This Week in Alternative News
As December tuned into January and a new year, several of the more popular eBay alternatives announced site changes, new features and upgrades for sellers. Here we look at who is doing what to encourage traffic and business on their alternative selling sites.
One well-known site, Etsy, the online marketplace for all things handmade, has made several site enhancements that include several new seller tools. The site's shop feeds are now pre-formatted for easy upload to Google Base, Etsy added shipping and address data to sellers' CSV download file to provide better information on the status of orders and it has also completed beta testing of Etsy Web Analytics, which is provided through Google Analytics.
This new release allows Etsy sellers to track metrics such as page views, site visits, popular content and page referrals. The best part? It's free for all sellers.
iOffer.com recently revamped its Web site and included a better search engine with category images and links laid out to make site searching easier. There is also a new "Current Activity on iOffer" that will display current member negotiations along with a section to show buyer ratings.
Atomic Mall, which launched several months ago, is now a selling base for nearly 6,500 members. Current listing numbers are closing in on 120,000 and Atomic Mall has now added Amazon Payments as a new option for sellers and buyers. Also, Atomicmall.com has joined as an official venue to Repatoo.com, a site that allows online sellers to use their service as a central "storage facility" for their user feedback from every selling venue they use. Other changes this month include new hosted server hardware for faster access.
In another interesting bit of news this week, eBid.net recently gave away $2,500 to the seller adding the two millionth listing in December, and now says it's ready to award $3,000 when it hits its three millionth listing. eBid's co-founder says that sellers are joining ebaid.net in record numbers. The site claims it currently has close to close to 2.4 million listings across 9000 categories.
Like many alternative sites, eBid is encouraging new sellers to join its online community, but in all the alternative news bits we've perused thus far, very few of these marketplaces are doing much, if anything, to reach out to buyers. Hopefully as we get into this year a bit more we'll start to see some of these alternatives churn out more buyer incentives and show more (non-seller) member growth.
News Briefs: eBay
According to eBay, some sellers have reported receiving a negative or neutral Feedback rating because they wouldn't mark an item as "gift" in order to skirt customs fees for cross-border shipments. Dinesh Lathi, vice president of seller experience, says that in these circumstances eBay will now remove the Feedback if the listing meets the Customs Requirements. The seller must also receive a negative or neutral Feedback comment that references customs delays or customs fees.
To even be eligible to have this type of feedback retracted, should it happen to you, eBay has decided that sellers must include a specific note to international buyers in the item listing itself. The text, as below, must be in a font size no smaller than the majority of the other text in the item description, and it must also be prominently displayed.
"International Buyers, Please Note:
- Import duties, taxes and charges are not included in the item price or shipping charges. These charges are the buyer's responsibility.
- Please check with your country's customs office to determine what these additional costs will be prior to bidding/buying."
In other eBay news, the company said that in February they will add two new electronic payment methods to the permitted payments list: Moneybookers and Paymate. This will round out the accepted payment options to include PayPal, credit and debit card payment to a seller's merchant account, Propay and Pay on Pick-up.
Lastly, eBay sellers can take advantage of a new Terapeak video game console index this week. According to Terapeak, video game consoles continue to be among the hottest-selling items on eBay. This new index enables sellers to track systems on a basis of total items sold, average price, and total sales over the past 30 days. The index can be used to compare next-gen console sales (Wii, 360, PS3) head-to-head, plus there are options to compare handheld systems and last-gen consoles like the PS2, XBox, GameCube and Dreamcast.
(Please Continue to Page 2 for eBay and Amazon Market Research)
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
