AuctionBytes Blog
News and insight focusing on ecommerce and the online auction industry
by Ina Steiner, Editor of AuctionBytes.com
November 20, 2009
uBid Sellers Worried over Enable Holdings' Financing
By: Ina Steiner
Fri Nov 20 2009 16:48:38
There have been recent reports from third-party sellers on uBid who complain of late payments from the marketplace. Enable Holdings, parent company of uBid, has been trying to arrange financing. Today's SEC filing show the issue remains serious.
According to the filing, a $500,000 loan in the form of 2009 Convertible Promissory Notes provided by Hdibu LLC, Theodore Deikel and Talos Partners LLC on October 9, 2009, is due on November 30, 2009. From the filing:
The Company is negotiating a financial restructuring with its secured and unsecured creditors which is being done at the same time the Company is attempting to secure further financing. There is no assurance the Company will be successful with the financial restructuring. If the Company is not successful, substantial doubt exists as to its ability to continue as a going concern.
The full Form 10-Q for the period ended September 30, 2009 is available online. It's not clear how long the company has to get its financing in order. Enable Holdings' CEO Jeff Hoffman was not immediately available for comment.
Third-party sellers on uBid.com fulfill customer orders and had generally been paid weekly by uBid, which processes customer payments. We'll update this blog post as we learn more.
eBay Gives Employee Discount on Fashion Vault Designer Goods
By: Ina Steiner
Fri Nov 20 2009 13:01:36
eBay launched a special marketing program this week called Fashion Vault for select sellers in which it holds 2- to 3-day sales event of clothing and accessories. The company is offering its employees a 30% "friends and family" discount they can use on the inaugural event - a 3-day sale of Cole Haan clothing from a eBay seller, "StylePremium."
Lorrie Norrington informed U.S. employees and contractors of the employee discount. The code (CFASHIONVAULTN20), which gives a 30 percent off discount on items during the sale, ending soon, has been published on Twitter (including by eBay's new fashion magazine) and on Michelle Madhok's fashion shopping blog SheFinds.com.
Ms. Norrington told employees they could share the code with their friends and family. The full news story about eBay's Fashion Vault is published on AuctionBytes.com.
More Than A Few Kinks in eBay's Cross-Merchandising
By: Ina Steiner
Wed Nov 18 2009 21:41:50
Shopping for children's magazines on eBay? You might find ads for Playboy magazines in the listings you peruse. Selling tetherballs? You might find ads for bondage rope at the bottom of your listing.
eBay's new cross-merchandising efforts are missing the mark, and some users are complaining about adult-themed items being inserted into ads inappropriately.
An eBay seller sent AuctionBytes an example of eBay showing Playboy magazines to shoppers of Christian children's magazines and wrote, "Regardless of rather your looking for a Christian magazine, a CHILDREN'S magazine, A sewing magazine... whatever it is... as long as it's listed in the magazine back issues there is a PLAYBOY collection in your listing!"
"Most Watched" Algorithm In announcing the new cross-merchandising feature, eBay said "Items are chosen based on popularity - the items in the same category most watched by buyers."
I had asked Michelle Waldorf who runs WatchedItem.com if sellers could game the "most watched" feature. She said that gaming the watcher count would not be a successful strategy for high volume, fixed price items. She also said, "I would be surprised if eBay showed items sorted by most watched. Watcher count is a good indicator of general interest, but not a true measurement of the desire to purchase the item." She believes eBay is probably showing the items with the best impressions/sales or impressions/bids ratio.
Whatever the algorithm, eBay obviously has some kinks to work out of its new feature before it gets slapped with an NC-17 rating.
eBay Vendors Named in Senate Exploitation Investigation
By: Ina Steiner
Wed Nov 18 2009 10:30:33
"American consumers shouldn't have to worry that their favorite websites are ripping them off during the checkout process," Chairman John D. Rockefeller said about programs such as WebLoyalty. The Senator launched an investigation into such programs, and released a list of ecommerce companies that participated in the programs. Among those named were eBay's Half.com site, eBay vendor ChannelAdvisor, as well as Buy.com and Tiger Direct.
I wrote about Marketworks' use of WebLoyalty in 2006 (ChannelAdvisor subsequently acquired Marketworks) and spoke to one of eBay's largest sellers at the time about his thoughts on participating in WebLoyalty despite consumer complaints.
eBay sellers were offering these programs on eBay's Third Party Checkout, so it would appear that buyers on eBay were also affected by these tactics. Did eBay do anything about the program after the AuctionBytes article ran? (And if not, could this become a problem for Meg Whitman, now running for governor of California?)
