FireMeg.com ebay Inc. News Blog

eBay: Please Help Us Help You

2011-12-29T08:53:00.001-05:00

Once again the year is drawing to a close and eBay has pulled out the stops, begging for buyers and sellers to pad eBay's numbers before the end of the quarter. If you're a seller, they're offering you three days (December 27-29th) with free listings. Sellers can get 50,000 free listings, after that they are regular price. And buyers, they get double eBay bucks for purchases made on December 29th only. Of course there are the usual exclusions to both specials, so you have to read the fine print. So everyone get over to eBay today and help them out. They're starving and their offering the masses crumbs for a day in hopes that in return the eBay community will provide steak for the entire next quarter for the executives.

#1 Cause of Viruses & Trojans on Home PC's? ...eBay!

2011-12-27T01:52:00.000-05:00

John Donahoe describing how
eBaysellers equate to the Jews in Schindler'sList....
Disruptive Innovation.

Hey eBay exec-tards, listen up....here's another free tid-bit of Firemeg info offered to you free of charge. Your disruptively innovative scheme of allowing only sellers with 10+ DSR's to list 10+ items per month....yeah, that has some major glitches. You might wanna look into that.

I get it, cool idea. Verify users, things individual sellers and former sellers (like me) were saying back in 2006, you know, verify that a seller is an actual seller and not a bot or a scammer from Romania, that sort of thing. Problem is though, that your crappy system seems to not be working. We received an email with links that serve as proof that sellers with less than 10 DSR and no verification whatsoever, have been able to list in excess of the 10 item limit imposed by eBay Inc. We have no reason to believe that the seller in question is a scammer, but they surely could have been.

So I'm wondering, what really does it take for a company that has a billion $+ in profit each year to pay a few engineers to actually write code that functions correctly? You could seemingly get better results from Indians posting will-do ads on Fiverr than you do from you own engineers.

BTW - love the video linked to in the caption above. John Donahoe at least gets the metaphors presented in the eBay attack videos and can describe them in detail....give him a few more stock options.

Amazon's Kindle Fire Tops Gift List

2011-12-10T02:43:00.001-05:00

You might not have to snoop in the closets or under the beds or shake already-wrapped Christmas presents this year to figure out what you're getting. According to Amazon.com, Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet is their most gifted item.

According to the eBay Pulse, 7 out the top ten most watched items are Android devices. An Xbox Live gift card and nanny cam are in the top 10 too. But, just in case you were thinking that eBay was getting really legit and devoid of utter stupidity, rounding out the top 10 is a get rick quick scheme for only $29.99, which uses a picture of a Ferrari as a gallery photo. For under 30 bucks you will get a CD that will tell you how to make thousands of dollars per week, while working only one hour per day! Act quick! The seller has a stellar feedback score of 41!

eBay Offers 5000 Free Listings - Promotion Sucks and is Awesome

2011-12-06T09:25:00.001-05:00

eBay announced yesterday that they were gifting qualified sellers 5000 free listings in addition to their normal 50 free per month. The promotion runs from December 6-8 and has some restrictions, so read the fine print.

The announcements like this are usually looked at in one of two ways, 1) Woopee! Awesome!...or... 2) Mother%&$#er!

These promotions give sellers an opportunity to run high priced items through auction to take a chance that someone might bite, but without having to pay fees. They also flood the eBay site with so much crap that it ends up making the sell-through rate go down.

But hey, it's good for eBay. It puffs up eBay's year end traffic by adding millions of pages to their site, a time of the year when sellers are already getting increased sales due to holiday traffic and a time of year that eBay is strongly competing against sites like Amazon for traffic. Don't forget, every listing you add to eBay means more ad revenue that eBay will earn.

Whether you like getting 5000 free listings or not, there is one group of people that absolutely hate the promotion, those are the sellers that just paid full price to have their listings on eBay for 7 days. The promo's 1, 3, 5 day auctions will be all mixed in with the 7 day auctions from the past few days, thereby diluting those listings...Merry Christmas!

Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman Admits She is a Failure at HP?

2011-11-30T19:15:00.001-05:00

Meg Whitman was head of eBay Inc. while it became a billion dollar company, but some critics would say that eBay's growth was more organic that the result of astute leadership from Whitman. Then she retired. ...and eBay didn't crumble to pieces due to her absence.

Then came her 2010 gubernatorial bid in California. She failed as badly at that as she did at being retired. Then she signed on as CEO at HP, the world's largest PC maker. Now she's admitted that she can't run HP as well as a dead Steve Jobs can run apple by saying that Apple will overtake HP in 2012 as the world's biggest maker of PC's, especially if you include tablets.

Whitman said, “I think it’s possible if you integrate tablets. Apple does a great job. We need to improve our game and our products to take over the leadership position. Apple could go past HP in 2012. We will try to become the champion in 2013. It will take time for the products that I have influence on to make it to the market.”

So Whitman is saying that she has no responsibility over the course of the company or their sales, because she is dealing with products that she didn't "influence?" And also that in two years the products that she has influence over will suddenly be cooler than Apple stuff? Two years is forever in the tech world. How will she be able to get HP to regain a lost top spot on the PC list, if she couldn't keep it from losing the spot in the first place?

And how is she going to use her influence to get her engineers to produce products that people want more than Apple?

Shouldn't, perhaps, she be focused on influencing areas of HP where good decisions might lead to HP remaining at the top? ie. marketing, branding, product image, etc.

This appears to be another case of Whitman being hired to run an already successful company that will ultimately go the course it would have gone without her. eBay grew. HP will decline. There are millions of unemployed workers out there that could head HP and lose market share, and do it for millions of dollars less in salary....(more)

eBay and Amazon Argue Over Sales Tax Debate

2011-11-30T19:10:00.001-05:00

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) -- Amazon and eBay had it out in a public brawl in Washington on Wednesday during a congressional hearing about allowing states to collect sales tax on Internet purchases.

Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) and eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) are an opposite sides of the lightning-rod issue -- and touchy about it. During their testimony, the two companies' lobbyists swapped barbs and accusations of everything from being misleading to outright profiteering...(more).

Google Checkout is Morphing Into Google Wallet

2011-11-17T23:21:00.004-05:00

Google announced today that Google Checkout is going to become part of Google Wallet. Much like Google Buzz sort of dissolved into Google +1, Checkout will morph automatically into Google Wallet starting in early 2012.

Google wallet is Google's payment processor and POS automated program that will allow customers to pay online and at brick-and-mortar stores with their Google account.

No changes are required and no updates are needed for Google Checkout clients to morph into their new Google Wallet status. Google just asked, in an email, that by early in 2012 that all Google Checkout users (sellers and online shops) change any wording and logos on their sites to the new Google Wallet text and graphics from the old Google Checkout wording.

Meg Whitman CEO of HP, Do or Die It Will Settle the Argument

2011-09-23T01:16:00.004-04:00

Former eBay Inc. CEO, Meg Whitman, has been named as the new CEO of HP. If you can't be governor, and you can't enjoy retirement as on of the few billionaire women on the planet, what do you do? You take over as head of a faltering former tech giant and attempt to turn things around.

The HP board might see this as a way to bring a "successful" CEO into the fold and breathe life into the company. However, many will see this as a test of Whitman's ability to actually accomplish something. She had a successful run at eBay, running a multi-billion dollar company and growing it into what it is today. Despite the success of eBay, critics still argue that eBay would have grown organically with or without Whitman's guidance.

So now she has to prove that she was more than a figurehead that was the leader of a corporation that went viral organically and actually prove that she is worthy of the billions of dollars that she has "earned" over the years. If she can turn HP into a profitable business and a brand that excites consumers, she might prove her critics wrong. But if HP continues to lose market share to other big players including Apple, Google, Toshiba and Blackberry, her critics might be able to finally have proof of her shortcomings.

eBay is All Ready for Back to School....Huh?

2011-07-21T02:52:00.004-04:00

Just when retailers like Target and other retailers were being admonished and criticized for their much too early "back to school" advertisements and sales...that's when eBay thought it would be a good time to put a "Shop for School" image in the header of their website.

Nice move geniuses. We're like six weeks away from the new school year, basically right in the middle of summer and consumer confidence is lacking severely in anticipation of a debt ceiling deal in congress, and eBay chooses to join the bandwagon and promote back to school shit in the middle of July.

Who shops for notebooks and pencils on eBay anyway? Those things are loss leaders (I'm assuming here, call me an ass) that major retailers price at stupid low prices to get people in the door in hopes of selling them something they don't need, won't use, and will likely cost a lot more than a 49¢ notebook.

Being the eBay masochist that I am, I typed "back to school" into the eBay search bar, with "Best Match" selected and my search returned over 5000 results with this outfit as the #1 best match.

That's right, a size 10 "outfit" with just hours to go in the auction is my "Best Match" for back to school shopping....now lest you think that this is a really hot item, it has one bid for 99¢ and the description: Great outfit for the fall.. the skort is a size 10 with adjustable waistbands and the matching hoodie jacket with zipper is also a size 10.. the outfit is from Childrens place.. will do combined shipping.. Thanks for looking!

So they spelled skirt wrong. So they didn't capitalize "Place" in the company name. So they didn't put the apostrophe in "Children's Place." So they use two periods at the end of each sentence. So they have only one crappy picture. So what. My children are home schooled, and boys, so I don't care. It's just funny that a company with around a billion dollars in profit each year would run a back to school campaign and then have this crap as the best match item for "back to school."

And then just try to find notebooks on eBay, you know, the paper kind.

O.co Says Goodbye to Marketplace

2011-07-19T01:03:00.003-04:00

Overstock is saying goodbye to third party sellers, on July 21st O.co will shutter its marketplace for good. No more Overstock Auctions, no more Overstock stores, no more individuals selling on Overstock. While the move is likely to go unnoticed by most of the eCommerce small business community of sellers, there are those who will remember that 5 or 6 years ago, Overstock WAS going to be THE eBay Killer.

In the end Overstock was just too late into the market despite the problems that the competitors already had. For most sellers it was easier to put up with eBay's high fees, stupid rules, and lagging prices and falling sell-through rates, than it was to deal with Overstock's obscurity. Despite national advertising campaigns on the internet, TV and print ads, Overstock auctions and multi-seller marketplace failed to catch on with sellers.

News of O.co's marketplace failure made me go back and check on some of the links to third party multi-seller sites on Firemeg.com. Many have closed. Most have either given up, been forced out, or morphed into affiliate sites that though while they end up feeding what they wished to overtake, they now have steady income without all of the hassle of maintaining a network of thousands of individual sellers.

Did eBay Launch a DoS Attack Against eBaymotorssucks.com?

2011-07-19T00:22:00.002-04:00

We received an email the other day from the owner of the www.ebaymotorssucks.com website concerning an ongoing DDoS attack against his site, one that he blames eBay Inc. for orchestrating. For those of you who don't know, and right now can't visit the site because it is down due to the attack, eBay Motors Sucks is a site that for years has been dedicated to exposing fraud on eBay; Whether this fraud be caused by unscrupulous sellers, scammers or by the corporation itself, there is little doubt in anyone's mind that eBay is wrought with fraud and has been for some time.

The site owner blames eBay for the attack. Is it reasonable to assume that eBay would do such a thing? Perhaps. If you've followed this and other eBay related blogs over the years, you know that eBay Inc. will use money, power, influence, threats and intimidation to accomplish their goals....it's a public company after all, and since employees (particularly the management) are paid in part with stock options, it is in their best interest that the company remain healthy financially. Denying fraud and hiding scams and hacking that have affected the site is to their benefit.

That said, it is also just as likely that the DDoS attack came from an unhappy scammer organization who didn't like eBaymotorssucks.com bringing to light their scams. Whether the attack was orchestrated by eBay, scammers, or another party, the fact remains that eBay Motors Sucks' website has been dedicated to exposing fraud on eBay for years....which is why it is my personal belief that eBay is not behind the attack. If I were an executive at eBay, I would be thanklessly grateful that such sites exist to expose fraud. It's much easier to pay an employee or two to peruse sites such as ebaymotorssucks.com to learn of scams and fraud, rather than pay a brigade of employees to search the site for scams - which change and morph constantly.

Anyway, eBaymotorssucks posted a video to Youtube about the incident, you can watch it and decide for yourself...

eBay Buys Zong for $240 Million........WTF?

2011-07-07T23:52:00.003-04:00

eBay bought Zong. Paid $240,000,000.00. Huh?

WTF is Zong?

Zong is a service that allows you to pay for things with your smartphone. The cost of things purchased appears on your bill. When buying things using Zong, you put in your cell # and then you get a text from Zong and have to reply with a PIN # and then you pay for the item on your next cell phone bill.

Zong is also the first international brand of China Mobile being launched in Pakistan. Huh?

Zong is also a massacre where there was a mass killing of African slaves that took place in 1781 on the Zong, which was a British slave ship. Huh?

I know I'm not up on everything in web 7.0 (or whatever number they're calling it now), but really, Zong? I asked several people today and nobody has heard of it. I tried to do my research (I quit after 5 articles). I get the general premise. You pay with your phone. How that is much different than any other service, I sorta get. How it is worth $240,000,000.00 is what I don't understand.

Was eBay buying a patent? I don't know, the "mainstream media" didn't say. I'm just thinking that eBay should have been able to develop their own similar system or enhance Paypal's own system for $240 million. Heck, they could have even hired 239 engineers from Google and paid them $1,000,000.00 for a year to come up with something and still saved a million dollars.

Like I said, I read 5 articles on the deal. Didn't learn much, but still givin' my opinion anyways. This just seems like another Skype deal - paid waaaayyy too much money for something that really isn't worth it. Perhaps they were just buying out a potential competitor...I don't know, at least that would make it make sense a bit. I'm not going to break it down and go into the math like I used to, but just think about it for a minute, think about how many million transactions they will need to process before they even pay for the purchase of the company...not to mention all the overhead, wages, marketing, integration engineering, etc. after the purchase until it makes a profit.

Got a Sales Call from Paypal Today

2011-06-10T23:55:00.003-04:00

We received two annoying phone calls today, one from an eBay seller asking for advice on how to sell something, info about the item and a valuation on the item....the other was from Paypal.

I mention the eBay seller calling simply to vent, and to warn other eBay sellers how non-eBay sellers (or former eBay sellers) view this type of thing. The caller started the phone call by saying basically, I sell the same type of widgets that you sell on your site, only my wife sells them on eBay. It was as if he just wanted us to say that we couldn't help him. After a litany of questions were fired at me about the item in question, I simply replied that he should list the item for sale on eBay and he'd find out all about it and its value in less than a week. He sarcastically thanked me for my time.

So eBay sellers....don't do this. If one of my employees took that call and actually gave him info, I'd fire them. Heck, Paypal is suing Google for stealing trade secrets! That said, I am available for eBay related consultation for my standard fee of $250 per hour, in which case I'll be more than happy to answer virtually anything

Anyway, the second call was from Paypal. They were asking us to give them another chance and to incorporate Paypal payments into one of our ecommerce stores. The store they were inquiring about has over 100,000 products and nearly 200,000 pages. My wife took the call and played along; at least she played along far better than I would have done. I'll paraphrase the conversation....

Paypal: We see that you use Google Checkout and do not offer Paypal, why?

Us: Google Checkout has better fraud protection and guarantees any payment made once they've "cleared" it.

Paypal: We do that too...

Us: Yes, but many times (in the past, from experience we know this...) you clear the payment only to remove funds from our account based on the buyer's activities, or even based on activities of other individuals that have interacted online with the customer.

Paypal: [No denial about that fact] ....but Paypal is really secure and trusted.

Us: Plus Google will actually look into a chargeback before withdrawing funds...

Paypal: You had problems with this in the past with Paypal?

Us: Yes, and when one transaction has an issue, Paypal can lock down the entire account, preventing other customers from purchasing goods and/or paying for them....

....and Google Checkout never has any stupid 21 day holds on items...

....and Google Checkout is cheaper....

....and Google Checkout doesn't refund customers immediately and makes customer prove that there was some type of issue or that they did not receive the merchandise...

....and Google Checkout does not have as many restrictions on what items can be purchased using their processing service....

At this point it apparently became pretty clear that the Paypal-tele-marketer wasn't going to get us to add Paypal to our site. My wife continued for a few minutes highlighting the benefits of any payment gateway, including trading beans for online purchases, over Paypal. Finally the caller said he was going to send some information via email that might make us change our minds - not likely.

eBay Inc. / Paypal Sue Google Over Mobile Payments Google Wallet

2011-05-27T06:28:00.003-04:00

eBay is at it again. This time it is Paypal who is picking a fight with Google. Paypal is suing Google over trade secrets that two former eBay employees allegedly provided Google that helped them develop their new Google Wallet smartphone based payment method that stands to revolutionize who goods are bought.

Paypal is accusing former employees Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius. Tilenius is alleged to have broken a non-compete agreement with Paypal by hiring Bedier. Bedier, who was working on behalf of Paypal to broker a deal to use Paypal on Android phones as a payment provider, is alleged to have used this knowledge to help create Google Wallet.

So, eBay, notorious for corruption and deceit and using customers ideas without compensation or permission is now suing the company responsible for the largest portion of its traffic, both organic and paid search. And not only does Google provide the majority of traffic to eBay, Google also provides most of eBay's paid advertising on eBay's website. One of these days Google is going to just have enough eBay's little games and put their fist down....and ultimately it will be the eBay sellers who suffer.

eBay has an ongoing tiff with Google. Remember in 2007 when eBay took down all their Adwords advertising to protest Google being a better company? Yeah, that went well for eBay.

It must be hard for Google execs to keep putting up with the annoying fly that is eBay/Paypal, especially when all it would take to make them go away is a hostile takeover.

eBay Charges Final Value Fees on Shipping WTF? TYS

2011-05-12T00:27:00.000-04:00

eBay has started charging final value fees on the shipping price paid by buyers on all products bought through their platform. This is not news, they announced it, they did it, eBay sellers complained, fees were charged yet life goes on and still millions of sellers continue to sell on eBay - many of them still charging for shipping, despite eBay's desperate attempts to convert the world to a free shipping system.

What I'd like to comment about is the reaction from the selling community, or at least the eBay selling community that I deal with. Last weekend was my first real exposure to eBay sellers since the final value fees on shipping was announced. It was the first local flea market of the year, a market with around 500 vendors. I must have heard the same sob stories from at least a dozen vendors, many of whom I consider friends, aquaintences, or at the very least "pickers." The consensus among the flea marketeers was that eBay is the devil and that eBay is raping sellers. The sad part is that even the longtime eBay sellers are saying this....like it is fresh news or they had an epiphany.

Back in 2006, FVF's on shipping was discussed as a way that eBay would continue to increase revenue. Also discussed during that time was eBay mandating a Paypal only payment method and even higher fees for sellers. At the time management laughed off those theories as silly and denied that they would ever happen. Oh, and the eBay fanboys all reiterated their same old crap that eBay pays the bills and that they were willing to bend if the eBay winds blew harder.

Well, let me congratulate eBay on remaining relevent, because five years later, they've fulfilled every prophecy that we forecasted and still people keep listing shit for sale.....and all the while Craigslist remains free and local classified sites have sprouted up around the country like wildfire.

I find it odd, but somehow familiar, that the sellers at the local flea market are willing to continue to bend to eBay changes. This is 2011 for God's sake! I can update my Facebook page with photos I just took on my Blackberry, photos that are tagged with my GPS location from a 4G network or wifi instantly for free, yet eBay keeps charging more for their service that has disimproved (word "disimproved" copyright ©Firemeg 2011) for the past six or seven years. Prices of stand-alone shopping sites have plummetted and their ease-of-use has increased exponentially while average selling prices have dropped on eBay. Still, die-hard sellers continue to post on eBay.

So I'm wondering....what is the breaking point for the masses of sellers still selling on eBay? They seem to disregard higher fees, lower selling prices, more seller restrictions, decreased traffic, etc. etc. So what does it take to get someone to look beyond eBay? A subscription fee to be allowed to sell? Sound out of the question? We'll just save this blog post and see about that, perhaps 3 years down the road.

Paypal Shutters Bradley Manning Defense Account

2011-02-24T14:16:00.005-05:00

In yet another move that gives businesses and individuals reason to not use Paypal, eBay Inc. owned Paypal has shut off the account of Courage to Resist, which is aiding in the defense of US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning.

For those who don't know who Bradley Manning is, he is the person responsible for leaking video of a US helicopter to Wikileaks, video that shows US military personnel gunning down innocent civilians, including some Reuters reporters. Oh, and there were children in the van that was blown to shreds by the US helicopter. The video of the incident, called Collateral Murder, can be found on Youtube. Whatever your views on the Iraq war are, the video is chilling to watch as not only are civilians gunned down by the US military, but the voice track of the soldiers is playing the whole time.

There are really only two sides to this incident. One, the US military did something reprehensible in shooting unarmed civilians and that Manning is a good guy for showing the world. Or two, the US was justified in shooting all of the people in the video and that Manning is a treasonous dog for painting the US military in a fashion that is less than honorable.

But even if you subscribe to the second side's view, surely he should receive a fair trial. It seems asinine that Paypal would shut down an account that was helping to pay for his defense. I can't help but wonder if the dolts at eBay walk around wondering why they get a bad rap.

A petition in favor of Bradley Manning is available here: http://www.standwithbrad.org

Amazon Prime Now Offers Free Streaming Movies & Shows

2011-02-22T09:29:00.002-05:00

Today Amazon.com posted the announcement on the left to their Amazon Prime page detailing new Amazon Prime benefits for members. At only $79 per year, Prime was already a good deal if you shop on Amazon very much with Prime's free two-day shipping. Now Prime members can get streaming movies and TV shows.

If you are not already a member of Amazon Prime, you can get a free one month trial of Prime. Heck, just the savings over video rentals would be worth a look. Free movies for a month.

Then if you buy much online, whether it's books or electronics, the free shipping will quickly let you recoup your initial $79 investment.

This looks like the first step in Amazon taking on Netflix.

The press release from Amazon is as follows:

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced the launch of a new benefit for Amazon Prime members: unlimited, commercial-free, instant streaming of more than 5,000 movies and TV shows. This new benefit is being added at no additional cost -- Prime membership will continue to be $79 per year. Amazon Prime's all-you-can-eat free Two-Day Shipping has already attracted millions of members. Customers can learn more about an Amazon Prime one-month free trial and start watching instantly at www.amazon.com/primevideos. Millions of Amazon Prime members already enjoy the convenience of free Two-Day Shipping," said Robbie Schwietzer, vice president of Amazon Prime. "Adding unlimited instant access to thousands of movies and TV shows at no additional cost is a great way to give members even more value for their $79 annual Amazon Prime membership."

Movies and TV shows included with an Amazon Prime membership can be watched instantly on Macs, PCs and nearly 200 models of Internet-connected TVs, Blu-ray players and set-top boxes that are compatible with Amazon Instant Video. The selection of videos available for instant streaming currently includes movies, such as "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" trilogy, "Amadeus," "Syriana," and "Chariots of Fire," noted documentaries such as "Food Inc.," "March of the Penguins" and "Ken Burns' National Parks," plus TV shows, such as "Doctor Who," "Farscape," "Fawlty Towers" and children's shows, such as "Arthur," "Caillou," "Super Why!" and "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."

Amazon Prime is a membership program that offers customers unlimited free Two-Day Shipping with no minimum purchase requirement for only $79 a year. Millions of items are eligible, including books, home and garden products, electronics, video games, clothing, accessories and beauty products. With the introduction of Prime instant videos, free trial and paid Amazon Prime members in the U.S. now also have unlimited instant access to more than 5,000 videos.

Amazon Instant Video is a digital video service that offers customers more than 90,000 commercial-free movies and television shows to buy or rent on an a la carte basis. New-release movies are often available as soon as they are released on DVD, and many TV shows are available the day after their first broadcast. Amazon Instant Video also offers thousands of movies and TV shows in high definition. With Amazon Instant Video, customers can watch instantly on Macs, PCs, and nearly 200 Internet connected TVs, Blu-ray players, and set-top boxes. To learn more about Amazon Instant Video on your TV, visit www.amazon.com/watchontv.

"In addition to now offering unlimited, commercial-free, instant streaming of 5,000 movies and TV shows to Amazon Prime members, we continue to offer all customers more than 90,000 movies and TV shows through Amazon Instant Video," said Cameron Janes, director of Amazon Instant Video. "With Amazon Instant Video customers can rent or purchase hit movies, such as 'The Social Network' as well as purchase the latest TV shows available the day-after they broadcast."

Customers who receive Prime shipping benefits through our Amazon Student and Amazon Mom programs can upgrade to receive paid Prime benefits for just $79 a year.

For more information on Amazon Prime and Prime instant videos and to start an Amazon Prime free trial, www.amazon.com/primevideos

Take the Auctionbytes Payment Services Survey

2011-02-02T07:34:00.003-05:00

If you are an ecommerce entrepreneur you may want to stop over to Auctionbytes.com and fill out their 2011 Sellers Choice Payment Services survey. The link to the survey can be found in this Auctionbytes blog article. The survey allows you to rate the top online payment processors including Google Checkout, Amazon Payments and Paypal.

The survey asks a few questions about seller preferences and selling methods and practices, and has ratings for the payment gateways. One thing that is not really addressed very well though is the independent processor. All the companies listed in the survey are companies that process cards and payments like Paypal, which I suppose is the point of the survey, but there were no questions regarding how well liked independently run website checkouts work. Many sites simply choose to use a service from their local bank or from a service like Authorize.net that is integrated into their website.

Amazon.com Announces Fourth Quarter Sales up 36% to $12.95 Billion

2011-01-30T15:39:00.000-05:00

SEATTLE, Jan 27, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) --Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced financial results for its fourth quarter ended December 31, 2010.

Operating cash flow increased 6% to $3.50 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $3.29 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2009. Free cash flow decreased 14% to $2.52 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $2.92 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2009.

Common shares outstanding plus shares underlying stock-based awards totaled 465 million on December 31, 2010, compared with 461 million a year ago.

Net sales increased 36% to $12.95 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $9.52 billion in fourth quarter 2009. Excluding the $139 million unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, net sales would have grown 37% compared with fourth quarter 2009.

Operating income was $474 million in the fourth quarter, compared with $476 million in fourth quarter 2009. The unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter on operating income was $18 million.

Net income increased 8% to $416 million in the fourth quarter, or $0.91 per diluted share, compared with net income of $384 million, or $0.85 per diluted share, in fourth quarter 2009.

