AuctionAddictsAnonymous.com

Well, I’m back after quite a long absence and of course I’m not surprised to discover that glitches are still the order of the day at both eBay and PayPal! Some things just never change. A group of eBay users were informed last Wednesday that their automatic payment had been declined and were requested to make a one-off payment and to update their automatic payment method. Unsurprisingly this was another error on the part of eBay, but at least it wasn’t related to the recent hacking of eBay accounts or the recent problem with PayPal. You can read more about these glitches and their outcomes at Auctionbytes.com .

None of these incidents make sellers feel in any way confident about their dealings with either eBay or PayPal. In fact, if you’re one of the many sellers who have had their PayPal accounts frozen at any time then you will be dismayed by eBay’s plan to force users to complete payments exclusively via PayPal. They have rolled this system out in Australia despite being ordered by the Australian Competition Regulator not to implement this plan. It looks like they are in for a long court battle on this one. Let’s just hope that justice and good sense prevail and eBay’s plans are scuppered for good!

Popularity: 42% [?]

There has been a significant development in relation to the Botnet attack on eBay which we reported to you on 6 September. It appears that the bot, which uses phishing as part of this attack, has been focusing mainly on eBay UK accounts with the Trojan distinguishing between accounts inside and outside the United States.

The bot, which is one of the first to employ extremely complex multi-stage attack methods, performs a distrubuted and covert attack on eBay accounts in an attempt to obtain personal information and/or items sold or purchases through the eBay site.

Please be very careful when visiting sites and never enter your eBay username or password into any form which was accessed via an email or any site other than eBay. If you want to check the status of your account or login to eBay, always type the url into your browser so you can be sure you are on the legitimate eBay site. eBay will never ask you to login from the link in an email!

It is recommended that you keep a close eye on your eBay account, perhaps change your password periodically to help improve the security of your account details and immediately report ANY suspicious activity on your account to eBay’s Trust and Safety department.

You can read this story in full at CNN.com

Popularity: 50% [?]

It’s been reported that eBay is under attack by a botnet! (See article here) Unsurprisingly, the company who discovered this attack has been unable to contact eBay directly to warn them. Sound familiar?

eBay must surely be one of the worst organisations to work with when you try to make contact with them. It’s as if they have no staff at all! If your eBay account is compromised by this attack, you would hope that eBay would be able to help you out. Not much chance of that if they don’t even respond to an attack on their user database. It looks like it’s up to us to keep a close check on our eBay accounts and immediately report anything suspicious to eBay. Stay safe! Check your accounts now!

Our message to eBay? Wise up and protect your users! We are, after all, your customers!

Popularity: 50% [?]

An outage at PayPal has caused mayhem for users of their subscription service. The outage was reported on 30 August and is still ongoing. PayPal has stated that the problem will be fixed by 5/6 September, which seems like a ridiculously long time, considering the number of staff and, presumably, programmers they employ. (You can read the full article at: Techcrunch.com)

If you have made a subscription payment to a site or service, the owners or administrators of that site, may not know about it. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself denied access to the services you’ve paid for. As far as their sites’ systems are concerned, you haven’t paid! If you’re frustrated by this, then the appropriate placed to vent your anger is at PayPal.

Even though it was the Labor Day weekend, it would have been easy for someone on PayPal’s “skeleton staff” to place an announcement about this problem, somewhere prominent on the PayPal homepage. It’s common courtesy! (Not PayPal’s strong point. Not surprising really when you consider it’s owned by eBay!)

Update: Just moments after publishing, it was announced that the problem has been resolved and PayPal are now working to clear the backlog. (Heave a sigh of relief!)

Popularity: 29% [?]

eBay have been testing their planned new page designs, search functions and services, and it seems that they have decided to go with the very successful Amazon model. Included in this very substantial rehash of the site are a new homepage, more specific search results with multiple images, links to user reviews and Amazon style price range results. This much smarter search will enable buyers to find the items they really want and cut through all the irrelevant, related items that always appear in the results. The images are now much larger on the results page, with the item being shown from different angles. It also includes product details and descriptions, and provides recommendations based on what other customers bought after they purchased the current item.

It’s certainly welcome news that eBay search results will be much cleaner with buyers finding the items they want to buy much quicker. This should make the shopping experience on eBay a much more pleasant one and save so much time for those who want to purchase our items. The buyer experience is paramount in the battle to keep eBay alive and well for many years to come.

Amazon has been growing faster than any other company in the online retail sector, while eBay’s GMV (gross merchanise volume) has been slowing and the number of listings have been in decline. Although eBay have denied using the Amazon model for this revamp, it’s clear that they have understood that the clean design of their competitors website is a major factor in their success.

I don’t think it’s really that relevant whether eBay have chosen to base their new features on those of Amazon. What really matters to us as sellers is that our customers hang around and continue to purchase their items on eBay.

