Common Sense eCommerce

I’ve been exploring the consignment selling aspect of eBay (called ‘Trading Assisant on eBay) for some time now and can’t say that I’ve very successful at it. This is really no surprise, but it seems the thing that people MOST want to get rid of is furniture.When people contact me about helping to get rid of their stuff, almost without fail one or more pieces of furniture is going to be on the list. Part of the consignment process dictates that the Trading Assistant takes temporary possession of the merchandise. This is common practice across all consignment models that I know of.

So furniture presents a problem for this, at least for me. My eBay business is one that I largely work myself and since I am not Hercules, I can’t haul sofas, love-seats, desks and so on by myself. I can sometimes arrange for help, but even then, my 50 plus body doesn’t like hauling furniture. So my only choice is to hire someone to do it for me. This eats into what I can make on the deal.

In addition, there is the storage issue. I have rented storage for the purpose of my eBay business, but one furniture load can easily fill it up. So if you are planning to be part of the eBay consignment gig, make sure you have a way to deal with furniture!

Tags: eBay Consignment, Trading Assistant, Trading Assistant Challenges, eBay Consignment Challenges

I was interested in researching Memory Foam as I see a lot of Memory Foam mattresses and mattress toppers for sale. But I was a bit confused as to how memory foam is measured for quality and what the “5#, 6#, etc” means.So I decided to check out eBay reviews. eBay lets sellers post reviews and somehow they get into the top 1000 of reviewers. I am not sure how that is tabulated but it must be pretty easy to get to be a Top 1000 reviewer!

Here is a review I found on eBay’s review system on Memory Foam (link here). It appears to be a fairly informative review although not all that well written. It did however, answer some basic questions for me about memory foam so I though I might check out this seller’s listings.

I thought it was odd that the listings shown along with the review were from other eBay sellers so I clicked his feedback. OOPS. Not a registered user — NARU baby. And NARU since about a year ago.

The last of his feedback looks like the seller disappeared or went under. Ok so this kind of raises an issue with eBay reviews. The obvious question here is should eBay have a Top 1000 reviewer that is NARU? In particular, should they have a Top 1000 reviewer that may have ripped people off?

There are some pretty nasty comments at the end of this sellers feedback record and that just doesn’t bode well for being a “Top 1000 Reviewer”. Granted the content of the review is probably still of value, but perhaps eBay should separate the content from the content provider when the content provider goes NARU.

Tags: eBay NARU, eBay Sellers, eBay Memory Foam, eBay Reviewers

About once every six weeks or so I get a cold call from a company telling me they’re ‘calling on behalf of eBay’ and asking for me by name. I call this the semi-regular eBay telemarketing call. It comes from a number in area code 801 (Utah) and they usually call to tell me about some lame feature that I already know about. I have yet to have them tell me about anything that I’m not already familiar with.

Today’s call was to tell me about Markdown Manager (which has been out for months now) and once again I told the person I was not interested in their calling me any longer. Today they interrupted me in the middle of lunch with a friend.

So I decided to find out how to stop these calls as they have been getting increasingly annoying and are never of any value to me. I engaged eBay chat and according to the chat rep, they don’t have any such calling system. He said that I can report this issue to the Trust and Safety team. Haha - typical eBay chat blow-off.

I was unable to find anything in my preferences that had to do with telemarketing and of course eBay Help was of no help. So next time they call, I will have to try to pin them down on who they really are and how I get them to stop calling me. It’s apparent they are either eBay agents or eBay has sold my name and phone number to some outside marketing company.

Tags: eBay Calls, eBay Telemarketing, eBay Telemarketing Calls, Annoying eBay Calls

Last week, the tragic Virginia Tech killing was linked to eBay in reports like this one:

Tech Shooter May Have Used eBay Account

Not that eBay is to held responsible for this tragedy, but it does tend to shine a bad light on eBay at a time when they really need some good “PR” press. They really don’t need links to unfortunate events like this.

Today, eBay came out with a statement acknowledging that Cho Seung-Hui did have an eBay account, but used it to purchase empty ammo clips and a gun holster - things that are unregulated.

Full Story Here

Some of the most hideous web pages can be found on My Space. I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps just the informal nature of the social network makes it a ‘who cares about my design’ place.There is a site called ‘Worst of Myspace’ which used to blog about some of the worst offenders on a regular basis, but lately they seem to have stopped posting. It can’t be that they’ve run out of material. Why here’s one right here.

You think this person likes eBay?