"Thanks to our customers, we achieved two big milestones," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. "We had our first $10 billion quarter, and after selling millions of third-generation Kindles with the new Pearl e-ink display during the quarter, Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com. Last July we announced that Kindle books had passed hardcovers and predicted that Kindle would surpass paperbacks in the second quarter of this year, so this milestone has come even sooner than we expected - and it's on top of continued growth in paperback sales."

Full Year 2010

Net sales increased 40% to $34.20 billion, compared with $24.51 billion in 2009. The unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the year on net sales was $86 million.

Operating income increased 25% to $1.41 billion, compared with $1.13 billion in 2009. The unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the year on operating income was $28 million. In 2009, operating income was negatively impacted by a $51 million legal settlement.

Net income increased 28% to $1.15 billion in 2010, or $2.53 per diluted share, compared with net income of $902 million, or $2.04 per diluted share, in 2009.

Highlights

Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle books than paperback books. Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the Company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the Company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. This is across Amazon.com's entire U.S. book business and includes sales of books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the numbers even higher.
The Company sold millions of third-generation Kindle devices with the new advanced paper-like Pearl e-ink display in the fourth quarter and the third-generation Kindle eclipsed "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" as the bestselling product in Amazon's history.
The U.S. Kindle Store now has more than 810,000 books including New Releases and 107 of 112 New York Times Bestsellers. Over 670,000 of these books are $9.99 or less, including 74 New York Times Bestsellers. Millions of free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are also available to read on Kindle.
Amazon added to its growing list of "Buy Once, Read Everywhere" Kindle apps, launching a Kindle app for Windows Phone 7. In addition, the Kindle for Android app was updated to enable users to buy, read and sync over 100 Kindle newspapers and magazines. All Kindle apps let customers "Buy Once, Read Everywhere"--on Kindle, Kindle 3G, Kindle DX, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, Mac, PC, BlackBerry and Android-based devices. All Kindle apps are free and incorporate Amazon's Whispersync technology, which allows readers to seamlessly switch between devices. With Kindle Worry-Free Archive, books purchased from the Kindle Store are automatically backed up online in the Kindle library on Amazon where they can be re-downloaded wirelessly for free, anytime.
The Company announced Price Check for iPhone, a new price comparison app that provides shoppers an easy way to compare in-store prices with the low prices from Amazon.com and other online merchants. Shoppers can use the app to scan a barcode, snap a picture, or say or type a product name to instantly see online prices for that item. Over the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend, mobile shoppers used Price Check to look up prices over a million times. In December, shoppers used the app more than two million times to check prices.
North America segment sales, representing the Company's U.S. and Canadian sites, were $7.21 billion, up 45% from fourth quarter 2009.
International segment sales, representing the Company's U.K., German, Japanese, French, Chinese and Italian sites, were $5.74 billion, up 26% from fourth quarter 2009. Excluding the unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, sales grew 29%.
Worldwide Media sales grew 12% to $5.23 billion. Excluding the unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, sales grew 13%.
Worldwide Electronics & Other General Merchandise sales grew 60% to $7.39 billion. Excluding the unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, sales grew 62%.
The Company launched Amazon.it, an Italian-language website offering customers a vast selection of books, DVDs, video games, music and consumer electronics at everyday low prices. Amazon.it's convenient services include Amazon Prime, the membership program with unlimited free guaranteed 2-3 day delivery at an annual fee of 9.99 Euros. The first product sold on Amazon.it was a Canon Pixma printer to a new Prime customer in Turino, Italy.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced lowered usage pricing on existing Premium Support offerings by 50% and added two new support plans to meet the needs of developers and enterprises of all sizes and technical ability. In addition to the existing Silver and Gold support plans, AWS now offers a Bronze support plan for $49 per month and a Platinum support plan that provides 15 minute response times and dedicated Technical Account Managers.
AWS achieved Level 1 Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance, continuing its commitment to providing the security certifications developers and enterprises care about. Merchants and other service providers can now run their applications on AWS PCI-compliant technology infrastructure to store, process and transmit credit card information in the cloud.
AWS launched Elastic Beanstalk, an easy way for developers to quickly deploy applications to AWS and manage applications in the AWS cloud. Elastic Beanstalk automatically scales up and down as needed so developers don't need to worry about configuring their infrastructure requirements in AWS. Unlike existing application containers or "platform as a service" offerings that force developers to accept infrastructure decisions pre-determined by the vendor, Elastic Beanstalk allows developers to "open the hood" to tinker with the AWS resources powering their applications. AWS customers can now choose to have as much automation or as much control as they wish.

Financial Guidance

The following forward-looking statements reflect Amazon.com's expectations as of January 27, 2011. Our results are inherently unpredictable and may be materially affected by many factors, such as fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, changes in global economic conditions and consumer spending, world events, the rate of growth of the Internet and online commerce and the various factors detailed below.

First Quarter 2011 Guidance

Net sales are expected to be between $9.1 billion and $9.9 billion, or to grow between 28% and 39% compared with first quarter 2010.
Operating income is expected to be between $260 million and $385 million, or between 34% decline and 2% decline compared with first quarter 2010.
This guidance includes approximately $140 million for stock-based compensation and amortization of intangible assets, and it assumes, among other things, that no additional business acquisitions or investments are concluded and that there are no further revisions to stock-based compensation estimates.

A conference call will be webcast live today at 2 p.m. PT/5 p.m. ET, and will be available for at least three months at www.amazon.com/ir. This call will contain forward-looking statements and other material information regarding the Company's financial and operating results.

These forward-looking statements are inherently difficult to predict. Actual results could differ materially for a variety of reasons, including, in addition to the factors discussed above, the amount that Amazon.com invests in new business opportunities and the timing of those investments, the mix of products sold to customers, the mix of net sales derived from products as compared with services, the extent to which we owe income taxes, competition, management of growth, potential fluctuations in operating results, international growth and expansion, the outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, risks of inventory management, seasonality, the degree to which the Company enters into, maintains and develops commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, and risks of fulfillment throughput and productivity. Other risks and uncertainties include, among others, risks related to new products, services and technologies, system interruptions, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. In addition, the current global economic climate amplifies many of these risks. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

Our investor relations website is www.amazon.com/ir and we encourage investors to use it as a way of easily finding information about us. We promptly make available on this website, free of charge, the reports that we file or furnish with the SEC, corporate governance information (including our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics), and select press releases and social media postings.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Kindle, Kindle 3G and Kindle DX are the revolutionary portable readers that wirelessly download books, magazines, newspapers, blogs and personal documents to a crisp, high-resolution electronic ink display that looks and reads like real paper. Kindle 3G and Kindle DX utilize the same 3G wireless technology as advanced cell phones, so users never need to hunt for a Wi-Fi hotspot. Kindle is the #1 bestselling product across the millions of items sold on Amazon.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, www.amazon.cn, and www.amazon.it. As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Cyber Monday - eBay vs. Amazon.com

2010-11-29T08:19:00.002-05:00

Amazon Gold Box Specials All Christmas Shopping Season Long!

Well it's Cyber Monday morning and all the ecommerce sites are all geared-up for it, well, except for eBay it seems. There is nary a mention of "Cyber Monday" on eBay's homepage. Sure, there are sale and discount graphics, but apparently eBay isn't hopping on the Cyber Monday bandwagon. If I were selling on eBay, this would be very troubling.

Amazon.com however, is driving the bandwagon. Their usual Gold Box Deals page is full of sale prices, discounts and specials on hundreds of items across many, if not all, of their many categories. In addition to that, Amazon has a special Cyber Monday Deals page with special deals for today only. A stroll through some of their categories also reveals a lot of sale prices on other items as well.

While Amazon.com appears to be making major attempts to bring in new customers, eBay is making their feeble attempt to draw in more sellers by offering free listings until after the first of the year....something that, by the way, Amazon offers year round.

But it isn't just eBay competitor Amazon.com that is offering deals and making a big deal of Cyber Monday. Twitter is abuzz with #cybermonday trending highest. Do a search for any ecommerce giant (Wal-Mart, Target, Buy.com, Overstock.com, K-Mart, Sears...you get the idea) and chances are that they are running some sort of Cyber Monday sale.

Now granted, Cyber Monday isn't the biggest online shopping day of the year, that comes about the second Monday in December, but what's up eBay? The sellers who bring in the customers and who paid for Meg Whitman's vanity run for governor deserve to have at least one engineer make up one banner with a link for today, don't they?

Whitman for Governor - Why That Phrase in Itself Means California is Screwed

2010-10-10T06:34:00.002-04:00

I was recently asked why FireMeg.com hadn't posted anything about the California gubernatorial race. I really know nothing about California politics other than the state is broke and seems to have a bit of a dysfunctional legislature. Those two reasons alone should be reasons enough not to vote for Meg Whitman. The whole illegal maid thing is a bit concerning as well, but for reasons other than have been repeated over and over in the media. And the amount of money she's spent so far on the campaign...that's a good enough reason to vote for anyone else.

Keep in mind that when Meg Whitman took the head position at eBay, things were already going along quite well. The company was expanding and becoming popular, the internet boom was...booming, and the company had plenty of extra cash laying around to work with for expanding the business. This led to a situation where an inflatable doll in the CEO's office could have probably accomplished some pretty good growth during its tenure. This is nothing like California, which apparently is virtually bankrupt and has a government that can't seem to agree on anything. Whitman is untested when it comes to this type of scenario. In fact, eBay under her leadership was beginning a slow decline in growth as Whitman wrapped up her time there.

On the illegal immigrant maid.... First of all, I could care less. Should it even be an issue? Not for the reasons that have been suggested. She was paying the woman decent wages and apparently the woman committed fraud and had fake documents when she was hired. Fine. Not something to worry about, except..... Whitman is supposed to be a business virtuoso with uncompromising leadership ability and wisdom beyond the normal Fortune 500 CEO's who might only have a net worth of a $100 million. How then do you let this happen? How do you also (if you're going to believe the story of the maid that Whitman knew she was illegal and fired her) not worry about this during the election until the maid comes forward? Was she just hoping that it wouldn't come up? And why wouldn't you help a worker that you've had personal contact with for years get citizen ship....especially when you're a friggin' billionaire and you have the ability to pull those strings? Maybe she was missing the dust on top of the picture frames and Meg Whitman just used the whole illegal status thing to get rid of her....I don't know, but the whole things makes you question Whitman's decision making skills.

Then there's the money. Meg Whitman now holds the record for the highest self-funding of a political campaign in US history. Way to go! She's spent over $120,000,000.00 of her own money and said she is willing to spend up to $150,000,000.00 of her own money. AND SHE'S BEHIND IN THE POLLS! This is where my head starts swelling and is in danger of exploding. Whitman is a former CEO of what at one point was one of the largest internet companies in the world. She ran a friggin' company (supposedly responsible for huge growth too) that made its money from a website! Now, you'd think that since the cost of bandwidth, memory, servers etc. has all come down drastically since she started at eBay, and since she should have a lot of connections that Whitman could have easily started a grassroots web campaign without spending virtually anything. I mean, I'm not a billionaire, I don't have my company giving me millions of stock options that I can sell after manipulating the market year after year, but I do have some common sense.

Whitman has spent nearly a fifth of what Obama spent during his entire campaign, of her own money. Yet her claim to fame is that she was able to take a small internet company and make it huge. So why couldn't she do the same with an internet campaign? Why the need to spend five or six times what her opponent is spending? As California still doesn't have a budget and is quickly going broke, conventional wisdom would say that overspending on a campaign is counterintuitive. While her rhetoric may be about fiscal conservatism, her spending is what everyone is hearing, and it's saying that she's just not very effective.

Former eBay Employee Speaks Out

2010-08-18T11:18:00.002-04:00

There's a new post on the Auctionbytes blog about a former eBay employee who is speaking out a bit and confirming a lot of what eBay critics and sellers have been saying and thinking over the past few years. The former employee was a TSAM (Top Seller Account Manager) who dealt with the top 1% of eBay sellers in terms of sales. The article is worth checking out and shows numerous ways in which eBay catered to the large sellers while basically walking all over the smaller sellers.

The employee stops short of saying that eBay intentionally used tactics that would harm certain sellers, something that many current and former sellers would love to debate.

Firemeg.com on Twitter

2010-08-18T10:54:00.001-04:00

Now you can follow Firemeg on Twitter. See what's going on in online eCommerce with news and informational links and posts.

Firemeg.com on Facebook

2010-08-17T09:42:00.002-04:00

Firemeg.com finally has a presence on Facebook. You can view the Firemeg page and become a fan if you'd like. We're looking for Admins for this account to post eBay related info and stories to Facebook. We're also extending the invitation of Admin status to persons interested in posting articles to the Firemeg Blog on Firemeg.com. You can take advantage of Firemeg's high search engine rank and link back to stories on your website, blog, or video pages.

Interested parties can email Firemeg or post to our wall on Facebook.

John McCain to Make eBay Inc. CEO Meg Whitman "King of America"

2008-10-24T07:36:00.003-04:00

If you are still an undecided voter, think about this before you make up your mind... John McCain has said that he likes former eBay CEO and current highly paid consult, Meg Whitman, for Secretary of Treasury. Whitman became a billionaire while at the helm of eBay Inc. all the while maintaining one of the lowest ratings of any CEO (around 3-5% approval rating in a Forbes poll).

Her hand-picked replacement, John Donahoe, in his short tenure as CEO has upset the eBay userbase of both buyers and sellers with many changes envisioned by Whitman and while guided by her insights and direction. The price of eBay stock has dropped much more than other similar companies of late. The share price is now trading at less than half its 52 week high.

eBay just announced last week that they would be borrowing $1 billion from Bank of America (a recipient of the US Government's bailout funds) to buy Bill Me Later....borrowing money to buy consumer debt and a consumer financing company in a market under an incredible credit crunch, caused largely by individuals borrowing too much money en masse. Oh, and eBay is borrowing the money despite having over $3 billion in cash sitting in off-shore banks.

eBay's business model and lack of competition made it an assured success; Whitman simply sat at the steering wheel of the train as the company grew, throwing money at pet projects and investments and acquisitions that she felt would stimulate faster and further growth. But many of her decisions resulted in massive financial loss and upset the userbase. Skype was purchased for several billion dollars, and eBay two years later wrote off over a billion on the balance sheet. At current Skype is still bringing in only several hundred million dollars per year in revenue - not profit.

One of the cornerstones of Whitman's policy / plans was expansion into China and other Asian markets. A good idea, but unfortunately for eBay investors she did not have the foresight to do so until the markets already had their own business models. Whitman dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into eBay China only to later shut the site down. The results were similar in other Asian markets where Whitman tried to unseat the market leaders in online auctions and ecommerce. If failure wasn't bad enough, Whitman gave eBay in China another try, spending even more money and failing to succeed again.

Under her direction, eBay launched eBay Express, a site costing tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars over the course of its existence (yes, it failed also, and has been shut down). Spending so much money on a site that simply duplicated product listing already on eBay.com without having a way for sellers to actually add products was not only redundant, but just plain stupid. Express and the cost in time, money and human capital was loathed by eBay's userbase, yet Whitman continued to pour money into the project despite the widespread opposition by the site's users.

If you were horrified by the events of September 11th and if the thought of anyone benefitting financially from the deaths of 3000+ Americans that day and from the ~5000 soldiers killed in the war and 50,000+ wounded..... you might be equally horrified to know that directly following the attacks on the World Trade Center, Whitman launched the Auction for America benefit auction on eBay.com. Her goal, she said, was to prevent a decline in revenue and the associated drop in stock price by appealing to the patriotism of Americans. This was one of her successes, because by the beginning of December 2001, eBay stock hit a 52 week high....a price that is higher than the current stock price.

NPR has said that whoever is appointed as Secretary of Treasury will become "King of America." If you feel comfortable having Meg Whitman crowned "King of America" and having your financial well-being in her hands, then by all means, vote for John McCain. Or you might want to join eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar, in his support for Barack Obama.

Some things to ponder about Whitman before the election:

Whitman's prior experience consisted of working as a marketing director at Hasbro, overseeing the global marketing of the Mr. Potato Head and Playskool brands.

Whitman was NOT a McCain supporter in the primaries, she was active as a co-chair in the campaign of Mitt Romney.

Her only notable charitable donations involve gifting $30 million to her alma mater Princeton university.....while eBay founder Pierre Omidyar has donated hundreds of millions to fund microfinance around the world and created the Omidyar Network.

Whitman lost billions of dollars when she overpaid for Skype.

Whitman was instrumental in purchasing a stake in CraigsList, despite the remaining shareholders' objections....then proceeded to sue CraigsList.

eBay stole the patented technology that allowed the "Buy It Now" button to work properly (end a current auction with a purchase immediately), then fought to keep using it without paying the patent holder. Then continued to use it despite an order to cease, and eventually paid millions in a settlement....all under the direction of Whitman.

During her tenure at eBay, Whitman oversaw the #1 and #2 ranking sites for internet fraud, phishing and identity theft (eBay #1.....Paypal #2). BTW, that's bad, it means those sites have the most fraud, not the least.

Despite millions of dollars of users money being stolen by fraud via eBay & Paypal, Whitman refused to implement any sort of verification process for users of eBay...for fear it would effect the stock value negatively.

Whitman has a horrible record when it comes to investing. The only two acquisitions that have resulted in good profits were former competitors - Paypal and Stubhub. Both companies that were beating eBay (in Payments and ticket auctions) were bought to reduce competition.

Paypal, which Whitman headed while at eBay, is not an FDIC insured bank.

It's not a bank at all, and the only banking charter it has is on foreign soil.

About the author: Firemeg came out of retirement and took a break from proudly clinging to his guns and religion in Pennsylvania to write this article because there is more at stake in this election than hypothetically raising taxes on Joe the Plumber and his hypothetical income from his hypothetical business.

Congratulations eBay Sellers, You Just Failed

2008-02-14T06:36:00.002-05:00

I would like to offer congrats, kudos and buckets full of sarcasm to the collective eBay seller community for failing to show an ounce of solidarity and a pinch of restraint that yesterday resulted in eBay Inc. once again proving to the world that management was correct by issuing sweeping policy changes and fee increases. I've been using and following eBay for nearly a decade, and prior to yesterday's glorious show of ignorance, eBay sellers were as close as I've ever seen to breaking the shell wide open, but in the end all it took to throw the cause into disarray was a 20 cent listing sale. Sad, very sad.

Prior to the listing sale the tide of events had turned in favor of the sellers for the first time. Meg Whitman is on her way out. Major news outlets were focussed on the plight of the sellers for the first time, and actually were giving come credence to the collective arguments against eBay's constant changes and exorbitant fees. Financial analysts and investment firms were losing confidence in eBay Inc. and many investors were bailing. Low or no-fee competitors of eBay were gaining traction and showing increased listing volume, while listing volume on eBay was down y/y. And while I'd like to have thought it was an eBay conspiracy to artificially inflate listings prior to the big "boycott," it seems as if the sellers really did just list an additional 3-4 million items (depending upon which auction count you use).

The reasons for being somewhat outraged at this are numerous. Most importantly the flood of listings effectively quashed any effect that the scheduled boycott would produce. Even if the boycott were to drop listings in half, it would be for only 1/2 a week, as the current sale listings will overlap the week of the boycott. Yesterday sellers showed that they could not afford to stop listing on eBay for a week or two and that the changes - although unpleasant enough to cry about - were acceptable in the end and something that sellers can and will live with as they continue to open their wallets to pay for ever growing eBay fees. Yesterday also showed that sellers are impatient, naive, incredibly gullible and desperately grasping for revenue and cash flow...

...of the nearly 4 million additional listings added during the fee sale, nearly 3 million will not sell. Conversion rates at eBay have recently been regularly dipping to around 30% on average and sometimes as low as 20% site-wide. Sellers could have waited one week until the new fee structure was in place and paid less in certain categories and gotten free gallery, but instead just blindly threw listings on eBay at the mere mention of a fee sale by management. And I might add, that fee sales and listing promos almost always result in marked decrease in conversion rates. So the sellers that listed items to "take advantage" of the fee sale yesterday will have a lower chance of selling their products and will receive lower ASP's (average selling prices)....all while paying higher upfront fees than if they had just waited a week.

It is for this reason - what I can only see as a catastrophic display of stupidity - that I will no longer offer any attempt to defend eBay sellers while chastising eBay management and their policies. I haven't relied on eBay for income in about a year, despite remaining a full-time ecommerce seller and while showing continued rapid growth. I am your competition. And with no listing fees, no final value fees, and lower payment processing fees (through Google Checkout) while maintaining traffic on par with most eBay sellers in my field, I have an advantage over you, as does every other former eBay seller that decided to actually follow through and make a statement by leaving eBay.

I see no reason whatsoever to continue to support sellers and defend them against eBay's heavy-handed tactics. Yesterday, eBay won, and it was eBay sellers who handed eBay the victory. The impatience that led to a one-day four million listing volume increase is the factor that will cement eBay firmly at the top of the online auction and third-party ecommerce business for years to come. Sellers yesterday effectively accepted the new fees, the new feedback policy and other policies (including new Paypal rules that call for 21 day holds on your money). John Donahoe begins his stint as CEO with wide reaching power that all sellers should shudder at. Due to Meg's recent unpopularity, recent losses in share price and the sellers' collective acceptance of new policies....I feel that Donahoe can pretty much do as he pleases for the foreseeable future. And sellers have only themselves to blame.

I had intended to end with a synopsis of eBay corruption, censorship, cover-ups and missteps over the last decade.....but the hell with it. If you are still selling on eBay and whining about it, nothing you read will make you come to your senses, especially after yesterday's performance.

Anyone needing or wanting to contact me can still do so via email.

Will Vladuz Return for an Anniversary Show Against eBay Inc.?

2008-02-12T19:47:00.000-05:00

I haven't seen anyone mention that the newest policy changes at eBay are scheduled for (pretty much) the one year anniversary of the Vladuz attacks of February, 2007. The attacks began several months of turmoil on eBay that included thousands of hijacked accounts and the posting of millions of scam listings as well as the financial information of thousands of eBay users to the community forums.

In the past few months Vladuz has been very quiet. A display of his hacking skills during the scheduled boycott (February 18th-25th) could be a huge blow to the auction giant - as eBay will be under much scrutiny that week to see how members react to the recent changes.

A lot of changes have occurred in the past year that would probably bring another large-scale Vladuz attack into the spotlight. In the past year the tables have turned a bit and the popular sentiment turned on CEO Meg Whitman, ultimately resulting in her "retirement." Also the stock broke through the $40 mark, only to fall back into the mid-$20's. The millions of dollars lost have woke up a lot of eBay investors. Also the slowed growth of the US marketplace continued and was contrasted by the accelerated growth of Amazon, which for the first time in December passed eBay in traffic.

The week of the 18th could be very interesting to say the least. That said, it will probably end on the 25th, anti-climatically. Time will tell.

Sellers to eBay Inc. - Do You Think We Are Stupid?

2008-02-12T09:08:00.000-05:00

Yesterday eBay Inc. announced that it would further lower insertion fees for media categories such as books, videos, and video games. eBay is acting as if they have given in to sellers and are offering a concession, and this is how it is being portrayed in the media....despite the fact that these changes were planned for some time and announced less than two weeks ago.

Does eBay think that the sellers who are threatening to boycott are really that stupid? And are they? Many former-eBay sellers who left eBay for the ease, convenience and no-risk / no upfront investment of Amazon are looking back at those sellers left on eBay, rolling their eyes and hoping they are - those that stay on eBay will be less competition at the largest marketplace for media.

Thus far, eBay Inc. is proving that it is anything but stupid with regards to its media categories. The conversion rates in books, movies, dvds, video games and music averages right around 30%. That means that eBay is making money off of 100% of those listings, despite sellers only making money less than 1/3 of the time. Currently the media categories have around 15,000,000 listings and make up more than 10% of the overall listings on the site. That's a whole lot of revenue generation for eBay Inc., and a whole lot of unsold items every day for sellers. Sure, there are millions of products in the media categories that don't sell each day on Amazon, the difference is that on Amazon, sellers aren't out any money when their item doesn't sell. Whereas on eBay, sellers collectively pay around a million dollars a week to not sell their products.

As Boycott of eBay Inc. Nears, Sellers Threaten Guerrilla Tactics

2008-02-08T08:05:00.000-05:00

eBay Inc. has heard the threats of seller boycotts and "strikes" before, in fact, they hear it to some degree with every fee increase. This time though, it looks like the threats are making an impact in the mainstream media. The reason for the widespread press about the planned boycott this time may have roots in the investment and financial community - as investors are less-than-thrilled that eBay Inc. shares have fallen almost $15 over the course of the last several months. After years of conservative guidance and slowing growth, investors are feeling a bit like eBay sellers at the moment - feeling betrayed and even as if they've been outright lied to.

I've seen many boycott "attempts" and they all have been less than spectacular, but this time the media attention is focused on the deteriorating moral of sellers and many sellers are planning to stage guerrilla attacks on the auction giant during the week of the strike. The following are some plans I've seen discussed concerning some sellers' plans during the week of the boycott (February 18-25), while I can understand the frustration of sellers, I am not endorsing the following actions (just reporting on them) as some may be less than legal.

1. Attack eBay Employee Auctions: Some sellers are threatening to bid up items and use eBay's BIN feature to "purchase" products from actual eBay employees that are selling items on the site. eBay employees need to identify themselves as such in the item description area and their products and user ID's are easily found by doing a search in titles and descriptions for "ebay employee." The rumor is that as revenge for the new feedback system, some sellers will "purchase" items from the employees, just to leave negative feedback. (Take a look at the items that the eBay employees have listed, and see how many are violating the shipping policy by charging a handling fee above the cost of packaging materials).

2. Disrupt the Market by Placing Thousands of Bids: There's an old trick that scammers seem to do for shits-and-giggles, place thousands and thousands of bids and then just don't pay. Not only does it cause headaches for sellers who have to file a bunch of UID's, sometimes some sellers will actually ship the items without payment. I've seen reports that some boycotters are planning this tactic for the week of the strike, both as revenge against eBay and against any scabs that cross the cyber-picket line to sell items during the strike.

