eBay Stores announced today that the custom designs may break under the “New” eBay look and feel for eBay Stores. Fear not! Our of hundreds of stores out there, we only have one store in the market that will likely fail under the new deal which won’t be enforced until March. Plenty of time for fixes.

Now we have some of those who have said that other companies are non-compliant, and that “thousands of stores” will break under the new system. Ouch. The reality is that even the top competitor in eBay store design  does not have more than a few hundred eBay stores out there.  So let’s all take a breath and relax. The sky is not falling. eBay is not punishing my competitors for their non-compliance, rather, they are taking the easy road to out-of-the-box thinking and watering down theirs store algorithms so that good creative design and extreme automation won’t mix. Too bad. The truth is that those non-compliant cookie-cutter designs were a brilliant idea of someone in the industry, albeit they may have technically broken the rules of eBay. Specifically the site interference rule of style sheets. * But in their defense, if only out of sheer envy, even throwing a gazillion dollars at it; won’t work. As eBay has now demonstrated those with a gazillion dollars can only seem to go so far. Ebay, who has a gazillion dollars can’t even seem to come up with a suitable backend that could handle both those who can’t figure out how to do great design, and those who do it well.

What is an eBay store anyway? Is it a cookie cutter store made for cookie cutter design or is it the property of the seller? After all, those sellers make money there and they PAY eBay for the privilege of having their stores, don’t they? Well, yes, and then it stands to reason that they should get the improved experience that THEY want out of their stores. But the truth is hard to swallow, eBay couldn’t figure out how to do it programmatically and that’s a shame. Good eBay store design will suffer.

Meanwhile, while we ARE experts at eBay and all of our stores (but one) are in compliance, and we DO play by the rules, still so much in eBay store design has outdone itself. We generally tout modified custom design for eBay stores because the truth is that the selling power is in the eBay template and not in the frilly store design. The truth is that our top clients, top 10 powersellers on eBay, don’t use full store design because it prohibits buyers from buying.

Conversion happens at the template level and not at the store level. Once they hit store they are already on the conversion trail. When companies tout their conversion rates, they have to know that this is based off of template conversion into the store and not the other way around. So what’s the reason for great eBay store design you ask? Well, for design companies it’s a no-brainer, profits.

Good eBay Store design means that it looks good, it feels good and buyers will buy unfettered by the extra barrage of ridiculous over-designing. If you are over designing your eBay store, you’re wasting your money. Go take a look at the work we’ve done for the number one seller on eBay, ACCStation, and you’ll see that it’s simple unfettered design. They clocked out their conversion rates and realized that sometimes good design is simple design. Now, I’m not saying that there is not room for improvement there after 3 years, but still, they are definitely converting or they would not be the #1 seller on eBay now would they!

Design is meant to compliment the offerings not to shout out all around it in complete design overload.

If you have aspirations to be a huge powerseller, you don’t want your eBay store to be the main source of your income anyways,  as the fees are pretty hefty. Most of the largest sellers out there opt for a standalone website.

I’ll do another post soon about eBay template design and the misnomers out there about conversions. Trust me, we know how to eBay!

* eBay rules on site interference:
http://pages.ebay.com/stores/newstore.html#o9 You might have used CSS extensively, which is against our Site Interference Policy.

So eBay makes this big announcement and calls in the troops to deal with the fallout of it all. I’m just not feeling it.We all know there is a recession out there and everyone else needs a trillion dollar bailout, but here we have a company with a gazillion dollars at their disposal and all they can come up with is a cleaner web 2.0 look, that we could have done for a cool million (just kidding) and a few cross sells. I guess they’re broker than I thought.I don’t know if I missed something, but truly, I’m just not feeling all the hoopla on this one. If you’re trying to sell me a few cross-sells and a couple of marketing trinkets and tout this as a brave new world, we’ve got a problem.

There is little that is significant in this announcement other than a few stores needing a new design, or a few hundred stores needing new picture hosting and new designs and a new designer.

The reality in this announcement is simple, it’s in the compliance factor that eBay wants to uphold to prevent hackers and spoofers, phishers and spammers  from messing up the site. The big deal is that eBay has to contend with millions of wackos to prevent being overrun by innovative programmers and cyberpunks.

If you have a Zen Cart and have been agonizing about SEO options, take a look at Ultimate SEO. This one works well and despite seeing all the disclaimers, we did not find any issues with making our Zen install Search Engine Friendly and safe from wierdness.

Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Zen Cart made easy.

It’s not just the topic of choice for recent Presidential candidates, it’s what’s happening on eBay too.

Over the past year eBay has made sweeping changes to its site.  Those changes have included listing policies, fees and even site design.  Actually, there are so many changes, let’s recap them…

Buy It Now format changed to 30-day duration
If your Detailed Seller Rating (DSR) falls below 4.3 you’re selling status is suspended
Yet more changes to the ‘Best Match’ algorithm to include what is being called ‘Recent Sales’.
Site implied restrictions on shipping for the Media category
Sellers no longer allowed to accept any type of paper payments – checks/money orders
eBay is closing eBay Express
eBay is incenting selelrs who offer free shipping with better search results and increased discounts on final value fees.
New View Item page
New About Me page layouts
New ‘I-frame’ template integration
Restrictions placed on multiple identical listings
Restrictions removed on multiple identical listings
Feedback ‘change’ instituted
On-site pay-per click style advertising that allows eBay sellers to advertise their listings and eBay Stores via a text ad on eBay search result pages.

And these are just in the past month or two!

Even for those working within the e-commerce/web-design community it’s been quite challenging to keep up.  Many users have abandoned the site altogether while others have capitalized on the new environment and are prospering.  Using qualified service providers can make the difference.  Keep yourself qualified!

From the standpoint of a certified eBay-stores designer, there have been many changes to the landscape as well.  From new View Item page standards to the upcoming Store changes, change is happening for certain.  Keeping yourself educated will be key and using services who are savvy and ahead of the curve will be paramount.  With eBay’s page views down over 30% from October of 2007 to October of 2008, sellers can’t afford to be sloppy.  Capturing the buyer’s interest now is more important than ever.

In early 2009 there are more changes (restrictions) coming, so stay tuned, alert and ahead of the curve.

Our latest experience with oversees contractors comes from some testing that we recently ran, where we needed lots of people to click test a website that we are developing. We put an ad on some of the freelance websites and come up with 20 people who can click buttons for half an hour. We have this set just right, you show up on a particular website at 7pm Pacific time and along with a group of 20 others, you click buttons continuously for 30 minutes.

We specifically state that we need US, UK, and Russian people only. That’s simply the demographic of the site we are testing.  Instead we get India and Pakistan “programmers” mascarading as US and UK citizens.

So what’s the big deal? Well first of all none of them showed up on time or understood the directions. None of them could read english well enough to figure out what we wanted. They had their canned response to our ad to get in the door and then they were unable to understand directions. Their timing was off, needing coddling for us to email several times to tell them when the testing would begin.

This behaviour is typical of India programmers that we have, per chance, worked with before. We simply don’t hire outside the United States for this reason. Not only will the work be cheap, but none of it ever hit a single deadline established, none of the work was spell checked, and none of the work was what we had planned. Basically you can not hire from India unless you have lots of time to hand hold. So what is your time worth?

If you do hire from India, remember that they do not speak English very well. Remember that India programmers are not going to work with you like an English speaker. Throw your timetable out the window. In our case hiring India workers for a beta test event at a particular time, failed miserably. We won’t do it again.

Our latest site Once Upon a  Family’s Home Based Business Opportunity website is up and running. Take a look

A new internet sellers group has formed and is now posting at Internetsellersgroup.com

Those of you who have followed the action in the last few weeks will appreciate the premise upon which this new group was formed, ie: no politics.  There is no Board of Directors, no bylaws and no bull. It is open to all members who endevour to have discussions about selling online.

The other day one of our larger sites had what they thought was a security breech and jumped out of their seats rushing to conclusions about site security. Their first conclusion went public and set off a bad series of events that could lead to legal ramifications. Now site owners should know that before you rush to judgment about what is going on in your forum, your first step is to stop and investigate. As this larger site may have learned, tossing out allegations of site breach and hacking are not a good idea without contacting a professional to find out what is really going on.

