Apparently intent on keeping up with the continued growth of socialization in online shopping on competing sites, eBay (EBAY) has announced some upgrades to the world’s largest online marketplace that it hopes will improve the overall shopping experience for both buyers and sellers.
Foremost among the changes, which eBay concedes are relatively minor compared to their fee restructuring announcement earlier this year, is the introduction of a new feature to give buyers a better idea of the condition of items listed on the site. Sellers will now be able to select from six descriptive conditions for products—‘new’, ‘new other’, ‘manufacturer refurbished’, ‘seller refurbished’, ‘used’ and ‘for parts/not working.’ Some product categories on eBay will be required to utilize these descriptions starting at the end of July.
Beginning in September, eBay will also begin integrating its buyer protection program further into their seller performance evaluations. Buyers already have the ability to thoroughly rate sellers on eBay based on four criteria organized through “Detailed Seller Ratings” on the site but the expanded protection program will lend even more legitimacy to transactions on the site and help resolve any disputes that may arise.
In an effort to step up security even further, eBay is now making all on-site communications between buyers and sellers anonymous and will allow sellers to manually opt out of automated eBay payment reminder emails and choose to customize their own messages instead.
Featured First listings, the listing option that gave sellers the top two spots for product search results for a fee, are being eliminated during this round of changes as well and will probably be the beginning of all paid/featured listings on the site being removed.
The final upgrade is going to give eBay users the ability to manage products in bulk, something desperately needed by those who manage hundreds or thousands of items. Users will be able to manage, edit and list up to 5,000 product listings at one time with the new change, which will also allow them to download bulk listings to eBay through a Microsoft Excel plug-in. The site’s bulk listing format that lets users managed as many as 200 listings at one time, will also be tested for better efficiency.
Overall, if you’re active on eBay and adhere to fair and common-sense practices on the site, these should be some good changes and improvements for your operation. But as always, we want to hear from you. Leave us a comment with your thoughts and ideas!
I a top-rated power seller that has seen a drop in sales from $1200 a day to $100 a day due to the last round of changes. I have dealt with change after change over the past 8 years and each time my bottom line goes down while my fees go higher. Ebay has done nothing to help the seller, they only care about the buyer. But if they run off all the sellers, what will the buyer buy?
You need to go on over to auctionbytes.com where they’ve been discussing the changes in September. Every honest seller wants to do their best for their customer….BUT Ebay will simply put a strike against them for ANY dispute the buyer may wish to open…whether it is disproven by the seller or not and whether its a scammer buyer or not – seller will pay for it with a strike to their reputation! Dirty pool! You can also check out a thread on Ebay’s Seller Central discussion board that is over 2,100 posts long…all sellers complaining about lack of sale, lack of traffic. My friend…Ebay’s core is in big trouble and nobody but the sellers in the trenches seem to understand that!