FeeBay to FreeBay

FeeBay is going FreeBay with lower Buy It Now insertion fees. But hold on! Expect more Paypal fees as eBay bans Money Orders and Checks. Wow! Sellers are going to love this. NOT!!!

Paper payments end this October

Beginning late October 2008, all items listed on eBay.com must be paid for using one of the following approved payment options:

* Direct credit or debit card payment via a merchant credit card account
* PayPal
* ProPay
* Payment on pick-up

Paper payment methods such as checks and money orders will no longer be accepted on eBay.com.

By January 2009, all approved electronic payment methods will be integrated into eBay checkout. For example, buyers will be able to enter their credit card number directly into eBay checkout, and the payment will be routed to the seller’s Internet merchant account or to their PayPal account.

Please note that the new payments policy will not apply to the vehicles categories in Motors, capital equipment categories in Business & Industrial, Mature Audiences and Real Estate.

http://pages.ebay.com/sell/August2008Update/Payments/

Selling on eBay like building a sandcastle on the beach

This is an eloquent analogy about selling on eBay (and building eBay services):

If you choose to invest time building sand castles, you have to anticipate the waves. I’m not telling you not to build castles. Just don’t cry when they wash away. Get yourself a castle mold so that you can easily rebuild. Be prepared to plop another one down the moment the wave receeds.

The analogy is from seller exdwh:
http://dev-forums.ebay.com/

My BigCrumbs referrer

I clicked on a link on the BigCrumbs.com home page and found one of my referrers. I think I first clicked through to BigCrumbs from Auction Bytes.

This person has 17,800 people in their network and earned about $2,700. That’s around $130 per month. Very interesting. I love hard numbers.

Anti-Auctiva sentiment

This is the topic I meant to write about yesterday. There is a sudden dissing of Auctiva in the forums lately by eBay Partner Network (ePN) affiliates.

Examples: ePN forum, abestweb.com

Auctiva is a 3rd party solution provider for eBay sellers. In 2005, they switched their business model of 6 years to the eBay affiliate model, and away from the traditional pay per month model.

What they do best: free photo-hosting, listing tool, and scheduler for eBay sellers. eBay charges $.15 per photo for photo-hosting and $.10 for scheduled listings. Auctiva offers these for free.

When a seller subscribes to Auctiva, a cross promotional showcase is embedded into their existing listings and newly created listings automatically. This is one of the ways they drive traffic to their Auctiva store which contain ePN affiliate links.

Affiliates are complaining because Auctiva overwrites their ePN cookies. Here’s what ePN says of the overwriting of ePN cookies:

First, I hope that everyone is aware that Auctiva is a long-standing member of eBay’s affiliate program so none of this activity is new.

We constantly analyze and evaluate affiliates and their various business models that are used to drive traffic to eBay via eBay Partner Network or in this case, provide tools for buyers or merchandise other items to users that are not directly shown on the eBay sites via seller tools. One if the factors that we look at is how incremental the traffic and activity is to the eBay sites. As highlighted in earlier posts, the last cookie on a user’s machine gets attributed the commission for any actions the take, which means that affiliates’ cookies can get overwritten within the 7 day cookie latency window. Something we watch for closely is whether there are affiliates that disproportionally overwrite other affiliates’ cookies - in this case with Auctiva and similar tools, we have not found that they are disproportionately overwriting other cookies.

That being said, we’re going to continue to evaluate the existing and new business models that are being used on eBay Partner Network to make sure they continue to drive quality incremental activity on eBay sites as eBay, your sites, and the web continue to change.

Steve

This statement means the affiliate model is going to change. Me thinks it will be pretty soon.

Fresh Air

Working while camping is where it’s at. Today, I’m at the 2nd Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Campground of the season. This time we’re in Caledonia, Wisconsin.

Jellystone offers free WiFi and I haven’t seen the kids in hours.

There is a clicking noise in the branches above my head. I wonder if it’s some kind of cicada or katydid?

You Looking at Me…Looking at You…Looking at Me

Someone posted one of my husband’s photos on Digg. It got 990 diggs so far and was on the front page for a few hours. The comments are wickedly hilarious!!!

http://digg.com/pets_animals/You_Looking_at_Me_Looking_at_You_Looking_at_Me

Welcome back Josh_Kulp!

Josh,

I like this new eBay ID, josh_kulp, much better than the old ID.

Will you give my new banner service a try? www.watchedItem.com I think the watcher counter would work best for you. It’s 100% compliant with eBay’s links policy.

