Where do you go if you're looking for refurbished goods? Many people might start by searching eBay or even Facebook Marketplace, but Amazon wants people to think of its site, announcing on Wednesday a "Second Chance Store" in the UK to draw attention to its offerings.

The Second Chance Store by Amazon is operating in partnership with a leading UK children's charity called Barnardo's. Amazon donated over 4,000 products to be featured in store, "including quality used, open-box and refurbished donated products from Amazon." (It promoted its own Echo, Kindle and Ring Doorbell devices in the announcement.) All proceeds will ... Read More

In 2005, small sellers treated then Postmaster General Jack Potter like a rock star at that year's eBay Live conference - it was a love-love relationship between online sellers and the USPS as the latter embraced the business as mail volumes were declining.

Fast forward 18 years to 2023, and it appears the USPS has shifted its "priority" from home-based sellers to Amazon. According to a report in Ars Technica, Amazon relies on the USPS for last-mile deliveries and Amazon packages are reportedly overwhelming small post offices.

Also impacting small sellers: the USPS is raising rates twice a year instead ... Read More

A reader sent us a link to a discussion board thread on Etsy where sellers were discussing a listing for Converse sneakers that was featured in Etsy's current sale. The original poster was shocked that the shipping price was set to over $6,000.

But as the EcommerceBytes reader pointed out, the listing directed shoppers to an off-Etsy website, exploiting the Variations feature. Etsy explains variations in the following YouTube video:

Instead of labeling the variation field something like "Color" or "Size," the seller labeled ... Read More

Etsy sellers have complained for years about having to compete with commodity goods that purport to be handmade or vintage. It turns out Etsy felt the need to create a filter to remove listings that also appeared on Temu, a shopping app offering cheap goods from China.

Etsy CEO Josh Silverman disclosed the incident during a presentation at the 3rd Annual Needham Consumer Tech/E-Commerce Virtual Conference on November 20, 2023.

When Needham analyst Anna Andreeva asked Silverman about "fast fashion" players like Temu and Shein and what Etsy was doing to respond to those entrants, he explained, "We were able to ... Read More

An eBay moderator responded to users on a thread where they reported a problem with eBay's search engine. The original poster reported that eBay was returning irrelevant results for many of their searches. "For example, a search for "Altec 1233", which is a brand and model of vintage speakers, returns results for 193 items, 5 of which contain the model "1233" in the title." In another example, the user said a search for "dynaco a35" returned 18 results, only 3 of which contained "A35."

"Hopefully this is just a bug and not by design like facebook marketplace," the original poster wrote, ... Read More