Hello! The light in my office is on, the coffee mug is there, let's get busy!
I’ll come back to an old topic now, “the eBay ban on Digital Products” (on Internet after 3 weeks … it is already old staff. It is amazing but it is true).
First it was a shock, I was unhappy too, but I didn’t start throwing stones on eBay.
I’ll explain why! There are actions with short or long achievement and usually the long achievement action can hurt from the beginning.
Do you remember when Google changed the rules on ranking in July 2006?
I lot of website owners was affected, me included. It was a brutal action; it was done over the night, without any explanation or giving us the new rules. I had Google tool bar on my browser and in one morning my rank was gone.
In a nutshell, the Google changes were done with a noble cause in mind, it was a loud cry for high quality pages, content pages!
The web was full of junk, without quality content and they wanted to stop the madness of poor pages on the Net. After almost 3 years, the web is cleaner now, everybody is convinced that the content is the king and the reason you are ranked or not. And everybody is striving to get content.
YES, a have to admit, there decision was a long term decision for improving the Internet content and, YES, they hurt a lot of people at the beginning of this process, but we are better off today.
Let’s come back to eBay. This is a company created for auctions, nothing else, just an application to facilitate e direct conversation between sellers and buyers about an item one wants to sell and the other wants to buy.
All of a sudden they discover that there are items which are selling at a price in the range if $0.01 and $0.99. I bought some e-Books costing me $0.10. Now eBay is a business, they make money taking a percentage, let’s say around $5.00.
1) How much they make if you sell some item with $0.10, please calculate $5.00 from $0.10.
2) It was a danger of transforming eBay in a junk auction company, a flea marketing company
3) They investigate why the sellers of Digital Products sell so low, the sellers really don’t make a profit and they are happy and continue to sell at so low price. They discovered the truth. The sellers of DP don’t make a profit on DP auctions, but they build a list, and they make a fortune outside of eBay with OTOs (One Time Offers), eBay doesn’t have earnings from OTOs and doesn’t care for them.
With other words we the people abuse the eBay system. It was not part of eBay business to create people's lists, in top of that people collected feedback for these low cost auctions and feedback system was manipulated as well.
I don’t make any excuse for eBay but I try to understand the reasons behind there action.
What eBay is doing now is what Google did in 2006. It is a long term decision to maintain eBay as a auction company, and maintain the good reputation of eBay, and don’t do business in the back of eBay with OTOs using the traffic of eBay.
I was hurt too but I really cannot blame them for doing it. Long term it will be OK and maybe the DP will start to sell at there real value. We have to stay in the positive side and obey the rules.
I didn’t like how they did it, it was a very short notice, they didn’t explain all the details, and when they changed the rules on Classified Ads they didn’t publish the new rules officially, to discover them you had to go in community help and read a lot.
What hurt me the most wasn’t the ban of DP, it was some rules they implement for feedback and PowerSeller policies.
My opinion is they have to treat sellers and buyers equally, the eBay founders did and for years the eBay business was prosperous and it was well appreciated by the public. Now the new rules are in the favor of buyers, and they forget about sellers.
Why I cannot let a negative feedback to a buyer, but the buyer can let me, the seller, a negative feedback. The buyers immediately begin to abuse the new rule, it was so many discussions back and force, and finally eBay changes the policy again. Starting from May a new change will be implemented in the favor of abused sellers this time.
The changes include protections for sellers against unfair negative Feedback:
1) Negative or neutral feedback will be removed when it appears a buyer is abusing the system. But, if you think this is happening to you, you must report to eBay by using the “Contact Us” link on any eBay Help page
2) eBay will also remove Feedback when a buyer doesn’t respond to an Unpaid item report
3) Or if buyer responds but doesn’t specifically call out seller performance, item condition or transaction problems
Wouldn’t be nicer just not to delete the equally treatment of sellers and buyers? But at list your voice made a difference.
Keep going the good work, eBay is still the best auction company and we all will benefit if we don’t abuse it. The focus must be how to stay within the rules, not how to find loopholes to do something else, profiting of FREE Bay traffic.
Regards
Michaela