Thanks,

Michelle

bravosixx stuffs eBay affiliate cookies in eBay listings

eBay seller bravosixx has multiple eBay listings that stuff eBay Partner Network affiliate cookies. Here’s one: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300246242550

Bravosixx is using the HTML object tag to force the cookie. Tracing the header info when the eBay listing loads, you can clearly see this http header roll by:

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?type=1&
campid=5336016432&toolid=10001&customid=

eBay’s response to this junk is to ban all active content starting in 2009. No Javascript or flash. Only a subset of html tags will be allowed. I imagine the object and iframe tags will be blacklisted. See eBay’s active content plans.

Bravosixx is also a pulser. This listing for a “Real live ghost! Trapped in a box!” has 1,135 watchers.

You can see the latest watcher count on this page: http://watcher.esellerstreet.com/?page=watchitem&ebayID=bravosixx

Cookie stuffers on eBay are annoyingly short-sighted. The trick never lasts. They will get caught soon and it makes my job of complying with eBay rules more difficult.

My blog’s domain is now WatchedItemEndingSoon.com

I just changed the domain for this blog to WatchedItemEndingSoon.com (from WatchedItem.com). We’re getting ready to use WatchedItem.com for a new dynamic banner maker site.

WatchedItem has been a long time in the making. Have you heard the rule for developing a product? “Quality, low cost or fast. Pick two.” I picked quality and low cost. Conserving cash is key. When your cash burn rate is low, you can make mistakes and continue to make corrections indefinitely.

WatchedItem is a free service that creates eBay seller banners and automatically updates the banners with the latest listing information. It’s shows the seller’s profile and info on their listings something like this:

The beta release will include a watcher counter that you can embed in your listings. This will make it a lot easier to show how popular your listings are. Your listing’s watcher count will be updated every 5-15 minutes.

I chose a dynamic image over flash because flash takes so long to load. This pushes the workload to my server rather than bogging down the user’s page loading time. Amazon S3/EC2 and GoogleApps are driving down the cost of servers resources. Yippee!

Now I hope I didn’t jinx the project by blogging about it. We’re about 75% done and my developer, Vitalii, is getting married in August.

Anyone want to volunteer for the Beta trial?

BigCrumbs account shows detailed purchase activity

Someone is buying a lot of stuff online this week. In my BigCrumbs.com account, I can see that my referrals purchased 11 items for $1,095 in the past 7 days. That’s about the most I’ve seen in a week on my account. 10 items for $1,049 were purchased on eBay.com.

My cut of the affiliate kickback is $2.70.

I have a 3rd generation now. I will get credit for purchases for up to the 5th generation of referrals.

I just like to see the progression. Kinda like www.wheresgeorge.com where you can trace the journey of a $1 bill.

BigCrumbs

Another MakeTrackster

I use the Firefox add-on called Load Time Analyzer. It tells me what my browser is loading and from where. For example, when you view a site like http://cashcownobull.com/ed/, the site calls two eBay MakeTrack URLs which forces you to become a watcher of their listings.

Which eBay seller is this MakeTrackster? Just visit the site and you will be watching their listings. Or you can just view the output of the Load Time Analyzer below:

http://cgi1.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MakeTrack&item=140240913340&ssPageName=VIP:watchlink:middle:us%20quality=
onStateChange - 594ms: start, 1266ms: redirecting, 1282ms: stop
Waiting for cgi1.ebay.com…
onStatusChange - 703ms: status Waiting for cgi1.ebay.com…
onStateChange - 610ms: start, 1563ms: redirecting, 1563ms: stop
Waiting for cgi1.ebay.com…
onStatusChange - 1328ms: status Waiting for cgi1.ebay.com…
http://cgi1.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MakeTrack&item=130234108769&ssPageName=VIP:watchlink:middle:us%20quality=
onStateChange - 610ms: start, 985ms: redirecting, 985ms: stop
Connecting to cgi1.ebay.com…
onStatusChange - 703ms: status Connecting to cgi1.ebay.com…
Waiting for cgi1.ebay.com…
onStatusChange - 735ms: status Waiting for cgi1.ebay.com…
onStateChange - 625ms: start, 1203ms: redirecting, 1203ms: stop
Waiting for cgi1.ebay.com…
onStatusChange - 1016ms: status Waiting for cgi1.ebay.com…

MakeTrack trick is still used to get on eBay Pulse

Here’s that listing that I meant to write about. It’s the wife and girlfriend listing on the right. This is a different seller, tjm2k5, but it’s the same listing and trick.

This one gathers watchers from a mature audience listing using the MakeTrack trick. The mature listing has a picture that says “click me for another pic.” I’ll show the screen shot here because I’m sure eBay Trust & Safety will tear it down pretty soon.

See the watcher action here.