Popularity: 25% [?]

I just discovered this listing on eBay and thought I would share it with you. It’s really hilarious! If, like me, you are a parent, you will definitely identify with this woman! Read all about how she came by the item she is selling, and just look at the price the item fetched! WOW!

The funniest listing ever!

A great lesson in making a listing that REALLY sells!

Popularity: 34% [?]

The first in our new video series is now ready for you! In this tutorial you will discover how to view your eBay store statistics and find out which of your keywords are working hardest for you. These statistics are very important for anyone with an eBay Store. Having this information will allow you to maximise your efforts in the right direction, seeing which of your pages are the most popular and concentrating your marketing on those areas of your business where most profit is generated.

We hope this video is useful to you. You can view it here, or use the Videos link on the main menu.

If you have suggestions for any other tutorials you would like to see then please let me know and we’ll see what we can do.

Popularity: 18% [?]

I spotted this very interesting article today by Derek Gehl on Marketingtips.com, outlining the 5 top reasons to open an eBay Store. I have quoted them here for you in full and you can read the original post here

Reason #5: More flexibility = more opportunities to sell in the format your buyers like best

Just because you have an eBay Store, it doesn’t mean you have to stop putting your items up for auction! An eBay store allows you to put your products in front of people in a variety of different ways.

My recommendation is to list 80% of your items in your store and 20% as auctions in order to drive more visitors to your store.

Reason #4: More automation = more free time for you!

With an eBay store, it’s far easier for you to automate daily chores such as relisting unsold items, asking for feedback, and keeping track of your inventory. The more you can automate your business, the more time you can spend growing it — and multiplying your profits!

Reason #3: More communication with buyers = more chances to sell to them in the future

When you have your own Store, eBay makes it easy for you to stay in touch with your bidders and customers, by allowing you to create your own store newsletter that eBay will send out on your behalf.

All you have to do is add a link at the top right corner of your store page that says, “Sign up for store newsletter” — and then eBay will automatically send people notices about your latest specials and products for sale.

It’s a great way to put your products right in front of your best potential customers… and encourage them to buy!

Reason #2: More exposure = more traffic

Unlike your regular auction listings, your eBay Store homepage — as well as your store category pages and any custom pages you create — doesn’t disappear once your seven-day auction is over. It has a constant presence on the Web.

And that means those pages can get indexed by the search engines!

So not only will a store help you get tons more exposure on eBay itself, you’ll also be able to put your products in front of a huge number of off-eBay shoppers, as well.

Reason #1: Lower eBay fees = more profits

As I said at the beginning of this article, when you own an eBay Store, your listing fees are way less expensive.

Just how much will you save? Well, if you run a regular auction for an item that costs $24.99, it’ll cost you 60 cents to insert your listing. But if you have a store, that same item will cost only 5 cents to list! That will add up to huge savings once you start listing a large number of items.

The final value fees are also considerably lower. For example, you have to pay 10% of the total value for every $24.99 item you sell through a regular auction. But when you own a store, you only have to pay 5.25% of the total value.

And money saved = more profits for you!

I think you’ll agree, this is some sound advice. As a store owner myself, I can safely say that it does save a LOT of money on listing fees. You can attract shoppers to your store by listing a few auctions and placing prominent links to your store homepage.

You can also promote your store outside eBay and in our forthcoming video series we’ll show you how you can achieve great results by using FREE resources to promote your store’s homepage.

So, what are you waiting for? Go get a store!

Basic eBay Store monthly subscriptions cost:

UK £6.00
US/Canada $15.95
Australia $14.95

To read this article in full visit: 5 Top Reasons to open an eBay Store

Popularity: 19% [?]

We have just launched our new resources page for eBay buyers. This is a list of tools for buyers to ensure that you can snatch that bargain! It includes details of bid sniping tools and links for help and advice regarding fraud and identity theft

We have also added a convenient search tool for eBay.co.uk which we hope you will find very useful. This is located in the sidebar. You can search for any item without having to leave this site. All search results will open in a new page.

Popularity: 16% [?]

After a lot of hair-pulling, nail-biting and coffee drinking, I have finally sorted out the issue of a poll. Doesn’t it look great? I thought we better start with a question about eBay since this is supposed to be a website for eBayers! I invite you to answer this poll, and urge you to check the site regularly as I will be adding more of them in the coming days and weeks.

As I mentioned before in my ebay blog I intend to provide you with opportunities to get to know each other and to this end I have started a forum for interest groups. The forum will be active very shortly. (Just a few more tweaks needed to make it as good as it can be!) If you have any suggestions or would like to initiate an interest group, just let me know by leaving a comment, and we’ll see what we can do for you! Remember, this site is all about YOU!.

Popularity: 14% [?]