Ebay Secrets Blog

Archive for November, 2009

After all the turkey, beer, stuffing, wine, pork, beer, mashed potatoes, wine, pumpkin pie and wine that I had on Thursday I can’t imagine heading to the mall in the middle of the night to try and find the latest deal. After hosting an even dozen family and friends it was all I could do to login to eBay and check out all the deals without leaving the house on “Black Friday.” Looking at the hi-tech, flashy “heat map” over on the eBay Holiday site, I wasn’t alone.

Essentially, eBay has created a transaction map of the United States that spans the duration of yesterday’s Black Friday shopping activity on the site. The map is a visualization of U.S.-based buyer and seller transactions over that 24-hour period.

The visualization is based on raw data that includes eBay sales and purchases occurring in approximately 33,000 U.S. ZIP codes. To best represent large population areas and to condense data for a seamless display, ZIP codes were grouped to create 3,118 distinct areas. The methodology used to create these areas was based on the distance from the center of one ZIP code to adjacent ZIP codes. Those with a distance of less than .35 (latitude or longitude) between them were combined into an area.

The size of each point on the map corresponds to the number of ZIP codes encompassed within that area. In other words, the more ZIP codes included in an area, the larger the point on the map. The color of the points ranges in intensity, and areas with lower transaction totals appear in yellow while those with the highest number of total transactions appear in red. The spectrum of color can be most easily understood by comparing points on the map to the Activity Level Indicator, found just beneath it.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to be hanging anymore “latitude or longitude” references. For now, I will tell you to go check out the map. It’s a pretty compelling, visual display of a day’s transactions in the eBay marketplace.

Even more interesting will be to see if we can make this a regular feature. It takes some fairly detailed transactional data to come up with such a high-level but targeted visual map. Crucial data for sellers looking to see geographical purchasing behavior patterns partnered with peak purchasing times (down to the second).

You can also add the map to your website or blog as a widget. To learn more about the widget and get the code for use on your site, click “Share This” on the application or visit apps.facebook.com/ebaymapping.

Cheers,
RBH

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I was listing some new items we picked up for Christmas last week and since I was awarded eBay’s Top Rated Seller status, I thought it would be a good marketing tactic to point that out to my buyers.

So I launched a few listings and forgot about them.  A few days later I was going through my My eBay listings pages and didn’t see them.  “That’s strange,” I thought. So I went over to Vendio where I manage my listings and saw them in the pending file with an error message that my listings were rejected by eBay because there were prohibited words in my listings.  I looked over the listings and couldn’t figure out what the problem was, so I called eBay PowerSeller support.

The folks there are pretty nice and very patient.  The rep that I reached took the time to pull up my listings and read through them.  After a minute or so he said: “Aha. I found the problem.” And then he read the following statement from my listing.

“We are top rated sellers on eBay and committed to giving our buyers 5-star service.”

“What is wrong with that?” I asked.

He explained that eBay does not allow sellers to mention anything about being top rated sellers or how many stars you have as it could mislead people.  Apparently there was a policy notice on that but I had missed it.

So if you have seen you listings cancelled and can’t figure out why, take a look at your statements and make sure you are not telling your bidders and buyers that you give good service and will take care of them. As eBay figures out you may be trying to mislead people.

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eBay took over some real estate in the heart of Manhattan on 57th for a pop-up store.  When I first heard about it, it sounded kind of weird (eBay in a store?)  I haven't had an opportunity to visit the store yet, but I've talked to some that have and they said it's actually pretty cool.

Fox business has two videos that highlight the store. Unfortunately they don't seem to have an embed function so I've linked to them.

In this first video, there's an eBay apparel seller, Linda's Stuff (Linda Lightman) talks about the store and her eBay business.  You can see the apparel part of the store pretty well in this one.

In this video, Lorrie Norrington does an interview on Holiday top sellers from the pop-up shop.

Enjoy the videos and if you happen to go to NY or have been, let us know what you think about the shop in comments.

SeekingAlpha disclosure – I am long Google and Amazon.  eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.

 
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Sellers had three concerns coming out of this weekend's outage:

• Is eBay going to be stable for Q4?
• What about the buyers that were impacted?
• What about the seller impact?

Is eBay going to be stable for Q4

According to AB posts and comments in the press, it looks like the outage was due to a software problem that eBay has found and fixed. Evidently a 30% surge in listings caused the problem to rear its ugly head.

