Fair Trade: Auction Edition

So, it seems someone out there at eBay really is listening! Based on an AP article by Rachel Metz that came out today, eBay will make changes yet again. This time it seems they are trying to appease their upset seller base. They’re promising listing fee discounts and a new higher tier of PowerSeller: Diamond, where highest-volume merchants may be eligible for reduced fees.

They’re also talking about reduced pricing for listing identical items. Starting Sept. 16, eBay will let U.S. sellers pay 35 cents to list an unlimited number of identical items at a set price, for a month at a time. Previously, fixed-price listing fees could run as high as $4 per item, and the listings were good for a week.

For some sellers, the sheer number of changes alone is understandably frustrating. For others, the changes on eBay have given them the incentive to move completely off eBay and start their own sites utilizing the “eBay alternative” AuctionAnything.com technology.

The biggest complaint we’ve heard from a number of our customers is that buyers are “extorting” lower prices in exchange for positive feedback. We certainly hope that eBay will get it right this time – although it seems as though it may already be too late to recoup the sellers that have abandoned eBay in lieu of more favorable selling platforms.

I believe it’s the new crop of seller sites like ours and others that have gotten eBay to sit up and take notice of the full extent of the damage they’ve done to their seller base. Many eBay sellers are using our service as a protective shield against bad buyers. If you aren’t downloading updated blocked bidder lists on a weekly basis, do so – you have nothing to lose and only better sales to gain!

As always, happy, safe selling!

Laurie

When I created this service, I didn’t expect to get the kind of response from our members that we’ve been getting. We’ve greatly appreciated both your praise and feedback. I also didn’t expect to get a call from the Wall Street Journal wanting to talk about our service, our members and eBay Live. I want to thank Debbie Imlay and Annette Whitefield for responding to our email and taking the time to speak with Mylene Mangalindan (WSJ) about their feelings towards eBay and the recent changes.

After speaking with Ms. Mangalindan, I realized that making some noise is not a bad thing. If this housewife can create a service that gets the attention of the Wall Street Journal, then collectively we can create enough noise to change eBay – or at least provide change to eBay ourselves through services such as RepXchange.

Thanks for your support and keep making noise!

“Next item on the block is eBay auctions: Going once, going twice, gone - to the big retailer in the back.”

Ebay is moving radically away from their roots – in what seems like a desperate attempt to boost their stock price. There’s a new sheriff (CEO) in town and all the mom-and-pop merchants who’ve made a living or sought additional income from eBay are pushed aside in favor of big businesses - like Buy.com using eBay as a fixed-price outlet for their overstock.

While eBay isn’t denying anybody from setting up their lemonade stand on the site, their new policy and fee changes are greatly favoring retailers with large, fixed price inventories over the little guy doing auctions. In addition, they are revising the revolutionary mutual feedback system between buyers and sellers that created a sense of trust. Only buyers can leave feedback on sellers, and sellers, unless they have something positive to say, are unable to leave buyer feedback on the transaction. Now sellers are unable to know if the bidder on their auction is a reputable buyer or someone who doesn’t like to pay for auctions they’ve won, or returns everything they buy damaged.

Furthermore, there are already reports of buyers extorting sellers for better deals after the sale is made using this new feedback system as leverage. This is a tough pill to swallow for merchants who’ve spend years building their eBay presence and reputation.

eBay Live, a show that traditionally feels more like a revival meeting than a business convention, is starting today. I wonder if the tone will change this year? Never before have sellers been this critical and upset – and many of our members have said they will boycott the event.

Many of our members have asked us if they can link to our site from their eBay listings. While we see the benefit (as a deterrent against bad bidders) it is unfortunately not permitted. According to eBay policies, you are not allowed to provide links to external sites such as RepXchange.com in your listings.

However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t tell bidders that you share your blocked bidder lists on eBay with other sellers. To that end, we’ve created 4 different graphical buttons (you can download smaller versions of these examples) that you can add to your listings:

Just be sure that you don’t add a link to RepXchange.com as well, as that’s when you are in breach of eBay policy. You can download a zip file containing each of the individual versions by clicking here or on the image above. Each button comes in a large and a small version so that you can pick the one that suits you best. It goes without saying that you should choose a version that you don’t think will be off-putting to your good customers.

