The Last Big eBay Convention Is History.

Chicago was the last because eBay decided to move closer to the eBay community in small cities, with less participants but face to face with real sellers and creating an environment in which each one can have a voice.
Moving in the community across America eBay hopes that connecting with the grass roots will be more profitable for sellers, buyers and eBay.

The first event will be in Oct. 3rd, 4th, 2008 at Fort Hays State University, 2 days event, $49.00 participating fee, max 250 people.
Each event will have a theme; in Oct. the theme is “Making Change Work”. For more info email Joyce at: yabie (at) ruraltel.net. The Education Specialists Trained by eBay are invited to participate, as volunteers and with no profit.

Now some details coming out of Chicago convention:
We are not allowed to use eBay as a marketing tool:

• No more email addresses in your action description starting 1st July; it is a short notice, search all your listings and delete emails. It looks as eBay with communicate with our PayPal via email but we will never see the email address of buyers
• No more links or references to websites outside of eBay, not even on “About me” pages. I don’t know when this one will start to be enforced. All you can have is a link from one of your listing to other of your listing or to your eBay Store
• eBay will limit the “active content” in auctions listings. If you have flash code, animation, java script you must delete them except if they are coming from third parties that are certified as eBay providers. This is very tricky and slippery proposition; it will not be enforced until September.

As you can see, the new eBay management started a big offensive which is a cultural shift that will require all of us to rethink our business.

The old days in which a newbie jumps on eBay and starts selling whatever he can put his hands on are gone. Some categories are dominated by large sellers with deep pockets, as a newbie you must be an educated eBayer from the start. You must know to find good selling niche and avoid electronics etc. I think this will be hard to accomplish and eBay will lose a lot of new sellers who will be discouraged in the first 2-3 month of their eBay experience.

The change in feedback rules, the eBay being in favor of buyers and the creation of Detail Seller Rating (DSR), heart the most the community of sellers.

Keep in mind, to strive improving your DSR make sense:

• Good score will produce more bids for you
• Sellers with a high average score (greater than 4.6) will have an advantage in the search results (now eBay sounds like Google!)
• Your high score can earn you free discounts as well, the highest 4.9 will get 20%, and the lowest 4.6 will get 5%.
• The Education Specialists trained by eBay need to get 98% positive feedback to stay eligible.

Note: the score calculation produces a huge confusion:

1. The score for bidders visible on your feedback profile is based on the past 12 month
2. The fee discounts and search placements are based on your scores for the prior 30 days. In the case, if you don’t have a lot of activities and one single bad thing happened you are drastically affected, but because of the 30 days grace period, you can correct your score quickly.

To improve the DSR, we must:

• Create accurate descriptions
• Have good communication with buyers
• Have a perfect shipping timing
• Don’t inflate shipping and handling, just give up on handling and use an accurate shipping figure.

I notice that the community of sellers is not happy with the new changes, but personally I’ll be patient to see what happen in the next 6-12 month. I am not jumping to conclusion now.

To your success
Michaela
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