June is here, and two important industry trade shows will be taking place in Chicago later this month - Internet Retailer (June 9 - 11) and eBay Live (the Developer's Conference runs June 16 - 18, and eBay Live runs June 19 - 21).
AuctionBytes will be covering all of these events. I will be reporting back from Internet Retailer, and a week later, the entire AuctionBytes team will converge in Chicago to bring you the most comprehensive coverage on eBay Live on the Internet. Bookmark our special eBay Live section and you can keep up-to-date with breaking news, photos, podcasts and blog posts: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/ebaylive2008
If you know of, or have an event that will be taking place during eBay Live - official or otherwise, let us know in our blog (http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2008/5/1212266183.html). As we get closer to eBay Live, I'll write up a schedule of all the official (and unofficial) events that are posted there.
June is an interesting month for another reason. eBay Australia will change to a PayPal-only marketplace, and the Australian regulatory agency that monitors anti-competitive business activity, the ACCC, said it would rule prior to June 17 on whether it will allow the policy.
If you've been following our news stories in Newsflash and in the Blog, you know that an AuctionBytes reader outed Google as the likely author of a submission to the ACCC opposing eBay's policy, calling its public benefits "illusory" (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/cab/abn/y08/m05/i29/s01).
In other news, eBay has changed its links policy. In July, eBay will only allow specific types of links in a seller's listings or other content on eBay - including their About Me pages. See the May 20th AuctionBytes Newsflash article, "eBay Changes the Rules of the Game, Again" (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/cab/abn/y08/m05/i20/s02).
It's incredible to me that eBay would prevent people from linking to their websites on their About Me page. For shoppers wanting to know more about sellers, what better way than to check out their websites.
Finally, a harbinger of things to come? eBay Germany has begun setting shipping and handling limits in certain categories on its site. eBay seems to be borrowing a lot from Amazon lately, and I think it may be only a matter of time before eBay makes these changes globally (http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2008/5/1212244534.html).
Enjoy today's issue, and stay tuned as we continue to cover ecommerce for small sellers.
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.