What about buyers that were impacted?

eBay is giving all buyers (winners) of auction-style items a 10% off coupon – this is the first time I've ever seen eBay do anything like this and I imagine it will turn this negative to a positive as now we'll have all of these buyers with unexpected 10% off coupons during a key purchase time.

eBay seller impact/compensation

eBay sent a letter to sellers Monday that detailed the compensation they are providing for the search outage. In addition to the normal listing/fvf fee reversals, it was great to see eBay not only give sellers the ability to cancel sales (auction-style listings) and be inoculated from any negative feedback reactions caused by that.  As you will see eBay even gave sellers some sample language should they want to cancel the sales.

Kudos to eBay for expediency and for acknowledging the severity of the outage.  Fingers crossed that we won't have any issues in the next 30 days!

BEGIN eBay's letter to sellers

Dear XXXX:

By now you might be aware that between 9:45am and midnight PST on Saturday,
November 21, eBay search was down with searches returning limited or no
results.

We know this is a very serious disruption, especially as you are ramping up
your sales for the holiday season. Because you had listings ending during or
within an hour after the outage, I wanted to let you know, personally, what we
will be doing to support your business and protect your eBay reputation.

First of all, this outage will not negatively impact your feedback or detailed
seller ratings (DSRs) in any way. All auction-style listings completed during
this time will be protected from negative and neutral feedback as well as DSRs
below a five star rating.

In addition, we will not expect you to fulfill

Auction-style orders
completed during this time if you feel the search outage prevented you from
realizing the full expected price from your auction-style listings that closed
during the outage or within an hour after the outage. It's up to you whether
you want to fulfill the item in the interest of good relations with your buyer
or cancel the transaction.

If you do plan to cancel a transaction, we ask that you contact your buyer
within the next 48 hours (by end of day Tuesday, Nov 24). For your convenience,
we've drafted some language below that you can use in your emails to inform the
buyer of your intention and let them know this cancellation was due entirely to
an eBay issue and not you as a seller.

If you had

Fixed Price listings completed during this time period, you
would of course be expected to fulfill sold items as usual.

Second, in keeping with eBay's
outage policy
and doing what's right for sellers and buyers, we are taking the following
actions for listings that ended during or within an hour after the outage
(9:45am Saturday – 1:00am Sunday PST):

• We will refund all associated fees for Auction-style
  listings and refund pro-rated fees for all active Fixed Price listings
  during the outage. This refund should be reflected in your next eBay
  invoice.
• We will remove negative/neutral Feedback and detailed
  seller ratings (DSRs) lower than 5 stars given by buyers for affected
  Auction-style listings.
• We will alert the eBay and PayPal resolutions team in
  the event that a claim of item not received is filed for an affected
  listing.
• We will be sending a 10% coupon up to $100 off to
  buyers who won Auction-style listings during the outage for any
  inconvenience.

We fully understand the impact of an outage of this scope
on you, our valued partners. We sincerely apologize for the disruption to your
business. I want you to know that we are continuing to focus our teams and
resources to ensure a smooth and rewarding holiday selling season for you.

Sincerely,

Lorrie Norrington
President, eBay
___________________________________

Suggested email for notifying your buyer of cancelled Auction-style
transactions:
Dear Buyer:

As you may know, for a period of time from Saturday, November 21 to Sunday,
November 22, eBay search was returning limited or no results. See the
official eBay
report. Unfortunately, the item you purchased from me on [date] was offered
through an auction-style listing affected by this technical disruption.

I wanted you to know that as a result of this issue, I am cancelling this
transaction and any payment you made will be fully refunded. In addition, eBay
will be sending you a 10% coupon up to $100 off for the inconvenience. Now that
eBay search is fully restored, I will be relisting this auction [today]. I
sincerely hope you will bid again-and win!

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact eBay via the
"Contact us" link at the top of the eBay homepage. Thank you for your
understanding. I look forward to your future business.

Sincerely,

END eBay's letter to sellers

Seekingalpha disclosure – I am long Google and Amazon.  eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.

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eBay has released a new “Deals” application available now for free from the iTunes app store. The new app provides a constant stream of the best deals across hundreds of millions of ebay.com listings and features simple navigation, customizable search features and PayPal integration that makes check-out fast and easy.

The Deals app is the latest addition to eBay’s mobile offerings; eBay also just released an upgraded version of its eBay iPhone app with new features such as social networking integration.

