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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 Ebay is still the little sister in the corner.
eBay is being left behind in the dust.
eBay = Dead Man Walking
Unfortunately the 3rd party seller portal for Walmart is really an unholy mess. You get the feeling it must have been designed by scheduled conference calls with programming teams where the QA of the end user experience has been completely lost. I just spent almost an hour trying to get 2 new listings on it and continually ran up against undecipherable vague errors. “We have a glitch at this time, please reingest later”. If you simply try to update prices or quantities on it you get errors. We don’t have time to invest on their site anymore until they get it functioning better. Their product catalog is also a complete mess, from our experience at least 40% of the items that should be listable on it are unlistable because the quality of the forced matched listings are either poor or vague or just have flat out bad info on them. I have complained to them that the quality of their listings are bad and we get this canned response back to submit a “spec form” for every product we are unable to list. Who has time for that? In my estimation they won’t be a serious player to either Amazon or Ebay until they make some major quality and usability improvements to their 3rd party seller portal.