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Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.
…….and scammers are voraciously awaiting these electronics to appear on the site.
Especially from new sellers who are not wise enough to record the serial numbers and other unique identifiers. And / or send an over $1000 item with no signature confirmation.
And when the “buyer” claims non receipt, or swaps out a book or box of rocks for that high-priced merchandise, the seller will take an expensive bath, aided and abetted by Ebay.
Of course its aimed at new sellers because anybody that has been selling on Ebay very long realizes that all these items they are trying to get the new sellers to list are high dollar scam items where the seller will most likely lose their money as well as their item. But Ebay will retain their 10% of the sale and hopefully help increase their ASP which seems to be lagging these days. The race to the bottom seems to finally be affecting Ebays numbers a bit now. Funny how they never thought about that until recently.
I decided to try this out before I ripped on it and updated to latest app version prior to testing.
1) It’s not really materially different than previous recent app versions. I scanned a UPC (FYI eBay catalog team, that’s a type of GTIN used here in the US), and the app pulled up a number of similar, but different model numbers of the device model I scanned. I had to scroll through 4 incorrect (but similar) items until locating a listing for the correct eBay catalog item.
Inexperienced users may easily make hasty mistakes or assumptions believing the barcode scan will automatically deliver the correct ePID listing item (which can obviously cause a lot of downstream pain if the listing goes is completed incorrectly.
After I selected the correct item and clicked the “sell one like this” button the app prompted me to select the condition, then dropped me into the main listing options list where I selected “Format & price”.
Strangely, as is often the case with the app, it suggested (as it for some strange reason it often does) that, “Buyers are more likely to purchase this item when you list it as an auction.”
I have never found eBay’s pricing guidance to be particularly accurate given an items traits, and I didn’t now either. This time, I estimate that eBays suggested pricing is roughly 15-20% higher than what recent identical NWT sold items have gone for, and general market pricing.
Hopefully at some point eBay will figure out how to properly integrate Terapeak’s data with it’s own systems to provide better pricing guidance.
BOTTOM LINE: I don’t see any truly new features or functionality in this app version. Sure, I ‘can list in seconds’ but the pricing will be off and more importantly, unless users are paying very close attention, it’s quite possibly to select an incorrect item to list.