One line summary
Some good stuff (Seller Protection), a few niggles (Item Specifics and Category Changes), a bit of a shocker (Featured First ending), but everything is overshadowed by a tremendous cross border trade opportunity.
eBay Summer Seller Update
Cross Border Trade
In today’s seller updates eBay have announced that from November for the price of an Anchor Shop you can list on all of eBay’s European sites as well as eBay Australia for free. Plus you get low 3 cent listings on eBay.com as an added bonus. Our quick calculation at Tamebay HQ says that you only need about 100 listings that you want to sell Internationally to make this a great deal. There’s also International Shipping updates and Listing Translation to make cross border trade easier than ever before.
Search Changes
There’s some not so good news for those that use Featured First listings, they’re going to be discontinued this Autumn. The Duplicate Listings Policy will be extended to include Auctions with Buy It Now, and the listing process will be a little more onerous due to new legal requirements.
Seller Protection
Better news is that eBay have listened to the 100s of sellers who wanted protection from the odd dodgy buyer. They’re to introduce a “Report a Buyer” feedback option and they’re going to make buyers communicate with sellers before they can open frivolous buyer protection cases.
Category specific changes
There are tweaks coming down the line for Clothes Shoes & Accessories that you’ll want to be aware of if you sell in that category. If you’re a tech seller you need to be aware that listings for CPUs/Processors, Server CPUs/Processors, Motherboards and PC Desktops & All-in-Ones will need to be matched against eBay Catalogue. There are also a few category changes.
Finally some housekeeping changes
• You’ll be able to choose whether to show the checkout comments box or not by deselecting the option in My eBay
• You’ll be able to add more details about the condition of items.
• You’ll also want to add product identifiers to your listings to appear in Google Product Search (Google Shopping).
• The business policy tool enabling you to edit all of your policies in one place has been delayed and won’t be available in the near future.
• My Messages will copy replies you send from your email client directly into your eBay My Messages sent items.
Tamebay’s Take on the Seller Update
There’s a lot to digest in this update, but most of it won’t affect your day to day business. A few more item specifics to complete and product identifies to add covers most of the boring stuff. Unless you used Featured First the search changes won’t affect you – just carry on doing what you’re doing to ensure your listings get found.
The big news and the only thing that really matters is the cross border trade news. Although an Anchor shop may look expensive, when your crunch the numbers it’s a bargain. Up until now it wasn’t worth paying for an Anchor shop unless you had over 6,000 live fixed price listings. With the cross border trade deal that number drops to around 100 active listings and upgrading to Anchor will save many sellers significant sums on their overseas insertion fees. If you’re not already selling overseas this should be your incentive to start!
19 Responses
report the buyer sounds like lip service and a waste of time , a buyer only needs to re register and its all for nought,
the rest seems quite interesting and needs digesting
Argggggh wheres the free extra images!!!!
I am sick of customers that can’t – don’t scroll down as far as the descriptions to see my extra images. We then get the question HOW BIG IS IT (oooo er).
We then reply with a polite template email regarding the extra images against a ruler if they would care to scroll down the description slightly.
EBAY.com and EBAY.au have free extras PLEASE when.
B-))))))
The suns got to me.
I think these changes are totes amazing, I love ebay and everything they do is wonderful. x
So what are the full ramifications of the cross border trade changes?
For instance if I have 1 item (as a 1 off) on BIN on .co.uk do the changes mean that this will get no default visibility on other sites or simply no visibility at all?
Up to now I have listed all my BINs on the UK site and around 50% have been sold overseas. Clearly a one off cannot be listed seperately on 3 sites at once and as a seller of mostly one off BINs I can only see this as a problem.
I was looking towards upgrading to an anchor shop later this year, so it seems like good news.
I would be interest like JD, to see what they do with international visibility as it currently stands.
When the changes are made, will we need to manually list our BINs on every EU site available? Isn’t this going to flood certain countries with listings that aren’t in their native language? As anyone who speaks a second language knows, online translation can totally corrupt the meaning of things, and can lead to much misunderstanding and frustration between buyer and seller.
Simon – free images would have been not just welcome but logical. It incentivises sellers to add more which can only be a good thing for buyers, especially with rising mobile purchases, and return rates with cross border trade. And would have been nice to help us trim costs!
All in all I am loathe to say, a thumbs down for this seller release and the demise of featured listings. All in all a fairly dissapointing day for UK (only) sellers who can’t quite ship their items (eg large heavy goods) within 1 working day!
I can almost guarantee that the more useful of these announcements will not actually appear, some of the last lot of announcements have still not been implemented, product bundles being the main bug bear for us, eBay tell us to get ready and 15 months and 2 updates down the line we are still ready…
…and still waiting
How many ebay sites are there in Europe?
Would I need to set up a new ID on each ebay site, or can i list to them all via my ebay.co.uk account?