3. List Fraudulent Auctions During Strike - Then Claim a Hijacking: Some sellers are suggesting that all participants of the strike list obviously fraudulent auctions for high ticket items during the strike to put a strain on eBay's Trust & Safety department. The plan is to upload an enormous volume of auctions, let them run a couple of days and then call/contact eBay stating that the account has a victim of a scammer and that it was hijacked. In cases of reported hijacking, eBay ends the listings and locks the account so that a new password can be added - eBay also resets the seller account of any hijacking victim back to the point prior to the fraudulent listings. This plan could prove terribly troublesome for eBay, as disproving a hijacking would be difficult especially with a large portion the seller base upset over new changes. The plan also backs eBay Inc. into a corner. Refusing to end the auctions or to deal with the alleged hijackings would be a public relations nightmare if any innocent victims of actual hijackings were not dealt with properly. Failure by eBay to cancel reported listings could result in innocent buyers being victims of real fraudulent listings and result in those buyers being scammed out of thousands of dollars.

4. Leave Without Paying Your Bill: Some sellers who claim to have ended their auctions, vow to never return and some are vowing never to pay their seller fees. eBay Inc. generates roughly 2/3 of its revenue from eBay.com listings. Any sellers who use this tactic will directly affect eBay's bottom line. If enough sellers do it, the Q1 earnings call would be very entertaining.

The preceding plans could have a huge impact on eBay if sellers were to follow through with their plans. So are there ways to take a jab at eBay legally and without breaking eBay policy? The following options have been bantered about by sellers as options for just that, with no apparent policy violations associated with them.

1. Withdraw All Money From Paypal Accounts: Disgusted by management's policy changes, some eBayers are calling for their fellow sellers to withdraw all money from Paypal and send it to their own banks. One of eBay's benchmarks of success is that sellers have over $1 billion in Paypal accounts. If this were to suddenly change, it would show that not only are sellers upset, but that confidence in Paypal - as well as eBay Inc. as a whole - has been shaken.

2. Shop Somewhere Else on the Web: eBay isn't the only game in town. While eBay's growth has slowed, ecommerce as a whole continues to expand rapidly. For the week of the boycott, don't just stop giving eBay your business, give it to another business. There are many former eBay sellers who have already left eBay and set up their own shops on the internet. If you haven't shopped beyond the confines of eBay, perhaps now is a good time to go window shopping....you just might be surprised at the selection and price that other sites are offering.

3. Cease From Using Other eBay Inc. Services: eBay.com is not eBay Inc.'s only revenue generator. A boycott of eBay while still using other eBay services is weak. For the week of the strike refrain from using: Paypal, Skype, Stubhub, Stumbleupon, Half.com, Rent.com, Shopping.com, eBayExpress, Kijiji.com etc.

After witnessing numerous boycotts of eBay fail in the past I was at first skeptical that this boycott could accomplish anything. I'm starting to change my mind. The mainstream media has picked up on the massive unrest and unlike in the past, now there are viable alternatives to eBay for many sellers in many categories. Previous boycott attempts ended with virtually no press and with sellers crawling back to eBay in droves, heads hung down with shame on their faces. A lot has changed since the last boycott attempt and there are now more options for those wanting to leave eBay, and those options are now much more user friendly and able to provide much more traffic to sellers than in the past.

Anti-eBay Site Bombarded With Bots - Is eBay Inc. to Blame?

2008-02-08T01:16:00.000-05:00

Firemeg.com has for the past several days been bombarded with with bots, hits and false click-throughs on paid advertisements. The past few days have shown a marked increase in "traffic" - up to 10 times the normal volume. One can only wonder if it has anything to do with the recent changes in policy at eBay Inc. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but it seems odd that after almost three years, FireMeg is now being bombarded with bots.....and this comes at a time when a new CEO has assumed the helm and also it comes after a three month hiatus from posting articles to this blog and updates to the site.

For the first time in its existence, eBay Inc. has lost grip of the leash that holds back its customers (eBay sellers) and also control of the mainstream media. In recent months we've seen major news outlets and financial publications wonder aloud how the company would fare under new leadership, and for the first time questioning of Meg Whitman's abilities reached the mainstream. The stock price has fallen and the current sell-through rate is at around 30% sitewide for eBay.com - a 25% decrease in the past two weeks. Sellers are planning to "strike" from all eBay activity beginning on February 18th. The decreased moral of analysts is only eclipsed by the crushed moral of the sellers on the site.

In the next few days, I will look into the bombardment of FireMeg.com further, but at present it appears that the attacks are coming from proxy servers/IP addresses. In the meantime, I will pose this question....Who has the motive to issue such attacks? FireMeg.com has a relatively low volume of traffic and advertising revenue when compared to other sites that I own, no sensitive information is contained on the site, and no user info is stored on the server....so is thinking that eBay Inc. may be behind the attacks so far fetched?

Protests & Boycotts of eBay Inc. are Gaining Steam

2008-02-04T09:12:00.000-05:00

The big boycott week seems to be scheduled for February 18th - 25th. Sellers are downright pissed off about the recent changes in policy and are planning not to list items on eBay.com during that time period. Despite the pro-eBay side saying that the boycotts will not work, sellers seemed poised to try one, or at least talk really loudly about it. YouTube has been starting to get videos about the boycott as well.

This morning both PSU and Medved show that listings increased over yesterday. The boycott remains two weeks away. Many sellers have said that they are making a last ditch effort to unload their inventory before the boycott begins. Doing so obviously shows the world the opposite of what their boycott is intended for - it shows that these sellers need eBay, and the increased listings up until the boycott prove it.

Should the listing volume on eBay increase during the boycott. eBay will be able to claim an administrative victory and claim that their new policies were justified and successful, which should be every sellers nightmare, because it opens the door for more unchecked fee increases by management in the future.

eBay Inc. Shows Listing Volume Increase

2008-02-02T00:29:00.000-05:00

Dear Pissed Off Sellers,
You are playing into eBay management's scheme. I just checked the PSU numbers and listings are up. You can't talk one game and then play another and expect everyone else to carry the bag. Listing are up since eBay lied about the fee increase and took away your ability to leave negative feedback.

To be brutally honest....you are making yourselves look like utter fools.....and making eBay Inc. stronger. You are proving that eBay management made the right choices with policy. You're showing analysts that you are weak minded nobodies that just like to whine.

If you want to make a dramatic point, cancel your auctions and go elsewhere....PERIOD.

eBay Fixes All Fraud......With a Video Game?

2008-02-01T08:09:00.000-05:00

eBay Inc. has figured out the solution to fraud. It's about time, after all eBay is the #1 phishing site on the net, followed closely by Paypal at #2. eBay Australia has created a novel way of educating eBayers to the dangers of fraud and how to protect themselves by posting a video game on the eBay.au site called Dunk the Scammer. eBay has even offered prizes to the players with the highest scores.

I can't imagine an educational video game having much effect in the way of preventing fraud, but hey, at least eBay can say it is trying to educate buyers. It would be interesting to know how much time and money was devoted to creating the game, and how far that money would have gone in staffing customer service reps in Trust & Safety that could be used to take down scam auctions of hijacked accounts.

An eCommerce seller on the Yahoo! eBay financial forum posted a list of links to obvious scam auctions appearing on the eBay site right now. So go play the game and educate yourself on how not to get ripped off by those and other fraudulent auctions that eBay seems content to leave on the site.

eBayers' Voices Being Heard, But So are Their Mixed Messages

2008-01-31T09:14:00.000-05:00

Oh, the drama in eBay-Land! Sitting back and watching the carnage is more than amusing. Fee increases and changes to feedback policy have eBayers, particularly the sellers, enraged into a hissy-fit of staggering proportions. Message boards, discussion forums and blogs are afire with angry comments and threats to abandon eBay. And yesterday afternoon, stories of the sellers' sentiment went out across the AP wires - by this morning there are upwards of 600 news outlets (many of them mainstream, Fox, CNN etc.) that have picked up on just how upset the eBay sellers have become.

It seems as if the world is finally listening to the cries of the eBay seller, but what is it that the world is hearing?

Many sellers are threatening to discontinue use of eBay as a sales channel. There are numerous boycotts scheduled for different times in February. Want to participate? Just boycott any old time in February, chances are you'll be boycotting at the same time as somebody. I'm also seeing reports that some sellers have abruptly closed their eBay stores and canceled their listings. There are also guerrilla tactics being discussed in some corners that call for cyber-terrorism that would involve the creation of multiple accounts to place thousands of bids on items and purchases of BIN items - just to leave negative feedback and throw the eBay community into chaos. The overriding reaction seems to be that sellers will decrease their eBay use in some manner or some degree.

The stories in the mainstream and semi-mainstream media are starting to catch hold. People are starting to notice. But...what the world is hearing and what is actually being done is something different. Since the announcement about feedback policy changes and fee increase on Tuesday, use of eBay seems to have increased. If you look at the traffic stats on Alexa, traffic is actually up. The number of auctions listed on eBay has also increased according to Medved numbers while the statistics published by Powersellers Unite showed an increase in listings from Tuesday until just this morning, but now show a drop in listings of a mere 28,000.

Locally and anecdotally....I've spoken with two eBay PS's since Tuesday. Both are currently selling on eBay and both apparently don't keep up with eBay news, because neither knew anything about the fee increase or the changes to feedback. I should mention though, that when I told them, both were far from pleased. Talking with those two local PS's and a number of other sellers who had not yet heard of the changes, none mentioned anything about the changes being a good idea or anything about the changes having a positive effect of bringing buyers to the site.

I received a good deal of emails after my blog article yesterday, in which I suggested that a boycott would never work...angry emails. Seems that many sellers do think it will work, and they are more than happy to SHOUT about it in all CAPS in fiery emails. Time will tell if any of the outcry results in any changes, but my bet is still that sellers will not be able to organize well enough to bring about any sort of change. If the sellers' shouts do get the attention of eBay, it is even more unlikely that they will roll back the fees past the point of Tuesday's increase...especially since rolling fees and the FB system back to that point would appease a great majority of sellers.

Angered by eBay Inc. Changes, Sellers Threaten Boycotts

2008-01-30T09:11:00.000-05:00

Once again eBay management has managed to piss off a large segment of the active seller community by implementing changes that are meant to enhance the buying experience and jump-start the falling stock price. And like so many times before, many sellers are threatening to boycott the site or leave the site altogether in search of venues that, to them, respect the sellers more and implement less changes of such a dramatic scale. A quick look at the boycotts and sellers who threaten them makes it obvious that the boycotts of this go-round with management will likely be as ineffective as boycotts of the past.

The boycotts that are being "planned" will fail...for certain. Take my word for it, I've seen enough planned boycotts against eBay that I could give a detailed schedule of how the collective body of sellers will act in the coming weeks...and it doesn't end in a successful boycott, nor does it end in eBay addressing issue or rolling back new policies or fees. The first big error that the boycotters are making is that they are planning the boycott. And their whole notion of affecting change at eBay just goes downhill from there. I will outline below how to make a boycott successful, starting from the beginning. I've seen what hasn't worked, and I've seen what has been tried, and I know what needs to be done to make any impact on eBay...the rest is up to the collective body of sellers.

STEP ONE: Bitch, Whine, Complain:
Ideally this step should already have been completed by now or shortly. It involves simply letting your voice be heard in as many places as possible that might have an impact of management's decisions. Remember to check spelling and grammar of any posts or letters written. A good way of showing everyone that eBay's policies are warranted is to spell like a first grader and use grammar with the equivalence of a caveman.
Places to express your anger: News blogs, financial blogs, non-eBay centric forums & discussion boards, local / regional and national media outlets.
Places NOT to express your anger: eBay Community Discussion boards, eBay centric forums. It may seem like a good idea to hammer eBay boards with complaints, and you might think that it will accomplish something if you could just get enough posts.....it won't, guaranteed! Both LiveWorld and eBay have the ability to make a thread with 2000 posts disappear instantaneously if they want. eBay has already been censoring and removing posts on their discussion boards that mention boycotts, and it will continue. As far as posting on eBay related discussion boards goes....it's a good place to vent, nothing more. If posting there was going to cause the mainstream media to take notice, it would have happened long ago.

STEP TWO: Leave eBay
Go now, do not pass go, go directly to anywhere - so long as you leave eBay. End your auctions, cancel your store subscription, stop buying, cancel your bids etc. Do it immediately. This step should be done in conjunction with Step One. Holding off on leaving "to see what happens" will result in more of the same as you've seen for the past few years. Right now eBay Inc. is at a critical junction, growth has slowed in revenue and growth in listings has actually become negative. Analysts and investors are scrutinizing eBay with a fine-tooth comb right now. And eBay has been using profits to buy up other sources of revenue (ie. Skype, Stubhub, Stumbleupon etc.) in order to make up for the lost revenue. eBay is also now relying heavily on contextual advertisements that are appearing on eBay search pages and that compete with YOUR listings. eBay stock price has fallen $15 per share in three months and does not pay a dividend. eBay has announced a stock buyback program, again....
What to do: Cancel your eBay subscriptions and listings. You can always go back when (if) there is a new management team that will implement the changes that sellers have long been looking for. Ending of listings will mean a loss of revenue for yourself, but also for eBay. Also, you might forgo paying your seller account as well. If a large number of members leave with money owed, eBay will have to explain that during the next earnings call.
What NOT to do: Wait. Do not wait. Do not discuss it with your friends or on eBay boards, simply leave. You did wait the last time, and look where you are now...still a puppet with your arms tied to management's strings, willfully getting fisted on a daily basis.

STEP THREE: Make a Plan
You've been here before. Surely you've discussed, or at least though about, what you would do if eBay were to once again raise fees. So you should have some idea of what you want to do. Finalize those plans, recheck your options and decide on a definite course. I suggest that this plan involve diversifying your selling platform and DO NOT rely on any site that is free. Selling on free sites like eCrater is fine and can be profitable, but don't kid yourself, it will NOT be free forever. All it takes is a buyout of the owners by another corporation, and viola' you're back in the same boat. Pick your destinationS based on how they treat their customers, their customer service and their goals.

STEP FOUR: Implement Plan
OK, Go. If you've chosen your plan, go and put it into motion as soon as possible. The quicker you set up your new "shop" the quicker you will be indexed into the search engines and begin generating revenue.

STEP FIVE: Forget eBay
(No, I'm not being hypocritical. I no longer sell on eBay, but I do have a revenue generating eBay-related website, so I must keep up with eBay to some extent). Just forget you were ever on eBay. The ecommerce world lives outside of eBay and the rules and buyers are different outside the confines of eBay, which is now being viewed as an online garage sale that is full of scammers, frauds and phishing.
What to do: Leave eBay altogether, do not go to the site. The loss of traffic will be undeniable. Also, go silent. You've got a business to run, so run it. Don't visit eBay message boards for the status of things. Remember Lot's wife.
What NOT to do: Second guess yourself. If you feel you need encouragement, talk to anyone who has opened their own eCommerce store. Many professional sellers who left eBay years ago are now running highly successful businesses online selling the same exact products that they were on eBay.

I know right now many of you are thinking "I can't do that, I need the money or the cashflow." Yes, and no. If you are a mid-level Powerseller on eBay, you are giving eBay between $2,000-$6,000 per month in fees (selling fees and Paypal fees). And yes, by "giving" I mean giving. Most sellers who fall into that range will have enough traffic and pictures that they would require at most a $20 per month hosting plan for their own site (or photos on a third party site) to cover bandwidth and storage. Sure, quitting eBay cold-turkey will result in a maximum loss of revenue in your first month equal to your average monthly sales. But remember to consider that you won't be paying out $2-6 in eBay fees during that month.

If you choose to use a third party site, such as Amazon, eCrater, Blujay etc., you can start selling immediately, and begin getting traffic to your items within a day. The hardest part is going to be getting all of your inventory listed somewhere else...it's a pain, but you should have thought of that while listing thousands of products on ebay, a site run by a company notorious for raising fees that are already the highest in the industry.

If you choose to start your own site, you can build one using Zencart, OSCommerce, Cubecart etc. But unless you know how to code, it will look like crap - sad, but true. It will also not have all the functions you want it to - or that you are used to on eBay. It's a trade off. If you want to commission a web designer to build you a site, you are probably looking at a $3,000-$5,000 (or more) investment, but in the end you'll have a site that has pretty much all the bells and whistles that you can think of.

What I've Left Out:
There's more, much more, facing any seller who wants to wander away from the confines of eBay.com. You have to think about contextual advertising, targeted marketing in search engines / social networking sites / shopping engines, payment systems (you won't want to use Paypal and support the beast that is eBay), the evolving environment of web 2.0...etc. Do your research. If you are intelligent, flexible and creative, you can be successful outside of eBay.

FINALLY:
If you make it far enough away from eBay to have your own webstore or a store on a third party site you need to forget all that you were taught about ecommerce by eBay. Shoppers who shop outside of eBay are, for the most part, much different than those on eBay. Treat your new store as a business, refrain from using "I" when referring to your company in correspondence and item listings, refrain from using "eBay lingo" as well. If you aren't sure what I mean by this, check out a site like Buy.com and notice how it differs from listings on eBay.

If all of this seems overwhelming, you might want to consider logging back into eBay and listing some more items, as I've only touched the surface of what you need to do to succeed outside eBay. And as far as affecting change at eBay is concerned, the collective body of sellers (or at least a good portion of them) will need to all do the things listed above in order to force eBay to roll back changes.

eBay has been making changes for years trying to make the experience better and spur growth, but sellers keep telling management that they just need to stop the changes and go back to the format of half a decade ago. eBay has not listened, and it will not either until they are hit in the wallet.

eBay Inc. Policy Changes & Fee Increases Anger Sellers

2008-01-29T10:59:00.000-05:00

If you're still a seller on eBay.com, there are a few things you should know concerning policies and fees that were announced today. The biggest changes come in the form of a fee increase (billed by eBay Inc. as a fee "decrease") and in changes to the feedback system. Within hours of releasing the new policies on the eBay site, the eBay community forum, eBay related message boards and blogs have been lighting up with comments from eBay sellers - the vast majority of them being less than happy about the new changes.

Changes to Feedback:
Basically, the biggest change is that sellers no longer will be able to leave buyers negative or neutral feedbacks. That's right. I know, it's hard to believe, but you can see for yourself (eBay's announcement). For sellers, there is no trade off, no concession at all, which would make up for losing the ability to alert other sellers to a buyer's bad habits (or non-payment habits). Sellers have been complaining about the feedback system for years, begging management to take away all non-paying-bidders' rights to leave negative feedback. Now eBay has spoken, and they've all but given the green light for extortion by buyers via feedback.

Within hours of the feedback change announcement (while eBayers in eBay's home time zone were still tucked in their beds fast asleep) message boards have lit up with angry comments by eBay sellers. Below are some links to message board - on eBay and other eBay related sites - that show just how much eBayers dislike this new policy.

eBay Changes Feedback Policy (Thread on eBay's Feedback Discussion forum)
Yahoo!'s eBay Finance Board (Lots of threads with upset sellers and investors)
Auctionbytes Blog Article of FB (Comments coming fast and furious)

Changes to Fee Structure:
In what could end up being the shining moment of Meg Whitman's career, eBay Inc. seems to have pulled off the ultimate coup with the media. Last year eBay's spin was they wanted to have less items on the site, and they adjusted prices and policies in ways that they said would make that happen. Now eBay management is saying they want more listings, and to do so they have announced fee reductions. At first glance, that sounds wonderful for eBay sellers - dig a bit deeper however, and you'll quickly see that the only sellers who will save money are those sellers who have items that do not sell. Those successful sellers whose items get bids and sell, will actually end up paying far more due to the fact that though eBay lowered insertion fees (by pennies and dimes) they actually increased the FVF by up to 66%.

Auctionbytes.com published this article that shows how an eBay seller with an average conversion rate of 50% will actually end up paying more money. Raising fees is one thing if they are announced ahead of time, it's quite another to spring a fee increase unexpectedly....and it's far worse that they actually advertised a fee decrease to eBay sellers and the national media (and the investors who listened in to eBay's conference call last week) that turns out to be a fee increase.

Once again eBay Inc. has shown that it is an unscrupulous company focused on revenue and is more than happy to lie to its customers and investors. Yet to be seen is whether these changes will have the effect that is being predicted by many professional sellers - a mass exodus to other online venues, such as Amazon.com which for the first time in December beat eBay in traffic numbers. Meanwhile the eBay spin machine is in high gear and thousands of news outlets across the country are reporting on the changes as being positive, when clearly the changes are hated by the vast majority of eBay users who've seen them at this early stage.

The eBay Nosedive:
For those who have the opinion that eBay Inc. is mismanaged and headed slowly for the annals of dot-com-oblivion, this latest sequence of lies and fee increases affirms that eBay is in a free-fall tailspin that is picking up speed. Shares of eBay have fallen $15 per share since the beginning of Q4, and the slide continues as I type this, with eBay being down $.52 today. The number of listings in core auctions on eBay.com is still slowing and lags almost 2 million behind over last year at this same time. Seller moral is at an all-time low on eBay as well. The announcement of the retirement of Meg Whitman was long anticipated, but ended up being another sore spot for eBay sellers as John Donahoe was appointed as her replacement (and it was announced that Meg would stick around for a few years as a consultant - earning $600,000.00 per year). Donahoe is responsible for the much hated DSR program and he is behind much of the advertising that is now appearing on the eBay site, advertising that directs eBay shoppers off the eBay site onto competing web stores.

Time will tell the extent of these changes on the eBay community, but rest assured, in the coming days and weeks there will be a lot of outspoken sellers complaining about eBay's decisions and there will be quite a few calls for boycotts of eBay.

The Negative Effects of a Recession on eBay Inc.

2008-01-21T07:32:00.001-05:00

As the US dollar weakens and the economy slips further into a recession the talk about eBay inevitably turns to eBay Inc.'s financial performance in a period of recession and the performance of eBay.com in meeting seller's expectations during that time. You have opinions that feel that eBay will experience large financial growth as a company during a recession, and you have those that feel that eBay Inc. will feel the pinch like everyone else. Probably less polarizing is the question of how eBay's sellers will come out in the end.

The Case for Increased Revenue of eBay Inc. During a Recession:
It's only common sense that any business that profits by allowing down-on-their-luck recession victims a means of selling their unnecessary convenience items will get more business during a recession. And eBay offers - what at first glance appears to be - an economical means of getting some cash out of those X-Box games, CD's and overpriced designer clothes that consumers have been gobbling up...in many cases, instead of paying their mortgages on time. For someone who has racked up thousand of dollars in debt buying convenience and luxury items, many of them bought from eBay perhaps, selling their items on eBay seems logical and perhaps even profitable....heck, if they were willing to pay $550 for a lot of Playstation games, someone else will too, right?
Unlike other third party classified, auction and ecommerce sites (such as Amazon, eCrater etc.) eBay makes money on each and every item that you see on eBay.com. Each of those 3,000 Elvis albums on eBay right now translates into cash for eBay. Then eBay makes even more money with Final Value Fees and Paypal per-transaction and percentage fees after the items sell. This method has a been a cash generating monster for more than a decade. And with a virtually universal saturation of knowledge of this fact, eBay is bound to get some type of influx of listings from individuals during a recession.

The Case for Decreased Revenue at eBay Inc. During a Recession:
For anyone who has followed eBay or who lives inside the eBay world, the case for a slowdown of eBay.com during a recession makes a lot more sense. There are several reasons why eBay may suffer just like other areas of the economy during a recession including: poor reputation, past sell-through statistics and simply the high cost of trading on eBay. It is likely that some new sellers will flock to eBay to unload their items for cash, but it is also likely that many will end their eBay experience a bit jaded and wandering what went wrong, and probably blaming eBay.
In recent years, eBay Inc. has done very little to boost its reputation with any part of the country. Sellers are constantly upset of glitches, fraud and high fees. Buyers are unhappy with constant changes to the site and search and the mix of products - in addition to the biggie, fraud. Investors have not seen their investments in eBay materialize into anything resembling a profit, despite eBay posting numbers that show continued growth to some measure quarter after quarter.
eBay is rumored to be lowering fees this week. If it has the desired effect, the site will be flooded with listings. This will no doubt lower conversion rates for sellers. eBay management has failed gloriously at bringing and keeping new buyers active on the site. Of those 3,000 Elvis albums on eBay right now, probably around 600 will sell. During a week without a listing special, the same 3,000 listings would garner about a 40% conversion rate, but that is still only 1,200 albums sold of the 3,000 listed. Lowering the fees has long been requested by sellers, but doing so at the beginning of a recession makes little sense. It will end up lowering conversion rates and average selling prices across the site.
Professional sellers with eBay businesses are unlikely to dramatically increase their listing volume simply because of lowered fees during a recession, while eBay will be hoping that the largest gains in listings will come from new users. Powersellers will use a number of tactics to optimize their sales, but pouring tens of thousands of items from SIF to core won't be one of them. Although some large sellers who are on the verge of not making ends meet on eBay may do just that in a last-ditch effort for cash flow. For the effects of doing this, refer to Randy Smythe's Glacierbay DVD store. And eBay is unlikely to ever see the fees from a seller who goes down in flames in this manner.
New sellers are always good for eBay, but during a recession the likelihood that those new sellers will leave the site unhappy is higher...and the rate much quicker. Newbies who are greeted with low conversion rates and low ASP's are unlikely to sing praises of eBay to their friends. Some percentage of new sellers who sell because of an economic downturn will be successful and happy with their sales...don't get me wrong. But former eBay sellers can be a very vocal group. Add to the mix some anxiety about finances and too-high expectations, and eBay is likely to take an even larger hit to its reputation. The number of anti-eBay sites and articles has grown exponentially in the past few years as have videos of unhappy eBayers on YouTube. Whether these former sellers are looking for revenge or just to vent, the outcome is the same, an uphill battle for eBay and their PR team.

My Prediction:
It's been almost two years since I predicted that within three years eBay would be a virtual shell of what it was in the early part of the decade if it didn't institute appropriate changes to pacify sellers, stop fraud and fix glitches and decreased traffic. In that time the listing volume on the site has stagnated and even decreased in some areas. eBay's reach has fallen. Fraud and fees have both increased on the site. The number of registered users has climbed (with increases each quarter) while the number of active users has flat-lined. And the price of the stock has fallen around $10 per share. ...so although eBay is not yet bankrupt, the trend over the past two years has certainly not been great...that is unless you're an employee in management getting stock options.
I think the recession accompanied by lowered fees (if the rumors turn out to be true) will benefit eBay Inc. in the short term with slightly increased revenue generated from moderately increased listing volume. In the longer term however, I feel the effects of the current problems with the company, especially low conversion rates and low ASP's during a slow economic time, will drastically reduce eBay's pool of users and increase the outcry of unhappy sellers across the web.

