Two new marketplaces have come to my attention, one of which might even have legs.

Wigix is a new marketplace which aims to work like a stock market matching buyers and sellers.  As a seller you state a price you are willing to sell at and this is displayed to buyers who are looking for that item, and vise versa. 

The site works on an inventory basis which will give good structure to the listings, something which eBay lacks.  The inventory based nature of the site allows a market price to be assigned to a product, which I think is a very nice feature.  Where as on eBay you have to guess what a product is worth based on limited information, this site sticks its neck out.  However, it was not clear how the price was calculated, a rolling average perhaps.

There are no listing fees on Wigix, but i am surprised to report that it has both buyer and seller final value fees.  I find the seller side very surprising!!

I am usually super sceptical about marketplace competitors to eBay, but this one looks like it has been well constructed unlike say, Bideasi.  The problem they will have is one of momentum, as this marketplaces require huge numbers of users to give the returns required by their VC investors. Also eBay has had over 10 years to get their model right, dealing with issues such payments, fraud and building a community.  Wigix will have to catch up very quickly to be able to compete, I can only hope they have a large budget

I am somewhat less impressed with fididel.  The USP for this site is to allow buyers and seller to haggle in real time.  This is supposidly ‘fun’.  Sounds like a real pain for both buyers and sellers for me, and not something out of which a viable marketplace could be built. 

There has been news in several of the dailys including The Times about an eBay strike on 1st May.  The main issues seem to be as follows:

• Changes to feedback.  In the future sellers will not be able to leave negative feedback for buyers
• End of level playing field.  eBay is going to start giving volume sellers fee discounts.

To sweeten this pill, eBay has reduced listing fee (although raised the final value fee). 

Like the last so called strike, I think that this is all a storm in a tea cup.  A microscopic number of sellers will take part and it will have a negligable effect.  In my opinion if they are unhappy, instead of whinging sellers should quietly look for other sales channels, such as launching their own website and amazon.  Many eBay sellers are too eBay centric.

My response to changes

I am broadly in favour of the feedback change.  The feedback system in the past has been a blunt tool, with sellers either scoring above 98% or not trading.  Few buyers would leave negatives for fear of being ‘negged’ in return.  In my opinion a buyer has done their bit when they have paid, so I would make the additional change of allowing negative feedback from sellers in the situation of non payment.

As for the end of the level playing field, eBay has set the entry level for qualifying for a discount fairly low, and so it should help most business sellers.  Discounts for volumes are common in almost every other line of business, and so people should not find this so surprising.  As the change changes are linked to detailed sellers ratings these changes should incentivise good performance and lead to a better customer experience.

eBay cross promotion rules are one of those features which it is easy to ignore. These rules define the items which are shown in the cross promotional box underneath each listing, showing other products which the seller has for sale.

eBay does not make it obvious how to change these rules and I suspect that most sellers probably just leave the setting as default, where eBay selects the items which are shown in the box. Rules can be changed in the marketing Tools section of My eBay. I have just changed the rule to show items from the same shop category, although items can also be shown according to other rules such as a keyword search. 

What I found really annoying about setting these rules is that eBay give absolutely no indication of how effective any change will be.  The limited traffic stats available to eBay sellers only show page views and not where the traffic has come from. This means that any change in cross promotional rules is a stab in the dark.  I think that it is eBay’s interest to provide better statistics as better informed sellers (should) means more successful sellers.

I have recently been thinking about how best to set up my email thought outlook having read the 4 hour workweek.  In the book Timothy Ferriss suggest answering your emails only twice a day, which I think is a great idea, the problem is that I want to be able to send emails more requently than that.

A friend of mine told me that 99% of requests for new functionality for microsoft products is actually already available, people just don’t know where to look.  I have been trying for ages to set up emails which would send and not recieve, and finally worked out how to do it!

• Set up an emails address in the usual way
• In outlook tools > options > Send/receive, create a send/receive group for your new email account which only sends email
• When you want to send and not recieve emails, select this account only from the send/receive drop down box on the outlook mail menu

Today I changed my brower homepage from the BBC to Google. I reckon that every time that I see the BBC site I have to read at least one story. 

Estimated time saving:  15 minutes per day x 20 working days = approx 0.5 days month

Anyone who reads my blog regularly might have noticed that it was briefly taken over by a turkish hacker.

Mr Hacker, Ha, Ha, very funny, please don’t do it again. 

Thanks to Sam from Arena Flowers for letting me know

I am just setting up a business (well two actually) and I have decided to manage the phones using skype, dispensing with landlines altogether.  I may live to regret this, but I thought I would share my reasons.

Alongside computer to computer calls, Skype also has a feature called a Skype-In number where users get a phone number which can be rung from any landline or mobile. I can therefore give out a number on my business website etc. which goes directly into skype.  Skype also provides voicemail and call forwarding at very reasonable rates.

Pros 

Cost Effective 

These numbers are pretty cheap (£35 per year + VAT, or £16 if you join Skype pro which is £1.50/month).  The other option I had was to get a landline at £15/month + calls.

Convenient:  Pick up calls from any computer

I use my computer at home and at work, and my skype calls are routed to the terminal which I have open at any time.  This means that calls are automatically directed to where I am.

Multiple phone numbers from the same location

It is possible to have more than one skype-in number running off the same skype account.  The only downside here is skype does not tell you which number has been rung.

Cons

Quality of skype calls can still be an issue

I have been given a sneek preview of the new launch of terapeak (thanks!).  Looks pretty nifty.  Here are my top picks of the new features. 

• Hot Searches.  This enables sellers to find the top searched keywords for particular categories and more importantly sub categories.  Great to writing titles
• Hot Sellers.  I think that this is a list of the top sellers on eBay (see previous post). 
• Top Category Sellers.  The new terapeak will give a list of the top sellers within a third level category (e.g Baby > Prams > bugaboo), pretty useful for scoping out the competition.  To my knowledge this info has not been available before.

Whilst particularly annoyed by Adwords the other day, I got thinking about things I would like to change about the major eCommerce platforms.

eBay

• User access levels.  eBay was never originally created with businesses in mind and so, unlike most business systems, there is no function to limit the access of some users to certain functions like listing items.  This fact means that an account’s password must be widely distributed, increasing the opportunities of ID theft
• Password entry.  Password entry would be more secure if eBay asked for select characters from the password and not the whole thing.
• Product attributes.  Currently on eBay, if you are selling a product which has multiple variations, you must make a listing for each variation.  According to eBay rules, shoes for example should have an individual listing for each size.  I would like to be able to choose attributes like colour and size at the checkout.
• Checkout upsell.  I would like to be able to upsell services in the checkout such as gift wrap

Google

• Moving Adgroups.  Unless I am missing something it is not possible to move adgroups between campaigns without deleting and then recreating the agroup, loosing all the quality data.
• Search query.  I would like to see actual query information alongside keywords in the adword interface.
• Google Maps.  I wish analytics would give figures of traffic which came from the Google Maps product.
• Extended Match.  Google’s extended match throws up all kinds of rubbish.  Google, we choose those keywords for a reason!

Anyone want to add to the list?

We understand that there are a relatively small number of faulty/not as described disputes opened on PayPal for items bought after 31st Jan 08. Customers should not return such goods to Clockworx premises as they are now closed and we will not be able to recover items sent to those premises after 28 February 2008. Instead, please send them to:

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We can also confirm that the remaining 3 pallets of items sold post-administration (31st Jan 08 and onwards) will be dispatched by close of business on Friday 22 Feb 08. There will be no further dispatches after that date. We believe that all sales orders will then have been dispatched, subject to delays at the couriers’ own offices.