We’ve been getting a few emails lately from sellers asking why we request that they only submit blocked bidders with whom they have had direct experience. Their argument is that they have gathered these IDs from message boards, other sellers, etc. and by sharing them via RepXchange, will only benefit other members too.

In theory they are correct as the purpose of the site is to provide a pre-emptive strike against bad bidders. However, we want to ensure that this site is better than just a list of blocked bidders that have been collected by various sellers for various reasons. As Sue Bailey has commented in her blog, a bad buyer for one person may not necessarily be a bad buyer for her.

Unless sellers submit only bidders with whom they’ve had a first-hand experience, they are in turn unable to effectively leverage the large volume of blocked bidders in our database. For example, when there are 100,000 blocked bidder submissions to pick from, how will sellers choose 5,000 to put in their own blocked bidder list if each blocked bidder could come from any source and submitted for any reason?

We foresaw this conundrum when we created the service and that’s why we have this particular submission policy in place and have provided such granular filters to allow sellers to download a subset of the blocked bidders that make the most sense for them.

If you’re hungry to earn credits on our service, don’t upload unqualified blocked bidders - just promote this site to someone else and we’ll give you 2,500 credits.

I’ll even take it one step further, if you write about our service on a blog or a message board, send us a link to it and we’ll give you 5,000 credits!

Also, don’t forget there is an alternative to the bulk-upload feature: By entering your blocked bidders one-by-one (this requires sellers to supply more details on the blocked bidder) you can earn 250 credits per blocked bidder you report.

Happy selling!

Thanks to Sue at Tamebay.com for reviewing our service and deeming it the most useful of the new feedback-fix she’s looked at over the past few weeks, and “certainly the only one I would consider using” in her article RepXchange: passing on the bad bidders.

Not a bad mark from one of the most prolific and influential eBay bloggers out there! She raises a few concerns that are valid and that we have thought long and hard about.

For example, she’s concerned that when the number of blocked bidders reported to the system grows exponentially (as it is!) it will be hard to find the ‘next problem bidder’ from this list, even with our granular filters.

She is a absolutely right in that – our site is not a crystal ball that can single out offenders before they’ve created havoc on a seller’s auction. All we do is allow sellers to customize a blocked bidder list based on what type of other sellers each blocked bidder was reported by. The logic is that if you can narrow down the pool of blocked bidders (up to 5,000), to the ones that have slighted sellers similar to you, then you’re better off than just picking a random 5,000 blocked bidders. If you want to do better than that, consult a psychic

That said, we have in our product roadmap considered engaging a statistical expert to mine all our data and correlate that data with the complete eBay history of each blocked bidder and seller to create unique risk profiles for all sellers and blocked bidders. In combination, this will result in a prioritized list of blocked bidders with a unique “probability-for-trouble” score for each seller.

We don’t have $200K to spend to test whether this has any merit, and chances are that eBay may for no reason other than that they don’t like us, decide to shut down the API access we need. So, for now, this is all we can afford to offer you for free for now, folks! However, we are happy to get any suggestions or constructive criticism that will help us further improve the site. If we get a lot of traffic, maybe we can throw up some ads to pay for the enhancements.

As far as the legal issues are concerned, we feel that we’re pretty well covered, but I’m not a lawyer and I’m convinced that if eBay threw their legal weight over us, they’d find a way to pull the plug. However, if any of you out there have legal expertise you want to share with us that may help us keep the service going, should we get in trouble with eBay, please let us know!

First, I want to say that RepXchange is now live and open for business! Thanks to Ina Steiner for her mention in Auctionbyte’s ”This & That” and also to Katherine Tyrrell for her thorough review in her blog, ”Making a Mark”. I sincerely appreciate their kind words and hope that the message is getting out to the eBay seller community. Our service should help provide some balance to the feedback changes that are happening with eBay.

