The Week that Was

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FEATURED POSTRichard Brewer-Hay / Friday, November 7th, 2008

The Week that Was

A lot can happen in 5 days. Tuesday was as big as they come (regardless of your political viewpoint) and the groundswell of emotion seen around the world as a result of it is pretty incredible.

I also came on the blog, firmly planted a stake in the ground regarding eBay Ink, and then seemingly vanished for the rest of the week. (Meetings will do that to me but all for good reason. Looking forward to sharing the results here on Ink in the coming weeks).

Some other highlights that are worth mentioning…

Motorola is possibly prohibiting the resale of its new phone online.
I still don’t know if this is actually happening and if anyone does know more, please share here or shoot me an email because I can’t imagine that EU Law doesn’t have a policy in place to prevent something like this… similar to the first-sale doctrine here in the United States. Mathew Ingram has a great take on exactly that here.

The eBay Developers Blog had a couple of key announcements this week.
First, they announced that PayPal had added support for eBay Coupons to Express Checkout. The blog used examples and artwork to show how this would look moving forward.

Secondly, they also announced ways in which folks could celebrate the 8th year anniversary of the eBay Developer Program and the eBay API platform. The program launched in November of 2000 and since then:
• Over 70,000 developers have registered as members of the eBay Developers Program
• Over 26% of all listings on eBay.com currently come from our third party eBay developer community
• eBay now serves up over 6 Billion API calls monthly

Finally, for those occasions like this week when I am in back-to-back planning meetings, please remember that we do have the “eBay You Say” and “eBay We Say” modules at the bottom of the eBay Ink homepage. The We Say module captures every blog post by eBay’s family of official blogs (see the blog roll to the right of the page) and updates in real-time, automatically. The You Say module captures the latest (and what I find to be the most interesting) external blog posts for readers.

Cheers,
RBH
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Add a Comment

Henrietta / November 7th, 2008 at 1:46 pm

Oh! That’s a familiar looking title, is imitation the sincerest form of flattery?

Marc / November 8th, 2008 at 2:20 am

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

This blog is dead

Marc / November 8th, 2008 at 2:26 am

Richard, are you always too busy for this blog?

Stop pretending and just get rid of it already. It seems more like a nuisance than a project.

Chris @ TameBay / November 8th, 2008 at 6:19 am

I know exactly how Richard feels – blogging takes up a huge amount of time and the number of blog posts doesn’t always reflect the number of hours invested. A lot of the work is behind the scenes and isn’t always visible for example responding to the hundreds of readers a week who would rather email then post comments directly on the blog.

What you see on the blog is only a tiny part of the work that goes on.

Gail / November 8th, 2008 at 2:13 pm

Richard, below is an example of the “help” sellers get from eBay. This is copied from an eBay discussion board. This person questioned being charged 15¢ instead of 5¢ for his listings with pre-filled info.

The September 15 announcement from Dinesh Lahti can be found here:
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200809.shtml#2008-09-15151424

As it’s copied in the response email, I won’t add it here, also.

Here is the response from eBay customer service to the seller:

“Dear xxxxxx,”

“Thank you for writing eBay in regard to fees charged for the Fixed price items you listed.”

“Well, in the promotion link, it is stated ‘Insertion Fees will be just 15¢ for Fixed Price listings in Books, Music, DVDs & Movies and Video Games categories-and for the holidays, starting September 16 and through the end of the year, just 5¢ when you use pre-filled item information.’”

“When we refer to the 5¢ insertion fees it states ‘-and for the holidays, starting September 16 and through the end of the year, just 5¢ when you use pre-filled item information.’”

“So for all the holidays starting from Setpeber 16, the insertion fee would be 5 cents otherwise on normal days the insertion fees would be 15 cents. So for al the items you listed in holidays, were charged 5 cents and the remaining were charged 15 cents.”

Richard, your opinion?

Gail / November 8th, 2008 at 2:34 pm

I’m just thinking, my point may have been too subtle. So, I’ll ask two questions regarding the above.

1) Does eBay require reading comprehension of its employees?

2) Where does the seller go to get a refund of the overcharged fees after receiving the above answer from ‘eBay customer service’?

Henrietta / November 10th, 2008 at 2:04 pm

A historic occasion, I agree with Chris Dawson 100%.

I spend an hour writing and average three to four times that in research per post, probably 75% of which does not get into the blog.

Where is your blog Marc?

Davey / November 11th, 2008 at 7:10 pm

Gail, in this case the perps are ebay bots, and they have a long history of not comprehending anything correctly. Basically, as a seller, you are SOL, and likely will give up wasting more time butting your head against the ebay CS wall and take your losses. That’s about the only choice.

And the site cheerleaders wonder where the seller anger comes from… It is built one papercut at a time, especially when CS is involved.

Gail / November 12th, 2008 at 9:07 am

Davey ~

In this case, I don’t think it was a bot. It took real “English as a second language” to misinterpret the eBay announcement.

Although, I have to say that the sentence is overly long and does have misplaced modifiers. Is English Dinesh Lahti’s second language?

The idea here is that eBay Customer Service doesn’t know or comprehend its own promotions.