I got a demo of both the “Deals” app and the updated mobile app (1.5) last week and I thought both were very cool indeed. I particularly liked the sharing functionality through Facebook/Twitter. I managed to get my hands on some video demos of both apps to accompany my overview below. Plus, if you haven’t already, you can go to iTunes and download them both for free now.

eBay Deals

The new eBay Deals app for iPhone presents a constantly changing view of deals across ebay.com, highlighting must-have products in popular categories, such as apparel and games; all “deals” have less than four hours of listing time remaining, zero bids, no reserve and free/fixed price shipping calculated into the total cost.

Pre-loaded with eBay’s top eight mobile search categories, the app allows shoppers to quickly access top bargains. Users can customize their own deal-specific searches and place an icon in the start menu for quick access. To see a new group of deals, users just have to shake their iPhones or iPod Touches.

The Deals app has built-in integration with social network sites like Facebook and Twitter, making it easier for buyers to share shopping activity with friends and even build consensus around deals.

Starting this coming Friday, eBay will launch the “12 Days of Deals” promotion with an exclusive Mystery Deal featured each day of the Daily Deal from Nov. 27 thru Dec. 8. iPhone users will be able to access the promotion via the Deals app. For more info beginning on Friday, check out deals.ebay.com.

I played around with the Deals app while having lunch yesterday and was able to purchase two stocking stuffers for my kids before finishing my first slice of pizza. It’s that quick. However, I did experience a minor bump when I learned that the app doesn’t currently support third-party check-out (the same is true for eBay Mobile 1.5). Therefore, although I was still able to get what I wanted, when I wanted, I had to complete the transaction from my computer when I returned to my desk 15 minutes later. Not a deal-breaker by any means for me, but something that I’m sure is on the product roadmap to include in the future.

eBay Mobile gets social
Social networking integration is also built into the upgrade of eBay’s popular iPhone application (version 1.5 ). There’s also a “Best Offer” feature that lets shoppers instantly negotiate prices with sellers through alerts and SMS notifications, and direct phone access to customer service.

The 1.5 iPhone application notifies shoppers through push alerts on the status of their watched items, so they’ll know if they’re being outbid. PayPal integration allows buyers to complete their transactions without leaving the app, and the “Buy It Now” feature lets buyers purchase items right away at a set price without having to wait for an auction to end.

For those folks without iPhones – anyone can access eBay’s updated mobile commerce site by visiting m.ebay.com on most mobile browsers.

Some Fast Facts from the press release:
• By the end of this year more than $500 million in merchandise will have been purchased via eBay mobile.
• Launched just a year ago, the eBay iPhone app has been downloaded more than 5 million times –making it one of the most popular iPhone apps.
• A purchase is made every two seconds via eBay mobile.
• Both applications are available for free on iTunes (requires iPhone OS 3 or later).
• Users from over 165 countries visit the eBay mobile website and use the iPhone application.
• “The Deals” app is localized for 8 languages.

Bottom line, I am joined at the hip to my iPhone (75% of my Twitter activity is conducted using Tweetie 2 for the iPhone) so having these two apps on there will almost certainly guarantee an increase in my eBay shopping activity because of the ease of use and immediacy of it all. Looking at the stats above, I’m clearly not alone.

Cheers,
RBH

Related Reads:
eBay Deals iPhone app pushes bargains in your face
eBay Beefs Up Mobile App

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Jennifer Lopez may do for Christian Louboutins what she did for Manolo Blahnik Okla boots almost 10 years ago. The top pop entertainer (who, I might remind you, is an accomplished dancer) was mid-way through her new song entitled “Louboutins” last night on the American Music Awards when she fell on her butt. The tweets started within five seconds of her fall and 10 seconds later she was a trending topic.

Despite highly-anticipated appearances by megas like Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston and limelight-moth Lady Gaga, who is everyone talking about today? Lopez…and her Louboutins. Of course, she deliberately fell!

Fashion has always been Lopez’s aide de camp in promoting her career and she’s done it again with the performance of this song. However, while her shimmery outfits did not outshine her smoldering beauty, they did zip for her style quotient.

However, it’s not a total washout, she has inspired my style tip of the day: If you’re curvy and on the smaller  side, add heels (preferably Louboutins, but any good heel will do) to elongate the leg. The dress (or shorts) should either be super-short or just a few inches above the knee. The lengths chosen by La Lopez for her shorts and her gold dress were unflattering.

