To eBay faithful, Hub convention a selling point
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If you buy a pair of shoes from Jon Kuhlmann, expect to pay for them before you try them on.
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eBay battles several days' worth of PayPal glitches.
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(InfoWorld) - After making a series of decisions that frustrated some merchants, eBay is wooing store owners. If a speech from Bill Cobb, president of eBay North America, hints at future relationships between the company and its sellers, the message is toÂ keep your doors open. During a Thursday keynote at eBay's annual sellers convention, Cobb pledged not to increase merchant selling fees this July and said that the stores category will return to the eBay page header within 30 days. In addition to offering its main auction listings, eBay allows merchants to set up shops and sell wares at fixed prices. Last July relations between store owners and eBay grew contentious when eBay announced an effort "rebalance the overall eBay marketplace," which had seen store listings eclipse auctions listings. The rebalancing meant higher store fees as of last August, and in April the stores tab was removed from eBay page headers. "For eBay Stores, the last 10 months have been a transition. We are committed to the long-term success of eBay Store owners," Cobb said. While store owners didn't welcome last August's fees, Cobb said he is pleased with the realignment's progress. Additional efforts to court store owners include 24-hour phone support for Featured eBay Store owners and a reduction in Anchor Store monthly fees. Among a raft of other initiatives for sellers, Cobb announced a temporary reduction in the Final Value Fee, a charge tacked on to an item's final selling price. Visual navigation, in which photographs play a prominent role in navigation, will be introduced to more categories. PayPal president Rajiv Dutta addressed merchant security during his portion of the keynote. "We heard the message on fraud. We know it's a top challenge. I am personally committed to keeping fraudsters off the site," Dutta said. In an effort to combat phishing, PayPal, eBay's payment division, will make theÂ PayPal Security KeyÂ available to all eBay and PayPal users on Friday. The security key device, previously in beta testing, generates unique security codes in 30-second intervals. Users then enter the code when logging on to their PayPal or eBay account. In August PayPal will launch a payment review system that flags "transactions that pose a risk." The questionable transaction is highlighted, and the seller is told to wait on shipping the item until PayPal confirms that the buyer's account contains adequate purchasing funds. Meg Whitman, eBay president and CEO, opened the keynote and emphasized that the company is suited to reach its goal of connecting people through three of its divisions. Finding, buying, communicating, entertaining, and paying are main Internet activities, she said. eBay fulfills the buying aspect, PayPal handles payment functions, and VoIP provider Skype, which the company purchased in 2005, provides communication services. "The lines between finding and buying are blurring. At the core the company is about connecting people," Whitman said. As eBay executives discussed staying linked and protected, some sellers said theyÂ felt a disconnectÂ from the company. "I'm happy to hear that stores are going back in the header," said Maria Ginter, who sells furniture and home decor on eBay. Ginter was less impressed thatÂ eBay is no longer advertising on GoogleÂ after a spat this week over a Google event to promote its own online payment system, Google Checkout. "That's how people find my furniture," she said. Deb Martin, who sells collectible figurines on her store wanted to hear of security efforts to crack down on dishonest buyers who create new user identifications solely to commit more fraud. "Buyers have no incentive to keep their name. They just restart their IDs and log back in." She also questioned the merits behind the temporary fee reduction and saw it as an effort to boost quarterly revenue and benefit shareholders. Although eBay is emphasizing its auctions, one merchant thinks that form of e-commerce has faded. "A lot of people are over bidding. They're just buying now," said Judy Pykhoff, who operates the Red Cougar Trading Post store on eBay.
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Blog: At eBay Developers Conference in Boston, company executives talk about their strategy for building a "commerce operating system."
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By Dana Knight, The Indianapolis Star  Dec. 18--Roxanne Hylton's loyalty to online shopping has a name: eBay.    She likes the variety , the prices and how easy it is to navigate the Web  site.
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The significant&#160;changes that eBay announced last week&#160;have merchants abuzz as they analyze and react to the impact that the restructured fees, modification of the search and feedback functions, and other changes will have on their sales and profits.
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eBay is back on Google, but this is far from a mutually satisfying ending.
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(InfoWorld) - A massive computing grid helps eBayÂ make changes to its auction Web site on the fly while maintaining a 99.94 percent up time, said Paul Strong, a distinguished research scientist there. While eBay designed most of its grid infrastructure, the company also wants to participate in standards-setting communities to bring more improvements to computer grid technology, Strong said Tuesday during the GridWorld conference in Washington, D.C. EBay's core business is hosting Web-based auctions, not in creating new grid technologies, he said. "We don't see ourselves as an IT development shop for development tools," he said. By working together on grid standards, participants can help "transitions be less painful," he added. On Monday, the Open Grid Forum standards body officially opened for business, delivering on its commitment made in June to detail its goals during GridWorld. EBay has made great strides in its back-end technology since the late '90s, but the company still wants more improvements, including the ability to change the site's code nearly instantaneously, Strong said. Right now, the company, with more than 15,000 servers in its production environment, distributes new application code to its Web site every two weeks, he said. EBay developers write about 100,000 lines of code each week, and using a traditional grid made up of about 350 Windows, Linux and Solaris computers, the site takes about 20 minutes to update with the new features, Strong said. With 104 million items listed for auction on eBay every day, the company needs to keep the site running while those changes are happening, he added. "We can't afford to take the site down," he said. "It's like changing the engines on a jumbo jet mid-flight." About $1,608 worth of merchandise sells on eBay every second, and a vehicle sells every two minutes on average, Strong said. A trading card sells every six seconds, and a pound of the Korean food kimchi sells every minute. The site has seen huge growth since the late '90s, he noted. Ebay.com has gone from 54 million page views a day in June 1999 to 874 million in December 2005, Strong said. The site sent out 35 million e-mail messages a day in December, compared to 1 million a day in June '99. And the site's up time went from about 97 percent to 99.94 percent in that time period. Still, the company would like more grid functionality, Strong said. EBay would like to get closer to that mythical 99.999 percent up time, he said. "We break almost anything we use," he said. "We're pretty much at the extreme limit of what you can do with off-the-shelf technology." And eBay doesn't want to wait to update the site every two weeks, he added. "We want to be faster; we want to be more agile," he said. "If someone comes up with a cool change that's not that big, I'd like to be able to roll it tomorrow." Improvements in grid computing is where community standards can help, he said. "We believe everyone has something to contribute," he said to the GridWorld audience. "We'd like to share ... with the community." GridWorld is organized by IDG, the parent company of IDG News Service.
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Seemingly out of the blue, eBay have decided to ditch some Microsoft technology from their site. eBay will drop support for Microsoft&#39;s Passport and .
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eBay will have quite a moat to cross if it wants to challenge Craigslist.
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A brand new year and already so much to purge. It is time for eBay, that all-season national yard sale. But who wants to put up with the annoyances of holding an eBay auction?
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EBay will cut fees for sellers of books, music, movies and games. But it is defending the changes to the feedback system that have so many sellers angry that they are planning a boycott.
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As the Web giants invade each other's territory, the auction site yanks its ads from Google. But eBay may not even need them
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eBay sellers have a new content management tool to help them post storefronts faster, thanks to a newly customized Macromedia toolset.
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Vendors who sell their goods on eBay are scratching their heads after the company unveiled a new fee structure in effort to boost listings and maintain its share of the online auction market it helped start a decade ago.
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Someone posts credit card information on 1200 users; eBay downplays the event as a hoax.
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If eBay is a political hot potato, maybe you should pass the sour cream.