Tags: Bad MySpace Profiles, eBay Logo Abuse, Myspace Eyesore, Poor MySpace Design

Simple Math wins! Well mostly.  One of the things I love about the WordPress platform is the wide variety of freeware plug-ins you can use to solve various problems with your blog. There are lots of plug-ins for spam obviously.

I started out by using Akismet which does an awfully good job at identifying comment spam.  However, it simply places comment spam in a queue and lately that queue was getting hundreds of humungous script-created spams per day.  That meant I had to keep going in and cleaning out the queue - not a small task considering the page load time for those huge spams.

So I wanted something that would stop the scripts but I never liked the word verification masks that I see on some blogs. Some of them are so hard to read that I often need two or three attempts to get them right.  And my eyesight is pretty good.

I tried WP-Gatekeeper, which is plug in that poses a simple question for commenters to answer. Very simple like ‘what color is an orange’?  That proved to be buggy at least in this Wordpress blog, so I removed that.

So then I installed the “Did you pass math?” plug in, which presents very simple (yes I mean very simple) math questions for commenters to answer.  Anyone over the age of 7 can answer them don’t worry - single digit addition only not advanced functions or calculus.  Just something to make sure the commenters are really humans not scripts.

So if you see a little ‘3 plus 5′ question, just answer it and know that it really works well toward keeping the blog spam free.

One buyer asked a odd 2 part question (1) he wanted to know if he could pick the item up and (2) he wanted our state license number.

The 2nd part was clearly none of his business especially considering that eBay doesn’t even require sellers to have a business licsense (both a blessing a curse in my opinion). Of course one does not say “None of your business” so I elegantly avoided the 2nd part of the question by answering just the first - that we are not set up for local pickup.

Then he replied and the reason for his question became obvious. He rephrased his question to ask if we were indeed required to charge sales tax for buyers in our state. Without explaining the implications of a licensed business NOT charging sales tax on eBay for resale goods, I just said yes we are required to charge sales tax.

I believe he might have been checking to make sure we were really a business. For actual businesses, we charge the customer sales tax and then we pay the state back for the sales tax we collected via our quarterly B & O tax filings. Perhaps there are eBay sellers who are not actual businesses charging sales tax and then pocketing it? Hmm.

Sales tax is the reason that we get relatively few eBay buyers in our state (our local sales tax rate is 8.8%). It’s going to be interesting to see what happens on eBay when internet sales tax is implemented!

Tags: eBay Sales Tax, State Sales Tax, Internet Sales Tax

Most of the time Google Adsense makes sense. But sometimes, it’s just so exactly relevant that it’s .. ummm…maybe too relevant? After clearing out this morning’s spam from my spam folder, what did I see? A Gmail Adsense link to a recipe for “Spam Hashbrown Bake”! Google taking things too literally or just having fun?

And the recipe looks about as unhealthy as spam itself!

  Yech! The recipe page can be found here if you’re REALLY interested.

I read a lot of blogs and come across many that have comments disabled. Here at Common Sense eCommerce, there is comment moderation in force, which is a lot different. The comment spam is so bad that the comment moderation feature of WordPress lets me keep the blog uncluttered and makes it easy for me to let only the real comments through.

My Home Business blog over at AllBusiness does not have comments currently working because the site went through a large change and that feature is still being worked on (much to the dismay of some of the blog authors there). But that is hopefully temporary.

In my opinion, a blog without comments is not really a blog - it’s an online newsletter. Not a bad thing necessarily, an online newsletter, but unless you’re allowing commentary and open discussions, it’s so… um.. Web 1.0.

Comments are what make blogs what they are - kind of like an open discussion led by the blog author. I still read some blogs that don’t have comments because they can still have great content, but it does feel like something is missing.

And could that ’someone’ be eBay?  Some time ago, before all the cybersquatting laws came into play, I registered a domain that was a phrase with the word ‘eBay’ in it.  So far it’s just a parked domain and is not in use.

A few days ago, I got an email from someone appearing to be from eBay chastising me for registering this domain.  I won’t repost the email since it was lengthy, but it basically cited some trademark laws and told me that I should let the domain expire without using it.

The odd thing about it was that the email did not originate from eBay. In fact, I’m not sure why my anti-spam, anti-phish filter didn’t catch it.  The originating domain was another company, a legitimate company who does such trademark enforcement. But the email was signed with someone’s first name (no last name) and the title of ‘eBay Enforcement Team’.  The reply-to email address was enforcement@ebay.com.  I don’t think the email was a phish because it didn’t contain any links to sites that asked me for anything - only informational sites.