*Photo licensed to: Photorazzi.com

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When I opened my email this morning I found the following email from Colleen at Worldwide Brands. I checked with Colleen to see if they would extend this offer to my readers and she agreed.  Here is the email from WorldWide Brands and a link where you can get the discount offer:

“It’s that time again.

Turkeys, relatives, (yes, I know…sometimes they’re the same thing!), sharing time with family and falling
asleep on the couch in front of the TV after a great meal.

There’s so much more than that, though. It’s a time of year when we think about what we’re thankful for.

This year has been tougher than most. We understand that, and we want to help. So, let me tell you what
we here at WorldwideBrands are thankful for.

We’re thankful for YOU.  We thank you for attending our free webinars. They wouldn’t be the lively discussions they are without you.

We thank you for reading our Newsletters. Your questions, comments and suggestions help us bring you more of the free
info you need to run a successful eBiz.

We thank you for reading our free ebooks. You help us spread the word that eBiz doesn’t have to be expensive and confusing.

Most of all, we thank you for your Entrepreneurial spirit,  because that spirit is what made this country great, and people
like you WILL bring us all out of the current tough economy.

So, we wanted to show our thanks to YOU.

We know that this is the best time to get ready for a comeback year in 2010. We know for a fact that our tools are the ones
that will do it for you and your eBiz.

So if you’ll “bust our doors down” in the next three days, we’ll  “buy the turkey”. From Monday, Nov 23 to Wednesday, Nov 25, we’re
giving you a full $50 OFF the WorldwideBrands Product Sourcing Package. One time fee, lifetime membership.

$50 savings is enough to buy a turkey with, right? So, save $50 on a new start in business this Thanksgiving, and use the $50 savings
to buy the turkey!

Show us your are thankful for all the free education we have brought to you over the years. Bust down the doors and get your business
started right!

Wishing you a Happy Holiday,
The staff at Worldwide Brands

Here is the link to the Worldwide Brands Holiday Special.  and let me take this opportunity to wish all of my readers a Happy Thanksgiving too.

Skip McGrath

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First of all, my personal apologies that I’m only just getting something up now. Inexcusable and I assure you it won’t happen again. This official statement was made by eBay Inc. this evening:

SAN JOSE — Saturday, Nov 21, 7 p.m. PST — eBay expects full search functionality to be restored to eBay.com on Sunday after a technical issue today resulted in searches returning either limited or no results throughout the day today. The identified technical issue has been fixed and is being implemented across the site.

The unanticipated technical issue resulted from a surge in live listings as sellers ramp up for the holiday season. eBay currently has more than 200 million live listings, 33 percent more than at this time a year ago. The company said the technical issue, once identified, was easily fixed.

I’ll obviously update this post as I learn more.

-RBH

UPDATED

***Full search functionality expected to be restored to eBay.com on Sunday, Nov. 22 – Lorrie Norrington, President, eBay Marketplaces ***

We are really sorry about the technical issue that resulted in searches returning either limited or no results throughout the day on Saturday, Nov. 21. We know this search issue may have disrupted your business. Our No. 1 priority has been to identify and fix the issue as quickly as possible, and restore full search functionality. Our teams are working around the clock to do that. Search functionality is returning to eBay.com throughout Saturday evening, PST, and we expect full search functionality to be restored Sunday.

We know this is a really busy time for sellers as you are ramping up your businesses for the holiday season, and we regret any potential impact that this technical issue may have had. Please accept our sincere thanks for your patience as we work around the clock on your behalf to restore search functionality. We will continue to keep you informed of site performance. Our immediate priority is to resolve this issue. Once that is achieved, rest assured that we will assess the economic impact of this issue and will be compensating sellers appropriately. In the meantime, we will be issuing full fee credits for affected listings.

UPDATED 2pm PT 11/22/09
The following statement was issued by eBay at 2pm PT today:

eBay restores search functionality following disruption due to technical issue

SAN JOSE — Sunday, Nov 22, 2:00 p.m. PST — eBay restored search functionality to eBay.com overnight Saturday after a technical issue resulted in searches returning either limited or no results throughout the day. The unanticipated technical issue resulted from a surge in live listings as sellers ramp up for the holiday season. eBay currently has more than 200 million live listings, 33 percent more than at this time a year ago. The company said the technical issue, once identified, was easily fixed and was implemented across the site’s servers throughout Saturday afternoon and evening.