Maybe eBay Inc. Shouldn't Have Gotten Rid of the Bottom 1%

2007-11-18T07:18:00.000-05:00

Earlier this year eBay Inc. made the less-than-brilliant move of removing the bottom 1% of sellers, based on quality / performance standards that eBay came up with on their own. eBay took into account sellers' recent negative and neutral feedback percentages in order to determine who would be given a virtual "time out." Now that online holiday shopping has begun, that move is looking like an even worse idea. Listings on the site over the past week have been down 2-3 million when compared to the number from one year ago.

And this drop in listings comes during a major eBay listing sale promotion.

According to Quantcast, daily unique visits to eBay have been steadily declining since May. Alexa shows that the number of page views per users is also still declining. Collective hearsay of online forums, blogs and other conversations seems to point to a decrease in ASP, but eBay refuses to publish the ASP numbers - so nobody can be sure how accurate the current performance sentiment among sellers might be. Unless eBay plans on doubling and tripling up on insertion sales and listing promos, it's clear that this Christmas season will show a marked decrease in available inventory on the site.

Congrats eBay Inc. You Beat Up the Little Guy

2007-11-07T07:18:00.000-05:00

eBay is a sleazy company. Period. That fact gets more evident each and every day. Yesterday that fact was plastered across the headlines as eBay won its "trademark dilution" suit against www.perfumebay.com. I'll try to keep this short and sweet, as my head is near the point of exploding each and every time I think about eBay. Basically, the lawsuit said that eBay was worried that Perfumebay.com sounded too much like eBay.com. Honestly, I don't know how Perfumebay pronounces their name, but it looks to me like it would be pronounced Perfume Bay. Anyway, eBay was worried that shoppers might think they were on an official eBay site while on Perfumebay.com. Given the track record of hackings, scams, fraud and general stupidity, Perfumebay probably wouldn't want their customers to think they were on eBay.

And one look at the site (go ahead, take a look, buy some Christmas presents - www.perfumebay.com) and it is obvious that it ain't no eBay. It's a nice clean looking site, simple in design and seemingly easy to navigate. It also appears to be a Yahoo! store. If eBay plans on taking everyone down that has the letters e-b-a-y in sequence in their names, who will be next? Type in any common word ending in "e" in your address bar of your browser, then add a "bay.com" to it. Most likely you'll find a website, possibly even an ecommerce store. Whatever the intentions of those sites for using "bay" at the end of their web addresses, it does not make it any better for eBay's PR to try to put them out of business.

This lawsuit is sort of like an elementary school bully beating up a retarded kid in a wheelchair using a tire iron. Yeah, the bully showed the handicapped kid who's boss, but so what, the bully just looks like a douchebag. ...and everyone who feels sorry for the kid in the wheelchair will probably show him some attention.

By the way, Perfumebay.com also owns the sites www.perfume-bay.com, www.scentguru.com and www.beautifulperfumes.com. Next time you need perfume, I suggest not checking eBay, but rather visit one of these stores and send eBay a message.

The stupidity of the ruling is not limited to the judge in this case. Heck, Pierre Omidyar stole his name from Echo Bay in the beginning. No, he wasn't trying to pretend that his company was Echo Bay, but it isn't like he came up with anything original to begin with. Also, more stupid, is the fact that eBay is still using BIN code that was nothing-short-of-stolen from MercExchange, and eBay has basically admitted that it is using stolen code when they paid MercExchange off the first time. But having to pay millions of dollars in fines was not enough to get eBay to stop using MercExchange's patented technology, no, eBay keeps right on using it, despite claims that they have came up with their own code that does not violate anyone's patents. What sense does that make? Finally, the utter stupidity of Meg Whitman & Co. to be bothering with these petty lawsuits is staggering. Hey Meg, there are problems with eBay and eBay's revenue stream, and sites like this aren't even in the top ten.

Vladuz and His Unfettered Access to eBay Strikes Again

2007-10-07T06:56:00.000-04:00

Does Vladuz have unfettered access to eBay Inc. servers and databases? The answer to that question seems to be closer and closer. Sure eBay's spin-crew are still denying that he has any access, but in the past few weeks, Vladuz has made it clear that he does have some access (just in case anyone forgot or never got to hear about his exploits due to the eBay cover-up machine). Well, it seems that he was back into eBay's computers once again, and this time it was personal. According to this thread on the eBay T&S discussion board, Vladuz emailed some of his critics on the T&S board before shutting down their accounts. Vladuz was able to limit some of their user functions on eBay, including the ability to sign in. These victims reported having their accounts reinstated within an hour "by eBay," but as the discussion on that forum thread continues, it seems obvious that it was Vladuz who lifted the restrictions and sent an administrative email reinstatement notice from eBay.

Ina Steiner of Auctionbytes wrote about the story on her blog with a story entitled, Hacker Vladuz Accesses eBay Servers, Suspends Accounts. In her article she reports that she was actually able to get a response from eBay on the issue. eBay's response? Basically that eBay fixed the problem and that Vladuz never had access to any private info, and only gained access to "externally visible servers." Which leads to the obvious question...why is the ability to shut down, limit and purge users' stores of all items available on external visible servers, and not on eBay's "secure" servers that hold the supposedly (ahem) unattainable financial information? This attack was directed at specific targets, and at least some of the victims weren't even sellers on eBay - so really there was little harm done (to the non-sellers anyway). But what would have happened if Vladuz would have had really bad intentions and went in and shut down the 20 largest sellers on eBay and purged their stores of all the inventory? Heck, even doing this to the top five stores on eBay would have resulted in a loss of 1.25 million items (around 2% of all listings in core and SIF).

More Reasons Why eBay Inc. Should Fire Meg Whitman & Comments on Skype

2007-10-02T07:23:00.000-04:00

First, a disclaimer: as many of you who've followed my blog and my postings elsewhere, I disagree with a lot of the decisions made in the past by Meg Whitman...and she keeps making decisions with which I disagree. I am by no means a financial genius, in fact after getting the highest score in the class on my first econ-101 exam in college, I sat back and got a B on my second, D on the third and something in the neighborhood of about a 30% on the last one. Then I skipped my final exam, which would have replaced my lowest score...ending up with my only D ever. That said, I welcome your insightful comments on how I might be wrong. (oh, and as always, I don't proof-read my posts, my grammar mistakes and spelling errors are my gift to you, and I don't need emails about them, thanks). Thanks to elikeebaycontinues on the Yahoo! eBay finance forum for feeling the need to correct a typo - "elike" reportedly works for an eBay PR firm and posts seemingly 24 hours a day to the Yahoo! eBay Finance Forum in support of everything eBay. Feel free to drop by the forum.

As I'm sure you've heard, eBay has decided to charge off the rest of the Skype purchase in Q3 and pay out Zennstrom and others founders around a billion dollars. This amount is not the max that the former Skype owners could have received, because simply, eBay was unable to take a viral product and actually make it succeed in the same manner that eBay.com has succeeded. The announcement comes right at the end of the third financial quarter as did the announcement of beta testing of eBay's forthcoming (read: God-only-knows-when) desktop app. Now, you may speculate that this announcement was made to draw attention away from the fact that growth had slowed even more this quarter and eBay hopes that this payout will mask the problems they are having with the "core." ...I'd agree with you.

The list below will have some links to graphic photos and some disturbing screen-captures (all of which appeared on eBay recently), if you are easily offended by any of them.....whatever you do, don't shop on eBay, because that's where they were found.

Reasons why Meg Whitman should be replaced (and not with Donahue):

Skype: Sure, usership is still growing, and people keep downloading it, and it is at the top of the VOIP field, BUT, Skype has not achieved the set objecting that it was purchased for in the first place. Originally, Skype was meant to bolster and expand the core with a new way of connecting buyers and sellers in a new way that would serve to be both cool & hip and at the same time increase security or at least the perception of security when buying and selling on the site. Note: When the deal was announced, eBay's sellers were less than excited about it, and many predicted what we are seeing now - a lackluster voice app acquired by a large company that couldn't find an appropriate way to monetize it, while being widely ignored by the core users of eBay.
eBay Express: Just typing those two words makes my eyes roll back in my head. What an utter an complete failure EE has continued to be from the announcement at 2006 eBay Live. EE according to Quantcast only gets about 3% of the unique visitors per month that eBay.com receives - despite being advertised on every page of the ebay site. A look at the statistics from Quantcast for pages.ebayexpress.com shows that the basic direction of EE was never achieved. Instead of the 18-35 year old age demographic, EE seems to be frequented most by middle aged, lower income users with no college education. Rumors have been abuzz for some time about the fate of eBay Express. Some say that eBay will shut the site down all together and reassign the employees to other areas where they are needed (Trust & Safety perhaps?), and other rumors suggest that eBay has already pulled the plug on Express and plan on basically letting it flounder at sea with little or no support or R&D. Note: When announced, eBay Express was viewed by eBay users as a redundant waste of time, energy and money that could have better been used elsewhere. It was also initially (and still) especially reviled due to the link between EE and two large fee increases for sellers.
Stubhub Ads: This one isn't a biggy, but it's still stupid nonetheless. Have you heard the recent Stubhub radio advertisements? They actually suggest that people shop on Stubhub for tickets rather than on eBay. They even poke fun at the bidding process (remember, eBay core auctions still account for the VAST majority of eBay revenue, and Paypal payments associated with those auctions increases the importance of auctions even more). The commercials state something like: ...you could think of better things to do on a Saturday morning than sitting in front of the computer screen clicking refresh. Hey Meg, you want this off the list? Fire the moron in marketing that came up with that brilliant ad. Note: Stubhub currently is offering UNDER HALF the number of tickets as are listed by eBay sellers on eBay.com.
VLADUZ: OK, enough already, just give the guy a job as the head of security, pay him whatever he wants, take orders from him concerning security, let him bring his team with him, pay them whatever they want, keep an eye on him and let him clean up the site. Whitman is the one who ends up looking stupid to the 80 million+ users of eBay when Vladuz shows everyone his little tricks. Most users don't even know who Rob Chestnut is....the head of Trust & Safety (that coincidentally, or not, has been on "sabbatical" most of the summer). Whether Vladuz is evil incarnate or Robin Hood, or something in between....eBay users don't really care. But they do care about having their personally information displayed on message boards, and despite the reassurances of idiot spokespeople like Hani Durzy and Catherine England and Nichola Sharpe, eBay users are concerned that Vladuz (and others) really do have access to eBay servers and databases, either through a back door, or a front door.
Redirects: This is possibly one of the biggest reasons why Meg should go. The number of scam listings on the eBay site that use redirects to lead (unknowingly) users off the eBay site to clone phishing and pharming sites is astronomical! Anyone using a browser that is not the newest, and who blinks while a redirect auction page loads is susceptible to account hijack, or worse. Sure, every company has issues like this, scams, phishing etc., but eBay REFUSES to implement a simple coding change that would prevent redirect code from being posted. Some have said that scammers actually have access to databases that allows them to bypass filters already in place in order to use their redirects.....this is possible, but go ahead, put a bit of simple html redirect code in an auction description and upload it to eBay. It'll work just fine.
Pornographic Gallery Photos: While many users have no problem seeing a picture of a fine looking woman pleasuring herself on a bed of fluffy pillows, some users do have a problem with it...particularly most women and anyone with children. Scammers have been using these porno gallery pics to draw curious users into redirect phishing auctions for well over a year. In the past week there have been thousands of these listings EVERY DAY. Note: do not click on the next link unless you are not offended by such images, or unless you are more offended that eBay allows this to go on than you are by seeing a woman's bare backside. This screenshot is similar to those used on a daily basis on eBay recently, these are from the completed auction pages! Notice all have the same title. What ever happened to eBay's filter? Or don't they even exist as I've suggested on numerous occasions.
Fee Sales: Decreased listing fees for a day or two or a month may seem like a good thing to some, but most professional sellers despise them. eBay offered a "successful" insertion fee promotion for all of September. No insertion fee - so long as you listed the item for under $10 with a gallery photo (that'll cost ya $.35) and had no reserve. Over the course of the month, eBay listings actually rose by about 2 million listings per day. And luckily, conversion rates seemed to have remained mostly in check (though some categories dropped to 30% or below during the sale). The silent killer of ebay sales is the average selling price, however. eBay (very smartly) never reveals average selling prices to the public. Sellers during each and every sale report their average selling prices going down, and this sale was no different. Note: Many speculate that fee sales are simply a way to manipulate eBay stock price, and for those that do, it seems that they have a bit of evidence (anecdotal at least) because eBay stock price reached and exceeded its 52 week high during the month long sale in September (coincidentally the same month that CEO Meg Whitman sold around 1.3 million shares of her stock).
The Out-Of-Touch-Factor: For years, decisions made by Meg Whitman and others under her direction have been met with a lot of backlash from professional sellers on eBay. Many have suggested that she is out-of-touch with the market and is only concerned about manipulating the stock price for her own gain and the gain of shareholder (which is fine, if it wasn't for the fact that many decisions help that group, while hurting the sellers who are the ones that are the engine of revenue for the multi-billion dollar corporation). In 2006 it was the "Power of Three," the there was "Social Commerce," and "Windorphins,".....and now, eBay has managed to top all of those idiotic ideas with their newest campaign, "Shop Victoriously." The Shop Victoriously graphic in the upper left corner of all eBay pages was immediately parodied by many eBay users in their signature posts on the forums and many anti-management sites with such parodies as: "Hack Victoriously," "Spin Victoriously," Spam Vicariously," etc. The retro font and the associated marketing campaign is once again missing the market and focusing on something (online auctions) that are increasingly becoming less popular. eBay users have shown (and the statistics prove this) that more and more people are getting over the fad of bidding on items and waiting a week or more to see if they have won the auction. People simply want to search, look, buy. Online auctions are not conducive to selling commodity items in a safe and effective manner. But, Meg & Co. made it abundantly clear that even common commodity items should be sold in "Core" rather than in eBay stores.....so the cycle of scams, low ASP, and market dilution keeps repeating.....while eBay's reputation as a source of vintage collectibles, antiques and rare items keeps waning.
Bugs, F--king Glitches, More Bugs and Needless Changes: One day in to the new beta version of eBay's desktop application, the complaints have started. Granted, it's in beta, but look for more (lots more) complaints, as eBay has released this beta version much quicker than anticipated (both by eBay and by users). And no, I'm not saying that other internet companies don't have glitches, some even end up costing users money and time, just like on eBay. The problem with eBay bugs is that they are preventable. Under Meg Whitman's direction, eBay has implemented change after change for the past decade. While some of them are good and useful, most are badly coded, glitchy and despised by the userbase. For four years, users have been begging eBay to stop fixing what isn't broken. And for years, eBay management has turned a deaf ear and shoved more dumb "enhancements" down the throats of their customers. Of course Meg & Co. give compelling reasons for the changes (combat fraud, combat fraud, combat fraud, improve buyer experience, combat fraud, increase conversion rates, combat fraud, increase ASP...etc). ....but, largely these enhancements have been major failures, and many get retracted or changed after coding issues are revealed or customer outcry reaches a crescendo of discontent. To add insult to injury for many eBayers, Mydanwei.com has a list of eBay employees' salaries. Many think that with a group of hundreds or thousands of engineers making around a $100,000-200,000 per year, eBay shouldn't have as many glitches as it currently does. Note: An eBay desktop application has been requested by many sellers and buyers on eBay for years - as a convenience and as a way to protect users against fraud. Finally eBay has agreed and produced such and app. (of course it looks like it took competitor Amazon.com to make one first to spur eBay into action). Firemeg will be testing the beta program and provide updates on it in the near future.
China: Another failure for the Meg administration. Failing once wasn't good enough. Instead of redirecting eBay capital and effort elsewhere (lots of places that are lacking), Meg goes all in in China again...which is not looking so good, since Tom Online seems to be seeing a slowdown in its growth in the wireless industry.
Foresight - or the Lack Thereof: For being one the most "successful" women CEO's of all-time, Meg seems to strike out, a lot. The only acquisition that seems to be working well as a source of revenue is Paypal (and Paypal revenue is largely dependent upon eBay auction and fixed price sales, and sellers with Paypal debit cards). And even the acquisition of Paypal was brought about after eBay failed at their previous payment gateway acquisition, Billpoint. Despite numerous acquisitions, all with splendid pronouncements of success to come, eBay has failed to really monetize any of the successfully, and certainly not enough to pick up the slack for the company if there was ever some type of disaster that results in the eBay.com auction site being offline, or experiencing a crash in listing volume. The graph below, which goes up to the end of 2006, shows the revenue and GMV of eBay (dark blue and green lines) with a graph showing listing volume on eBay.com imposed on top. Notice that despite numerous acquisitions, eBay revenue seems to be influenced mostly by the listing volume.
So Easy a Monkey Could Do It: Let's face it, it's hard to make an argument that Meg Whitman in any way shaped the course of eBay. Ask any seller or buyer on the site what influenced the direction and large userbase of the site and I doubt any will say "Well, that CEO sure was a genius!" eBay was a great idea, and one that caught on and did well, and continues to thrive to an extent, but the success of eBay had little to do with Meg Whitman. She's an photogenically challenged figurehead with very little charisma. What charisma she exhibits appeals more to the Wall Street types than to the John and Jane Q. Public eBay sellers. When forced, on rare occasion, to speak about and respond to critiques in a forum where she is speaking to the everyman, her speech is riddled with "so's," and "uhm's" and other hesitations that one can only surmise that she is either lying through her teeth or she feels intimidated talking to those who are affected negatively by her actions (corruption vs conscience...you decide). eBay users have been incredibly resilient with massive amounts of policy changes, coding changes, enhancements and fee increases over the years - this resilience is one of the reasons why eBay has thrived, despite Whitman's follies. Whether an eBay seller is selling something to make a bit of extra cash for a vacation, or selling on eBay to feed their children, most every active eBay seller has some incentive to be flexible and adaptive to changes that management imposes, whether those changes are viewed by the individual and collective sellers as positive or not.

Running eBay was a breeze for Whitman, and providing positive growth was not difficult, because it is driven mostly by the publics' need and desire to buy stuff and to have some extra money....and yes, it is that simple. eBay provided a marketplace where both could be accomplished without too much of a hassle. Whitman has been along for the ride that started before she began working at eBay. Her forays into communications (Skype) and social networking (MyWorld * Stumbleupon) have yielded results that are in no way even close to being similar to those shown by eBay auctions. So the question is, I guess, how many missteps and how many times does Whitman need to anger those who are providing the momentum for eBay Inc. before she is no longer viewed by Wall Street as the perfect CEO?

For anyone who thinks that Whitman's performance as CEO has been less than stellar, check out how much she has made from her stock options in addition to her yearly salary. And if you are a seller, take a look at your seller account and ask yourself if your sales have increased over the past several years and if Whitman is currently making eBay a better place than it was five years ago, or are you just paying more fees and getting poorer results than you were five years ago.

eBay Inc. Caught in Web of Lies About Hacking Attack

2007-09-28T07:11:00.000-04:00

Updated 10/1/2007: The video below shows another hacking on eBay in progress that happened last week, where Vladuz gained access to eBay employee Scott Noyce's employee account and posted personal info to his ME page and a link to an article on the Auction Guild website. The victim of this hack was the same Scott Noyce that sent threatening letters to Falle-Internet in Germany, threatening to involve the FBI if they did not comply with eBay demands concerning "scammer" use of their server. (No, of course the F.B.I. doesn't have such powers in Germany, and no, the company was not intimidated).

Admit nothing, deny everything. Good advice for a major corporation that is being made to look very silly by a Romanian hacker on a repeated basis.....this time though, eBay didn't stick to that motto, and this time their cover-up and quashing campaign is blowing up in their faces. This week eBay showed the world that not only is eBay not a safe place to buy and sell, but the management is completely devoid of anything that resembles ethics.

At BEST, the incident on the T&S board the other day was a prankster revealing sensitive financial information in a public forum or 1000+ eBay users. At WORST, it was an eBay caused glitch that caused users info to be automatically posted there when they clicked on a Paypal link on the eBay site - don't make that face, keep reading, because that's what one eBay employee (at least) told eBay customers that had happened. And somewhere in the middle is Vladuz. Those posts were signed with his signature and he is taking credit for incident.

Later in the day after the breach, it seemed as though eBay was finally going to take some responsibility for the incident. On the eBay Chatter Blog a post with the title Trust & Safety Forums Issue This Morning was posted by an eBay employee. That title is where the honesty stops and the bullshit begins. Notice the second sentence of the blog post...."I've been talking with our Account Security and Legal teams, and I'd like to share some more details about this incident." That's right, the author "Laura" (who goes by the name of Daphne when giving "customer service" on eBay) checked with the legal "teams" (notice the plural) before posting any information about the incident. So, an employee which eBay does not reveal her full name, and admittedly (like all eBay CS reps) does not use even her real first name in correspondence and conversations with customers (who pay her salary) checked with her legal team before announcing what thousands of people had already witnessed? She went on to write that eBay was in the process of contacting those whose names appeared on the lists on the forum. Funny thing though, as of yesterday, eBay still had not made contact with all of them. Now sure, maybe some were on vacation, but with 2000+ employees working in Trust & Safety and related fields, you'd think they could have contacted 1200 people within an hour or so.

So yesterday, the inevitable happened. Meg Whitman & Co. whipped out the phishing card. Like George W. Bush explaining why invading an oil rich desert country is a good idea by dropping "9/11" into every other sentence, eBay used the phishing excuse once again. In an InfoWorld article, eBay spokeswoman Nichola Sharpe blamed a fraudster (whom eBay has been working with law enforcement to catch), but declined to say whether or not the anonymous fraudster had been caught. In case you're wondering, no, Vladuz has not been caught, unless he is able to hack into eBay and post to message boards while incarcerated.

From the InfoWorld article: Regarding the credit card numbers, eBay now knows they didn't belong to the affected members and is fairly certain that the numbers weren't valid at all. "We have reason to believe this data was falsified to cause public concern," Sharpe said. How did eBay know that the numbers didn't belong to the members? Because some of the members on that list have been contacted privately about the issue, and those contacted CONFIRM that the credit card numbers posted to the eBay site were real, valid, and belonged to them.

Wednesday, another post appeared on the eBay Chatter Blog by "Laura/Daphne" in which she said, "While the issue was very unfortunate, it was clearly falsified to cause public concern." So now eBay is spinning the situation as if eBay Inc. is the victim of some devious plot by some unknown and unnamed conspirator who is hell-bent on causing "public concern." "Laura/Daphne" fails to mention who might have falsified the info about the issue, or how it was falsified.....thus setting the stage for another eBay coverup. The incident was witnessed by possibly thousands of users around the world, and many took screen-shots of it as it happened. Some of those who witnessed the incident actually contacted some of those on the list who then confirmed that the CC and other info was correct. Nothing false there. The screenshots are still available many places on the internet, here for example.

eBay Spin Doctors Get Careless

One good rule to follow when trying to run a coverup of any sort is to keep all low level employees quiet or at least have them deny everything and simply play "stupid." eBay didn't do this, not by a long shot. It almost appears as if eBay tried to flood the blogosphere with small boatloads of mis-information directly from eBay to try and confuse any eBay members who might stumble upon (no pun intended) any articles relating to the incident.

On Wednesday, xman@eBay.com (an eBay "Pink" who goes by Xavier) posted this to the Powerseller discussion board, "The site wasn't actually hacked...It was a server issue where the system displayed the posters' information rather than the post itself. Being that the credit card information was on a different server, that information came up incorrect. It was not some hacker sitting there entering in someone's information and using a card generator."

Huh? Go ahead, email xman@eBay.com and tell him what a douchebag he really is. In case you missed it....
1) All posts were signed by Vladuz (or someone using his signature) "SGI Inc. - emocnI gnitareneG rof snoituloS" which is the name of his "business," Solutions For Generating Income, spelled backwards.
2) Uh, xman, your spokespeople are saying it wasn't a server error.
3) xman's excuse is outlandish because that early in the morning there are not nearly that many posts to the T&S board that...and especially not that close in succession.
4) The credit card info was invalid, and didn't come from eBay/Paypal according to the spokespeople.....or did it, xman?

It gets WORSE, another eBay employee "Steven S.S." in a Live Help conversation with an eBay customer responded to questions with answers that seemingly would have been a ridiculous scenario, IF he hadn't simply been copy & pasting his answers from a list of answers provided by his superiors. The user asked Live Help rep Steven S.S. if he could explain what happened on the T&S discussion board. His response:
8:23:59 AM Steven S. S.
Due to an exploit of a feature on the PayPal site, some eBay users’ contact information may have been exposed. As soon as we learned of this exploit, we worked very quickly to shut it down.
8:24:26 AM Steven S. S.
This occurred when eBay users clicked on the PayPal account signup URL from the eBay Web site. Third parties may have been able to enter an eBay ID and get the user’s contact information. [IF PRESSED, this information includes name, e-mail address, shipping information and phone numbers]

Notice what appears in brackets - [IF PRESSED, this information includes name, e-mail address, shipping information and phone numbers] - or in other words, this idiot Steven S.S., couldn't even manage to copy and paste a canned response without copying and pasting some of the instructions to Live Help reps with their canned responses that were provided by someone higher up. Without that little slip up, it may have seemed that Steven was just making assumptions or speculating on his own, but with that bracketed instruction, it shows that the Paypal excuse was going (at least at some point) to be used by eBay to explain the situation.....and they weren't going to tell users about the credit card info by the sounds of it. For the entire ridiculous exchange between (probably former) eBay customer service rep Steven S.S. and an eBay customer, visit this thread on the eBay community forums. If for some reason, it gets pulled, I will post the text of the conversation.

The final eBay excuses that I could find were reported by The Auction Guild. "Various ebaY spokespersons also made statements to various press inquiries and calls to them by power sellers etc, that this was a hoax, that the information had been posted by a disgruntled user with access to the API, that the information was not valid, that the credit card numbers were not real and if they were real, they did not come from ebaY's database and were unrelated to info on ebaY."

So let's recap for anyone still with me....what excuses has eBay given? (and why it's a fishy excuse following each one).
1) It was a fraudster who posted the info manually, and the info was gathered in a phishing scam.
Think this is possible? Go to the eBay forums. Sign-in, make a post - even a copy & paste one - submit it, sign-out....and repeat 1200+ times. Oh, and make all posts almost simultaneously. Yeah, exactly. Even with 100 Romanian kids on 100 Romanian computers typing feverishly, it never could be done.
2) It was a server issue that displayed eBay users' private personal and financial info instead of the actual post they made.
Think this is possible? Go to the forums again. If you want to be real sure, go in the early morning EST. Go to the T&S forum. Sign in. Click refresh. Click refresh again. Repeat as necessary until you are sure that the number of posts during the incident was absurdly and abnormally high compared to the usual number of posts that are made.
3) It was an error in a Paypal account sign-up link on the ebay site that when clicked, allowed anyone to simply enter an eBay user ID (somewhere) and get that personal info of the user....and oh, it must have been automatically posted to the T&S board too.
OK, if this one is true, and you believe it....NEVER use eBay for ANYTHING again. Sure, this was the excuse eBay was giving customers (if you believe everything eBay says, you now have a serious problem), but come on, even I can't imagine that the engineers screwed up so badly (without being hacked, mind you) that they would have a link that would lead to a page that any user ID could be entered and suddenly financial info of that user would magically appear on the T&S discussion board...and with Vladuz's signature of course.
4) It was all caused by a disgruntled user or developer with access to eBay's API.
It sounds plausible, but the fact that eBay moved away from that excuse as things developed suggests that that is definitely not the culprit. If it was, eBay would have thrown the disgruntled developer under the bus, and when it had run him over, eBay would have hoisted his body onto a flagpole and held a press conference while Griff poked the bloody mess of a corpse with a stick - just to show the world that eBay was not to blame, and that they fixed the problem created by the disgruntled developer.

So What Did Happen?

Ok, for my opinion, I'm just going to refer to comments made by Vladuz. And yes, I trust an anonymous Romanian hacker more than I trust eBay. If after reading to this point in the article, you still trust eBay more, you need to lock yourself in your bedroom after covering yourself in tin foil.

Vladuz responded to the Cappnonymous video on YouTube (which mysteriously was pulled for "policy violations" without explanation - see the article on this, or watch the video on hidebehind). Vladuz claimed responsibility for the attack and said, "There's a lot of talk out there about this...what I can tell you is that the issue is unrelated to Liveworld (eBay forums)...there simply was a bot logging in with each account and posting a thread with a message that the bot passed along." He then alluded to stopping the attack by saying, "However...what makes you really think, it lasted 1h or so, but it could of lasted years..." See full screenshots of the video's responses here.

In other responses to that YouTube video, Vladuz poked fun at eBay saying that he hurts them more in a day than they hurt him in a week. He also said to stay tuned that more would be to come. He issued a warning to anyone who thought that using eBay was safe and secure by calling them "delusional." Vladuz also made an appearance on the Pheebay forum where he once again claimed responsibility for the attack.

More to corroborate Vladuz's account and shoot holes in eBay's story

The system administrator at PLMK.com wrote this article about how he used one of the compromised eBay user's credit card information to actually make an account on Amazon.com and purchase an ipod. Odd that he was able to do that if the CC numbers were not legit, as eBay has stated. Censored YouTube eBay hacking video-documenter, Cappnonymous, stated yesterday evening that after going through tons of screenshots of the attack, the attack actually began at 4:23 AM PDT and lasted up until 6:51 AM PDT. He reports that eBay finally shut the forum down in reaction to the posts at sometime after 7:23 AM PDT. [He's got screenshots too, check it out] So although eBay is publicly stating that they resolved the issue "within an hour," the screen captures show that their response time was at least THREE hours. So this information was available to be seen by anyone, good or bad, for more than THREE times as long as eBay admitted - that's a long time to have your credit card and contact info (everything needed to run a scam or buy things online with the CC) posted for the world to see.

At 7:00 AM PDT, our hero xman (eBay employee, Xavier), posted to the Trust & Safety board, "Hi all, we're looking into why this happened however I've confirmed with the US teams that the credit card information was indeed false for all the accounts." His post, which came a mere 9 minutes after the final attack post appeared, apparently was to help assure eBay users that their credit card information was safe. Note: any Fortune 500 companies out there looking for a good CEO? Hire xman, he was able to check 1200+ credit card numbers in less than 9 minutes. Imagine the things his super-powers will do for your company. (By the way - xman's post mentioned above, as well as two others were removed by eBay BEFORE the T&S board was locked down - which seems to suggest that his responses were off the cuff and eBay really had no idea what was happening).

If you are worried that your eBay user information and credit card info might have been compromised, you will want to check this list to make sure. And as a warning about future eBay activity? This from The Auction Guild: "Since ebaY obviously does not know how deep this problem goes, it is possible that ALL user information on the ebaY site has been breached, so if you have ever used ebaY, and have any sensitive information recorded on the site - such as a credit card or bank account information - you need to monitor your accounts for possible problems.....The other thing that is abundantly clear in all this, is that ebaY is NOT secure, even if we just consider the user ID email address factor that ebaY is so adamant about in their hiding user IDs from users, but obviously not from scammers, but then ebaY's lack of secure systems has been obvious since we first reported on the activities of Vladuz and the Chinese hackers, 11 months ago."

eBay - eBay Inc. w/ Apologies to Allen Ginsberg

2007-09-27T01:15:00.000-04:00

After the hacking events that took place yesterday, I've received a couple requests to re-post my abomination of Allen Ginsberg's poem....

But first, just let me say that eBay management has once again perpetrated an enormous series of lies against its userbase. The personal info posted yesterday (probably two days ago by the time you read this) was valid, including the phone and credit card numbers. The info is available if you look hard enough.

Also, I would like to point out that eBay continues to allow their Google Adwords to appear on my site. For being one of (if not the highest traffic) anti-eBay management sites on the internet, you'd think they would steer clear of allowing their ads to appear here. ...and despite the outrage and confusion of thousands of eBay users over the recent Vladuz hackings of the eBay site, virtually nothing appears in the mainstream media about the issue. Even YouTube caved to eBay and removed THIS VIDEO, which you all should see, that shows screenshots of the Vladuz claimed hacking of eBay....

My apologies to Allen Ginsberg-

eBay I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
eBay two dollars and twenty-five cents February 22, 2007.
For an auction listing.
eBay when will you end the scammer war?
Go fuck yourself with your double speak
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't list anymore till I'm in my right mind.
eBay when will you be angelic?
When will you fire Meg Whitman?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your millions of users?
eBay why are your forums full of tears?
eBay when will you end your insane censorship?
We're sick of your insane demands.
When can we go into the marketplace and buy and sell as WE see fit?
eBay after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Sellers, buyers leaving the site, I don't think they'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
eBay stop pushing I know what I'm doing.

eBay the stock prices are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial by
VERO.
eBay I feel sentimental about the sellers.
eBay I used to be an idealist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I shop on independent websites every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the computer on my desk.

When I go to Amazon I buy stuff and never get scammed.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen the pharming page.
At first glance I thought it looked perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
eBay I still haven't told you what you did to Aunt Gertrude after she signed up for an account.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our business plans be run by Wall Street analysts.
You're obsessed by Wall Street Journal.
I read it every week.
I see the millions your executives make on insider trades. On the backs of the sellers.
I read it online while looking for scams and waiting for Vladuz.
It's always telling me about eBay's earnings per share. Businessmen are losing. Ma &
Pa sellers are losing. Everybody's losing but eBay.
It occurs to me I was once eBay.
I was an infant once as well, but I grew then too.
I am talking to myself again.

eBay Inc. Proof of Hacking Video Pulled From YouTube

2007-09-26T14:10:00.000-04:00

A video posted by Cappnonymous was recently pulled from YouTube today. The video was posted yesterday and in that day made it to the top 4 most viewed video in its category with over 25,000 page views in one day. It also made the top 100 for most times added to the favorites list and most discussed.

The video showed a clear screen-capture video of a hacker attack that used eBay's databases to post eBay user information (including user ID's, passwords, names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers etc.) to the Trust & Safety discussion forum on eBay.

The video's creator says YouTube has given no reason for the deletion of the video. Here is his blog.

If you haven't seen the video, I strongly encourage you to see it. Responses to the video on YouTube have been quite shocking and many eBay users are in disbelief. Visit the blog in the link above for information on how to check to see if your eBay user ID was on the list.

Here is the video: http://hidebehind.com/68F952

The conspiracy theories are flying....did eBay have the video pulled to keep the whole situation quiet? Sources say that eBay has yet to contact the 1200+ users whose information appeared for millions to see on the T&S board.

eBay Inc. Member Gestapo Does Nothing But Aid Scammers

2007-09-26T08:11:00.000-04:00

Below was typed quickly off-the-cuff, was not proof read for errors in spelling or grammar - don't email me if you find any. Thanks
As you might have heard, eBay was once again hacked again by Vladuz or someone claiming to be Vladuz. You may have also noticed pornographic gallery photos in inappropriate categories, like Toys & Games or Musical Instruments. You might think that I'm going to (or at least should) harshly criticize Vladuz and the other hackers and phishers....or maybe rant about eBay management and their inability to do a simple coding edit to prevent use of redirects in auction listings....you'd be wrong. Frankly, this go-round, it is the eBay Gestapo that deserves the blame.

By the way, "eBay Gestapo" is my pet term for those members of the eBay community that like to use the "report this item" link (whatever their intentions, good or bad) while policing the site, in an attempt to clean up the site of policy violators and scammers.

I know this is going to piss people off, and frankly I don't care...

It is no longer the fault of the the scammers, and although eBay management refuses (for whatever god-forsaken reason) to edit the infrastructure of the site to prevent redirects and overlays, the blame for the massive hacking attacks falls squarely on the shoulders of the gestapo. Last night I tried to think of an analogy to describe the failed tactics of these unpaid eBay police, but I couldn't. The members of the gestapo that witnessed the posting of thousands of users' information on the T&S board yesterday did what they always do...reported the offending threads, went to Live Help, called their reps, and bitched about it on the boards after witnessing yet another shockingly slow response from eBay and Liveworld. Not only is all that a waste of time, it is just getting old. It is as if they haven't learned anything over the past few years (and yes, some of the gestapo of three years ago are still around in the quixotic quest to stop scammers via the "report this..." links.

Last night someone came to the T&S discussion board on eBay.com and started posting nude photos - the ones that were appearing in the "My Girl" listings (check out eBay Motors Sucks if you're wondering what all is going on) and then started using those photos - hosted by Andale, by the way - as their signature line. Just 14 hours after thousands of ID's were compromised on that very board, moderators failed to take down these posts for over 20 minutes, even after the poster taunted the moderators and more-or-less begged to be kicked off. One of the posts was entitled something like "OK How about this....Look at my hooch!" and another had links to websites that are more than critical of eBay management. The poster returned under another ID after Liveworld finally got around to censoring the posts, and started over again. Still, the response time for the removal of some posts (all with nudity) was around ten minutes - and this just minutes after the first round.

So what was the point of those posts? Several members on the T&S board debated it a bit, but here's my theory as to the intent of those.
1) Prove a point that eBay is not all that concerned with these scams and the posting of sensitive personal info. If they were concerned wouldn't they pay some overtime and have more T&S employees and moderators actively watching the boards - especially just hours after 1000+ users had their ID's & passwords & credit card numbers shown to the world?
2) Prove a point about the pornographic gallery photos. It was sort of funny to see that the posts did get pulled - even if it did take 20 minutes, yet there were dozens (probably hundreds) of easily findable auctions with pornographic gallery pics with redirects to phishing sites in the listings that had been active on eBay for hours (HEY ROB! You still there buddy? Better check your filters!)
3) Make a point about redirects. There is no simpler solution that would have such an enormous impact on the world of eBay scamming than to simply disallow the use of redirect code of all types within the body of a listing. Scammers use redirects and overlay images with links to direct people off the eBay site to phishing sites. Heck, they usually use eBay's own hosted s.gif (a transparent pixel gif) for the overlays. Despite the fact that eBay has shown how easy it is to prevent users from posting certain types of code (java, flash, cookies etc.) they still REFUSE to disallow the use of redirects. Makes one wonder.

Ok, back to the gestapo and why this is their fault. During the porno posts on the T&S forums, some posters were upset and, as usual, simply reported the posts to the moderators for removal. After the posts were removed there was discussion about the motives of the posts, as I had mentioned earlier. One poster even went so far as to post this:
"Only from the sad people who actually think they're going to get some cheap porn. I mean, who in their right mind is going to click on these auctions. In my opinion, the people who do really shouldn't be looking for this kind of stuff on Ebay. I see them appearing in the Stamp category, but I still have absolutely no reason to check them out. It' only a small ( I hope ) minority that would do this and frankly, they get what they deserve." Do you see where I'm going with this? Nobody actually clicks on those for "cheap porn." They click on them for one of two reasons. 1) to report the item or 2) out of simply curiosity.

After the events of yesterday, I checked the news sites online and my daily Google News Alert for "eBay" email....nothing. It is - like so many times before - like it never happened. There were some stories about it on various eBay related blogs and low level computer/internet related media sites, but nothing from anything near the mainstream media. If this was the first time it had happened, I could understand it. If it was the second, maybe still there wouldn't be much of an uproar...but this is a repeated systematic attack that has been plaguing this worthless company for years. ....and the eBay gestapo are helping to sweep it all under the rug armed with their "report this..." buttons and their caps of righteousness.

It isn't working, period.

For example, remember that Manhattan Jeweler who ended up being NARU'd and fined by the NY state Attorney General for shill bidding? Some members of the gestapo along with members of the part-time jewelry faction of the gestapo say that that seller was reported to eBay hundreds of thousands of times for individual policy infractions and shill bidding over a two year period. It took well over a year for the user to even be kicked off the site (btw - eBay made millions on FVF's and insertion fees while he was an active seller).

You want me to provide a solution, you say? Simple.
1) STOP REPORTING FRAUD!
2) Stop reporting policy violations.
3) Stop trying to lay the blame on criminals (nobody cares, not even the scammers, after all they know what they are doing is wrong - and lucrative).
4) Stop defending eBay! Sure, every major company has these issues, but they don't deny everything all of the time and most have some type of insurance or method of reimbursing their clients - not eBay.
5) Acknowledge the attacks and show your outrage - be vocal and let everyone know, send out links to the FBI, news outlets, blogs, post to forums etc. and let everyone know it is happening - just don't tell eBay. Members of the gestapo missed their perfect opportunity yesterday. Previous attacks happened in the middle of the night in the US where only a scant few members actually saw the members' info before it was pulled. If the gestapo hadn't jumped and pushed the "report this..." button, they could have drawn attention to the issue, and that is the last thing that eBay wants.

As long as you keep hitting that report button, eBay has no incentive to actually fix anything. Next time it happens, what if everyone that sees it reproduces the lists and posts it everywhere? Does that astound you that I would ask such a thing? What would it hurt? The scammers already have the info, and most likely they've already used it, sold it, or passed it on to other scammers. How would taking screenshots of the list and passing it on to the media hurt? Or posting the list to every board on eBay?

Are you fuming? Before you push me under the bus, get yourself a copy of that list. Contact those members on the list. Ask if eBay has contacted them. It if is like in the past, the answer will be NO. The only reason eBay contacted ANY of those on one of the previous lists is because several anti-eBay management bloggers and myself contacted the individuals and found out that they hadn't and promptly wrote articles about it. eBay is required by California law to contact - at least - those on the list that reside in California. Call a few of the people on the list, see if eBay contacted them and ask what they were told if they had been contacted by eBay. Also ask if eBay had locked down the account. If it is like last time, the answer will be NO.

It is well past the time when the community should be doing ANY policing of the eBay site! While Meg Whitman sits back raking in the tens of millions cashing in her stock options, the gestapo spends their free time trying to prevent people from seeing the effects of scammers, and doing nothing to get at the root of the problem - and not even anything that might help prevent future phishing attacks. It's a battle that cannot be won without help from eBay, and management isn't going to hire an extra thousand employees to police the site. ....but they will be forced to make changes to the site and their security if need be. Sooner or later the fraud on eBay will reach a critical mass and eBay will be forced to address the issue, with or without the help of the gestapo.

People are still being scammed - you aren't stopping anything. The best that you are doing is helping eBay cover their tracks and keep everything quiet. I know that feeling you get when you find a scam on eBay, you feel sick thinking that some unsuspecting user (possibly your Grandma) might fall prey and lose a few thousand dollars, or have their credit cards maxed out etc. But, stop and think about all of those users that found that auction before you, clicked on it, signed-in to the redirected phishing page and are already lost. Sure, they should have been smarter, and taking the auction down will prevent someone else from falling for it to....but there are thousands of them every day on eBay. You won't, and can't, get them all.

I won't venture so far to say that the members of the gestapo are eBay's bitches - well, I guess I just did. You do realize that eBay is lying to all of you and the rest of the userbase? If you witnessed the porno pics in the gallery photos yesterday, today or anytime....tell me, how do you think that they are bypassing Rob Chestnut's filters? Or have you woken up enough to realize that those "filters" are a complete and utter fabrication? I mean, common sense says that if there were such filters in place, they would simply filter the exact title (ex. My Girl Will Do Everything, Even Swallow) that is being used to bombard the site with thousands of identical phishing listings. If the filters are real, and do exist as the head of Trust & Safety assures us....then why don't they simply use them?

It only takes a bit of preschool logic to see that eBay is using you, stop letting them, and do something constructive to encourage eBay to put a stop to fraud. Meg giving a speech to a bunch of internet millionaires just isn't cutting it anymore.

eBay Inc. Hacked.....Yet Again! (Check Your Financial Info)

2007-09-25T17:49:00.000-04:00

This morning scammers, hackers, pranksters (whatever you want to call them), once again posted thousands of eBay users' financial and eBay login information to the Trust & Safety Community Board. I personally just missed the excitement and showed up to the board just in time to see that eBay had locked it down.

eBay has admitted that something happened, which is a first. So the magnitude of this attack, one can surmise, must have been quite large. Below is a video of screenshots from the attack. Also, check out more info on Auctionbytes, as they will be following the story.

eBay Inc. Releases Q2 Numbers & Investors Yawn

2007-07-19T08:57:00.000-04:00

There's no telling what will happen with the price of eBay stock today, but this morning in pre-market after yesterday's numbers were released, eBay at one point dropped $.66. eBay's revenue and growth beat both analyst and eBay's expectations. So why do investors seem less than excited about the relatively big numbers that eBay put up? There probably are several reasons for this, some that I haven't heard or thought of even, but it seems the biggest factor is uncertainty over the future of the core business, and in turn, uncertainty over Meg Whitman & Co.'s ability to generate revenue and growth. I won't delve into the financial numbers too much, there are hundreds of articles on Google News if you want the details.

A Business Week article says that listings fell 6% on the core site, while other articles are saying that there was a 2% decrease in core "style" listings and another 25% decline in SIF (Store Inventory Format) listings. Whether those numbers reflect US listings or all listings is a bit unclear. My guess is that it reflects all listings worldwide (eBay has a very good/bad habit of countering decreases in listings in the US with international increases in their statements).

It seems as if investors do care about listing numbers on the site, despite most analysts assertions to the contrary. Some die-hard eBay backers point to higher revenue on the lower number of listings as a positive sign, but the market doesn't seem to be listening to them. One thing that is important to remember is that during the last quarter eBay Inc. offered at least five listing fee sales and also lowered their FVF on the first tranche (sure the maximum savings on FVF is only $.19, but...) in an effort to boost listing numbers. eBay also began running two-day sales, and started announcing them up to two days in advance, so that sellers could be ready to list lots of items and/or dump loads of inventory from their eBay Stores into core auctions for the sales. Many sellers and some investors see these tactics as little more than an attempt to manipulate the listing numbers.

A 25% decline over the course of one year in SIF listings is a bigger-than-huge blow to eBay, and is in-line with the predictions that you've read from me. So why the decline? That's easy, "knowledge." eBay sellers are learning things faster and on a greater scale than they had been. Many sellers now know that eBay is not the only place to offer their goods for sale and still get good traffic. Combine that knowledge with the fact that many are simply tired of dealing with eBay and Paypal issues, and you have the beginnings of an exodus. The increase in number and quality of shopping search sites also plays a big role in the decline of SIF listings. Now sellers have the ability to have their items show up on dozens of websites around the world - the majority of them free - where before it was only eBay.com and Froogle (now Google Products) via their eBay feed. Some sellers are tired of the poor customer service too, and the fees....why pay fees now that there are viable alternatives? Five years ago it would have taken almost a computer science degree at the least to start an independent webstore and customize it so that it stood out. Today, many sellers are doing just that and having their sites up and running in weeks, and making sales shortly thereafter.

Meg Whitman is the other major reason I see for the yawn from Wall Street. She is so far out of touch with eBay sellers that it borders on the ridiculous. It has been over a year now since she started spouting her little catch phrase: "The Power of Three." The marketplace, payments and communications. Sure, that's powerful. The problem is that this is not a trinity, it's basically three somewhat related things. eBay.com in generating the majority of the revenue, and people are using Paypal to pay for their items, but not using Skype on eBay. Paypal brings in 40% of eBay revenue, but of that amount, a majority of it comes from eBay sales. Plus the "Three" in question are all on separate sites.

Meg should have kept counting if she wanted the market to take her seriously. Try the Power of Six: marketplace, payments, communications, networking, search & entertainment. The fad appeal of online auctions has long diminished and what remains are those buyers and sellers who do it simply to buy and sell. The new fads are networking and entertainment, both of which Meg has failed to bring to eBay. Unless you call chatting with a Live Help representative "entertainment." And search? Well, it seems that rumors of an eBay / Yahoo! merger are popping up all over the place on a daily basis. Some investors must want to see something like that happen.

eBay had the power to become a one-stop for a great majority of internet traffic. What it has become is what it was six years ago, the first place people look for used items to buy. If eBay wants to be taken seriously by Wall Street it needs to find some direction. Obviously listings and sellers matter to investors, ignoring the concerns of sellers is probably not the best policy. Also Meg & Co. need to start showing that their internet capital acquisitions not only make sense, but are profitable and popular. Buying up-and-comers is fine as long as occasionally a few of them make it to the big leagues, if they don't, why waste the money in the first place.

As I finish this little article, eBay stock is down 93 cents.

Survey Results for eBay Inc. User Satisfaction Survey

2007-07-09T09:09:00.000-04:00

To view the current results of the eBay poll click here. If you haven't filled out the survey yet, we encourage you to take a few minutes and do so. You can fill out the survey here. Results will be updated as needed.

First let me start by saying that this poll is not a scientific poll and I'm making no allusions to that whatsoever. What it is though, is the widest ranging poll that I've seen to date that has been published publicly concerning the climate at eBay according to actual users. Sure, eBay conducts their own polling, heck they will even pay you to fill out surveys, but eBay makes virtually nothing from those polls public - and what results you do hear are used to bolster a position or policy change that eBay has taken. As I write this, there have been 317 respondents to the survey. The poll is still open if anyone would like to add their 2 cents worth. While the sample size is not large enough to be considered scientific, we can see some patterns developing and use the data to start to see some trends of user mentality. This poll was not only advertised on my site, but on numerous sites with similar themes, as well as several news forums and blogs and several financial blogs and forums relating to eBay Inc. Only 2 people said they were not eBay users at some point, and 90% of those who took the poll are currently registered members of the site.

Questions 2-3:
32% of poll takers report having 3 or more eBay ID's, and another 27% report having two eBay ID's. Only 37% said that they have only one eBay ID. 41% report having more than one ACTIVE eBay ID in the past four months. It has long been suggested by some critics of eBay management, myself included, that Meg Whitman & Co. try to manipulate the share price of eBay and the reputation and success of the company by reporting large numbers of registered users. They report around 300 million users worldwide. Yet from this small survey, you can start to see just how many eBay members have and use more than one ID. (eBay considers anyone who has bought or sold and item in the past 6 months to be active)....

Question 4: How do you use eBay?
Over 81% of the respondents say that they sell on the site or have sold on the site in the past. Given what we saw in the last two questions, it makes you wonder if eBay's figure of five million sellers on the site is accurate.

Questions 5-7: Length and depth of eBay use
These questions show that a wide range of users responded to the poll. The results are spread pretty equally between users that have been members for periods ranging from under a year to over six years, and from zero to 5000+ feedbacks. 55% of those polled still report checking eBay for one reason or another several times per day.

Question 8-10: Past & Future eBay Use
This is the first point in the poll when respondents start to show a trend, a trend of declining eBay use. A majority of users say that there use in the past three years has declined - same for over the past year. Most striking is the fact that 64% say that over the next year their use of eBay will decrease. Almost 2/3 of current users will use eBay less in the rest of 2007 & 2008. If eBay sanctioned polls result in similar stats, no wonder they are desperately trying to expand their network to areas beyond internet auctions.

Question 11: Why use eBay to buy
Almost 30% of users say they buy on eBay because of the low prices. That's a fantastic reason to use eBay....if you are a buyer, but if you are a seller it is a good reason to not use eBay to sell. 30% said they used eBay because it was the only place they could find an item. I suspect this number will decrease dramatically in the next couple of year with the expansion of free shopping search engines such as Shopzilla, Bidhopper, Google Products, ShopWiki, and Microsoft Window's Live Product search - some of which already have numerous times as many products as can be found on eBay alone. Also many former eBay sellers, successful ones, have started their own sites; some of them can be found here. There are many who point to eBay's enormous 90%+ marketshare of the internet auction industry in the US as proof that eBay will continue to thrive for up to a decade or more, but I feel the proliferation of shopping search sites and independent niche retailers combined with the growing frustration of many eBay members will ultimately lead to a faster demise of eBay - if issues are not corrected - than any other auction website.

Question 12: What other eBay owned sites do you use
I see the results of this question as a very profound indicator of just how poorly eBay management is running eBay Inc. Below is the actual question and the striking results.
What other eBay sites have you visited and actually used the services of, or purchased items from?

Paypal.com	83.6%	(265)
Skype.com	11.4%	(36)
Rent.com	4.4%	(14)
Shopping.com	4.1%	(13)
eBayexpress.com	5.4%	(17)
kijiji.com	2.2%	(7)
Half.com	19.2%	(61)

While eBay is striving to expand into the world of communication, classifieds, social networking and non-auction format shopping, it seems that those people who are driving the revenue of the company - ebay.com buyers and sellers - are not adopting the use of any of the other eBay companies listed above. The exception of course is Paypal, which is now a virtual mandatory requirement for all new sellers on the site. eBay has dumped literally billions of dollars into Skype and eBayExpress. Skype is struggling to keep a hold of investors' attention as eBay is having a tougher time monetizing it than expected. And EE is continuing to be promoted by eBay as THE place to shop for new items, despite being littered with old, used, vintage and antique items as well as a search that is less than user friendly. Express- despite that massive marketing efforts by eBay - continues to be seen as a cruel joke by eBay users and the bastard son of eBay Inc.

