eBay: Please Help Us Help You

Once again the year is drawing to a close and eBay has pulled out the stops, begging for buyers and sellers to pad eBay's numbers before the end of the quarter. If you're a seller, they're offering you three days (December 27-29th) with free listings. Sellers can get 50,000 free listings, after that they are regular price. And buyers, they get double eBay bucks for purchases made on December 29th only. Of course there are the usual exclusions to both specials, so you have to read the fine print. So everyone get over to eBay today and help them out. They're starving and their offering the masses crumbs for a day in hopes that in return the eBay community will provide steak for the entire next quarter for the executives.

#1 Cause of Viruses & Trojans on Home PC's? ...eBay!

John Donahoe describing how
eBaysellers equate to the Jews in Schindler'sList....
Disruptive Innovation.

Hey eBay exec-tards, listen up....here's another free tid-bit of Firemeg info offered to you free of charge. Your disruptively innovative scheme of allowing only sellers with 10+ DSR's to list 10+ items per month....yeah, that has some major glitches. You might wanna look into that.

I get it, cool idea. Verify users, things individual sellers and former sellers (like me) were saying back in 2006, you know, verify that a seller is an actual seller and not a bot or a scammer from Romania, that sort of thing. Problem is though, that your crappy system seems to not be working. We received an email with links that serve as proof that sellers with less than 10 DSR and no verification whatsoever, have been able to list in excess of the 10 item limit imposed by eBay Inc. We have no reason to believe that the seller in question is a scammer, but they surely could have been.

So I'm wondering, what really does it take for a company that has a billion $+ in profit each year to pay a few engineers to actually write code that functions correctly? You could seemingly get better results from Indians posting will-do ads on Fiverr than you do from you own engineers.

BTW - love the video linked to in the caption above. John Donahoe at least gets the metaphors presented in the eBay attack videos and can describe them in detail....give him a few more stock options.

Amazon's Kindle Fire Tops Gift List

You might not have to snoop in the closets or under the beds or shake already-wrapped Christmas presents this year to figure out what you're getting. According to Amazon.com, Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet is their most gifted item.

According to the eBay Pulse, 7 out the top ten most watched items are Android devices. An Xbox Live gift card and nanny cam are in the top 10 too. But, just in case you were thinking that eBay was getting really legit and devoid of utter stupidity, rounding out the top 10 is a get rick quick scheme for only $29.99, which uses a picture of a Ferrari as a gallery photo. For under 30 bucks you will get a CD that will tell you how to make thousands of dollars per week, while working only one hour per day! Act quick! The seller has a stellar feedback score of 41!

eBay Offers 5000 Free Listings - Promotion Sucks and is Awesome

eBay announced yesterday that they were gifting qualified sellers 5000 free listings in addition to their normal 50 free per month. The promotion runs from December 6-8 and has some restrictions, so read the fine print.

The announcements like this are usually looked at in one of two ways, 1) Woopee! Awesome!...or... 2) Mother%&$#er!

These promotions give sellers an opportunity to run high priced items through auction  to take a chance that someone might bite, but without having to pay fees. They also flood the eBay site with so much crap that it ends up making the sell-through rate go down.

But hey, it's good for eBay. It puffs up eBay's year end traffic by adding millions of pages to their site, a time of the year when sellers are already getting increased sales due to holiday traffic and a time of year that eBay is strongly competing against sites like Amazon for traffic. Don't forget, every listing you add to eBay means more ad revenue that eBay will earn.

Whether you like getting 5000 free listings or not, there is one group of people that absolutely hate the promotion, those are the sellers that just paid full price to have their listings on eBay for 7 days. The promo's 1, 3, 5 day auctions will be all mixed in with the 7 day auctions from the past few days, thereby diluting those listings...Merry Christmas!

Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman Admits She is a Failure at HP?

Meg Whitman was head of eBay Inc. while it became a billion dollar company, but some critics would say that eBay's growth was more organic that the result of astute leadership from Whitman. Then she retired. ...and eBay didn't crumble to pieces due to her absence.

Then came her 2010 gubernatorial bid in California. She failed as badly at that as she did at being retired. Then she signed on as CEO at HP, the world's largest PC maker. Now she's admitted that she can't run HP as well as a dead Steve Jobs can run apple by saying that Apple will overtake HP in 2012 as the world's biggest maker of PC's, especially if you include tablets.

Whitman said, “I think it’s possible if you integrate tablets. Apple does a great job. We need to improve our game and our products to take over the leadership position. Apple could go past HP in 2012. We will try to become the champion in 2013. It will take time for the products that I have influence on to make it to the market.”

So Whitman is saying that she has no responsibility over the course of the company or their sales, because she is dealing with products that she didn't "influence?" And also that in two years the products that she has influence over will suddenly be cooler than Apple stuff? Two years is forever in the tech world. How will she be able to get HP to regain a lost top spot on the PC list, if she couldn't keep it from losing the spot in the first place?

And how is she going to use her influence to get her engineers to produce products that people want more than Apple?

Shouldn't, perhaps, she be focused on influencing areas of HP where good decisions might lead to HP remaining at the top? ie. marketing, branding, product image, etc.

This appears to be another case of Whitman being hired to run an already successful company that will ultimately go the course it would have gone without her. eBay grew. HP will decline. There are millions of unemployed workers out there that could head HP and lose market share, and do it for millions of dollars less in salary....(more)

eBay and Amazon Argue Over Sales Tax Debate

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) -- Amazon and eBay had it out in a public brawl in Washington on Wednesday during a congressional hearing about allowing states to collect sales tax on Internet purchases.

Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) and eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) are an opposite sides of the lightning-rod issue -- and touchy about it. During their testimony, the two companies' lobbyists swapped barbs and accusations of everything from being misleading to outright profiteering...(more).

Google Checkout is Morphing Into Google Wallet

Google announced today that Google Checkout is going to become part of Google Wallet. Much like Google Buzz sort of dissolved into Google +1, Checkout will morph automatically into Google Wallet starting in early 2012.

Google wallet is Google's payment processor and POS automated program that will allow customers to pay online and at brick-and-mortar stores with their Google account.

No changes are required and no updates are needed for Google Checkout clients to morph into their new Google Wallet status. Google just asked, in an email, that by early in 2012 that all Google Checkout users (sellers and online shops) change any wording and logos on their sites to the new Google Wallet text and graphics from the old Google Checkout wording.