Second, I want to thank our new users who have signed up and to those of you who have caught bugs and alerted us to that fact. We are very quick to respond to any errors so please, if you have any trouble, do not hesitate to let us know. We are also looking into a case of our system filtering some submitted blocked bidders as “not a registered user” when in fact they are valid. Technology - why art thou so temperamental! Our goal is always to supply sellers with the best possible information, so we’re carefully looking for any bugs that may challenge the integrity of the data (as well as sellers who are a little ’sloppy’ with their reporting :-).

On a personal note, we are vacationing in Norway at the moment, so my timing is a little off-kilter. So if you see email or posts that appear to be in the middle of the night, you may be disappointed to learn we’re simply 6 hours ahead as opposed to frighteningly diligent. It’s wonderful to be able to work from someplace other than home!

Wishing our users & readers a fantastic Memorial Day holiday and happy selling!

During the month of May 2008, eBay will roll out a set of changes to their feedback system with the purpose of preventing sellers from leaving negative feedback on buyers. Today, in response to eBay’s feedback changes, we are launching a public beta of our free service, called RepXchange, short for Reputation Exchange (www.repxchange.com). On this site, eBay sellers may anonymously pool their blocked bidder lists, aka black lists, and extract a new, custom list of blocked bidders that fits their own business profile. Now sellers can weed out bad buyers, and by extension, avoid spending needless time on re-listing, or worse, filing dispute claims. The unique filtering functionality provides the ability to, for example, take a pool of 10,000 blocked bidders and narrow it down to a list of 1,000 bidders who have been blocked by at least 3 US based sellers who have sold on eBay for more than 3 years and specialize in electronics worth over $200. The goal of this service isn’t to simply fill your blocked bidders list with a lot of names; when sellers do so, they are potentially losing good buyers in with the bad. On RepXchange sellers can be very specific about the buyers they want to block, thus allowing them to focus on servicing profitable customers.

We fully confess that the site is not perfect, flashy or slick, however it’s free and we hope that at least in the short term, it’ll do the job. We expext the beta period to uncover both technical and potential legal challenges (although we don’t forsee any) that we’ll have to deal with and we welcome any advice and criticism as long as the dialogue remains focused on improving the lives and profitability of eBay sellers everywhere.

I encourage sellers to sign up and take it for a test drive and tell us what you think! - Laurie

Research shows that customers are more likely to use social media for product or service reviews when they had a bad experience than when they had a good one. At RepXchange we’re all about celebrating great sellers, so when we learn about sellers who offer excellent service in the spirit of fair trade, we’ll blog about it!

First story out of the gate is about Music Center Ink. Recently my husband got a call from his brother in Europe who had just made a purchase from them on eBay, but failed to see that the merchant would not accept payments from non-US PayPal accounts. Typically he would pay for the item and ask for it to be shipped to our address in the US, and then we would either forward it to his address in Europe or bring it with us when visiting.

So, when the payment was declined, my brother-in-law wrote the merchant an email asking if they could send my husband a PayPal invoice for the product instead, which was fine with the merchant. As it turned out, we were leaving for Europe and he wanted the package to get here in time for us to bring it with us.

To make a long story short, for whatever reason, the new invoice never reached my husband’s inbox, so 3 days before we’re leaving for Europe my husband sent the merchant payment via PayPal without having an invoice, hoping the payment situation would be resolved and result in speedy shipping.

The merchant promised to get the package in the mail immediately, but in order to get to us in time, it needed to ship priority, with a $32 surcharge (the item was originally listed with free shipping).

My husband called the merchant to pay the surcharge with his credit card, but said that he thought it was unfair that we would have to be penalized because the merchant hadn’t been able to bill us in time to ship the package regular mail. After escalating the issue to the manager, the entire $32 surcharge was waived, which I’m sure killed their margins completely, but was still the right thing to do.

So, lesson to merchants, it’s ok to slip, but you don’t have to fall. Maybe someone will blog about the experience and recommend you!

While we’re busy working on QA and final adjustments to our service - we thought it might be helpful to outsiders if we gave you a little glimpse of how RepXchange will look and function. Below are some links to a few videos that will describe some of its core functionality.

If you want to be notified when this service goes live, please email me at: info(at)repxchange .com

Quick Overview:

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Upload Blocked Bidders

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Download Blocked Bidders

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Check Account Balance

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