eBay Responds to Questions about Auto Relist Feature

by: Philip Cohen

"eBay has been REALLY BAD about communicating this change."

So, what's new? I would suspect that this situation is due simply to incompetent programming and the promise now of no fee is simply damage control, but you'd be wise to keep an eye on your eBay invoice ...

“eBay expects sellers to consistently provide service that results in a high level of buyer satisfaction. This includes setting and meeting buyer expectations by providing excellent customer service from beginning to end.”—eBay Seller Performance Standards …
[Yet, by every measure, eBay consistently fails miserably the standards it sets for others … http://bit.ly/YvxFEg]

by: Philip Cohen

"Deflecting the spotlight is born of humility, though not just the personal kind. It comes from an awareness of something that slightly spooks—and humbles—eBay's management from Whitman down: the suspicion that eBay runs itself. The company's formula is so incredibly simple (provide a worldwide market and collect a tax on transactions as they occur), and its growth is so organic (buyers go where the sellers are, who in turn go where the buyers are ...), that a saying has become part of eBay lingo: "A monkey could drive this train." Maynard Webb, eBay's chief operating officer and the technology guru who saved the website when a traffic overload threatened to collapse it in 1999, summarizes the resulting ethos: "Most of us say, 'Man, we've got something special. Don't screw it up.'" Founder Pierre Omidyar ... thinks of eBay not as a traditional company but as what physicists call a "complex adaptive system," like the financial markets or the weather. Translation: It's pretty much unstoppable."—(11 Aug 2003)
http://emp.byui.edu/NYGRENM/Web%20Page%20Documents/Meg%20and%20the
%20Machine.htm

[Regrettably, a couple of years later, along came John Joseph Donahoe II ...]

“eBay UK Updates User Agreement - Managed Returns Mandatory for Some”

http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abn/y14/m01/i15/s04

Naturally this will not apply to eBay’s preferred merchants, only to most of those small–medium merchants that made eBay the great marketplace that it used to be and are apparently now surplus to Johnny Ho's needs …

So, the question is, how advanced are you with your post-eBay plans?

by: NetWatch

@Philip, wise sellers starting fleeing ebay quite some time back and began listing and selling their items on other online selling sites. Social networking selling sites are rapidly becoming ebay's replacement as well.

by: Rexford

I've always viewed companies that use these tactics to be sleazy or unethical.  It is generally used because most buyers either won't see it (especially in this case, where we would not even know about it if it weren't for ecommercebytes.com)or users won't go to the extra effort to remove it from the default.  I've seen this used often by companies for auto-rebilling.

These companies should not be opting people in to these types of changes automatically.  First they should communicate these changes to the users and then allow them to opt in or opt out.

Facebook is notorious for doing this without communicating it to users.  It is a means of forcing users into what the company wants them to do.  It is my opinion that this is exactly what eBay is doing.

by: RCL

It might have to do with whether the listing is "Good Til Cancelled" or of 30-day duration.

by: Puck

"eBay has been REALLY BAD about communicating this change."

The New eBay is a corporation built on policy ambiguities, vagueness, and weasel-word obfuscation.

Boss Hogg at the top likes it that way.

by: Bloggo

''
When contacted, eBay spokesperson Ryan Moore said, ''We're in the process of rolling out product changes for this particular feature. As of Jan. 8th, sellers who have elected into auto-relist are getting insertion and advance listing upgrade fees waived. The content on the site is in the process of being updated to reflect the pricing changes.''

He just said that the program wasn't ready but we rolled it out anyway.  

by: Philip Cohen

“We are driving more changes than ever. There are no silver bullets, we're testing in different geos, when we find things that work, we'll do more of them and less of the ones that don't.”—John Donahoe (2008) ...
[So, we have no idea of what we are doing but we are doing it anyway ... http://bit.ly/YvxFEg]

by: graham4anything

This brings to mind a question-
if one doesn't know they had an auto relist, and the 30 days ends, what happens to the ended auction? And will the seller know it was auto relisted and then get dinged for a duplicate auction?  

by: blaumann2

Ebay is desperate. They want listings, they want FVF. The checking of that box is a ploy to fill up the site.

by: comet

.....And---are the FVF the SAME as they would have been if we spent a few SECONDS to relist these on our OWN?

No one has answered this for me yet.  

I was doing a few listings today--NEW listings--and the "Relist auto"  box WAS checked--and I know I did NOT check it!!!!---across two different accounts I use.  Very different items.  

Don't think it is being used on Motors tho from an item I sell there.  

And anyone that thinks THIS is the latest and greatest--to ME it smacks of ebay sellers having items NOT seen and NOT sold to the point where there was SUCH a crushing backlog they HAD to do SOMETHING.  

That is not really---comforting.  

by: Bloggo

''...we'll do more of them and less of the ones that don't.''
JD hasn't gotten around to the last part of that sentence yet

by: Toledo Maude

“and weasel-word obfuscation”

I am blushing!

by: Massachusets Howler

Hey- I just looked over my invoice last night and saw that I was being charged $15 a month for ''Selling manager Pro''!
Same sort of thing- LOOK at your invoices- I bet many of us our being charged now for a ''subscription'' to selling manager pro- CANCEL IT RIGHT NOW as I did.
What a crappy company!
MH

by: Puck

@MH:

"Hey- I just looked over my invoice last night and saw that I was being charged $15 a month for ''Selling manager Pro''!"

That is a new covert corporate program code named 'Operation Bushwhack'

When fully "rolled out" it will add 1¢ to the EPS and trigger $100,000,000.00 in additional executive bonuses.

by: ebayisajoke

My invoice is a mess. Not only was I overcharged for Final Value fees last month, but charged for their so called "Free listings" and item relists that were promised to me to be free.

I simply can't believe anything eBay tells me anymore and I seriously demand that eBay stops rolling out products and new features for at least 1 full year and fix everything that isn't working now.

The only reason I'm still selling with you eBay is because I'm making over 10k a month in profits from drop shipping products from Amazon to MY EBAY BUYERS (NOT YOURS EBAY). That's right my buyers are mine! Not yours.

I would also like to see a few more top cats jump ship. This is a clear indication of where eBay is headed in 2016.

eBay I hate that you have stolen money from me, but yet I keep paying you. I guess Ebayisajoke is just an "Ebay Sucker".

by: Bloggo

''Chris Saridakis, the president of eBay Enterprise, resigned for personal reasons.''

Ha ha, another one takes a hike.

by: Philip Cohen

Don't be so cynical Bloggo; undoubtedly, like Hugh Williams, Chris is going to "spend more time with his family" ...

by: bitbybit

''Another one bites the dust'' or how about this one ''ebay is dropping executives like flies''.

Just read that Hugh went to Pivotal. Could it be leaving executives are developing a conscious or JD has no further need for them? Obviously something is in the wind.  

by: Philip Cohen

Hey, guys, come on, give the Ho turkey a go; he has boasted of as yet only replacing ~75 of the 100 top executives at eBay; that means there are still ~25 more to be purged—Undoubtedly, “Uncle Joe” from the USSR would have been proud of the Ho management style ...

Funny, how some years after his demise most of the "senior executives" of the USSR admitted that the head man was a psychopath—to say the least; but few were game to try and get rid of him, and if they were, they were never heard of again …

Bodes not well for eBay Inc., methinks … ttp://bit.ly/11F2eas