As eBay and Etsy ramp up their paid-listing ads, sellers are getting increasingly concerned about the impact on their sales. One result of marketplaces looking for revenue growth from ads is the insertion of blocks of ads for rival listings directly inside sellers' own listing pages.

Sellers work hard to get buyers to find and click on their view item pages, not just through compelling photos, descriptions, and other listing optimization efforts, but through investments in email marketing, social media, and yes - paid advertisements of their own. 

So when they have a shopper land on their listing, they don't want them distracted ... Read More

An interesting debate about policies on shipping to PO Boxes arose on the eBay boards recently. A seller asked if they could change their settings to exclude PO Boxes by default. They had set it up that way in the past, but when eBay changed the listing page, it undid their settings and no longer excluded PO Boxes by default.

Another seller responded with a link to an eBay help page that included the following information:

What if you could "hijack" a successful online store brand with little more than a hyphen? That's what one longtime reader said is happening to him.

His store name consists of two words, and his website domain name is the company name with no spaces. It came to his attention today that someone had obtained the same domain name except they added a hyphen between the two words. He said they're using his logo and selling identical items on the site - only they aren't fulfilling the goods - it's a scam, he said.

He discovered the existence of ... Read More

eBay sellers are reporting that local pickup is being offered as a delivery option in their listings even though they didn't turn on the setting. A seller reported it on Ecommerce EKG on November 3rd.

The seller explained, "I had item listed with calculated shipping but it only shows "Local Pickup" when viewed. I turned that off; still broken. Ended and relisted; still broken. I will have to create new listing."

Having to create a new listing is costly for those who discover the problem, and potentially more worrisome for those who don't discover the issue until a buyer demands to pickup ... Read More

eBay will no longer restrict the accounts of sellers who list banned books on its marketplace, though it will continue to remove listings of books it finds violate its Offensive Materials policy.

eBay did not widely publicize the change in policy that took effect on Thursday. Rather, it came in response to a thread on its discussion boards started by a seller who said eBay restricted his account for selling books by Dr. Seuss, a book about knives, and an OJ Simpson title.

The seller wrote in part: "As a seller of 50 + thousand titles at any given moment, we ... Read More