Question 13: Google Checkout
57% say they would use Google Checkout rather than Paypal if given the choice, while only 24% would choose Paypal. A low 4% say they would avoid buying from a seller using it solely. These numbers can't be far off, judging by the reaction of many sellers concerning the Google Checkout saga. The users WANT Checkout. They want a choice.

Questions 14-15: Selection & Prices
It seems that respondents are pretty much split down the middle concerning whether prices and selection have increased or decreased over the course of their membership. This probably has to do with the varying length of their memberships and the varied categories in which they sell. It is a fact that including Stores inventory, selection has increased in the past few years, while auction volume in the US has decreased. eBay management says that average selling prices have risen in the past couple of years - of course they give no proof of this, but in this case their word is all we have.

Questions 17-20 & 25-27: Fraud
Fraud on eBay is a major issue for many users, and a vexing problem for management - which they seem ill equipped to combat. 68% of users say that fraud is a concern when using eBay or Paypal (just about the same percentage that says they will use eBay less in the next year). While half of those that responded to the question of whether or not they had been scammed replied that they had been, a massive 81% report being the target of a scam. The same percentage feel that fraud has increased on the site since they became a member. An amazingly low 3% felt that eBay was too secure to be hacked by the Romanian hacker, Vladuz. Another 3% felt that since eBay said the hackings did not happen, they did not happen because eBay wouldn't lie about something like that. 64% said that it either was possible or that they read about it or actually saw it happen. 1/4 of respondents didn't know who Vladuz is. For the record, Vladuz did hack into eBay to some degree - it has been proven and was witnessed by at least hundreds of eBay members. The attacks by Vladuz, related to Vladuz and similar attacks resulted in tens of thousands (at least) of compromised eBay passwords and other info, including financial info. If you do not know about what happened, and what is continuing to happen on eBay, I suggest you Google: Vladuz eBay.

93% of users admit they know what phishing and pharming are, and almost all (92% of total respondents) say they feel they occur on eBay.com.

59% of users feel that 1% or more of auctions listed on eBay.com are fraudulent, while only 10% of those surveyed think that fraudulent listings are below .1%. eBay claims that fraudulent auctions actually account for only .01% of all auctions. Whatever this means, it is clear that the vast majority of eBay users are seeing or feel they are seeing more fraud than eBay admits, and nearly 60% of users say they feel that the actual amount of fraud is 100 times more than eBay admits. Almost 20% of users say that the level of fraud is 1000 times more than eBay management admits. eBay is failing on the fraud issue. Either fraud is as rampant as users think, and they are losing revenue and customers because of it, or fraud is only as bad as eBay reports. Either way, eBay is losing customers because of actual or perceived fraud on the site. eBay management needs to either ratchet up their anti-fraud efforts or their PR efforts to assure people the site is safe.

Questions 21-24: Management Approval Rating
Billionaire Margaret Whitman has been touted by many analysts as one of, if not the best, woman CEO to ever set foot on the planet. Yet, eBay customers (the ones who provide the revenue stream) only rate her a 2.8 out of 10 (ten being the best of course). This is not the first time she has received a less than stellar approval rating. Two years ago, Forbes did a poll of many Fortune 500 CEO's, and Meg received a horrible 4% approval rating. While there are those who say that she is a brilliant leader and the reason why eBay is successful, I feel that her leadership has more to do with why eBay is having the problems that it is. The buyers and sellers could have virtually provided the same growth without her over the past five years or so. The constant management and micro-management of the site are issues where eBay users often find themselves wishing eBay would find a workable code and then step away and let the sellers sell and the buyers buy.

Rob Chestnut, head of Trust & Safety, ranked a 2.5 out of 10, which is understandable (and maybe a bit high) considering so many members are worried about fraud and its recent increase on the site. Bill Cobb, North American CEO, ranked the lowest with a 2.4. From all accounts that I've heard, Cobb is a great guy, a very friendly and likable individual with a nice personality....which, combined with his jolly look, may have been part of the reason he was hired in the first place. Cobb often ends up being the executive spokesman it seems, and he has shown at times that he is "out of the loop" at best, and disturbingly clueless at others. In my opinion, the reason he was ranked so low by users is that when he was hired he was viewed as an everyman that could relate to eBay sellers and would make the site better. It would seem that he has had no such effect.

Questions 28-36: Site Function & Enhancements
It is important to keep in mind when viewing the results to these questions that most of the respondents are current eBay users who use the site on a daily basis.
- 59% like the now-discontinued SYI2.0 listing form, which eBay scrapped in favor of the less liked version 3.0.
- 50% dislike the new star feedback system, while only 18% say they actually like it.
- 84% feel that eBay charges too much to list items, while only 11% feel fees are just right or low.
- 75% of users have experienced glitches in code on eBay in the past year, and only 18% feel that eBay corrects the problems quickly.
- Users rank the function of the eBay and Paypal sites at only a 4.7 out of 10.
- 2.8 out of a possible 10 is how users rank eBay's customer service. CS at eBay is atrocious. Members routinely report having to wait 72 hours and more for a response via email, and many times the canned response they receive is irrelevant to the original question. One admitted former eBay employee who filled out the survey said:
"eBay does have a large team to combat fraud, but eBay no longer treats employees as valued individuals. I felt treated more like a robot than a person towards the end of my employment at eBay. Quality work is not an eBay priority. As a result, many fraud items go through the cracks and customer service suffers. I used to love my job doing customer support for eBay Motors before it was outsourced to India. Working for eBay was great at first, but became extremely stressful and my view of customer service clashed with eBay's view. I believe in providing the best quality customer service and to try resolving all issues and questions with just a single contact. eBay believes in quantity and encourages employees to sacrifice quality in favor of quantity. I lost my job because I couldn't bring myself to lower my service standards in order to meet their insane productivity metrics. Great customer satisfaction was more important to me than if I did 85+ chats each day. Any time you are in a chat, the eBay agent you chat with will have 1-4 additional concurrent chats going. This leads to the use of a lot of canned responses (sometimes sent to the wrong customer). Where's the quality in that? I was actually extremely relieved when eBay terminated my employment."

Questions 37-38: eBay Stock Price
58% of those polled feel that eBay has pretty much maxed out at their high for the next 52 weeks. Only 11% think that eBay will see anything above $40 / share. On the low side, 55% feel that eBay will drop to below $25 per share in the next year. 11% of respondents said eBay would not drop below $31, and it actually dipped to $30.61 in early June, shortly after I posted the survey.

TAKE THE SURVEY - VIEW CURRENT RESULTS

Is eBay Inc. Ignoring the Antiques & Collectibles Market?

2007-07-07T08:47:00.001-04:00

This past week, the Kovels asked a similar question in their newsletter with an article entitled What Happened to the Collecting Bug [login required]? In the newsletter, they refer to eBay as the "500-pound gorilla" and say that eBay has "antagonized (antique) dealers by changing rules about feedback so they seem to favor buyer complaints.....It is almost as if eBay has decided the collectibles market is no longer important." The article did not state anything profound, but it did echo things that I've been hearing a lot of lately about eBay, and it got me thinking.

Any longtime antique dealer will tell you that eBay killed the market for antiques and collectibles several years ago. The site made the rare, common and the unique, commonplace. Those dealers who refused to jump on the eBay bandwagon likely had a tough time of things in their field for the past six or seven years, but things have been changing. The acceptance rate of eBay among longtime dealers was slow from what I've seen, although it seems to have really increased over the past few years - seemingly because of a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude towards eBay. But now that eBay drew them all in, it seems many dealers are wishing once again that eBay had never came along.

Besides over-saturation of once scarce vintage and antique items, eBay has of late managed to virtually ignore this segment of their userbase and the reaction of dealers is becoming evident in the slow down in listing volume. Kovels points to a 3.8% drop in auction listings and a possible 30% decrease in selling prices. They did not cite their source for these numbers, but the Kovels are among the most highly respected antiques experts in the world - so I'll take them at their word on this, as I'm sure they have a much deeper idea of the antiques market than I do. The Medved charts are showing listing numbers (in the US) are at or below the levels seen in 2005. Dealscart is also showing a major drop in listings of late.

If one were to look at the eBay site and you'd see why the antique dealers are a bit perturbed. For the past few weeks, eBay has had large ads and graphics for two brand new fads, the Transformers movie and the new Apple iPhones. Now, you can't blame eBay for trying to cash in on pop culture when it can, but the trend of late has been to advertise the heck out of the next possible Tickle Me Elmo-type product while all but ignoring the bread and butter antiques segment of the site. With the iPhone, it seems that the marketing on eBay may have actually backfired. Only a week after its release, reports are circulating that the average profit on an iPhone on eBay has come down to less than $35 per phone. One look at the completed listings for iPhones shows many phones that apparently were ended without bids, most likely to be sold off-eBay so that the sellers could save money on fees and recoup their investments. Others are selling for just over the retail price - and as of late in the week, the Apple online store was still not sold out of the phones. Every couple of months eBay sends out a bright & shiny large format catalog to users who are signed up to receive mailings. The last catalog I received had (at my best count) absolutely zero antiques and only a few items that would be considered vintage.

So has the collectibles and antiques market dried up entirely, or is that just what it seems like to sellers? Most eBay users cite "low prices" as a major determining factor in why they buy on eBay, and they've had a lot of low prices on antiques lately. Meanwhile former eBay sellers who have branched out into their own web stores are reporting that they are selling items for prices that far exceed those attainable on eBay at the moment.

Alexa shows that some of the other major multi-seller antiques sites are also suffering, including Rubylane.com, goantiques.com, tias.com - so it is likely that this problem is not entirely eBay's fault. Kovels, in their previous newsletter, suggested that consumers are now looking more toward reproduction items that are clean and inexpensive (and readily available) over more costly and scarce antique items. The Kovel's newsletter created quite a bit of discussion among antique dealers and this morning the iPhone ads were gone from the eBay homepage and the Transformers movie banner was replaced with an ad for first generation Transformers on the site - which are now around 24 years old. In fact, as of this morning there are absolutely NO new products appearing on the eBay homepage. Vintage jerseys, vintage Barbies, Gibson guitars, Lava Lamps, retro t-shirts, records....quite a drastic change since earlier in the week. You can speculate about the reasons behind this sudden move. Personally I think eBay over-estimated the demand (or the absence of lack of supply) for the iPhones; that coupled with the Kovels article might have helped wake up some of those in management a bit. It's one thing for me to complain about eBay and call them names, but it is quite another when someone as influential as the Kovels takes a dig at them.

eBay Inc. Takes on eBay.com With Classified Ad Site Expansion

2007-07-05T08:55:00.000-04:00

I read about eBay Inc.'s expansion of their Kijiji classified ad site to include US cities yesterday. I didn't think much about it until I visited the site today. Unlike the majority of eBay users and the rest of the world, I had been to Kijiji before this. Kijiji is being billed as a competitor to Craigs List as well as print classified ad sections in local and regional newspapers.

I'll begin with the flattery before I get to the WTF? of the move. The site looks nice to me, very nice. No dumbass flash ads with dancing overweight twenty-somethings, no diet pill block ads, no long-loading banner ads for irrelevant goods and services, no Yahoo! ads....quite nice. It's a nice simple site that is easy to navigate and the panel to list ads is so simple that I can't believe it's an eBay product. You can upload up to four pictures as well. And the best part is that it is free at the moment.

Now the WTF? As with any decent offering from eBay Inc. (there are so few), there will need to be some type of monetization at some point - eBay isn't in the charity business. So expect to pay for ads, pictures or other features at some point down the road, or be prepared to see tacky banner ads all over the site.

Some are thinking that this site will be a good place to offer the use of Skype and Paypal. I'm not so sure that makes much sense. Most people use classified ads because they don't want the hassle of shipping items, and I'd guess most sales end with cash changing hands when the item is picked up. And being that most items are purchased locally, it's probably easier just to use your good ole' telephone or cell phone to call with inquiries about the ad than use Skype.

I understand that Craigs List is a competitor to eBay, but I'm not quite sure why eBay would offer Kijiji now. Growth is slowing. Listings in core in the US are slowing. eBay already offers paid classified ads on eBay.com and owns 1/4 of Craigs List. It seems that eBay is competing against itself with Kijiji. eBay Inc. has a poor track record of monetizing their products - if Kijiji catches on in the US and monetization is an issue, eBay could end up losing boatloads of revenue to sellers who start using the free Kijiji instead of eBay.com to sell their stuff. The time it takes to list an item on Kijiji is a mere fraction of the time it takes using an eBay listing tool such as Turbo Lister, and much much much faster than using eBay's monstrosity of a form, SYI3.0. Also Kijiji is not involved with the transaction after the sale like eBay is...I'll let your mind think of a dozen or so ways this could be good and bad. Another benefit of Kijiji is that the terms of use of privacy policy combined are only about a page long, and seem to say nothing about advertising your website or ecommerce store in a Kijiji ad.

It seems to me that the success of the new site will be dependent upon how well eBay gets the word out about it. If it is successful, I don't see how it wouldn't hurt eBay.com in terms of revenue and traffic. A successful Kijiji could make eBay obsolete. Think that's far fetched? Each year Craigs List gets bigger and more and more sellers are leaving eBay to enjoy the freedom on CL and the freedom from fees.

A Heads-Up to eBayers About Changes to the Site

2007-07-03T09:16:00.000-04:00

I found this morning that if you come into eBay through a Google Adwords ad the search results you get are sorted by "price+shipping - lowest first," despite the fact that this is NOT my default. Even after I opened a new browser window the results were sorted the same way. So I went to the "customize settings" link and checked - yep, my preferences were still set to sort by "ending soonest." If this happens, just go to customize and click the apply button and it will restore the results to your preference - that is if you don't want to. While the search results sorted by that method may be useful for some, the items that I search for often will return erroneous results as the keywords I use result in search results for items that range from about 3 ounces to about 25 pounds - so shipping price is irrelevant.

Also, eBay announced yesterday that they are doing some more beta testing (yep, they actually gave the users a heads up so you'd know it wasn't a glitch - of course you'd have to actually check the announcements board and read the announcement concerning the testing to find out, and you don't actually know if you are part of the testing unless your view is different and you check the announcements....but, whatever....). If you seem to be experiencing glitches or funny looking pages, you can check the sneak peek page and see if your issues match the beta testing.

Finally today, just a heads up about our Generic eBay User Poll....the results will be published this coming Monday after the holiday weekend. If you haven't filled out this survey, please do so by going here, it will take about 3 minutes.

Meg Goes East - eBay Inc. Expands to Vietnam

2007-06-27T08:54:00.000-04:00

The proliferation of eBay.something sites has expanded once again. eBay Inc. has opened up another website in Asia, this time in Vietnam. The Vietnam Net Bridge reports that with this site, eBay hopes "to create export opportunities for Vietnamese businesses and individuals through the global eBay online market." [sounds an awful lot like eBay China].

eBay.vn is live, but many of the links appear to link directly back to the eBay.com site, which makes one wonder if eBay is even finished with the site yet. Being that it seems that many of the links to items link back to a site called eBay Asian Promo (http://ebayasiapromo.com), and also back to eBay.com, my guess is no. The links to items do not, of course, take you directly to that homepage, but rather to listing pages that are hosted under that domain. The listing pages have Vietnamese language in the eBay portion of the listing, but retain their original language in the listing.

The expansion into Asia has some eBay users feeling annoyed. The Asian sites have yet to show that they can generate revenue that is worth the expense, and some of the sites in Asia currently have free listings for the members. ebay Inc. has been criticized for allowing these free listings to then show in the searches of eBay.com in the past - no information yet as to whether or not eBay.vn listing will appear in the US searches or not, or what other eBay.somewhere sites might return search results for eBay.vn listings.

Time will tell if Meg Whitman's push into Asia will be successful. What I cannot figure out though, is why spend the time, money, personnel and capital creating sites that are specifically for export in these non-English speaking countries if the goods listed there will be primarily for export TO English speaking countries. It would seem that the shipping costs would make selling prohibitive for many small sellers - not to mention the language barrier and the assumed apprehension of buyers buying from non-English speaking sellers 8,000 miles away. Large exporters already have avenues of dispersal without eBay and I'm guessing will be unlikely to use eBay to list retail priced individual items. Maybe Meg knows something that the critics of this Asian expansion do not, but last time she thought she knew what she was doing, it ended up costing eBay tens of millions of dollars in China without any benefit whatsoever.

Mightybids Listed Site Too Soon on eBay, Misses Listing Sale

2007-06-26T07:51:00.000-04:00

Yep, that's right, another sale (or listing special) on eBay.com. June 26th & 27th you can list your items on eBay and save a whopping 15 cents off the price of gallery pictures! Add that to the deep discount in FVF (yes, I'm being sarcastic) and you stand to save up to $.39 per listing on auctions that sell for over $25!! So, get listing!

This sale does not come as a surprise or anything. I did not receive the notice via eBay MyMessages until this morning - quite short notice since the sale has already begun, but a sale of some sort was expected....considering the fourth of July is only a week away. The 4th holiday is a notoriously slow listing time on eBay, and the usual summer listing volume slide really starts to show around that time.

One auction listing that won't be seeing any 39 cent savings is the auction currently running for the sale of the www.mightybids.com auction website and business. That listing is right here. The Canadian online auction company has a reported 100,000 registered members. The site is currently devoid of any auctions while the site is being retooled. The current owners say that the tweeking will be complete and auctions will be up and running before the end of the eBay auction for the company this Sunday.

The owners have gotten one last dig in against eBay before they leave Mightybids for a new business venture by embedding a video in the listing that reminds everyone why sites like Mightybids were started in the first place.

eBay Inc. Ridding the Site of the Worst Good Sellers

2007-06-24T15:04:00.002-04:00

I reported on this the other day...since then, more users have come forward on the eBay Community Forums (some of them violating eBay policy in doing so) to say that they also had their accounts suspended for falling in the bottom 2% of sellers in ratings.

It seems that eBay is suspending sellers based on some type of phantom rating procedure. And it seems to be being done by robots or some other type of software filter. What exact criteria is looked at when suspending the sellers is being speculated by eBay members and their thoughts are that it includes feedback, the star rating system, and buyer complaints. As of yet, eBay has not announced any sort of addition to the User Agreement that gives eBay the authority to suspend users for this "bottom 2%" criteria....and some of the sellers who are being suspended have FB ratings up in the mid-99%'s.

eBay moderators (aka Liveworld representatives when they aren't kicking posts and posters off the eBay community forums) pulled a thread that I posted about the possible negative uses of such a policy. Here is that post:

Anyone Buying From Competitors to Put Them in the Bottom 2%?
firemeg (12 ) View Listings | Report Jun-24-07 10:53 PDT

Just wondering...

I can see the plot playing out now...

You have a competitor selling like items on eBay...

You don't like them, or the competition....

You buy a bunch of items from that person under different IDs....

You leave negative & neutral feedbacks...

You get the items (which you can now resell in your own
inventory)....

You file paypal chargebacks for INR & ISNAD....

Your competition vanishes....poof

It was pulled for "encouraging others to violate eBay policy or user agreement." I guess I have a different definition of encouragement than eBay does.

Anyway, one poster on the eBay boards reported that eBay hinted at this policy at eBay Live by saying that 1% of eBay users create 35% of all the problems on the site. Below are a few threads discussing the subject. I have posted the exact title so that if eBay decides more censorship is in order, you might be able to check Google for a cached page.

Is there a good reason for suspended/limited selling accounts?
Suspended seller read this
Has Ebay's suspension policy gone awry or is it applied fairly?
Will Ebay restore my linked accounts or not?
>5% buyer dissatisfaction

UPDATE: 6/25/07 - here are some more threads that have popped up, I will add to them as I find them. If you find others that I don't have listed, please just leave a comment to this article with the link. Thanks
Random thoughts on ebay's restrictions
SUSPENDED ACCOUNTS FOR DOING NOTHING WRONG?
My selling account suddenly limited
SNPC 14-Day Restricted Account
SNP - Fair Calculation Being Used?
suspended account
eBay Says Neutral = Negative
Selling account suspended- WHAT???? Please Read!!!
Has eBay flipped it's lid?????
Restricted Account Punishing The Sellers! Big eBay Brother
I think Ebay is going to POT ! This Just Can't Be ???

More Stupidity from eBay Inc.

2007-06-23T08:58:00.000-04:00

OK, I half-heartedly apologize for the title of this post, but only because I have a mish-mash of items to report from both the user-front of eBay and about eBay's actions, that really are probably best summed up by this title. Before I begin, I will say that in a company of eBay's size, there will always be problems, but that said, the "petty" preventable problems need to be addressed correctly in order to protect not only individual users (who need many times to be more responsible) but more importantly the reputation of the institution. With a billion or so dollars just sitting around in eBay's piggy bank, there are sometimes no excuses that can be made for the type of, uh, stupidity that you are about to read about.

More eBay Sanctioned Censorship:
"It's eBay's site, they can do as they see fit." I've seen that line posted so much by eBay huggers over the past few years that I've grown numb and no longer even argue on the eBay forums when I hear it. I've reported before about eBay seeing fit to censor things that are not really policy violations, and even molding their policy to give them broad ranging censorship power over their users. The story I want to relay today deals with the Trust & Safety discussion board thread, help with frau?!!!!!!!!! You can read the whole thing in about five minutes if you want, it isn't long, and it surely won't get any longer - since eBay moderators have locked the thread, preventing any more posts. I give eBay kudos for not deleting the thread entirely, but locking a thread with valuable information about fraud is not only unproductive, but just plain stupid.

They original poster on that thread starts off by revealing that they really have no idea about how the Paypal Buyer Protection program works, and that they had bought an item but the same identical item was still up and running without a BIN price. It appears the listing had an immediate redirect to a website based in the Czech Republic to a page that mirrored the eBay listing page - complete with fake eBay sign-in page when the BIN button was clicked. Buyers need to learn about these, you can't always just blame eBay for this....that said, it can be very hard to spot, as you almost have to watch your address bar constantly. To make matters worse for the buyer (and in defense of the buyer's actions that lead to handing over their password), the buyer contacted eBay Live Help about the listing and the Buyer Protection Program. The Live Help rep looked at the auction and replied to the buyer's concern:

Should you need a refund for this transaction, the insured amount will be taken from the seller's purchase protection account and sent to you. The refund is sent to your bank account, or by check or money order. The way you are refunded is at your choice. You have 30 days from the purchase date to request a refund. Refund requests are processed within 3 days.

That post, as well as several others from the "rep" that was posted by the buyer on the eBay T&S forum shows one of two things....1) That eBay employee is completely devoid of any knowledge about eBay & Paypal Policy.....or.....2) The scammer set up a fake Live Help link and is actually using "Live Help" to talk buyers into "purchasing" fraudulent items. My guess is the former, as the chances that a buyer will click the three links necessary to get from a listing to Live Help is low, and the amount of programming it would require for such a low chance of use is probably not a very efficient way to run a scam......but who knows - so be careful. By the way, if you read the paragraph from the eBay Live Help rep above, and don't notice any problems, you NEED to read up on buyer protection.

In Defense of eBay:
I must note that the seller of the item discussed above was suspended. Although it took multiple referrals from T&S Board users, it got done. When trying to view that seller's other items, you get an error message from eBay: Feature Unavailable. We are unable to return search results because this seller's account has been suspended. We apologize for any inconvenience. eBay has seen fit to actually use the word "suspended" and remove all of the ads from these pages. There have been numerous critics of eBay for posting ads on these NARU alert pages and for the vague nature of the message.

Now let me suggest that eBay go even further and post a reason why the account was suspended along with a warning about completing transactions with the seller in question and also a request that anyone with information about the seller should contact eBay T&S team. It could say simply: Feature Unavailable. We are unable to return search results because this seller's account has been suspended because of alleged fraudulent activity. We suggest that you do not complete any transactions with the eBay user in question at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience and gladly accept tips and information about this seller and other instances of fraud on the site (and then give a link). Doesn't seem so difficult.

More Live Help Incompetence:
This one actually happened to me. I use Live Help from time to time, but have NEVER had a Live Help representative actually answer my question correctly or resolve the problem I'm having. A few weeks ago, I tried to list an antique Tiffany & Co. item. The listing would not go through TurboLister. I assumed that it was because I used the keyword Tiffany & Co., and recent listing restrictions on designer items have been put in place. I checked with Live Help to see if that was the case (because TL didn't identify the error). Here are the explanations Live Help gave me for error.
1. The first thing that needs to be done to ensure the listing will go through is that you link your PayPal account to your eBay account. Yeah, I'd already done that one and sold on the account in the past.
2. Second step to do is add a credit card on file and or get ID verified so that your account is set up to sell. Yep, done and done, weeks before.

I suggested that the error might have been due to a lawsuit against eBay by Tiffany & Co. The rep assured me that I just needed to put a CC on file or get ID verified, repeatedly, even though I kept telling him that I had done so a long time ago. I listed the item on a different account while I was chatting with him, and it uploaded fine. I then listed another item on the account in question while chatting with him, and it uploaded fine.

The Bottom 2%:
Think you have a good eBay business? Think you are a reliable seller who exhibits excellence in your selling practices? Do you have exemplary feedback? Think again! That's right, just because you have great feedback and happy customers doesn't mean you are a good seller, not according to eBay anymore. Some sellers have been reporting receiving emails from eBay and having their accounts shut down because they fall in the bottom 1 or 2% of eBay sellers. One such seller's story made the ABC news, story in this video. The video tells the story of a seller with 99.3% feedback that was NARU'd and had all her listings canceled because of what eBay says was ONE complaint. Yet eBayMotorsSucks.com routinely shows instances of fraudulent sellers who have been repeatedly reported for scam listings and no action is taken by eBay for days or weeks.

Threads are popping up all over the eBay Community Forums about this issue. Like this one seller who has a 99.5% feedback rating. The seller received this email from eBay:
eBay requires sellers to maintain minimum standards in buyer satisfaction. Our goal is to ensure that the marketplace is a safe and reputable place for our community to buy and sell.

