I have just come across Auctionair - a sealed bid auction site which seems to deal in charity auctions and luxury products.

Auction air use two types of auctions:

• High bid auctions.  This is sealed bid auction where the highest bidder wins.  The sealed bid nature of the auction means that the individual bidders do not know what other bids have been made
• Low bid auctions.  In this case the lowest unique bid wins. Gambling basically.

According to the site the company originated from inflight auctions on British airways and they run auction though the website and also a catalogue.  In this way the site is more like a traditional auction house than eBay i.e. low volume, high value items and specialist auctions. I noticed that over the weekend they were running a promotion with the FT.

It seems that this site plays on the perception of eBay as a low value marketplace.  Brands that would not like to be associated with eBay can use Auction Air to sell their products, as they feel that it will not affect their brand. 

I think that this is all a bit daft.  I would suspect (but I have no evidence for this) that sealed bids result in lower sale prices.  Perhaps sealed bid originated because of the British reluctance to talk about anything as vulgar as money. My view is that luxury brands and charities should swallow their pride and sell on eBay.  The will almost certainly get more exposure and more money.

Like all of eBay competitors the volumes are tiny and strangely seller are by invitation only despite the fact that they are selling some pretty run of the mill products such as TVs.  Not much for eBay to worry about here.

Thanks for everyone who came to see me speak at the Bstartup show. The seminar was surprisingly popular  - see photo of the queue below

If you want the slides from the presentation click here 

eBay.co.uk is trialing a new innovation to deal with negative feedback disputes.  Disputing parties will be able to submit their feedback to a jury of 100 ebayers, who will decided whether or not the feedback was fair.  To get feedback overturned 70% or more of the jurers will have to vote in favour of overturning the feedback.

In principle I think that this is a good idea.  Groups of people deciding independently on issues can be a very effective way to producing fair results (see The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki ).  It will certainly be more effective than eBay employees deciding from on high.

However I have several reservations about this system and I fear that it will require significant changes before it can really work.

• Lack of incentive for jury members.  Who has the time to do this, and who cares?  eBay is a commercial company and not a public service, why should I give my time to them for free.
• Volume of disputes.  Submitting a dispute is free, I can see the volume of disputes being submitted being huge.  Auctioning4u for example got 37 negative feedbacks in the last month
• 100% feedback conversion.  As this system can only reduce negative feedback, I fear that it will make feedback even less of a differentiating factor than it is at the moment.

I wonder whether to make the system work, eBay will have to introduce some method or credits or payment to encourge people who really care about their feedback to submit disputes, not just people fishing for a reprieve.

Try to control yourselves but I will be presenting at Business Startup 2007 on Friday at 2.45.  The presentation is called "How to be an eBay Entrepreneur".  See you there.

I have just been alerted to the launch of an new eBay searching site - getitnext.   This site has rather nice functionality, allowing users to refine their seaches using tag clouds and selecting categories from a graphical category tree.

The application also allows buyers to find hot items within a particular category i.e. items with the most bids, and deals i.e. items with no bids, a functionality with eBay also does not have.

So in summary, this is a search app which actually adds value to the user.  My only worry for the people of getitnext is that eBay could so easily borrow their ideas.

I have just been invited to the beta of Auctomatic, a new eBay listing tool.  On the face of it I am not sure why its creators thought that there was a requirement in the marketplace for a sub-Seller Manager Pro offering.  The product offers the same kind of inventory features as SMP, but without the more advanced features such as scheduling and automation. 

That said it does look quite pretty.  I was a bit dissapointed as I had high hopes that they might produce something interesting.  People of auctomatic, if you are listening, here is what your product needs for starters:

• Item scheduling
• Auction template (i.e. where you can separate the template design and content)
• Automatic emails
• Auctomatic feedback

The other day eBay revealed detailed of the average rating being left on the eBay detailed seller ratings.  

The detailed seller rating were supposed to enable sellers to give a fuller picture of the service that they received, and reward those that gave a truely excellent service.  Here are the results:
 

Looking at these figures it seems to me that detailed seller rating have the same problem as ordinary feedback, i.e. people normally giving high ratings and hence the score does not really give much indication of the quality of the service.