Also, Lorrie Norrington, President of eBay Marketplaces, made the following statement on the eBay Announcement Board:

***Search functionality restored to eBay.com – Lorrie Norrington, President, eBay ***

We are happy to report that critical search functionality was restored overnight on Saturday and we are seeing normal activity levels today. As part of our effort to restore critical search functionality as quickly as possible for sellers and for buyers, we have kept some secondary search features temporarily offline. This includes refining search by certain item specifics, such as color or clothing size, and having Store Inventory Format results included in the main search results. We expect to bring these features online today as part of a phased approach to restore full functionality.

We encourage you to keep checking the System Announcement board located in the right side on eBay’s Announcement board for the latest updates on these secondary features.

We know this is a really busy time for sellers ramping up for the holiday season. We’re sorry that this technical issue occurred, causing search to return limited or no results throughout the day Saturday, and we regret any potential impact to your business. Our teams worked around the clock to restore functionality as quickly as possible. Please accept our sincere apologies, and thanks for your patience as we resolved this issue.

Our first priority has been to fully restore search functionality. We will now be assessing the economic impact of this issue and will be compensating sellers appropriately. In the meantime, we will be issuing full fee credits automatically for affected listings.

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Around noon ET we started to get some inbound requests from sellers asking about the status of our systems because of unusually slow order flow.  Everything was fine on our end.  We realized that eBay's search system was having instability and ultimately a hard outage.  You can follow the official eBay Announcement board here for details.  At the time of writing, it looks like we're going on a 6hr+ outage here.

The problems manifest themselves in zero search results like you see here.  It's interesting that eBay chooses this behavior instead of a page saying the site is down.  You'll notice that the sponsored listings and other advertisements are all doing just fine.

This is a bad buyer experience IMO because it makes it seem like eBay has zero (ipods, xbox, etc.)

There was a similar, but shorter outage last in in October.  There are four general buckets of problems that will impact a search engine like this:

• New software has bugs – Hopefully they haven't rolled new software this time of year, but if they did it would be a likely culprit.
• New hardware causing problems – Perhaps they slipped in some last minute new hardware that is having problems
• Existing hardware problem – Search engines require lots and lots of storage and lots of machines to hold the indexes and serve them quickly.  There's a lot that can go wrong in there. eBay invests heavily to make sure they don't have any Single Points of Failure (SPOFs in our world), so I doubt this is it – it would have to be pretty massive to see the impact we are seeing here.
• Existing software/system  bug/corruption – As the holiday sales period ramps up, software systems are put under pressures they don't see in other time frames. This can cause hidden bugs and problems to pop up. 

Judging by the hint given in the AB post – "errors in our  backend systems", I'm going to go with the 'existing system bug' theory, but it's all speculation at this point until we learn more.

One thing is clear, this doesn't give anyone in the eBay ecosystem confidence that the site will be up and robust for the critical next 30 day prime time holiday selling period.

Impact on sellers

Sellers are asking us if there will be some form of compensation from eBay.  I believe eBay has to declare it an outage first and then they automatically extend listings 24 hours as compensation.  You could theoretically argue that this isn't an outage as the front end of the site is up.  That's an empty argument as it's like saying your car is starts fine even though it has four flat tires.

The 'extend listings 24hrs' thing is a kick back to the auction orientation of the site and doesn't really apply to today's fixed price world where a days worth of sales have been effectively lost and extending listings won't bring 'em back.

Speaking of SPOFs, we've been guiding sellers that putting all of your eggs in one basket isn't prudent.  Today is one of those days that amplifies that message for eBay-only sellers.

What's the impact on you?

eBay Strategies readers, did you experience the outage?  What was the impact on your business?

SeekingAlpha Disclosure – I am long Google and Amazon.  eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.

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First of all, my personal apologies that I’m only just getting something up now. Inexcusable and I assure you it won’t happen again. This official statement was made by eBay Inc. this evening:

SAN JOSE — Saturday, Nov 21, 7 p.m. PST — eBay expects full search functionality to be restored to eBay.com on Sunday after a technical issue today resulted in searches returning either limited or no results throughout the day today. The identified technical issue has been fixed and is being implemented across the site.

The unanticipated technical issue resulted from a surge in live listings as sellers ramp up for the holiday season. eBay currently has more than 200 million live listings, 33 percent more than at this time a year ago. The company said the technical issue, once identified, was easily fixed.

I’ll obviously update this post as I learn more.

-RBH

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