With the New Year well under way and Christmas already pretty much a distant memory for most people it’s getting towards the time of year for eBay to release the first seller update of 2012.
Last year’s Spring Seller Update was released in mid-March, so there’s probably a good few weeks before we find out what eBay have in store for us this year, but what would you like to see?
If you were eBay and planning changes to selling (or buying!) what are the first things you’d change and why? Would it be feedback, fees, categories and seller standards which are the main areas last year’s changes affected, or are there other things you’d like to see eBay change?
41 Responses
Quick one (more later) Can we have a ‘processing’ section in SMP please.
Batch processing would make it so much easier for many sellers.
The real issue for me is not ebay but shipping and packaging costs that are rising way ahead of inflation.
Not too sure ebay can offer any help with this one.
But they could simplify search by removing the “exclude postage and packaging” option from search and make search “postage and packaging inclusive” only.
And as for “free shipping”. ebay are surely having a laugh with this one!
I would like item specifics fields to autofill when listing are uploaded.
I’d love them to put any changes on hold and concentrate on the literally 100s of site glitches and other stuff that doesn’t work correctly.
I would like eBay to stop overseas sellers selling silver which does not comply with UK hallmarking regulations, as this is illegal.
For all UK sellers which ship from within the UK ebay UK should automatically place a large “Union Jack” logo/icon at the top of all listings and in the search to make it very clear to UK buyers where goods are shipped from.
In fact I have no problem with this going global on all ebay sites worldwide.
I would like Ebay to get rid of Best Match.
When I pay for advertising, I expect to be advertised…
Allow feedback/reviews to be left on products not just sellers so good products find there way to the top of searches.
Refund you’re eBay fee’s automatically if you cancel a transaction.
Make it much clearer for shipping upgrade options at checkout.
There are so many things they can do to make the site better. But they are a casualty of their own success. The site is too big and far expanding to easily develop now. So we will just have to put up with everything for now and forever really.
Surprised nobody has been able to come along with a rival to eBay really. There are plenty of big well financed companies out there that could do it.
Couple of things for me:
1, I would like to be able to reduce products in a better way, like on Amazon, rather than only offer a markdown for 14 days!
2,I would like to be able to look up customers full order details from their message on ebay, or even from your SMP, rather than having to search five different places, again like Amazon.
3,Again like Amazon I would like to be able to refund customers easily, without a million different pages and logging in twice!!!
Just to make life a little easier…is it really that hard?
I wouldn’t mind seeing “Want it Now” promoted a bit better. I’ve used it a few time with mixed sucess.
I’d like eBay to stop persecuting their sellers, and treat us like customers again. For too long, eBay has been buyer-oriented with no comeback for the seller.
And I’d also like to see buyer feedback abolished – meaning feedback awarded to buyers. Amazon don’t do it; eBay should not either. And it’s meaningless because a seller can olny give positives…. how stupid is that on top of an already stupid system?
Let’s face it, the only reason for feedback is so that a buyer can see if a seller is reputable. Therefore it follows that any feedback received *as a buyer* is meaningless; it’s not showing a member’s selling reputation.
The kind of feedback that says that this bloke is a great eBayer because he paid for the item is pointless and useless!
Agree re feedback. Pointless leaving it for a buyer.
The only thing I can think of that eBay could do for us is to do a mass mail out to all users asking them to confirm or update there address and phone numbers held on file, hours are wasted each week chasing correct phone numbers in order to arrange delivery.
1. People should be able to see how many people are watching an item. I have had quite a few items with over 30 watchers and yet no bids, then when item finished quite a few will then contact me saying … “Oh as your item didn’t sell and you had no interest will you send it to me for nothing etc etc” If they had seen how many watchers there were at least one of them might have been spurred into bidding.
2. Free listings all the time – with higher final value fees. A lot of my items are quite niche /long tail items, eBay is now too expensive to list these.
3. More free photos – in a lot of categories you only get 1 photo this surely would cut down on INAD claims
4. More realistic postage caps. £1 for DVD’s is ok if you sell them individually, but if you try and sell a bundle to actually get the sale you can still only charge £1 and often end up making a huge loss.
Chris, everyone that reads these pages regularly will be already aware that eBay does not listen to what sellers want.
The suggestions made here are valid, but won’t go any further than here.
eBay always does what it wants so this article seems a bit of a waste of time to me.