However, I am treating the email as a spam for a variety of reasons.  For one, legal notices such as that should never be conveyed via email.  For a various reasons, not the least of which are the existence of email filters, sometimes email does not get delivered and there is no real way to prove email delivery.  The method of choice for any kind of legal notice is still postal mail (certified) which will hold up in court.  I doubt if email notices like that can be considered any kind of official notice. 

Secondly, a first name signature is not very official.  It was a very common name and looked unprofessional.

Thirdly, why did this company not identify themselves as the actual company representing eBay, rather than try to pretend like they were eBay?

Is eBay just too lazy to send the notice via postal mail?  The domain in question is not private so whoever this was had access to the PO Box address associated with the domain.  It was available for them to mail me a notice.  Or is it just someone trying to strong-arm the domain away from me?

Whatever the case, I will most likely renew it when it comes due unless I get some sort of official notice coming from something that I can positively identify as eBay.  I will need to seek eBay’s approval before doing anything with the domain; this was my intention all along.

On January 3rd, eBay announced their annual fee increase. No surprise there - as mentioned in an October blog post (Link Here), eBay still has no apparent path to business growth other than raising seller fees. They can sugarcoat it all they want with talk of resetting the eBay marketplace balance and such, but that’s the way it is in 2007 just as it was in 1999. The only good news is that this time around, it’s minimal. Barring any nasty surprises as they pulled last year with the eBay store fee hike debacle, it’s an increase that we can live with.

Unless you sell in eBay motors, there are only two levels to be concerned with. The first is the insertion fee for items listed in the range of $1.00 - $9.99. They are raising that by 5 cents. Yet another reason to start your listings at 99 cents! See my earlier blog post on 99 cent listing strategies (Link Here).

The other affected level are final value fees for items in the range of $25.01 to $1,000. That is going up from 3% to 3.25%, a relatively small increase but an annoying one just the same. Hard to get around that unless you sell in extremely low end stuff or extremely high end stuff.

The complete glossed over announcement can be found on the eBay announcement page (Link Here).

Here is a challenge to you eBay: How about getting a bit creative with ways to grow your revenue? And by creative, I don’t mean thinking of different variations of raising seller fees! I can’t think of too many businesses of their size who rely on just one thing for their ‘bread and butter’. Even Google with its heavy dependence on Adwords revenue is coming up with different things to bring in more growth. Come on eBay - you can do it, I know you can!

I got a spam in my email from PricePlay, which was really only a press release. I am beginning to look at press releases as spam. PricePlay, as near as I can tell, is a site where you select goods and then play an interactive game. The better you get at the game, the lower your price for that item gets (or something like that). I guess the idea is that your buyer sticks around for awhile playing a game.

First of all, a company that has to resort to spamming me with their press release gets knocked down a rung on the ‘legitimacy ladder’ to begin with. Secondly, this site is a bit confusing and I suspect that buyers might be suspicious of something they don’t fully understand.

I decided to give it whirl. The sign-up itself was suspect. I did not even put in a real email address and it let me get away with it! I played a Grand Prix game which I lost miserably because I could not get back to game instructions. Then I played a ‘whack a mole’ game which wasted even more time. With each mole whack, the price on my item was dropping.

I am not sure what the seller gets from this. There is a “Visit Sellers Website” button showing which you can use to go to their site.

If you get really good at the game, I suppose you get the item free? I couldn’t say; I didn’t have that much time to spend.

Tags: Strange Business Models, Odd Web Businesses, Press Release Spam

I received an embarrassing email in my box this weekend.  It had this as a subject line:

Hi !firstname_fix}, This set a record at Clickbank

!Firstname_fix?  The worst part is that is from a very well known, highly successful internet marketer.  You probably know his name.  In fact, maybe you saw this as well.  I know his list is very large. 

This is a problem with the email auto responder setting. If you are going send out an email blast, marketing gurus, please make sure your auto responder is set up properly.  My name is not !firstname_fix}.

That is a really quick, quick way to get your email deleted before being read.

What is eBay’s credibility going into 2007? From the buyer perspective, I think eBay’s credibility issues are probably much the same as they’ve always been. In Steve Woda’s Blog (link here), he attributes buyer trust problems to ‘information asymmetry’. According to Mr. Woda, information asymmetry exists where:

… one party has more or better information about the product than the other party. In eCommerce and on eBay, the seller clearly has an information advantage over the buyer, and this is information asymmetry.

I think this is an issue facing eCommerce in general, but it’s particularly apparent on eBay. This is due to many factors such as eBay not qualifying sellers and seller related fraud on eBay.

What about from the seller perspective? eBay Sellers were treated to a huge amount of flip flopping from eBay this past year and I will go out on a sturdy limb and say that seller trust in eBay is waning.

There was the announcement early in the year where eBay promised it would direct more traffic to eBay stores and give them more exposure. Yet on July 19th (almost two months after eBay live - the annual public relations event), Bill Cobb announced an enormous store fee increase and a reduced store exposure strategy, contradicting the earlier direction. This was given under the limp banner of “Resetting the Balance of the eBay Marketplace”.

Then there was the confusing paid ad partnerships with Google and Yahoo! (Yahoo for United States eBay users, and Google for Non U.S. users). And there is the persistent problem with the money eBay spent on Skype and their failure to bring it to market in any meaningful form.

In general, this has not been a good year for eBay establishing trust among sellers. There are already indicators that sellers are leaving eBay or are in transition. As an eBay seller myself, I would ask eBay: What have you done for me lately?

Tags: eBay Selling, eBay Stores, eBay Sellers, eBay Credibility

Microsoft’s music player has hit the market with a mixed hoopla.  I plan on checking it out over the next week as my iPod is rapidly in decline.  As a longtime iPod user, here are few things I feel Apple could improve on to make their product better.   (In the unlikely event someone from the Microsoft Zune product development team reads this blog, they might get some free ideas here.)

Battery - Much has been made about the iPod battery issue so I won’t belabor the point.  It could have all been solved, Apple, if you would have ONLY built the iPod with a removable battery.  Then people like me would have been happy to pay for a new battery to extend the lives of our iPods.  Microsoft, are you listening?

Podcasts - I’m a far cry from the typical iPod user.  I use mine mainly for listening to podcasts.  On the iPod, podcasts are organized under … Podcasts.  Makes sense.  Except when you play one and the episode finishes what happens? The iPod goes back to home position. Oh I know, I can create a playlist to solve this, but Apple, why didn’t you set it up so that the next episode in line automatically plays? That would have been ever so handy.  Microsoft, are you listening?

Wireless - Updating the iPod is nothing short of clunky.  First you must update the iTunes software on the computer, then plug the iPod into the computer to update it. A 2 step process that really could be better. I have said for a long time that the iPod would be so much better if it were a wireless device and could connect to the iTunes directories wirelessly. Microsoft, I know you listened a little here but I mean really wireless.

My digital player needs are simple. Why are the devices stumbling over each other to be so complex?

Tags: Apple IPod, Microsoft Zune

eBay’s VERO program (VERO stands for ‘Verified Rights Owner’) was designed to give intellectual property owners a way to protect their copyrights on eBay. Typically, this is used to protect against counterfeit and illegal sale of items.

You might imagine my surprise when I learned our eBay account was zapped with a VERO complaint earlier this week. At first, I thought it was some disgruntled competitor using the VERO program to create negative strikes against us. The VERO violation was for a brand name juicer we sell although it really wasn’t clear exactly what the VERO violation was for.. Upon closer look, I saw that the email of the person who filed the complaint was from the juicer company itself. The eBay user id was a ubiquitous one which is apparently kept as a ‘mole’ for this company.

The biggest issue I have with this is that we are established resellers for this line of juicers and we have permission to use their images, trade name, etc. on our website (according to their terms). Apparently, that permission does not extend to eBay although their terms say nothing of that. Furthermore, this particular juicer is sold nonexclusively on the Amazon Marketplace with stock images, text, and trade name. So this begs the question: why is OK to use their trade name on my website and other sales channels, yet it’s a VERO violation on eBay?

It looks to me like this VERO complaint is nothing more than a sham to keep sellers from selling their product on eBay. It doesn’t appear to be about intellectual property at all. My inquiry to this eBay user regarding this matter has gone unanswered, so that leaves me to rely on assumptions. To be honest, this line of juicers was performing poorly on eBay (and other channels) and I had decided to drop the line before this VERO complaint.

I suspect this isn’t an isolated incident. Here is an article that describes another dubious VERO case.  Are IP holders filing VERO’s because they don’t like eBay?

While suppliers and IP holders should be free to establish their sales channels and to limit certain sales channels like eBay, such policies should be communicated clearly in their Terms and Conditions. If they don’t want their product sold on eBay, let them say so in ways other than bogus VERO complaints.

Tags: eBay VeRo, Home Based Business, eBay Home Business, eBay Business , Intellectual Property

Well it happened again today.  An IT telemarketer called and started reading to me from a script. Nonstop. I mean I could really tell he was just reading from a script.  You can always tell - when a person reads, it always sounds different.  Different nuances and different ways of speaking when a person is reading that gives it away. 