When a seller lists an item and a buyer places a winning bid for that item, they have formed a contract. When a seller fails to fulfill the obligation in their contract, they are in violation of eBay’s Seller Non-Performance policy . If more than 5% of a seller’s buyers are dissatisfied, as measured by negative and neutral Feedback left or Item Not Received complaints, the seller is in violation of the Seller Non-Performance policy. It is important for you to understand the following information regarding your performance:

 Based upon inputs from the buyers over the past 90 days, your level of performance resulted in >5% buyer dissatisfaction. This account falls into the bottom 2% of all eBay sellers with regard to buyer satisfaction.

Ooopsie-Daisy:
Not only is eBay shutting down accounts in the bottom 2% of customer satisfaction, eBay has been reported to have shut down a number of sellers accounts for no reason whatsoever. eBay has called this a mistake and has reinstated the users' accounts and put their items back into their MyeBay (in the unsold section) where the seller then has to relist everything - which is sometimes thousands of items. eBay has reportedly compensated some of these sellers financially, a very good indication that eBay screwed up big time, but the compensation was very very low and did not even amount to a small fraction of the sales lost during the down-time....not to mention those lost while having to relist thousands of items.

Portions of the above article may make no sense, may have grave grammatical and sentence structure errors.....It's the weekend....sorry.

eBay Inc. Goes Back to China

2007-06-22T08:14:00.000-04:00

eBay has once again put on the gloves and jumped back into the Chinese auction ring with the ebay.cn going live....again. Redline China reports that eBay's Chinese site will be mainly for use for business trade internationally. So get ready for even more Chinese items on eBay.com? Time will tell.

I don't have too much to say about this move, partly because dumb-ole-me can't read Chinese. However there are a few things that caught my eye on the site and one thing I must comment on. First, although much hype has been made of the eBay v. Google "battle" here in the US, eBay has put a good sized Google logo at the bottom of the eBay.cn homepage - with a link to Google.com. The link is almost as large as the eBay logo at the top of the page (all the logos for other companies at the bottom are this size too). It seems to me that eBay is playing the media and financial analysts with the whole "right hand don't know what left is doing" routine. It's sort of like dating someone that's unpopular, but only in private, while denying you even know the person to all your cool friends.

If you visit eBay China, you will also see scrolling ad banners on each side of the page. They follow you.... For the critics of all the banner ads on eBay.com, take note of how bad it could be and be thankful.

Finally, my thoughts. I admittedly don't know the details of the relaunch, as it seems they have not been released by eBay, but... eBay has already failed in China once. Now they are using Tom Online (which holds a 51% interest in the new site) to try to gain local acceptance. Critics of eBay management view this move as silly and one more time that eBay is neglecting the profit center (the US market) in favor of fanciful dreams of world domination that seem so far out of reach. Proponents of eBay's re-entry into China are giddy with anticipation of 1 billion+ Chinese using Skype. It seems that their hope in this will never succeed. Since the new site does not appear to be for everyman-China, but rather businesses who want to sell items and ship them outside of China, the pool of potential Skype users shrinks dramatically.

Meg Whitman also reports that there will be even greater fraud prevention measures in China. WTF? So does this mean that eBay Inc. has the means at their disposal to crack down harder on fraud and prevent more fraudulent listings from appearing on the US site, but is choosing not to use those methods - instead will use this technology and methodology on an unproven site in a region that has all but rejected eBay? ...all but rejected eBay, but for the millions of items every month listed from China on the US site that are fakes, forgeries, reproductions, knock-offs, etc.? There has been much criticism from both buyers and sellers in the US over the inclusion of Chinese based listings in the past, and that continues today.

If this effort fails, what then? Meg Whitman & Co. have shown mediocre results at best when it comes to acquisitions and decisions based outside of the US eBay.com site. Failure in China, failure in Japan, slow acceptance of the eBay brand in other Asian countries, and no real big winners as far as profit goes from their many acquisitions. How much money is eBay willing to throw in the well, hoping to get it right in China?

SS2BM Begins Today

2007-06-21T07:08:00.000-04:00

What is SS2BM, you ask? It stands for Summer Solstice to Blue Moon, and it is a ten day celebration of independent eCommerce business owners and auction sites and their independence from eBay Inc., according to Pheebay.com, where the idea was conceived.

The promotion runs from June 21st through June 30th. So is there a sale or something? Yes, possibly. Each individual site owner that is taking part chooses their own promotions during the SS2BM. Quite a few independent etailers have signed up for the promo as well as a number of online auction sites. The goal of this campaign is to educate the online consumers that there is more to shopping on the internet than just going to eBay.com.

The days of the internet boom and sites like Pets.com has come and passed. Today there are very few large webstores that are household names, so many times buyers turn to the only remnants of that boom for their shopping needs - mainly eBay and Amazon. While both are good sites that offer plenty of selection it is important to realize that there are hundreds of millions of products on the web that appear on independent web stores and smaller auction sites - many times the number listed on eBay at any given time.

To do a quick all-inclusive search of those stores and auction sites that have signed up for SS2BM, simply use the custom Google search bar below. For more info on SS2BM, please visit the Pheebay SS2BM forum.

Mystorespace.com Founders Kicked Out of eBay Inc.'s Live Convention for Mentioning Google Checkout

2007-06-20T20:28:00.000-04:00

An attendee at eBay Live last week in Boston reports on his blog, Google Blogoscoped, seeing two other eBay Live attendees being kicked out of the closing gala by eBay security....the two men were wearing Google polo shirts. The author brought this amusing article to my attention. At first he thought the men were Google employees. It turns out however, that they were probably actually the owners of a new eCommerce store building software design site, Mystorespace.com. A seemingly revolutinary new WYSIWYG store builder that offers Google Checkout and not Paypal.

The founder of Mystorespace.com writes about the incident in his blog. He feels he was ejected from Live for telling other attendees about the benefits of Google Checkout, which his site uses as the sole payment module currently. He says that Gary Briggs (eBay VP of Marketing) ask their intentions and then left to get some big bouncers to remove the two owners of Mystorespace.com. He details the whole incident on his blog, and rather than regurgitate the whole ridiculous (on eBay's part) incident, I suggest that you just read his article, here.

Did Anyone See eBay Had a Sale Last Weekend - Does Anyone Care

2007-06-18T09:08:00.000-04:00

UPDATE: It seems that eBay finally pulled the auction mentioned near the end of this article, with 6 hours to go, and after a lengthy discussion on the eBay forums and repeated reports by users. EbayMotorsSucks.com has the summary HERE.

eBay Inc. had a listing sale promotion on eBay Motors this past weekend. Doesn't anyone care? In what looks like a virtually unprecedentedly poor showing, the number of listings on eBay this weekend actually went DOWN during the listing special. The promotion was actually a big money saver for those who wanted to take advantage of it. eBay offered Motors listings for only a buck, that's right, $1. That's a $39 savings off the regular fees! If the vehicles listed during the promotion sell, they are still subject to a $40 FVF, but heck, with a chance to save $39 per listing, I would have guessed that a lot of individuals and many large dealerships would have jumped at the chance to save money and bring in some cash flow.

The chart below is from Medved. It shows that listing on the site actually decreased by over half a million listings during the two day sale.

So what does this mean? I really don't know as I do not have the pre-sale category count for eBay motors. But, this is the first time that I can remember eBay offering a sale of this magnitude and actually getting a negative net turnout. This was another one of those sales that eBay gave plenty of warning about, and it even lasted two days - still it seems that nobody cares.

According to eBayMotorsSucks.com, fraud on eBay motors continues to be a major problem for both sellers and buyers - not to mention eBay management who can't seem to get a handle on the fraud. One particularly disturbing article on EMS is about an auction for a classic car that was apparently being sold by someone other than the owner - who had recently purchased the car. The new owner reported the scam to eBay and yet two days later the auction is still going with the "seller" canceling all bids and asking bidders to email him. Read it all and see the screenshots of the listing and eBay forum discussion and judge for yourself.

Summer is usually a slow time on eBay. Sellers report lower sell-through rates and lower prices, listing numbers go down, and usually the stock price slides a bit. As I type this, eBay's listing numbers are levitating just above 10 million in core. If the summer blahs are setting in for eBay numbers, it could be a long summer, and eBay might see listings that number below 10 million consistently for the first time since 2003.

eBay Live: The Good, the Bad & the Stupid

2007-06-15T09:07:00.000-04:00

No, I am not attending eBay Live, for a number of reasons, but most importantly I didn't want my bitterness to taint a positive gathering of jubilant eBay lovers. I gave the Boston Globe a short interview yesterday for an article on eBay Live. I was characterized by the author, Hiawatha Bray (which by the way gets my vote for coolest name I've heard in some time) as being bitter. I thought about this for a moment and realized he's probably right to an extent. Over a year ago when I started this site, I was bitter at eBay and at Meg Whitman for several reasons, however, those feelings of bitterness have evaporated completely as I have expanded my online business to my own eCommerce sites. eBay's actions got me started down a road that will ultimately lead to greater success and currently I am seeing faster growth than I had experienced in the previous two years when I was selling solely on eBay.

A lot of new initiatives were announced during the first day of eBay Live in Boston. Before I start mentioning and commenting on them, please keep in mind that just because eBay says something, doesn't mean it will actually go into effect. And if the policy is instituted verbally or "on paper" does not mean there is any assurance that the site's code will reflect the changes (see auction extension prohibition, Paypal only for new sellers, indexing filters - all of which were said to be active, but later proven that eBay had not even implemented any type of code that would actually make them work or prevent users from breaking those policies or even flag users who violated the new policies).

eBay to make giant investment in Paypal servers:
Ok, that's good. eBay is basically covering their asses with this, but it benefits buyers and sellers so that get a thumbs up from me.

Paypal to start "Payment Review":
Wonder where they got that idea, ahem Google Checkout ahem.... But another idea that I see as a positive change, in fact that is one of the benefits of Google Checkout over Paypal right now - the ability for Google to stop payments that are fraudulent before sellers spend the money and send out the item to a scamming buyer or CC thief. Paypal says the payments that are reviewed will be 100% guaranteed....forgive me if I'm skeptical that this will be the case without pulling hairs, but I guess we'll just have to see.

Stores Tab on New Header & Other Benefits for Store Owners:
wooohooo! for eBay Store owners!!! Store owners have been requesting this EXACT feature for what, three years now? Repeatedly the idea has been shot down by eBay, but now it seems they are desperate to please someone. btw - I don't know the exact numbers, but core listings total about 11 million a day, while Stores listings exceed 50 million each day, possibly many more than that. Store owners will also now have 24 hour phone support. And the rarely used eBay Anchor Stores will see a reduction from $500 per month down to $300 a month for that service.

Auction Ending-Time Countdown Timers:
It seems eBay will catch up to dozens of small free auction sites in technology on this one. Way to go engineers, welcome to the 21st Century. Sarcasm aside, I'm indifferent about this. If it works, it will be a fine addition.

Widgets:
More widgets. Good thing, because without Google Adwords traffic, sellers are going to need something to bring buyers in. Alexa is already showing a decline in traffic since eBay quit their Adwords campaign in the US.

Powerseller Restructuring:
Now Bronze Powersellers will have access to phone support. Also there is a plan to allow high volume, low revenue sellers to become PS's without selling an average of $1000 per month. And why not? If someone is selling in a massive volume and still not selling $1000 per month, they are more-or-less just sending eBay envelopes stuffed with cash. Personally I have never understood this situation. I understand that high volume sellers of low ticket items need quality customer support, but $1000/month in sales is really not very much if you are a professional seller or even a seller trying to supplement income. I did not hear any threshold number for this volume PS status, but it will be interesting once it's announce to see how much a seller will have to spend in fees to qualify for this.

Best Match:
More and expanded Best Match search results, including those based on PS status, shipping price (eventually), and seller ratings. Lots of opposition to the seller ratings and Best Match. When it is fully implemented, at least there will be some tangible representation of all those eBay cookies on your computer.

Fee Reduction This Summer:
FVF's will go down .75% for the summer months. I don't think that a seven cent savings on a $10 sale was what sellers had in mind when they were discussing a seasonal price structure, but hey, at least it isn't a fee increase.

Paypal Security Keys:
Now in beta testing, but available to everyone. They are, at best, an added layer of security. No complaints here, but users can still sign in to Paypal without the key if they want to. Also, I feel that it is unlikely that much of the target audience for fraud and abuse will take advantage of this key fob. Most likely the users that are already diligent in protecting their information online will be the ones to get them, while the stereotypical hijack victim probably won't even know about the security keys.

Designer Product Selling Limits:
Like so many of the changes that were announced, this one works to relieve the symptoms of fraud rather than stopping the underlying problem. So legitimate sellers of designer items will likely find their accounts limited or capped or their designer listings will just not go through. Listing caps and selling limits are not going to solve anything on the site, especially when it is so easy for scammers to register as many accounts as they want to sell the items. It will also make the fakes harder to spot for buyers. Now if you see a seller with 200 Louis Vuitton handbags, you might think that's fishy. But if a seller puts one LV bag on auction with a smorgasbord of other items, you might be more likely to think it is real.

Google Gets Bitch-Slapped by eBay....It's On!

2007-06-13T19:04:00.000-04:00

UPDATE: Shortly after I wrote this article, Google posted this notice stating that their Let Freedom Ring party would not be held as planned. No explanation was given. I'm sure you can guess the probable reason.

On Monday Google announced that it was having a little get-together near the eBay Live venue this Thursday. It seems that eBay took offense at Google taking offense at eBay preventing sellers from choosing Google's Checkout as a payment processing option, because eBay has announced that it has pulled its Adwords campaign from Google in the domestic US market. eBay Adwords will still appear internationally.

As of yet, there has been little reaction from eBay users, but it is starting on the community forums in this eBay thread. What exactly this means for both companies is highly speculative at this point.

What do you think? A short 8 question poll on the topic, tell me what you think. Results will start to be published tomorrow on this blog.

The original FireMeg Generic eBay User Poll will be running all of June. If you haven't filled it out yet, please do so if you have a few spare minutes. Preliminary results will be out in a couple of days.

Google Wants eBay Live Attendees to "Checkout" Their Free Boston Tea Party: Official Google Checkout Blog: Let freedom ring

2007-06-13T08:06:00.000-04:00

Official Google Checkout Blog: Let freedom ring

Google has announce on it Google Checkout blog in a post entitled, Let Freedom Ring, that the company will be holding a "Boston Tea Party" this Thursday in Boston at the Old South Meeting House. This party will be a "celebration of user choice." Free food, free drinks, free live music, free massages.

If Google was trying to give eBay a slap in the face, this may have done it. News of Google's party has been spreading like wildfire across the web and blogosphere for only two days and it's getting big attention, as is the fact that eBay is currently being sued for anti-trust violations for not allowing sellers to choose payment methods other than Paypal. The last time I saw any statistics, Checkout had a high one digit marketshare of the online payment industry. I have not seen any numbers since Google opened up Checkout virtually worldwide a month or so ago. Critics point to the ~9% marketshare number as a failure for Google, but its service has been live for less than one year - still an infant, even in the adolescent world of the internet.

eBay's yearly user convention, eBay Live, was of this morning not sold out - less than a day before the conference begins. Many eBay members have wondered aloud why eBay charges entry into their convention, when most industry conventions are free and open to members/businesses that the company and/or industry holding the convention benefits from. eBay member, chopsueysisters, has started a thread on the eBay Community Forums about the tea party.

Cuomo's Office Says eBay Users Should Be Happy About Jeweler's Fine

2007-06-12T10:01:00.000-04:00

This past weekend, I first gave my two cents about the NY City jewelry seller who was fined $400,000 for shill bidding. Now I will give my next two cents worth after speaking with a spokeswoman from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office.

The spokeswoman from Cuomo's office stated that the best article to go by was the one done by the New York times. Articles from the AP and Reuters were vague at best, and slightly misleading at worst. Cuomo's spokeswoman indicated that eBay did in fact bring the shilling seller to the AG's attention sometime in 2005, while Eliot Spitzer was AG. She did not say when the "several months" was that eBay helped in the investigation. She also said that the reason it took so long for a penalty to be handed down was because this type of fine for this type of behavior was unprecedented and a detailed analysis of the economic damage imposed on eBay buyers by the scammer had to be done - an analysis that reportedly took over a year to determine the final outcome.

In the end, according to the NY Times, the seller, Ezra Dweck, was ordered to pay $400,000 in fines and restitution, $100,000 of which would be restitution. Cuomo's office stated that the restitution would be divided up among the eBay users who were affected by the scam and paid out to them by Cuomo's office. She could not, however, give details about the way the restitution amount was determined or who exactly would receive what amount of money.

Speculation of RICO violations on Dweck's part was unfounded according to Cuomo's office. In fact, no criminal charges were ever filed or it seems considered. Instead the AG filed a civil action against the seller under the Deceptive Practices Act. The FTC Deceptive Practices Act was compiled here, if you're interested.

OK, now back to the eBay portion of this story....

Cuomo's spokeswoman could/would not give a specific answer as to why the timing of the news release of this story happened four days before eBay Live. She did say that it had nothing to do with eBay Live or pressure from eBay. She said more-or-less that the AG's office releases new like this about their cases all of the time and it just happened that the shill bidding story was released when it was.

I asked the spokeswoman if eBay was under investigation for complicity in Dweck's scheme or any possible RICO violations. She said that eBay was not. When I conveyed my concerns about eBay's role in this, she said that eBay she thought personally, that eBay users would be happy that with all the fraud on eBay that someone was stepping forward with results, and helping to stop fraud on the site.

I agreed wholeheartedly. I also informed her that neither I nor anyone else I had spoken with thought otherwise, but rather my concern was that eBay had made millions of dollars off of this seller before finally shutting him down. She sort of speculated that eBay might have had to gather proof before shutting his account down and contacting the AG's office. [I know, as do many of my readers, that eBay often doesn't concern itself with proof before NARU'ing some users, so why in this case would definitive proof have been a goal?]

So...my thoughts on this story after speaking with Cuomo's office? If I go by what I was told, it does seem that eBay was being "proactive" in the sense that Cuomo's office insists that it was eBay who brought this seller and his scheme to their attention. However, being truly proactive would have been to NARU the seller after the first series of complaints to eBay (numerous sources say there were thousands of reports to eBay about the seller shill bidding). If eBay had done so initially, then a suit by the AG's office in NY would never have been needed, as the number of users affected would have been minimal - even negligible. eBay obviously did not NARU the user immediately, and did not rely on the word of the eBay community. Instead, eBay apparently took a year to gather evidence of the shill bidding, all the while bringing in possibly millions of dollars in revenue from the seller.

Take what you want away from this story. But let me say that in the course of my time dealing with eBay members through my website and blog, I have heard many stories about small-time and part-time and occasional sellers on eBay being NARU'd for shill bidding on their first offense (not permanently, mind you). This past weekend, I thought there was something "fishy" about this story, and I still do.

I challenge eBay Inc. to do the right thing and give ALL the revenue ever generated from Dweck to a deserving charity in one lump sum cash payment - including insertion fees, FVF's, Paypal fees and any add-on fees. Keeping that money that was attained through the fraud of someone in violation of the Deceptive Practices Act makes eBay Inc. no better than a shill bidding scammer. Do the right thing Meg Whitman. Cut a check today, announce it at eBay Live that you are donating that money to a good cause - and I'm not talking the Mitt Romney Presidential campaign. How about a Children's Hospital or a college fund for the children of veteran's of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

eBay Auction Fraud by Manhattan Jeweler All but Condoned by eBay Until Now - Just in Time for eBay Live!

2007-06-10T07:21:00.000-04:00

This story, updated on June 11th at the end of the article with new info.

I began this article as an informational news article about another eBay seller who had been arrested/indicted/fined/etc. for some type of scam involving eBay. I didn't have to look very far until I realized that there was something far more sinister about the news that came out about it last night and this morning. This article is long, but after reading it you will see that eBay Inc.'s management is desperate. They want you and me and all eBay members and press and analysts to take them at face value for the story about the New York shill bidder - before you do, consider what I've written below and the reasoning behind the timing of the now international headlined story.

News is out today about a New York eBay seller, Ezra Dweck and his company EMH Group, that agreed to a $400,000 fine and a four year suspension from eBay for running a large shill bidding campaign on eBay and other sites. The seller sold primarily jewelry and his ID on eBay was jewelrybyezra, and of course he has been NARU'd. His company currently has their own auction site, which sells in the same manner as they did on eBay, 99 cent starting bids and no reserves, and by looking at the bid history on some of the items, a lot of shill bidding.

eBay spokesperson Nichola Sharpe said of the incident, "We do not tolerate criminal activity and proactively assist law enforcement to prosecute any individual who may try to defraud our users."

That last sentence gets its own paragraph, not out of respect for grammatical rules on my part, but because it represents a new strategy by eBay. Read it again. Notice the word proactively? That's right, it was eBay's "Internal Fraud Prevention" team that alerted New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. I know what you are thinking, that only happens in the imaginations of the PR people at eBay, but it does seem to be the case this time. But it appears the goodwill gesture ends there...

You were probably thinking that eBay being proactive and searching out criminals on the site and reporting them to authorities was too good to be true....if so, you'd probably be right - sadly. Notice the timing of the news of this fraud-bust? It comes FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE START OF EBAY LIVE!!! Coincidence? You tell me your thoughts, please. A spokesperson for eBay told Reuters that the timing of the release was decided by Cuomo's office after a several month investigation.

So, in an unprecedented move eBay contacts a state AG about shill bidding and the case is resolved within a week of eBay's international convention? eBay often uses the word "proactively," but until this point is was that eBay proactively encouraged law enforcement to contact eBay about issues. That's right, eBay "proactively encourages" people outside of eBay to report abuses to eBay, so that eBay can help them out with the cases. I'm not making this up. Here's the quote from eBay's Law Enforcement Center of the community pages, "The Outreach Program Manager proactively encourages government agencies to send any consumer inquiries from within their jurisdiction to eBay and PayPal. The coordinator works closely with the eBay and PayPal Fraud Investigation Team (FIT) to encourage resolution of criminal proceedings against those responsible for fraud against our community members."

It doesn't say that the Outreach Program Manager does anything to investigate fraud, assist in the Fraud Investigation Team's investigations, or reach out to the law enforcement agencies when eBay knows of illegal activity happening on the site. Rather it leaves the responsibility of catching the crooks up to local and federal law enforcement, while eBay sits back and rakes in the dough generated by the scammers. It seems that eBay's policy is and has been to merely "proactively encourage" others to find fraud on the site and then help these agencies if they do find fraud. So why start now? Not that it is a bad thing that eBay is trying to clean up the site, but the timing of the announcement reeks of scandal.

Reuters reports that eBay contacted New York Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo's, office about the matter and helped with an investigation over several months. It does not say when his office was contacted exactly, but since he didn't take the oath of office until January, 1st 2007, it had to be within the past five months. Now look at the feedback page for the seller in question. The last feedback received by the seller was in December of 2004. So eBay sat on information of shill bidding for over two whole years before "proactively" reporting it to the Attorney General's office? Looks that way. The definition of being proactive is to control a situation by acting before something occurs, rather than waiting for something to happen to act. If eBay was proactive, they would have prevented the shill bidding in the first place.

And it still gets better apparently... Lawyers for the shilling seller deny that Dweck has done anything wrong. Apparently the seller had a buyback program in place for his employees that would offer to buy back items the employees bought on eBay for more than the bid price. Basically, he probably told them (or they knew from working there) what the wholesale cost of the items were, and if the auction did not reach the profit point, the employees could bid on the item, pay, and then have Dweck buy back the item for more than they had paid. Sounds like a dirty little scheme, and it probably is dirty, and probably against eBay policy perhaps, but apparently it is not that cut and dry. The $400,000 fine imposed on Dweck was a settlement agreement between his lawyers and Cuomo's office. I've watched enough Law & Order episodes to know that the Attorney General does not give deals on open-and-shut cases, which this did not seem to be.

Dweck's lawyers responded to Reuters, that they had resolved the matter "only to avoid an interminable, costly battle with the AG's office." "EMH and Mr. Dweck did not intentionally encourage any fraudulent bidding," the lawyer said. "A buyback program which was vetted by two attorneys, was created to give winning bidders an incentive to sell back to EMH certain items."

Dweck's buyback program was scrutinized by two separate lawyers and found to be legit. His buyback program was in place for about a year. During which time eBay accepted 232,000+ bids from his employees, worth over $5,000,000.00 (that's right five million bucks), which eBay is now - two years after the fact - calling shill bidding. The seller's feedback page shows some 673 pages of feedback (@ 200 per page) during 2004, the last 11 1/2 months before the seller disappeared from eBay - that's 134,000 transactions that feedback was left for. I don't know the exact average rate that buyers leave feedback, but eBay users know that it is not uncommon to receive far LESS feedback than the actual number of transaction completed for a variety of reasons. For the sake of this article, I'll round the number of transactions off at 150,000 during 2004 - but by experience, I would say the number is actually much higher than that. Also it has been reported that Dweck also used another eBay ID, auctionriot, for selling, and the total number of ID's could be more.

To think that eBay Inc. was hurt by this seller is a bit of a stretch. Consider that each $1.00 starting bid auction would garner eBay $.75 in insertion fees. That's $112,500 for the last year Dweck sold on eBay, minimum, based on his feedback. Also consider the Reuters number of $5 million in bids. The final value fees eBay charges is 5.25% of the final selling price. So those $5 million in bids would have made eBay a cool $262,500.00 in 2004. This does not include the FVF's (Final Value Fees) on the price above the employees bids when the employees were outbid - which likely would have been significant, otherwise Dweck would not have been able to stay in business. Now consider the Paypal fees on that many transactions. Paypal charges a $.30 per transaction fee off the top, so that would be another $45,000 eBay gained in revenue. Paypal also charges a percentage fee on each transaction of roughly 2.5% at the level of sales that Dweck was attaining, or more than $125,000 in 2004. Also (I know how this looks, and sadly, you're thinking along the right track) Paypal takes their percentage fee on the shipping price too. Dweck charged (according to his ME page) $2.95 shipping for single auction item wins. The Paypal fees on the shipping alone would have been $11,000 or more in 2004. Add another $5000 in Paypal fees for the percentage taken out of the money paid for insurance on top of the regular shipping. OK, get out your calculator...add it up...

