eBay is pretty quirky in lots of ways - after all, it started as a person-to-person online auction site in 1995. Nevertheless, it's baffling why in all this time, eBay has never assigned unique numbers to individual orders.

Last year, a seller expressed his incredulity in a letter to EcommerceBytes: "Why does eBay not provide order numbers? This is something so basic, yet it does not exist. The item number is shown, but that same number is for all sales of that item. There is a PayPal transaction ID, but that is not from eBay.

"The only number that is unique to a ... Read More

We take a look at next week's USPS rate changes and how they impact sellers in Sunday's Update newsletter. The June 23rd change means higher rates (of course), though only for large lightweight parcels shipped via certain services - including Priority Mail.

An article in Freight Waves caught our attention as we were putting the story to bed. All three major carriers charge DIM weight rates, but it seems they give a break to the largest shippers:

eBay stated that users had trouble accessing the site for a short period on Wednesday, though the acknowledgement came in responses to posts on Twitter rather than in any announcement we could find.

The problem was reported on Ecommerce EKG at 2:30 am, and Down Detector shows a huge spike of reports that came in overnight between about 1 am - 4 am.

This was a typical tweet that came in during the incident (2:56 am): "@askebay ebay power seller with 25000+ fb here, the site and app are down and I cannot process my orders!"

AskeBay responded at 2:41 pm: "eBay experienced technical difficulties for ... Read More

eBay continues to work on an Amazon FBA-style fulfillment program and referenced a "high-sales velocity program" in a new survey about the service.

We can track eBay's interest in offering fulfillment services as far back as 2009, and in January of this year, it invited sellers to participate in a pilot program called Fulfillment for eBay. The marketplace is not building out its own infrastructure the way Amazon has done, but instead, is using partners - just as it has down with its Global Shipping Program, powered by Pitney Bowes.

A reader forwarded the survey, ... Read More

eBay is limiting the number of shipping options shown to buyers, it announced today. The change, which it calls an improvement to the buying experience, impacts listing pages and checkout pages.

It seemed eBay did some time travelling in making the announcement - on June 3rd, it wrote that the change would go into effect on May 28th.

eBay stated in its announcement:

Some key points sellers should know: