eBay is continuing its push towards emphasising fixed-price goods from professional sellers, but that doesn’t mean the process always goes smoothly. Back in February it announced plans to make it compulsory for all sellers to specify handling times and return policies. That was supposed to happen in May, but has now been delayed until August.
Since launching in Australia, eBay has always had a policy of placing local listings ahead and separately from those originating overseas. From today, that approach will change somewhat, with listings from the US and UK sites intermingled with those offered by Australians in a “variety of categories”.
According to analyst firm Frost & Sullivan, Aussies spent $617 million on online classified advertising in 2010, a growth of 22% on the previous year. But the most surprising element? That sum still only represents 35% of the total classifieds market, which is still dominated by print.
eBay already offers free listings for local classified ads and often runs listing fee specials, but from April it will offer a permanent option of no listing fees on auctions with a start price of 99 cents or less. However, you might be well advised to avoid that choice.
Last night, the Oprah Winfrey show conducted its lottery for two shows being filmed at the Sydney Opera House on December 14. If you missed out (as most people did), don’t go hunting for tickets on eBay: the site is using the broadcast as the first chance to enforce its recently-announced free tickets policy, which bans resale of tickets that were free in the first place.
eBay policies often seem designed to benefit the auction site itself rather than consumers, but this one actually seems pretty reasonable: the site is working to ban resale of tickets for events where the tickets were originally given out for free.
