News and Announcements
After a quiet period following last year's store fee hikes, eBay is launching a promotion designed to bring in new subscribers by offering a free 30-day trial to those who have never had an eBay Store. The free trial period ends March 18th, and for those who meet the eligibility requirements, an initial store fee is posted as a credit to their account.

Working to boost listings on eBay.ca Motors, the Canadian eBay Motors auction site is offering a week-long free insertion promotion for car sellers until March 18, 2007. Canadians taking advantage of the promotion won't have to pay the $5 CDN insertion fee on eBay Motors Canada. If you are not a Canadian resident, you're out of luck as you will have to list on the US site, where sellers are charged a much higher insertion fee of $40 (for passenger vehicles).

In eBay company news, trouble appears to be brewing in the Chinese market. In December of last year, eBay Inc. and China's Tom Online Inc. announced a joint venture to operate an online auction business there. According to Market Watch, Tom Group Inc. is offering to buy all the outstanding shares it doesn't now own due to "a diminishing interest." It also wants to turn the company over to the private sector. On the other hand, eBay claims the joint venture is still on track for launch this year.

Services and E-Commerce Tools
ProStores 8.0 was released this week and offers merchants a revamped user interface and a redesigned Store Design module. Changes in the new version mainly revolve around making it faster and easier for merchants to set up and edit their stores. The big change is that the Design Studio from previous versions was replaced with a Store Design hub that lets merchants more easily modify their store design elements.

All the commonly accessed features, such as store design settings, page template management, store versions and so on are now accessed from one location. In theory, the changes should make editing faster because it prevents having to navigate back and forth between pages using the Design Studio. You can read about all the new ProStores 8.0 features here in our coverage ProStores 8.0 Debuts.

Currently being called a "Google Base done right," Freebase is an online database designed to centralize as much data as possible. Freebase collects all types of data and allows users to add new categories, similar to tags, and will also allow developers to add Freebase information to their Web applications through a set of APIs. Freebase is currently in Alpha stage but you can sign up on their Web site to get an invitation to participate. Sound Google-ishly familiar? Freebase may be worth keeping an eye onuntil the jury returns with a verdict of Google Base Killer or plain old hype.

ShopSite, Inc., a provider of e-commerce shopping cart and catalog software, released Version 8.2 of its platform, with a focus on Google support. The latest version includes "Sitemap support" which enables merchants to automatically create a Sitemap when they create their store. This Sitemap is used for indexing and lets Google know about all your store pages, plus Yahoo and Microsoft also support it. Additional Google features include Google Base support, improved Google Checkout integration and Google Analytics.

With so many new and revised e-commerce products centered on Google properties, it is only fitting that we also include an update from the Google Base team this week. For those merchants registering a new bulk upload to your Google Base account, you've most likely noticed the new bulk upload formatting instructions. According to Software Engineer Xin Chen, this new page represents a "large and ongoing cross-team collaboration to provide detailed and explicit information on which attributes are needed to make your items visible." More information, along with details on new bulk upload error messages, can be found on the Google Base blog.

Eye on The Little Guy: PlunderHere Profile
Putting a focus on selling, community involvement and fun, this week we take a look at online auction Web site, PlunderHere.com. Suzanne Kenney, president and owner of PlunderHere, launched this online auction venue in mid 2005. She already owned the domain name, which matched her eBay name at the time, and wanted to produce a site that promoted something she felt eBay had lost over the years — a sense of community for online sellers.

Ahoy Auctioneers: PlunderHere.com is a community-based site. (Click for larger image.)

For sellers interested in listing on PlunderHere, the auction site offers a clean-cut interface with quick and easy access to auction or fixed-price listings, an eBay feedback importer, as well as a newly released Power Lister. This is in addition to the standard auction features you expect to see on sites these days. PlunderHere offers its sellers free listing, free reposting, and free image hosting and image previews.

Fees that sellers may incur on the site when listing are for optional services such as category featured, highlight titles and icons. Final value fees are a flat 2.5 percent of the selling total. PlunderHere members can also subscribe to eStores. The basic store is free for all members, while a Preferred Store will cost you $5 per month and there is a $2 per month fee for a Featured Store. Preferred and Featured Stores offer top placement on the site's eStores page rotation.

PlunderHere is Kenney's full-time job and she has worked diligently at learning the scripting to maintain the site and implement updates and features herself. Currently, she works with a group of 11 volunteer staff members who assist with forum moderating, monitoring the live chat, site linking and more. Additionally Kenney has a programmer available to handle the user requests and features she is unable to implement herself.

Kenney told ECommerce-Guide that her top priority is to foster the community aspect of online selling. To boost community spirit, the site takes requests for features and site options, which Kenney says are frequently implemented, and also offers PlunderHere merchandise to show support. Adding to the fun, PlunderHere also offers member contests as well. In fact, the site just ended a contest in which members vied to name the site's new mascot. The winning vote was for "Plundy the Parrot," and the winning member not only gets bragging rights, but also took home some PlunderHere swag as well.

Kenney says that PlunderHere currently boasts around 750 members with 17,000 active listings spread over the site's 2,010 item categories. In the coming weeks members can expect to see some new features added such as RSS feeds, an affiliate referral program, some new tweaks and the addition of more user-requested features.

Research and Trends
Pulse data for the top three search items on the auction site doesn't show any change from last week. The most popular searches are still keyed in by buyers looking for good deals on console game systems. This week's top three keywords remain the PS3, with alternative search keywords of PlayStation3 and the wii. Here is a snapshot of several eBay categories and the corresponding top searches in each for March 15, 2007:

• Coins and Paper Money: gold, silver, pcgs and silver eagle.
• Clothing, Shoes and Accessories: Women's Accessories, Handbags: Coach, Channel, Gucci and Louis Vuitton.
• eBay Motors: Cars and Trucks: 4x4, no reserve, convertible, and skyline
• Real Estate: Florida, land, Texas and California.
• Toys and Hobbies: Robosapien v2, Elmo, Star Wars and Tickle Me Elmo.

In other online auction site trends, community site Pheebay.com posted its quarterly Alexa report detailing traffic rankings for eBay and some of the more popular alternative online auction Web sites. The top site, of course, is eBay with a traffic ranking of 13, according to the report. Amazon.com pulled in second with a ranking of 22, followed by the U.K. versions of eBay and Amazon, with Overstock.com coming in at fifth and ECrater (see Breaking up With eBay) gaining enough traffic to take seventh place with a score of 17,705. ECrater beat out the US eBayExpress site in terms of traffic rankings. The full top 20 traffic report is available on the Pheebay Blog.

Only on eBay...
This week our favorite IT is quite a mystery. Keeping in line with eBay rules, however, this auction is only a cardboard box. So, why is a cardboard box selling for $5,100 on eBay? Because the seller indicated that the box may very well contain more than $8,000 worth of merchandise, including designer clothing from Prada and Fendi and hot electronic gadgets such as a PS3, iPod and laptop. In the auction description the seller also claims he or she will add in an additional $4,000 worth of merchandise for every $2,500 in bids.

If the auction reaches $55,000, the winning bidder can expect a 14-day Caribbean cruise for four to be included, and if bidding reaches $100,000, a hybrid vehicle will be included. Not only is this obviously a high-value mystery auction that is fun to watch and comment on, but the seller, "skrapbookz" will be donating 10 percent of the auction's highest bid to Susan G. Komen For the Cure.

Have an interesting e-commerce tool, auction tip, auction or news item to submit for eBay Watch? Tell us about it!