eBay rolled out the Top Rated Seller program last week, introduced a new seller dashboard, and made changes to its search algorithm. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of reaction from sellers, including two main areas of concern: Why didn't I qualify for TRS? And, why did my standings in search results drop? You can read all about the changes in today's issue, including links to our recent coverage of the eBay fall release.

Two weeks ago I caught up with Woot.com founder Matt Rutledge at the Shop.org conference in Las Vegas. Woot.com is the king of the "Daily Deal" (you can read my 2004 interview with Matt in this AuctionBytes article). Matt said he has a new project still under wraps, deals.woot.com, that will be of interest to eBay and online powersellers, and he promised to share more details when it got closer to launching.

Matt was part of a panel discussion at Shop.org called "Reinventing Online Retail: Radical Business Models That Are Paying Off Today" with Susan Lyne of Gilt Groupe (link). While retailers at the Summit were talking a lot about social networking and mobile commerce, interest in the secondary market was a strong undercurrent.

I also spent some time at the show talking with Ztail founders Bill Hudak and Jordan Kobert, who are putting a unique spin on trade-in programs that are all the rage with retailers, especially those selling consumer electronics. In an interview, Bill shared his thoughts on how such secondary-market programs will affect both retailers and online sellers - the podcast will be available soon on Ecommerce Industry SoundBytes, where you can also find an interview with Craig Gillan, Director of Ecommerce at clothing retailer Charlotte Russe, and with ecommerce expert Jochen Krisch who writes the ExcitingEcommerce.com blog from Germany.

One of the keynote speakers at the conference was eBay CEO John Donahoe, whose main message to attendees was to reassure them that "eBay is not a retailer."

The three AuctionBytes video clips from John Donahoe's keynote address were quite popular, and the Valleywag blog picked up on this one in which John said auctions were not a religion, but were nothing more than a format. "A format that was 80 percent of what we do, and now is 25 percent of what we do," he added. Interestingly enough, eBay ran a sale to encourage use of the auction format 2 days later, and it has changed the way search works in collectibles and toy categories.

Many retailers at the show expressed cautious optimism about the upcoming holiday season. Attendance at the Shop.org Summit was up about 9 percent, according to organizers, with a final tally of 2,600 attendees.

Branded retailers are obviously looking to push new products, so there was no talk of antiques and vintage goods at this show. But everyone agrees that these days, consumers are looking for value, and it's likely that their searches will lead them to alternatives to mass-marketplaces and retailers, finding great shopping opportunities smaller venues and websites. This could be a decent year for the small, nimble online seller.

Thanks for reading.