For 150,000 items in 2004 (which again, is probably a low number):
Insertion Fees: $112,500.00
Final Value Fees: $262,500.00
Paypal $.30 per transaction fees: $45,000.00
Paypal % Fee on Final Price: $125,000.00
Paypal % Fee on Shipping: $11,000.00
Paypal % on Insurance: $5,000.00

(Rough) Total eBay Revenue: $561,000.00

That's right, eBay brought in more than HALF A MILLION DOLLARS in revenue from this alleged shill bidder in 2004. Apparently the eBay Inc. spokespeople forgot to mention that to Cuomo's office and the Associated Press, and Reuters. Keep in mind, I have not begun to scratch the surface of the revenue generated by this one seller in 2004. You have to realize that my numbers do not include any listing fees for items that did not sell ($.75 a pop w/ gallery each), additional add-ons such as bold, highlight etc., or any Featured type listings (which start at $19.95 per listing), or subtitle, or second category or addition pictures or Paypal international transaction percentage fees. Also according to eBay's Shill Bidding Policy, Dweck would have forfeited all insertion fees on all the items that eBay ended when they NARU'd him - items that would not have shown in feedback.

This story is starting to read like a B-rate mob drama. It looks to me, like Ezra Dweck is merely the patsy in this plot. I'm not excusing him for shilling, but according to his lawyers his buyback plan was legit and legal, and the New York Attorney General's office apparently didn't have enough evidence on him to prosecute. Dweck seems to be taking the fall to keep the spotlight off the mob-boss, eBay Inc. There is no doubt that eBay executives plan on using this story as a shining example of how eBay is getting tough on fraud and cyber-crime on eBay.com at eBay Live which starts June 14th. It should be interesting to see if they still decide to run with this story, now that it has been shown that eBay possibly made millions of dollars with the help of a so-called scam artist shill bidder, at the expense of hundreds of thousands of innocent and unwitting eBay members.

So some questions are raised in my head.... Who exactly will Ezra Dweck be paying the restitution to? The victims who paid more than they would have if his employees did not bid up the price? eBay, for the pain and suffering of raking in a half a million(+) dollars per year and having to see that revenue disappear by NARU'ing Dweck? And what was the total restitution amount? The articles that I've read say that the $400,000 levied upon Dweck was for restitution AND fines. And what right does eBay have to keep the money made from Dweck? Doesn't eBay owe each and every legitimate winning bidder on Dweck's auctions that were influenced by shill bidding some compensation? Perhaps the difference between what they actually paid for the item and what it would have sold for if Dweck's buyback shill bidding had not occurred? Seems fair to me.

Also, when was eBay first notified of Dwecks "shill bidding?" I wish eBay would provide some proof of when he was first reported, but we all know they won't. Doing so honestly, would show that Dweck continued unabated with his scheme for up to a year, despite community reports of shill bidding. Folks, take a step back from this, look at the big picture. Dweck is dirty, but he did not force his buyers to bid above what they were willing to pay. eBay on the other hand is dirtier. eBay knowingly let this scam artist run wild on the site for hundreds of thousands of transactions. While doing so, eBay collected fees from Dweck, and saw the average selling price on eBay rise (at least fractionally above what it would have been had the hundreds of thousands of items sold for their true market value). Then eBay waits TWO years to act on this case legally and has the outcome announced days before eBay Live - and after the worst five months of scamming that eBay (no, strike that) that the ENTIRE internet has ever seen (literally, look it up).

Attendees, eBay members and analysts had mixed reviews after last year's eBay Live. Forbes reported after last year's event that RBC Financial gave the stock a "sector perform" rating with a $42 price target for the following 52 weeks. But since then, the stock has only managed to reach a 52 week high of $35.41. A big announcement at Live last year was eBay Express, which after the event shot up to around 4,000th in website rank according to Alexa - yesterday Express ranked almost 68,000th and over the past three months traffic is down 58%. eBay has also seen the number of core listings in the US drop dramatically over the past 52 weeks, despite repeated major monthly sales this year and numerous almost bi-weekly smaller listing fee specials. Listing volumes on other eBay sites internationally is not doing much better. Last year around the time of eBay Live, Google announced testing of Gbuy, which later was officially launched as Google Checkout - GOOG's online payment processing service. In less than a year, Checkout has gained approximately a 6-9% marketshare in the US, and just in the past month began offering Checkout to international sellers outside of the US. Also, last year's event held 15,000 people and sold out early. I haven't seen any numbers on capacity for this year's Live, but eBay still has not sold out, only three days before it begins.

Something is wrong. Meg & Co. know it. Keep this article in mind if you attend eBay Live this week.

UPDATE: June 11th
Last evening and overnight I received more information on this story from a couple sources that I found to be reliable, and also this morning from another frequent reliable anonymous contributer. I often hesitate to post news from my sources, despite the fact that they all are highly reliable, but due to the fact that I have numerous sources all stating pretty much the same things, I feel that I can justify adding this new information to the article.

It seems as if Ezra Dweck actually did have several eBay selling ID's that he used to sell items, and apparently many if not all were used in his buyback shill scheme. The number seems to be at least a dozen and the actual total may be upwards of twenty ID's. So, more than likely, the total revenue brought in by Dweck's listings to eBay was in the millions of dollars over the course of his scamming. I should point out that ALL of the revenue eBay received from Dweck is suspect, even from the auctions that he did not need his employees to artificially boost the prices. Why? Without a gimmick such as $1.00 opening bid auctions with no reserve, combined with rampant shilling, Dweck would not have been successful on the site, and quickly would have went out of business.

Also, it should be mentioned that the seller was selling very cheap jewelry and illegal knock-offs of designer pieces, and was reported to eBay a massive amount of times for this as well as shill bidding.

Several of my sources also report that not only was the seller allowed to continue selling on eBay after repeated community reports to eBay Trust & Safety about the activities of this seller, but also that eBay did NOT proactively contact the NY AG's office about the matter. Rather it was just the opposite with the NY AG's office forcing eBay to NARU the seller and provide proof and evidence against the seller. It seems that eBay is trying to make it look like they contacted the AG's office concerning the matter this year. Apparently the previous AG (and now NY Governor), Eliot Spitzer was the one being proactive against fraud on eBay. Spitzer sued a NY art gallery for selling fake artwork on eBay in 2000. Spitzer also forced Paypal to better disclose the rights of buyers who do not receive the items that they paid for on eBay. That last link talks of three "agreements" between Spitzer's office and Payapl (eBay Inc.) - ie. agreements that were made by eBay in order to prevent lawsuits.

More updates to be added as this story develops.

eBay Live - Get Your Tickets Today!!!! (Meg, I Want Commission on Sales)

2007-06-09T00:47:00.000-04:00

Four friggin' days from eBay Live 2007, and eBay is still advertising it each time you sign in to eBay.com. Not sold out yet? What's the issue? The venue is in the heart of Megalopolis USA, Boston, MA - less than a four hour drive for what, 40 million, people? And eBay can't sell out a convention hall?

I urge everyone sign up and attend. Sure. The blogosphere has been lit up over the past week about possible announcements at eBay Live. eBay Desktop? eBay Express listings? Paypal to anoint itself king of everything (prematurely)?

It's late, and this will be short and probably cryptic....but, what the hell? Has everyone forgotten about last year's eBay Live? (I'm assuming that you've noticed the speculation about the possible slew of godsend announcements forthcoming from Meg & Co. this year). Remember last year? Good times by all who attended. Fun, gambling, partying, chatting it up with friends in Vegas? Yeah, sort of wish I would have went. Then remember what happened a month later?

Huge fee hike.

Of course management denied any talks of it prior to eBay Live, 2006. It was a spur of the moment decision that the executives made. You know, increase the vibrancy and make the dynamics healthy, all that crap. Fact is, eBay sellers were lied to and treated like crap. So, what will this year bring? I don't know, and I won't speculate. But, I am anxious to find out.

btw - if I were management....I would have said the event was sold out a month ago. Is the number of people you are going to persuade to attend in the last few days worth the bad press of not being able to sell out for an annual meeting of THE people that drive the revenue of the company - eBay sellers? I don't think so.

eBay Bans Ivory Sales, But Allows It.......What It Means for the Future

2007-06-06T01:37:00.000-04:00

Have you filled out our Generic eBay User Poll Yet? http://www.firemeg.com/poll.htm

eBay has announced that it has placed a ban on all cross-border sales of ivory...but will still allow intra-national sales in countries which permit the trade. While I'm all for the end to the senseless slaughter of animals simply to produce decorative consumer goods, this decision may have some unintended consequences for eBay Inc.

eBay Inc. is by all means a very liberal left-wing skewed company that is concerned about the environment, headed by a right-wing conservative CEO. They have made efforts to increase awareness and participation in recycling with their Rethink initiative.

eBay stands to lose a low number of listings with their policy, since the sales will still be permitted within the countries that allow the trade. eBay probably will not gain more favor from environmentalists since they are still allowing some ivory trade to occur on their site. With this move eBay may be painting itself further into a corner in respect to what can be listed on the site. The ban was prompted by activists and their survey, which found 90% of the ivory sold on the site to be "probably illegal." eBay has come under fire in the past six months for the proliferation of e-fencing on the site, where ALL of the items that are e-fenced are illegal (as they were stolen for the purpose of selling on the site.

eBay began with a mission statement ten years ago and has since managed to create a user agreement full of rules so large that it rivals the US tax code. The ban on ivory sales further complicates the act of selling on the site, just as do the rules about ticket scalping, recalled toys, and licensed products - just to name a few. As time goes by, eBay's list of banned or regulated items keeps growing. Rather than simply making sellers responsible for the items they sell, eBay has stepped outside the bounds of being a venue and become its own regulatory and enforcement agency for ecommerce. This isn't the first time, nor will it be the last, that eBay has taken steps away from the "just a venue" stance.

As eBay becomes less and less of a venue, and more of a highly regulated ecommerce site, the door is opened further for other companies that might want to fill the "venue" void. Just as a flea market promoter cannot and is not responsible for a vendor selling illegal items under the table, a multi-user ecommerce site should not be responsible for trying to regulate and enforce the sale of illegal items. I envision the day that a competitor will spring up with virtually complete transparency and put the responsibility of selling legal only items on the individual sellers. eBay's regulation of such things wastes a lot of money and resources that could be better spent making the site, say, function properly on a regular basis.

If I were to post a classified ad on a website locally for an item that is banned in Costa Rica, is it the responsibility of the local classified site to know the laws in Costa Rica and to remove my listing? I would think not. Just as Blogger is not responsible to the Chinese government if I post anti-communist rhetoric on my blog in the US. It only makes sense. eBay has caved in the past to lawsuits and injunctions brought on by persons seeking to halt the online trade of certain items, and this has led to what is happening now; eBay is forced to keep up with a world full of laws and special interests and has to try to adhere to everything to prevent lawsuits. The dominoes have been set in motion some time ago. eBay has set the precedent that it will legislate and enforce laws around the world, and there is no going back.

If you are interested in a list of banned & prohibited items that cannot be sold on eBay or which the sale of is regulated by eBay, you might want to read this page and all of the links. A good example is the wildlife and animals link. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to what is permitted and what is not.

Listing on eBay.com...A Week Documented

2007-06-04T09:07:00.000-04:00

If you haven't done so yet, please fill out the Firemeg generic eBay User Poll here: http://www.firemeg.com/poll.htm. I'll start tabulating results sometime this week.

It's been a few weeks since I listed anything for sale on eBay. I have quite a pile of things to list now that I hope will do better on eBay than at my antique store. I started this morning and ran into messes right away, so in order to help me get through a week of eBay listings, I thought I would simply write an ongoing documentation article to help me vent more than anything. My websites are continuing to grow in both traffic and sales and we are right on target to be completely eBay free by the end of summer while maintaining the same level of revenue from our web stores. I will update this article with happening throughout the day while listing and throughout the week as things transpire....good and bad.

And so it begins:
June 4th, 9:00 AM EST - I did an update to Turbo Lister, hoping to God that eBay had fixed the issue created by the USPS in mid-May when the USPS changed their prices to dimensional weights. Nope, not that I can see. No place still (after more than two weeks since the USPS changes) to enter package dimensions. While downloading the updates I was asked via a pop-up window if I would like to try the new Beta version of Turbo Lister.....against my better judgment I clicked yes. We'll see how that goes.

June 4th, 10:01 AM EST (7:01 Pacific) - eBay Listing Tool Live Help still not open for business, despite the message that they start at 7:00 AM Pacific time.

June 4th, 10:03 AM EST - Live Help is open finally, and only a one minute wait time. Wow.

June 4th, 10:04 AM - I type my question "When will Turbo Lister be updated with a way to enter package dimensions for the USPS's new rates?"

June 4th, 10:14 AM - After seven minutes I got a response. Basically eBay is weeks behind and I'd have to wait a few more weeks unless I wanted to try the Beta program of TL. The Live Help rep said, "if you do join I would strongly recommend reading the user agreement that goes along with it." Hmm, wonder why. BTW - the beta version currently only has the capacity to take dimensions for Priority packages. That's good for the USPS, I guess. Also, if you use empty "template" type listings prefilled with all of your basic info and just add category, pic, description and title.....the beta program does not seem to update your current listings, but does have the spaces for dimensions when starting fresh.

June 4th, 11:02 AM - My items are showing in the search after about 10 minutes, so that makes me happy. Rob Chestnut's "fraud filters" are being kind.

June 4th, 12:22 PM - Listed 22 items. All have indexed into search except one, which in MIA still after 30 minutes. btw - experienced no real issues with the TL beta.

June 5th, 10:01 AM - Noticed I had a question about one item, yet the My Messages link on the left in MyeBay did not show any questions.

June 5th, 10:53 AM - I realized that I spelled a word wrong in an auction listing title. I go to revise (using the wonderful and magnificent SYI3.0 form) and alas, eBay has yet to fix the glitch with the zip code when revising a listing uploaded via Turbo Lister. I'm using the beta version too, so don't look for that bug to be fixed anytime soon.

To be continued....

eBay Inc.'s Management's Lies & Desperation

2007-06-01T07:16:00.000-04:00

Don't forget to fill out the Generic eBay User Poll: http://www.firemeg.com/poll.htm

This blog was updated on June 1st at 8:45 PM, this update appears at the end of the article.

A month or so ago, eBay flat out denied that it was in talks to acquire Stumbleupon....yesterday the deal was finalized and a giant SU banner/block graphic ad made its way to the eBay homepage. Blatant lie? Or good business practices? Last July eBay said that they would only put Yahoo! ads at the bottom of search result pages that returned null results or very few. And once again...Yahoo! ads are showing at the bottom of ALL search results for some users. In addition, some users are seeing huge eBay Express tables with five ads at the bottom of every search. Lies, deception, indecision and seemingly aimless managerial direction seems to be becoming status quo at eBay.

eBay Store owners are not happy about the inclusion of the pay-per-click Yahoo! ads at the bottom of each page and it shows in this thread on the eBay community discussion board. (I'm not going to post all the links and screenshots here, as the thread has many and is very concise about what and why the sellers are unhappy. If eBay should decide to censor and/or remove that thread, I will post the screenshots and links here in an update to this article).

It appears as if eBay Inc. is getting desperate for revenue...why else put ads all over the site that take buyers to sites like MSN Shopping, Tiger Direct, Become.com, Bestbuy, Shop.com (which is even a competitor to eBay's shopping.com), Yahoo! Shopping, Apple Store, JR Music and Macys? Sure, I have pay-per-click and pay-per-impression ads on this site, BUT I am not selling anything and I also do not take money from a userbase for a service that includes an implied ability to sell something on my site. eBay knows their core is slowly crumbling and are trying ever so hard to branch out with other types of revenue generation very quickly. The question everyone seems to be asking is why has eBay turned their backs on the sellers who have been the revenue engine of eBay Inc. for over a decade?

UPDATED PORTION:
Since first learning of eBay's newest method of maintaining revenue growth, eBay users have noticed that not only are ads for competing websites showing on the eBay search pages, but now some users are seeing ads for individual products complete with gallery pictures, titles, prices, names of website and link to those websites. Check out the very ironic screenshot that was taken after doing a search for "Pez dispenser."

eBay User (and Former User) Poll

2007-05-25T09:44:00.000-04:00

During the course of discussions in online forums, such as the Yahoo! Finance message board, I'm often asked to provide detailed empirical evidence to support my position on problems at eBay Inc. and with eBay management. eBay Inc. regularly conducts (or has a third party do them) polls of users for various topics on the site, ranging from customer satisfaction to the new SYI form 3.0. But, eBay does not publish the results of their polls publicly. Perhaps they don't want competitors gaining access to their data, or they may not think that the media and Wall Street would look kindly on some of the resulting data. Whatever the reason, the public is only left with mentions of eBay polling data in press releases and statements made by management when trying to make their case for changes to the infrastructure of eBay.com.

We've put together a short little poll that should take you only a couple or three minutes at most to fill out. This poll deals with eBay.com and eBay Inc. and has a wide array of questions dealing with your use (or former use) of eBay, your satisfaction (or lack thereof) with eBay and also with your projection of the value of eBay stock. Please take a few minutes and fill out the survey. Results will begin to be published in the next week or so.

July 9th the Genocide Begins? How eBay Inc. Plans on Stealing Content and Getting Rid of Undesirables

2007-05-21T10:15:00.000-04:00

This morning's Auctionbytes article about a new update to the eBay User Agreement seems to make eBay look a lot more like Big Brother, if not a full blown communist regime where your thoughts belong to the "community" and where those with bad thoughts may be disappeared. The changes in question went into effect immediately for new members and will be enforced site-wide starting on July 9th, 2007. Most notable of these changes is that eBay seems to have given itself autonomy to strike down anyone they see fit, and use any and all copyrighted material that members post on the site, without permission or royalties.

In the user agreement additions there is a section entitled "Abusing eBay." The section begins like something out of Orwell's 1984, "eBay and the Community work together to keep the Sites working properly and the Community safe. Please report problems, offensive content, and policy violations to us." Seems to be a call to arms for the collective community gestapo to quash anything from listing violations to dissent among users, and of course for the betterment of the community with no financial incentives for users to do the work that many feel should be done by Trust & Safety. The second paragraph goes on to describe the VERO program designed to keep members from using intellectual property that has been copyrighted previously by third parties.

The "Abusing eBay" section then turns an even more diabolical shade of Big Brother in the last paragraph which reads: Without limiting other remedies, we may limit, suspend, or terminate our service and user accounts, prohibit access to our website, delay or remove hosted content, and take technical and legal steps to keep users off the Sites if we think that they are creating problems, possible legal liabilities, or acting inconsistently with the letter or spirit of our policies. We also reserve the right to cancel unconfirmed accounts or accounts that have been inactive for a long time.

With an ounce of imagination and an ounce of speculation, one can easily interpret that paragraph to mean two things. First, and most importantly, eBay will have the right to NARU users based on virtually any reason they see fit, or for any reason that management feels will benefit eBay management. And without a detailed description of exactly what "creating problems, legal liabilities, or acting inconsistently" entails, members are left with little more than speculation as to the true meaning and intentions of the new addendum to the user agreement. If you complain about an eBay glitch in your eBay blog, could that be construed as "creating problems?" What about exposing scams on or off the site? Letting the world know that eBay is actively deceiving its userbase and virtually participating in scams might be considered a "legal liability."

The second thing that you may want to take away from that paragraph deals with the "right to cancel accounts that have been inactive for a long time." Everyone knows that these dormant accounts are widely used by scammers to post fraudulent listings on the site. This paragraph gives eBay the go-ahead to be proactive in fighting fraud by removing immediately any accounts that eBay finds to have the possibility of being compromised. Our friends at eBay Germany (the members, not the management) seem particularly adept at finding lists of compromised account information on Romanian and Russian websites that are being offered for sale to scammers. If eBay has free reign to simply close the accounts of anyone on those lists, they will no longer have to go through the arduous task of contacting the members on those lists and telling them to change their passwords and locking down their accounts until it is accomplished. Basically, eBay Trust & Safety can now find the lists (not too hard, just read the community forums where users are discussing them) and close the accounts of all members on the list that are not active. If this helps stop fraud on eBay, great, but I feel that this is a band-aid solution that will allow eBay to publish glorified numbers on the amount of fraud that is caught or prevented on the site. It will do nothing to stop the constant phishing with eBay clone emails or the rampant use of eBay.com for pharming attacks on unsuspecting users.

So if you have anything bad to say about eBay, or have had warnings in the past for any violations (or even if you haven't done anything you feel is questionable), and you find yourself removed from eBay on July 9th, now you have an idea why.

The second change that Auctionbytes writes about is the addition of a section in the user agreement called "Content License." It is a very short addendum, which reads: When you give us content, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicensable (through multiple tiers) right to exercise the copyright, publicity, and database rights (but no other rights) you have in the content, in any media known now or in the future.

This addendum, I believe, is designed to be vague for a reason - so that eBay can capitalize on viral content and use it for marketing, use copyrighted ideas posted to the eBay forums, blogs, etc. for their own use, and to allow eBay affiliates and developers to use all eBay content in their ads, programs and web gadgets. The last reason makes sense, and is something that is legitimate, but if this was their main aim, why did eBay simply not write the "Content License" portion of the user agreement to include use of copyrighted material only for use by affiliates and Certified Developers' tools (ie. for not-for-profit ads and links back to eBay, specifically to the exact auction with the copyrighted material from sites like MySpace, Bebo or other sites that eBay has recently entered into co-op deals with)?

"When you give us content." What exactly is meant by "give?" Does this include anything posted to a community portion of the website? What about anything posted in an auction description? This seems to allow eBay the right to go so far as to sell ideas, tools, e-Books, software programs listed in auction....to anyone they see fit, and for a profit, with no compensation or notice due to the original copyright holder...or even to use the ideas and seller-copyrighted software and programs for themselves. Some may wonder how eBay can have a VERO program in place to protect VERO members, while requiring all eBay members to give up all their copyrighted info for free. I understand why VERO members need to be protected, but why protect those companies and at the same time steal content from eBay members without compensation, and without permission - other than the fact that eBay members agree to the user agreement when they use eBay.com?

If eBay wants to go in this direction, that is fine, however it seems that eBay has applied the new addendum's to the user agreement without notifying eBay users. No mention of the additions have been given on the community announcement board. This move seems like it could be a way of getting rid of undesirables and capitalizing on the work of eBay members without so much as crediting them for their work. If anyone reading this feels that it is the responsibility of eBay users to regularly read the user agreement (along with all the links from the UA, which are considered by eBay to be part of the agreement) and familiarize themselves with all of it and all the changes....consider THIS! This is a mere PORTION of the eBay and Paypal user agreement. As shown, it has almost 20,000 lines of code to make up that page. And I did not even scratch the surface of all the links, sublinks and sublinks of sublinks.

These new changes have been forced on members without their approval or consent and without any sort of notification to eBay members. Ask yourself, are these changes in line with eBay's mission statement and community values? Or is it an attempt by eBay to gain even more control over the group of people who continue to drive revenue forward while being able to claim that - despite proof to the contrary - eBay is doing something about fraud?

You can discuss this topic here on the Pheebay forum.

Small Business Owners to Participate in International Independent (R)Etailers Week

2007-05-15T09:31:00.000-04:00

Several members of the Pheebay online forum have begun organizing a sort of International Independent E-tailers Week in order to educate and inform online shoppers that there is a lot more to shopping on the web than just browsing eBay. For years eBay has been touted as the "world's largest online marketplace," but that position is gradually being diminished by the formation of many small online niche shops and stores - many of which were founded by former eBay sellers. These independent online retailers are being invited to join in a global week of marketing and education this June from the summer solstice to the blue moon (21st - 30th) called the Midsummer Madness Grand Summer Fayre.

The goal of this promotion is to educate online shoppers about web retailers who offer quality products and services on websites that are easy to navigate and browse, but most importantly, sites that offer much higher levels of customer service and safety than eBay. Many "St. Elsewhere" stores (as they are sometimes referred to by former eBay store owners) were created because of fundamental flaws in the eBay Stores system. These flaws included poor exposure of listings, inaccurate search results, glitches in the infrastructure of eBay and eBay databases, high fees, poor customer service and rampant fraud that was beginning to give all sellers on eBay a bad reputation. Many St. Elsewhere store owners started making the move at the end of last summer when eBay raised store insertion fees from 2 cents to 10 cents per month for many items. Many St. Elsewhere owners realized that they could save thousands of dollars per month in fees by leaving eBay while not suffering much of a drop in traffic (even after the initial move). More importantly perhaps, these sellers found they could have complete control over their inventory, payment methods, design and customer service. One seller said, "I can now list cap guns without orange plugs and other eBay regulated items without risk of anyone removing my items. It may not seem like a big deal, but with thousands of items in inventory the lack of "Big Brother" trying to micromanage my sales saves me lots of time, effort and a lot of headaches."

Many sellers and buyers alike feel that the exodus away from eBay by some of the top sellers is starting to show, and the effects are not good for eBay, but are great for those sellers who have left. eBay listings in the US have once again fallen below the 11 million mark, which is the lowest pre-summer figure since 2003. eBay traffic this week hit a six year low, and eBay's rank has fallen to #19 on the list of most visited sites in the world (from a high of 5th in early 2006). While eBay is faltering in the amount of shoppers visiting the site and slowing in number of new users, other sites that showcase independent retailers items are gaining steam. One site, Bidhopper, that gathers inventory from sites based on an OSCommerce shell has seen a marked increase in number of items in their search inventory. Microsoft's Expo Live, a site that gets both feeds from independent sites as well as classified ads directly, is gaining in traffic and rank (as well as inventory) at a very brisk pace, and has passed eBay in both the amount of traffic it receives and the number of users visiting the site. Many sellers who want the ease and convenience of selling online without the work and maintenance of their own website have been choosing to list their items in free eCrater stores. eCrater has seen a very rapid growth in the past two years, due in large part to eBay management's stance of eBay Stores - a stance that many sellers believe involves the dissolution of Stores and at least the hiding of inventory in favor of other eBay products (namely eBay Express items).

For our part in this Independent Etailer Week, www.firemeg.com will continue to take submissions for our Off-eBay Success Stories page. And while you won't see any actual anecdotes on this page, you will see a list of many successful former eBay store owners' new independent web stores that are a success story in themselves. Please email Firemeg.com through our site to add your store to the list, and then we recommend visiting Pheebay to get a copy of the promotion banner to add to your site. If you are a buyer or a habitual eBay shopper, we encourage you to take a week or so at the end of June (or start now for that matter) and search some independent websites when shopping online. If you love eBay, you just might find that you love shopping outside of eBay as well, after all, many of the online stores on independent websites and online malls are filled with inventory from former eBay store owners.

For a list of some independent online retailers, visit our Off-eBay Success page as well as our homepage for links to numerous online shopping malls with multiple sellers.