This is a story we've kind of been expecting to bring you since the day eBay bought PayPal. The company is thinking of requiring members to use PayPal to complete transactions -- in Australia anyway.
Right now you can arrange payments by check, money order, PayPal, or other methods. But next month eBay will change that policy and require Australian shoppers to pay via PayPal. And that's prompted antitrust complaints from Australian banks, which arrange money transfers for eBay auctions. Some sellers also complain that PayPal fees are higher than bank transfer fees, which means the new rule could cost them money.
Honestly, we don't know many people who use eBay and don't use PayPal. It's easy and convenient. And eBay claims it does a better job of preventing fraud than other payment services. But let's not forget that eBay gets a cut every time you pay with PayPal. And that's on top of the commission eBay already takes for items sold on the site. The company claims any additional income will be offset by increased investment in buyer protection measures.
There are currently no plans to go PayPal-only in the US and other markets. But eBay could be using Australia as a test case before expanding the policy. Australian regulators haven't yet issued a final ruling on the antitrust implications of the policy.
While eBay is busy annoying its power sellers by raising fees and changing its policy on digital goods, a bunch of new companies are popping up and hoping to grab a little piece of the online sales pie that eBay has been hogging. Fididel is a new site that aims to differentiate itself from other auction/retail sites by letting buyers and sellers negotiate prices in real-time.
At first glance, Fididel looks pretty much like every other online store you've ever seen. You can search for items by keyword or you can browse through a list of categories. but when you click the "fididel!" button, things get a bit funky. Instead of a bid or checkout page, you get taken to a chat window. And we're using the word chat loosely here, because there's actually only a predefined list of comments that you can leave. While this probably prevents buyers from swearing or making inappropriate comments to sellers, it also constrains the terms of your haggling session a bit.
But the important thing is that you can find an item listed for $100, offer $50, and meet somewhere in the middle. The whole process can be much quicker than waiting for an eBay auction to end. of course, the seller needs to be online in order for you to have a real-time negotiation session. But if you don't sit in front of your computer all day, you can hire another Fididel member to do your negotiating for you for a commission fee.
In case you hadn't noticed, there's been a bit of a revolt among eBay power sellers. Basically, eBay increased some fees, which led some buyers to hold a boycott. But the truth of the matter is eBay is a giant, and if you make a decent portion of your income buying and selling goods on eBay, there aren't a ton of good alternatives. Wigix wants to change that, and the site is willing to waive fees on all items sold for less than $25 to do it. For pricier items, WIgix has significantly lower transaction fees than you'll find on eBay.
Wigix isn't exactly an auction like eBay. Rather, it's an "exchange," which lets buyers and sellers connect with one another. Sellers don't have to fill out product descriptions manually. Instead they choose from a database of products which already have product descriptions. This database also makes the search process easy for buyers. When you start to enter a term in the search box, Wigix will provide a list of items to chose from before you even hit enter. When you find the item you're looking for, you can see how many buyers and sellers there are, and you can set a price at which you're wiling to buy an item. As soon as the item is available for that price, Wigix will hook you up with a seller.
You can conduct similar transactions with eBay's Half.com, which lets you "pre-order" an item which will automatically be purchased as soon as someone offers one for sale at your desired price. But Half.com only includes books, movies, music, and video games, while Wigix users can sell pretty much anything.
Social media tool Chirpscreen is out of beta, and has a few new tricks up its sleeve. When we first looked at Chirp in January, the application was a tool for grabbing images from your Flickr and Facebook accounts and showing them on your Windows desktop. Now Chirp has added support Twitter and eBay. A Mac client is also available.
Chirpscreen comes in two parts: a desktop viewer called Chirpscreen and a screen saver. The screen saver is still Windows-only, but Chirpscreen Desktop runs on Macs and PCs.
When you first run Chirpscreen, you'll be presented with a slideshow of Flickr photos. But you can enter your login details for various social networks in order to see content from your contacts, including Facebook and Flickr images and Twitter messages. You can also enter keywords to see an assortment of images from public Flickr photostreams and from eBay.
Chirpscreen Desktop also lets you respond to Twitter messages or leave comments on Facebook images. It's also easy to share Flickr images via email or through Facebook.
Online auction site eBay is changing its policy on digital items that are delivered electronically. Instead of selling these items via auction, eBay now requires sellers to take out 30-day classified ads for $9.95 to sell digital goods. The change is intended to prevent sellers from artificially boosting their feedback ratings by selling thousands of identical downloads for as little as pennies. There's no feedback involved in the classifieds section, but classified ads will show up in a regular eBay search.
The inherent problem with digital downloads is that there are pretty much no delivery costs, and once you produce an item you can sell it over and over again, which gives sellers the ability to game the system. Of course, we know a few record company execs that don't see things that way. And to be perfectly honest, we're not convinced the classifieds section is the right place for digital goods, because while we don't want to see anyone beating the feedback system into submission, if you legitimately sell items that have value on a regular basis, it would be nice to get some positive feedback for your efforts.