The product bundles that were promised along with the cart please 🙂
I would like ebay to treat neutral feedback as neutral. As a non-pro seller living in the coutryside I sell things with a 5 day STATED dispatch time, then get neutral feedback because buyers expect it next day.
sort feedback so it does not favour buyers
dump the outlets before they do anymore damage
I would LOVE to see multi-level access for staff members.
A pink came onto the PS forums a long while back and asked if this would be of use, there was a resounding ‘YES’ from the community and we’ve heard nothing since.
I really don’t want some of my staff seeing our sales figues and being able to read buyer messages and such.
Get rid of best match.
Bring back a level playing field.
Dump DSR’s
Simplify the site layout.
(now you have to click umpteen times to get anywhere while as before it was a case of type in what you wanted, it came up ending soonest, job done) Probably why I don’t look there as much any more and even when I do cannot find what I want
How about an icon close to the selling price signifying that the seller provides VAT receipts – should help level the playing field with unregistered sellers and encourage people buying for business.
1.Simplify main page, and order page layout so buyers see key information,ie, price, postage, delivery time.
2. Re-introduce limited buyer feedback, ie, a seller can leave one neg per 500 transactions, this is really needed to prevent buyers ripping sellers off systematically.
3. No price increase, we have already been hit dramatically.
4. No major system changes, we are really working hard at the moment, we need stability.
5. More honest assessment of feedback removal requests that takes in to account general buyer behaviour.
I’ve thought of another one. Bring in a cap for Final Value Fees for business sellers. For those of us that sell high end products the uniformal 10% FVF is really making some products uncompetitive.
Why are Buyers allowed to leave Negative Feedback on delivery times from overseas sellers when they simply don’t read the delivery times.
It should be so easy for Ebay to block or remove Feedback for slow delivery when the Buyers simply dont read the delivery times.
Example
MY item says delivery time 10 – 22 working days.
Bob buys shirt on 1st Dec and then leaves negative with bad dsr on 24th Dec. Nice item but slow delivery
How can that be!
Remedy
Seller has the option to challenge the Feedback
I hoped I would have a lot less unpaid items now that the basket has rolled out. That is not the case so I would like to see the following.
When an unpaid item is closed the items gets added back onto the inventory.
Returns should not be added back on as they may not be in a condition to resell.
Thanks
change anything and everything to favour buyers I need their money
Now that eBay have a basket arrangement it would be nice to be able to set an ebay store minimum order value for BINS.
I don’t want customers buying a 1 x 99p item when they could be putting a selection of 99p items in the basket minimum order £5 say. I cannot understand why punters buy a single 99p NEW item when the shipping exceeds the cost of the item by a big margin but they do.
I have this minimum order value set up on my website so why can’t BIG ebay do it?
That’s something I’d like to see as well, though I doubt it will ever happen.
I have to agree with DBL and the ebay LinkedIn group discussed this at length last year. So many of us would like a ‘processing’ section on SMP – although we all have different reasons for wanting it – a wide variety of sellers would find it useful.
It’s a little annoying that some of us have been asking for this simple change for over 4 years on a professional ebay (SMP) product and not had any feedback on why we can’t have it.
I feel the fees are just too high plus VAT, it is starting to make me think it is not worth the business I have built up
Two simple changes eBay could make that would make us all more profits including themselves.
1. to have a much larger and clearer system for buyers when viewing an item to encourage them to go into sellers shop. We show customers and they are amazed and we see it time and time again when they get into the shop they make multiple purchases ” just click the red door, What red door?”
2. on our eBay site we pride ourselves on customer service in 12 months 17,000 sales with only 1 neg BUT this after a lot of hard work what we have suggested to eBay every time we have to get rid of neg feedback due to slander or just bare fibs spending countless time on the telephone arguing wasting ebays time and ours IF a customer had to tick a box before able to leave neg or neutral feedback that stated they had given seller the opportunity to resolve any issues, we operate within the DSR and we will always refund in full including there p&p often they leave the objective feedback we take time to resolve any issue But they don’t reply you do everything you can but they just ignor Simple currently a message pops up but if they had to tick box so the eBay rep when you were on the telephone could see they have left neg without even contacting you eBay could then suspend the comment or even not allow them to leave it until they had made contact we see it over and over again the negs are left by people who don’t contact you and after the event don’t answer you AND that is unfair “dare I say it even eBay staff admit it”