The difference between the 90th and 10th percentile for item as described is 0.4 i.e. an 8% difference.  News is that eBay is going to be using DSRs to influence search results and PowerSeller Status.  Whilst I applaud any way of prioritising eBay sellers which give a good service, is being 8% than the best worse a reason to start penalising the these sellers (i.e. those in the bottom 10%).  Will this new system really separate out those who give truely awful service, or  will it hit those who for some reason in a more difficult category (e.g. those who sell second hand items, who by there nature are more prone to problems).

I have been doing a lot of research into product to sell on eBay of recent and here is a review of the products which I have been using.

eBay tools can be broadly divided into two sorts, those that go through the eBay API and those that scrape eBay results through the login.  Software which uses the API are fast, but constrained in the results which they can provide.  For example they cannot give details on the size of sales within a particular category, as this might be used in predicting eBay’s financial results. 

Software which scrapes eBay pages are slow but can give more information about a particular category, for example the size of the category and who is sellling within that category.

 API Software

The product I have been making the most use of is terapeak.  terapeak provides data for UK, France, Germany, Australia, Canada and US eBay marketplaces making it the most comprehensive tool on the market.  The product is charged at $24.95 for a single site and £39.95 for all 6 countries.  Reports include:

• Product Search.  Analyse performance of eBay products by keywords search
• Top Seller Seach.  Analyse top sellers for a product.  Sellers are given a number (i.e. their IDs are hidden, but these can be revealed by clicking through to the products they are selling)
• Seller Report.  Analyse sales of a particular seller - very useful
• Category Report.  Relative performance of a category over time.  Very limited functionality.
• Keywords Search.  Analyse keywords which have improved performance for a particular product. 

What I find particularly useful is the seller report.  Using this report a seller’s sales can be analysed to discover that items are selling most effectively and what their GMV is.  My one criticism of terapeak is that it does not provide a good printable report of search results. 

Recommendation:  Use terapeak if you are performing in depth analysis of your competitor’s sales and product level analysis

Unlike terapeak, eSellerStreet is charged on a per search basis ($0.35).  The product produces report on sellers or eBay searches giving the following information

• Statistics 
• Top Categories
• Matching items
• Sales by listing type
• Sales by time of day and day of week
• Sales by duration
• Listing promotions

Recommendation:  I find eSellerStreet to be particularly useful if you want to quick analysis of a seller or search, presented in an easy to digest format.

eBay Scraping Software 

Auction Intelligence 

Auction Intelligence, produces indepth analysis of eBay searches and sellers, without any of the constraints placed on the API products.  The product provides reports which are not offered by the other products such as the effect of offering PayPal and the effect of postage rates.  Reports offered:

• Statistics summary
• Effect of auction timing on price
• Hot items (items with most bids)
• Effect of offering PayPal
• Effect of Feedback on price
• Duration effects
• Listing upgrade effects
• Common search phrases

This adds up to a very powerful picture of the eBay marketplace which is not available through the API products.  The one drawback of AI is that searches can take hours.

Recommendation:  Use AI to build a picture of your eBay marketplace, and to analyse your sales in depth.

Sometimes the old ways are the best.  I registered this blog on Technorati about a year ago but they never seemed to register my new posts, despite the fact I was pinging their server.  I tried emailing but got no reply.  The ‘top’ blog search engine clearly was not interested in what I had to say!

A quick web search showed that several other people were having a similar problem with getting their blogs indexed.  I was not so bothered about getting traffic from Technorati, but a lot of people use technorati’s Authority rating to as an indication of the quality of a blog’s content.  My low authority was brusing my pride and drastic times called for drastic measures

As a last ditch attempt to get through I wrote a letter to a bigwig at Technorati, stating how dismayed I was with their level of service.  Within a week my problem was resolved.  The eBay, Ecommerce, life now has an authority of 26 and all my posts appear in the Technorati search.

With many people receiving 100s of emails a day, I have often found that snail mail is a very effective way of making things happen.  For some reason people sit up and take notice - try it next time a company or organisation is not up to standard.

I have just read eBay Q&A by Robert Pugh, author of the eBay Business Handbook.  Robert compiled this list of topics from questions which were posed through his blog and newsletter the eBay bulletin.  

As opposed to most beginner level books on eBay, this book does not go through a step by step guide to how to use the eBay website (yawn!) but rather concentrates on interesting titbits on how to use eBay.  For example

• Does the timing of my bid make a difference?
• What start price should I use?
• What is a PayPal Chargeback?

The advice is clearly written and easy to digest.  Perhaps good for a  before bedtime snipped of eBay advice!