Users can still sell digital goods in traditional auctions -- as long as they provide physical media which requires shipping. If you've got software on a CD or DVD for sale, that's fine. Just don't offer buyers the option of digital downloads or you'll be in violation of eBay's new terms of service. That said, when we checked this morning, there were plenty of auctions still available for digital downloads. It'll probably take eBay a while to clean house.
Has this ever happened to you? You run out of ink, paper, good books to read, or something else, so you go online to order replacement as soon as humanly possible. You find what you need for a good price, add it to your cart, and then when you hit the checkout button the shipping charges hit you like a 2 ton heavy thing. The truth is while many sites like Amazon promise free shipping on orders over a certain price, it's not always easy to tell if an item qualifies for free shipping.
Free Shipping On is a new service that makes it easier to find free shipping deals. First, the site has a huge database of deals and coupon codes you can use to get free shipping from stores like Newegg, Circuit City, Staples, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Apple. The site is sort of like CouponMountain, Techbargains, or xpBargains, except it focuses specifically on free shipping deals.
But you can also use the service to search Amazon and eBay only for items that can be shipped for free. No more surprises in the checkout aisle... or cart.
Have you been so busy sending angry letters to Saturday Night Live about their choice of actors to portray Barack Obama that you've fallen behind on your Download Squad reading? Not to worry. Here's a roundup of some of the stories you might have missed this week:
Download Squad at Future of Web Apps
Download Squad's Grant Robertson hit up the Future of Web Apps 2008 conference in Miami this week. And he's been kind of busy. Here are just a few of the topics he's covered or live-blogged:
This week DivX shut down the online video sharing site Stage6. The web service never got as much attention as YouTube, DailyMotion. But it was a favorite among online video connaisseurs for its excellent video quality. DivX is now directing users to check out online video site Veoh.
TotalEdit is an advanced text editor with programs that could come in handy for coders, including syntax-coloring, code-folding, and line-numbering. There's also a portable version you can run from a USB drive. But one of the best things about this article is the fact that a bunch of readers weighed in with their favorite text editors in the comments.
Nobody really noticed when a group of eBay sellers decided to boycott eBay in protest of eBay's new fees and feedback policies. Not even the numbers seemed to notice, with hardly a hiccup in the volume of daily listings on eBay.
Rather than admit defeat, the same eBay sellers have decided to extend their boycott. Originally scheduled to end February 25th, the boycott will now continue to March 9th.
eBay has yet to respond in any official capacity regarding the boycott, and it's hard to imagine it ever will. The bottom line is that eBay remains the dominant online auction space, and with no real competitors in the same space, it can do whatever it darn well pleases.
What a time for 1.0. Hot on the heels of Adobe's official release of AIR version 1.0 comes the 1.0 version of eBay Desktop. The two releases are so close you would think the makers of eBay Desktop planned it (which of course they did).
eBay Desktop 1.0 provides a desktop alternative to the eBay website - you can use it to search, browse, bid, keep track of your auctions, and more. And because it uses Adobe AIR, it runs on both Windows (XP and Vista) and Max OS X (10.4 and 10.5).
The eBay Desktop installer weighs in around 7 MB (the AIR installer is included if you don't have it installed on your system already). Install was quick and easy, though getting the program to run was a little more work: on our test Mac, the program kept crashing until we went to the Applications folder and opened the program manually.
When you first start the program, you'll be met with a nifty little video introduction to the eBay desktop. The eBay desktop home page allows you to track all your bidding and watching activity, and there are separate tabs for finding items, tracking and paying for your winning bids, and a feeds tab.
eBay has put a lot of work into this desktop application, and it shows. The interface is clean and very intuitive. The one major drawback is the lack of features for sellers. You can't track the items you're selling or your past sales. At this time, eBay desktop is definitely a buyer's tool.
What if you held a protest and nobody noticed? Unfortunately it happens all the time. And while a group of eBay sellers who are protesting eBay's new fees are getting some media attention for their week-long boycott, the truth is that it's hard to findy any real impact on the auction site.
The boycott launched on Monday, and according to Fortune Small Business, eBay listings are down just 3%. That might sound like a substantial figure until you realize that it means there are 14 million items listed for auction, down from 14.5 million a few days earlier.
Those figures come from third party services, while eBay officials tell Fortune that there's been no noticeable impact at all. And even if there was an impact, would it make any real difference? eBay is still the biggest name in online auctions, and even if the site isn't the seller's paradise it once was, it's still the go-to spot for buyers. So while sellers may be able to stage a one week protest, we're guessing they're going to wind up returning to the service soon with no choice but to put up with higher fees.
While eBay isn't the only online auction site around, it doesn't face very serious competition from any other service, so while there's pressure to increase revenue, there's little pressure to stay competitive with Amazon Marketplace or other rival services.
