DevCon gives a taste of things to come

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Those lucky souls at the eBay Developers’ Conference this week have had a sneak preview of what’s coming on eBay in the next twelve months. Some highlights include:

  • Merchant credit card processing integrated into eBay Checkout later this year.
  • Revise more data in multi-quantity fixed-price listings even after they have sales
  • A new finding API, which should make for some interesting third-party apps.
  • Better blocking of buyers in “locations to which I do not ship”: rather than the registration location, this is now being touted as “Block buyers whose primary shipping or registered location is excluded by seller”, so may exclude some of those who register with a UK address but want your mobile phone shipped to their nephew in Nigeria.

That’s the good news. On the flip side, I’m slightly concerned about “All pre-sale member messages intermediated through eBay for safety” – eBay’s email forwarding system at the moment is patchy at best, so if there’s something new coming that’s going to restrict things even further, I’d be worried that it’s going to make communication even more difficult than it is at the moment.

As always, details from DevCon are a bit sketchy because the announcements are not aimed at sellers themselves – so as ever, more details when we have them.

13 Responses

  1. Better blocking of buyers in “locations to which I do not ship” OMG Superb!!! I absolutely detest the buyers who “used to live in country A but moved to country B and couldn’t be bothered to change their registration details”.

    Quite honestly if negs could still be left for buyers I’d neg em! Happy days, I’ll be able to block those who don’t actually live where they pretend to from their registration 😀

    Just hope it works 🙂

  2. Merchant credit card intergration sounds good to me…if the UK get it,,,are we one stop closer to a flipping shopping basket yet do you think?

  3. #1, we clearly state in the listing description that we don’t ship outside of the UK. still get people asking though… :rolleyes:

    also get people actually buying stuff having moved from the UK to, for example, Singapore, Australia. Usually a quick message to them apologising and noting what it states clearly in the description is enough to make them realise what dunces they are for not reading the description properly in the first place!

    Merchant credit card processing should be interesting (hope they include Paypals Virtual Terminal too!), as should Revising more data in multi-quantity listings – they should start with location/postcodes – try moving your warehouse and then changing your location on listings with sales. you simply can’t.

  4. @ # 9

    Or try living in a state that just increased their sales tax rate due to budget shortfalls. It makes no sense the way eBay currently is with their restrictions on what can and cannot be edited after sales. I can understand it for auctions but not fixed priced (unless best offers are currently on the table).

  5. #12, we did with another company we worked at that also sold on ebay, and found that it was a lot of hassle, especially with returns, but also with delivery times, tracking, etc.

    Also, we only shipped to certain European Countries (due to huge parcelforce costs of sending to the likes of Greece etc), yet ebay only allow you to specify either that you ship to Europe, or that you don’t. They don’t allow you to specify what countries.

    There were other things as well. At the end of the day, we found it was just too much hassle, and decided not to do it with the company we’re now with.

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