When asked whether insertion fees could go all the way to zero, he said it would vary by category and country, but, "It won't go up. It will go down over time. But there's nothing planned this year in that front. We made the structural changes we needed to on that front last year."Part of eBay's announcement will certainly be about the "new and improved" search that I will be forced to use next month. Additionally, I believe that more and more users are getting opted into the new item pages, which are designed to be more like Amazon's and other retailers.
EBay is also rolling out changes with the seller dashboard so that sellers can get more information about which types of buyers give certain types of ratings. Some sellers have already been opted into the new version of the seller dashboard. I do not have access to the new version, but my seller dashboard has a link to a detailed page that explains how to use the new seller dashboard. At the bottom of this page is a very interesting message:
It's against eBay policy to question buyers about the ratings they left. It's also against policy to use these reports to interfere with the anonymity of detailed seller ratings.It astounds me that eBay actually is making it "illegal" to ask buyers about their ratings. Now I stated many months ago that it is a very bad idea to ask buyers about their ratings, and I would never do so. However, I find it disconcerting that eBay is forbidding sellers from asking.
It is further amazing that eBay states that we cannot use the detailed "reports to interfere with the anonymity of detailed seller ratings." I have a newsflash for eBay: for small sellers such as me, the detailed seller ratings have never been anonymous. Now eBay has made it against policy for me to use my own brain on any given day to determine that the one buyer who left a rating that day is the one person who made the average rating go up or down that same day. The only time that I have not known who left a certain rating was the time my ratings went down significantly, and two people left feedback on the same day. So long as I do not receive multiple buyer feedbacks in one day, I know who left which kind of rating. As a buyer, I am very aware that all of the lower volume individual sellers will know whether I left good or bad ratings.
EBay can tell me not to do this or that, but they cannot prevent me from making observations about the seller dashboard among other things. In spite of the hidden buyer IDs, I have finally satisfactorily proved to myself that a certain bookseller shill bids on his or her auctions with another ID. I have suspected this person for years, and I knew which buyer ID I suspected. I finally spent around an hour running searches and making detailed comparisons, and I proved the connection between the IDs. I plan to do nothing with the information since it would be too hard to try to get eBay to see it, but this is a free world, and I can sleuth all I want.
Note: I will not under any circumstances reveal which seller, and I will not give any additional information. I did email one person in private and ask whether he saw it too. He did, so I know I am not seeing something where there is nothing. This is something that has nagged at me for the longest time, and I decided to prove it once and for all.
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