A few weeks ago eBay announced plans to change its fee structure. The company was spinning the move as something that would help sellers save money. But that only worked out to be true in some instances. Since eBay planned to lower listing fees but raise final sale fees, most sellers were a bit concerned that they'd wind up giving eBay a higher percentage of their hard earned cash.
Responding to concerns from sellers, eBay has announced yet another fee structure change. This time, the listing fees for media including books, music, movies, and video games will go way down. The price for listing an item with a starting price less than a buck drops from $0.20 to $0.10. Sellers with starting bids of less than $10 will now be charged $0.25 instead of $0.40. And if you've got an item with a starting bid of under $25, you pay $0.35 instead of $0.60.
Since eBay is still raising the fees on final sales, in most cases sellers will still wind up paying owing eBay a little more. But today's announcement softens the blow. A little.
Whether you're looking for a beta invitation code to a hot new service, tips on making the most of your email service, or a Valentine's day present for that special someone in your life, we've got you covered. Here are some of our favorite Download Squad articles from the week that was.
Invites for Digsby and SugarSync
This week we looked at two new services in private beta. Digsby is desktop application that lets you manage multiple email, IM, and social networking accounts. It's sort of like Pidgin plus an email notifier and a desktop client for Facebook and MySpace. And we've got 5,000 invites to give away.
We also have about 500 invites for SugarSync, another new desktop/web service. SugarSync lets users synchronize files between their computer, mobile device, and a web server. Just add contact/calendar sync and we'd be in heaven.
Google made a lot of waves when it launched an email service a few years ago. The idea of a web mail account that measured storage in gigabytes rather than megabytes was pretty revolutionary at the time. But vast amounts of storage aren't the only thing that set Gmail apart. In this week's edition of Emailers Anonymous we take a look at threaded messaging and how it changes the way we think of email.
Have you ever bought something on eBay only to have a problem with the transaction? Maybe the seller never shipped the item, or didn't respond to your questions. Maybe it was damaged and the seller wouldn't let you return it. Or maybe the item arrived late or wasn't as described.
The first thing many of us would do is leave negative feedback for the seller. But sometimes we stop to think twice before doing that. Because if we leave negative feedback, the seller might retaliate by leaving negative feedback for us. And then when we go to sell something we might find it hard to get a fair price because we have a mark or two against us.
eBay is aware of this problem, and is proposing a pretty extreme solution: prevent sellers from leaving negative feedback for buyers. The BBC reports that starting in May, sellers will no longer have the ability to leave negative feedback. Of course, sellers aren't particularly happy with the proposed change, saying it removes a tool for dealing with problem customers who refuse to pay or make trouble in other ways.
But honestly, the feedback system is really much more useful for buyers trying to find trustworthy sellers than vice versa. For the most part, if someone wins an auction, the system is set up so that you have to sell the item to them. So there's never been much reason for eBay to allow sellers to rate buyers anyway.
If you're outside of Pennsylvania, you have nothing to worry about, probably. But one Pennsylvanian woman who started selling goods on eBay to stay at home with her daughter who was diagnosed with a brain tumor, is being prosecuted by the state of Pennsylvania for not having an auctioneer's license.
The story essentially boils down to the idea that people who are doing well on eBay in Pennsylvania need to be regulated, and at this point it looks like suing them for not having a costly auctioneer's license is the way it's going to happen. So far, only two people have been hit, apparently to make a legal point.
Correct us if we're wrong, but isn't eBay technically the auctioneer, while sellers are just people/businesses putting items up for auction? Now whether this is just a case of misguided bureaucracy or a way to create some commotion in order to get online auction related legislation in place, this seems rather wrong.
If she was dodging taxes on her at-home business, that is one thing, but from the looks of it, she's getting sued over a point which technically doesn't even apply to her. But then again, there are those who think the Internet is a "series of tubes."
Want to sell some old junk lying around the house on eBay, but don't feel like putting up with listing fees? The company has announced plans to cut listing fees by up to 50 percent.
The cuts aren't across the board. In fact, some fees will be raised. For example, if your items sells for less than $25, you'll now be charged 8.75%, which is a 67% increase.
The new fees take effect on February 20th and are aimed at the US, although eBay plans to announce rate changes in the uK and Germany soon. The move comes at a time when eBay is struggling with flattening growth and competition from other online auction sites.
Do you still use eBay to buy and sell new and used items? Or have you started turning to other auction sites? What do you think of eBay's current listing and transaction fees?
This is a story we've kind of been expecting to bring you since the day eBay bought PayPal. The company is thinking of requiring members to use PayPal to complete transactions -- in Australia anyway. 
Have you been so busy sending angry letters to Saturday Night Live about their choice of actors to portray Barack Obama that you've fallen behind on your Download Squad reading? Not to worry. Here's a roundup of some of the stories you might have missed this week:
