Red Ink Diary: That Was The Week That Was

That Was The Week That Was (TW3), was a British lampoon show of the week's happenings from the BBC in the early 60's. This is my News & Blog Roundup Week ending September 20th 2008

Let's start with The Telegraph here

Next we will visit Genuine Seller who has an amusing eBay game for us.

The Brews News has written a thoughtful and motivational article which should be required reading for ALL e-commerce merchants.

We, as sellers, simply must take full responsibility for our own actions. If we cannot be successful selling on “the new eBay” then we simply cannot sit around hoping eBay will change; we ourselves must change and that change may or may not include continuing to sell on eBay.

While you are there read this amusing story about new seller requirements."

eBay is having the normal number of glitches, this one serious enough to qualify for an announcement,

At this time, we are asking sellers NOT to end and relist these items, because we don't know at this point whether the relisted items will index properly. However, we do know that new items will index properly, so if you'd like to end your affected listing and start a new listing from scratch, that will be fine, and it should index into Search properly.

We will update this post when we have more information. In the meantime, please be assured that we will be automatically crediting fees for all impacted listings (whether active or closed) early next week. Thank you for your patience, and we apologize for the frustration this is causing you.

eBay standard operating procedure policy is 'ignore and it will go away'; it is probably safe to assume the indexing glitch is a large and system wide problem.

The eBay Ink Blog has made one post in the last week, on September 16th. I found the previous post September 12th far more interesting, with a fascinating response in the comments by Dennis Goedegebuure one of the eBay Internet Marketing Specialists.

Dennis G
On 09.12.2008 at 9:28 pm Said:

Hi All,

Richard has asked me to respond on your feedback directly here on the Ink blog.

As Richard has outlined in his post, the new pulse has some changes versus the old Pulse. I understand from your comments that you have been using the Pulse page in the past to find keywords in the deeper categories.

The background of this project is complex. The Pulse page might not be the most important page on the site if it comes to buying and selling, it does give our community great insight of what is in high demand in certain categories. Where the majority of the product resources are focused on bringing the new Search to the eBay platform, the Pulse page was actually in danger to get closed down.

Because I see the value of the Pulse for our users and for the Search engine optimization efforts, I decided to take the Pulse page off platform and work with an external developer to come up with an alternative. This has caused a couple of trade offs which have an impact on the way we are able to display the keywords in every category.

As the Pulse page now is off platform, and maintained by non-eBay engineers and me, we are not equipped to make monthly changes with the normal category changes. This is why we are only able to show the keywords within the current Meta categories.

In return we have looked for more information to be displayed in these categories. This comes in the form of the Internet Pulse, where we look at what experts in these categories are writing about, and more popular searches within a category in the form of the new keywords and movers & shakers. I hope you will see the value in the expertise of the external sources we look at.

This new Pulse is a start for the new life of Pulse. We will try new modules on the page, and I thank you for your feedback on the fact that you now miss out on the most popular searches in the deeper categories. I will take this feedback into any of the ideas we are looking at for further development.

Furthermore, I would like to ask you a question. The module of the most watched items is gamed by smart sellers who are getting more exposure to certain types of items. What would you prefer?
- a list of most watched items in any category
- a list of most popular products in any category
- or a list of the items with the most bids in any category

What else would you like on the Pulse page?

Now that I got your attention, I would like to take the opportunity to point you to a couple of SEO tips for eBay sellers that can help you to get higher ranking in the search engines and hence more buyers. [tip#2 link here}

I hope this will help you to drive more traffic to your listings.

Kind regards,

Dennis Goedegebuure