I have questions into eBay and eBay vendors today to learn more about who was (and is) offering such programs and what they think of the Senate investigation, stay tuned! Here's an excerpt from the Senate report:
KEY FINDINGS FROM THE INVESTIGATION:
Three Internet companies - Affinion, Vertrue, and Webloyalty - exploit consumers' expectations about online shopping to trick them into joining their membership clubs.
Consumers often do not know these companies have their credit card numbers until they start seeing charges on their bank statements.
Affinion, Vertrue, and Webloyalty and their e-commerce partners have earned over $1.4 billion in revenue with their misleading tactics.
There have been more than 30 million consumer enrollments in these clubs and several million people are unknowingly enrolled in these clubs at any one time.
More than 450 e-commerce websites and retailers have partnered with Affinion, Vertrue, and Webloyalty to employ aggressive sales tactics against their online customers splitting the revenue about 50-50.
Eighty-eight companies have made more than $1 million by partnering with Affinion, Vertrue, and Webloyalty, including Classmates.com, which made more than $70 million.
Amazon.com traffic surpassed that of eBay for the month of October and experienced greater growth rates as well, compared to September 2009 and year-over-year. The number of unique visitors to Amazon.com was 54,492,000 in October 2009, while eBay had 50,992,000 unique visitors last month.
October 2009 Unique Visitors Amazon's unique visitors metric in October was up 5.78% from the previous month and was up 12.9% year over year.
eBay's unique visitors metric in October 2009 was up less than 1% from the previous month and was up 3.61% year over year. This was eBay's first positive year-over-year increase in unique visitors since September 2007, but given that October 2008 unique visitors were at a 4-year low, it was an easy comp.
October 2009 Page Views Amazon.com's page views metric was up 16.74% from the previous month and was up 40.38% year over year.
eBay's page views metric was up 6.25% in October from the previous month and was down 4.01% year over year.
What Will November Bring? If the past two years are any indication, Amazon.com could be set to near eBay's peak traffic set back in December of 2006.
In order for eBay to have break-even traffic in November year-over-year, traffic would have to rise 8.72% from October 2009 to November 2009 - a tough target given October 2009 was up less than 1% from September 2009.
Holiday shopping season be damned, eBay is making a major change late in the game to listings on its marketplace this week. Sellers can expect to see their competitors' items displayed on their live listings beginning tomorrow, November 17.
eBay had promised sellers not to make major changes more than twice a year, and to give them 60 days notice of such changes. Of the timing and lack of notice, eBay's announcement simply read, "While we usually refrain from making changes close to the holiday season, the test results showed a considerable increase in sold items, and we wanted to offer this functionality to our selling community ASAP."
eBay is already displaying competitive ads on sellers' listings, but only after the listings have ended.
According to its announcement, "Items are chosen based on popularity - the items in the same category most watched by buyers." However, that would seem to run counter to Best Match best practices by driving untargeted traffic to listings that could hurt the sales-to-impressions ratio.
According to the announcement, cross-merchandising on other sellers' item pages is optional - you can opt out at any time by changing your settings in My eBay. However, it doesn't specify whether opting out means other sellers' ads will not display on your pages.
Amazon.com Perceived as Owning the Customer 3X More than eBay
By: Ina Steiner
Sat Nov 14 2009 22:06:17
It was an innocuous four-question poll, which brought back a very interesting result.
Last week, we asked our readers, "When a customer transacts business with you on (eBay, Amazon, Etsy and Bonanzle), who do you feel the customer belongs to?" We gave respondents two choices to each question: theirs or the venue's. We were much less interested in the aggregate results than if the perception of customer ownership varied at all across venues.
Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority felt the customer was the seller's - in fact, there was less than 5% difference in response across three of the venues, but on Amazon.com, a significant number of the very same respondents felt the customer still belonged to Amazon - nearly 3X that of eBay, and nearly 5X more than Etsy and Bonanzle.
We put our theories about the factors that contribute to this seller perception in Sunday's newsletter (link to article) - but let us know what YOU think!
There have been recent reports from third-party sellers on uBid who complain of late payments from the marketplace. Enable Holdings, parent company of uBid, has been trying to arrange financing. Today's SEC filing show the issue remains serious. 
eBay launched a special marketing program this week called 
Shopping for children's magazines on eBay? You might find ads for Playboy magazines in the listings you peruse. Selling tetherballs? You might find ads for bondage rope at the bottom of your listing.
Holiday shopping season be damned, eBay is making a major change late in the game to listings on its marketplace this week. Sellers can expect to see their competitors' items displayed on their live listings beginning tomorrow, November 17.