Furthermore, he didn’t pause to take a breath or ask me if I understood what he was talking about until he was finished babbling (about 3 minutes). I have some bad news for him - during that time I tuned him out and just continued working on the thing I was working on.

I wonder if those scripts work at all?  Perhaps they might be better looking at an outline or some such thing rather than something they have to read word for word.  Something to make them sound like we having a conversation rather than a sales pitch.

I found it necessary to switch hosts (already).  The former host (Dot5) had some serious downtime issues to the point where I figured I should cash in my ‘30 day trial’ before it went too far.  I guess you can take that as a ‘thumbs down’ for that hosting company.  I’ll reserve judgment about the current host until I’ve been with them awhile. 

I saved all the posts and links, and reposted them on my new host with the WordPress platform. One thing I didn’t save (because I was not sure how to do it) were the comments. For those of you who commented and no longer see your comments, my apologies - just know that I didn’t delete them.  Just one of those casualties of changing web hosts.

I love WordPress a lot and hope to have that ‘thoughts’ template back soon (in case you’re reading this with the ubiquitous blue WordPress default theme). So far, I have used Blogger and Moveable Type for blogging and WordPress beats them both by far, IMO.  OK, back to business now.

– Frank Ross

PEBKAC used to be kind of an insider acronym used only by and between I.T. Professionals. It is meant to refer to ‘user error’. Wikipedia defines it best:

PEBKAC is an acronym which stands for “Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair”. Also used is PEBCAC, which stands for “Problem Exists Between Computer And Chair”, or PEBCAK (”Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard”). Other variations are PIBKAC (”Problem Is Between Keyboard And Chair”) or EBKAC (”Error Between Keyboard And Chair”). It is most commonly used by experts to describe to one another that the problem was not in the computer but was instead caused by the user operating it.

And all this time, I thought PEBKAC was a well kept secret among I.T. Professionals! I.T. Professionals, after all, seem to love acronyms and this one was commonly giggled over at the conference table. Now Intel is using it in a series of ads. I have not seen TV ads (I don’t watch much TV so I have no idea what kinds of ads are on now), but I see them popping up in news sites and other authority sites.

It certainly made me take notice. I’m not sure if people who do not know what PEBKAC is will appreciate the ads, but at least Intel will attract the geeks!

You can select from their full selection of PEBKACs at the Intel PEBKAC page. Link here.

– Frank Ross

Earlier this year, I purchase Robert Kyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad and his corresponding Cash Flow Quadrant books. They were digital download in PDF format. I loved the books! Of course these are books that every entreprenuer in the room has already read so I felt I really needed to knuckle down and read them. I read RDPD in whole, and had just started on CFQ when I got sidetracked by various issues.

One of them was a computer issue which forced me to reload Windows and restore all my files. Apparently there are now new procedures to be followed when backing files up for restore that have to do with DRM (digital rights management).

I reached the point last night where I thought - hey! I need to get back to that book. But I got a rude surprise when I tried to open CFQ which I had just started. The DRM kicked in and told me I would have to re-claim the digital download. When I did that, the Adobe DRM then informed me that until I released it from the “other computer”, I could not use it.

I can only assume the ‘other computer’ was the computer prior to the rebuild. I assume there must have been a registry entry which controlled that or some hidden file. Adobe’s official instructions are:

1. On the other computer, run Acrobat or Adobe Reader and use the menus to navigate to the Adobe DRM Activator site as follows:
If you are using Adobe Reader Version 6, select Tools > eBook Web Services > Adobe DRM Activator.
If you are using Adobe Reader Version 7, select File > Digital Editions > Authorize Devices.
If you are using Acrobat Version 6, select Advanced > eBook Web Services > Adobe DRM Activator.
If you are using Acrobat Version 7, select Advanced > Digital Editions > Authorize Devices.
2. On the Sign In page, sign in using the same Microsoft .NET Passport or Adobe ID that you used to activate Adobe Reader or Acrobat on this computer. Note: If you have forgotten your Passport or Adobe ID password, both systems offer a password recovery option.
3. After you sign in, activate Adobe Reader or Acrobat by clicking the Activate button.

Arrgh! Forget it I said. It was only $20 and I’ll spend probably much more than that trying to get someone at Adobe customer service to give me another way to retrieve the books. So I just bought them again - this time in physical form! Moral of the story: DRM (at least how Adobe has it implemented) may not be ready for prime time.

– Frank Ross