I have noticed the phoney emails, too. I recently dropped my eBay store and went to the Vendio store. Just a heads up.
Pat