Since we do lots of forums for larger groups, we thought it would be a good idea to set out some guidelines for site owners. Now let’ say you are sitting in your private forum and suddenly you see another member in there that is not allowed. Oh my God, what to do. Well first of all don’t jump to conclusions about your security system, feeling you’re being hacked or worry that there is anything amiss. The best thing to do in any business is to first, take a breath, investigate and then proceed. Hopefully you have all your wits about you, and are not too stressed, sleep deprived or overly paranoid before you go jumping around concluding things that may not be true. You don’t want to start harassing site visitors and announcing that they are hackers when this might all be just a misunderstanding on your part, and geez, worse yet – don’t tell anyone you are going to file criminal charges for something they had nothing to do with. In the legal world I’m not sure how the courts will view this, but likely they will feel that you did not do your due diligence before making the accusations and this could lead to a big legal action against you. You don’t want that now, do you?

Most professionals have two sets of IT eyes on things to ensure they are not making rash decisions when it comes to forum security. It’s likely part of your obligation as a provider of services and you might consider it an important aspect of business especially if you are a large company with possible legal exposure.

Now, Can people access a private forum? A little googling will answer that for you. Not really but yes they can “appear” to be there. Anyone who is wandering around with time on their hands can put your url into the browser and start switching around numbers to see what is out there. A hidden forum or a private forum might appear, but likely they will only see a login or an error message. While you, sitting in the forum will see them browsing simply because the call to show who is browsing is higher on the list than the error message or login form. Fear not. You are safe. All those wild thoughts about hackers and site violators can be put to rest. Nothing is amiss except the subtle reminder that you need a qualified professional to explain to you what is going on, and possibly a lawyer if you’ve already banned members and jumped to conclusions, pointed fingers and made wild accusations about someone trying to find out what you’ve been thinking or worse yet, accused anyone of trying to take down your website. If you’ve already gone that far my advise now is put a nice apology in writing and last but not least get a lawyer.

If things haven’t deteriorated to this point and you need more help and don’t have a Phpbb forum site admin or web designer, check out our services or ask your host for more help.

Any questions?

As a recent Chairman of Ethics and Moderation for one of the trade groups dealing with internet commerce and eBay sellers, I have to say that the experience was interesting. As time went on, I had been involved in two groups. Some people know why I quit the first one. The second one promised to be even more open, member owned and transparent. As time went on I grew leary of these claims as things were done in the back room and not reported to the members. *edited*
Day three: The Ethics of that group decided it had gone far enough when the Board refused the Ethics committee vote and wrote their own ticket. The Ethics committee balked and posted a statement that the Board had overruled a vote and took their own vote. The Board promptly moved the post, Moderators promptly moved it back and after several attempt the post was deleted by the Board, the Ethics Chairman suspended which left members of the member owned group guessing at what happened. One Board member resigned, another threatened to take public action and was suspended… and that leads to this post.

Are these groups really worth it? I guess if all you are doing is gleaning information you’re in good company. But if you get sucked up in the rhetoric and start volunteering, watch out. Nothing in these types of groups is member owned, and here’s why.

1. The Presidents of these groups are often egotistical backed by a posse or hopefuls that will do or say anything to be part of the upcoming promised success

2.  Hours can be invested to no avail because at some point it will be overturned by the Board who has gone googly eyed over their fearless leaders.

3. At some point, usually when $100,000 or more is in the kitty, someone wants to take all  the glory and keep their own reputation from being besmirched while running things the way they seem fit. After all,  they built this city and they should never be challenged.
Any questions?

According to Matt Cutts blog, Google has penalized sites that used the service traffic power to optimize and seo their sites:

I can confirm that Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. If you are a client or former client of Traffic Power and your site is not in Google, please see my previous advice on requesting reinclusion into Google’s index to learn what steps to take if you would like to be reincluded in Google’s index. 

Ouch! That means that if you were an innocent site owner hiring and SEO and they used some trickery to get traffic to you, it’s your fault for being that stupid and not investigating their tactics. That makes sense. (no sarcasm here).

Meanwhile, we noticed some pagerank drops in sites and pages being pulled down in rank completely since last week – although still indexed, their ranking is gone. Why? The most obvious reason floating around is purchased text links, but in this case the only payment involved in the links on the pages I’ve noted are cj.com links, which relate directly to the site promoting a related product, and links to other related sites. This makes one huge reason to have a single website that handles EVERY aspect of your company as Google’s robot can not seem to differentiate between your other companies, your revenue production and pure spam out there. Linking between your various sites can give the impression of spamming text links to the index. The best recourse is therefore to only list those “resources” on a single page not related to any other content on your site, lest you find your entire site gets caught up in the mix.