EBay Announces Testing Phase for New Search Upgrades

On October first eBay will roll-out previously announced changes to its search engine. As a result, several eBay listing features will be retired. According to auction giant, some features simply need to be discontinued to "emphasize the most relevant results in eBay search."

The doomed optional listing features—upgrades  that sellers may choose to pay to use when listing an item for sale—include Featured Plus, Border, Highlight, Gift services, ProPack and Homepage Featured.

EBay is now testing the search upgrade before the official roll-out in October. This month, approximately 20 percent of buyer traffic will view the new upgraded search so the optional features will be turned off as a part of this testing period.

According to Director of Global Search, Gene Cook, sellers who have purchased these optional listing features during the September test phase will receive credit for 20 percent of the feature fees paid—prorated for the number of days these listings overlap with testing.

When the features are officially retired in October, sellers who have purchased them for live listings will see them removed from their listing and will receive credit.

Also, after the October deadline, Featured First (the optional upgrade that increases your chances of a listing appearing on Featured Items’ first page of search results) will only be available to Top-rated sellers. If buyers sort their search results using anything other than Best Match, Featured First will not be displayed.

Other listing upgrade changes will also affect sellers who purchase Featured First or Bold along with International Site Visibility. In this scenario, the listing features will only be displayed on the site of purchase to give domestic listings the most visibility.

To help sellers adjust to eBay’s major Fall 2009 platform changes, including listing features and search engine result placement, the company offers a Best Practices Guide.

General Motors Extends its eBay Motors Promotion

According to a statement released by General Motors (GM), its "Click-and-Buy" promotion offered through eBay Motors has shown signs of early success.

The program, which launched on August 13th, has logged more than 1.4 million searches of GM inventory, as shoppers visited virtual showroom sites through the end of August, and now GM plans to extend the promotion through the end of September. 

In its announcement, GM said that nearly 4,000 new car buyers entered into negotiations online, over the phone and in person as a result of this promotion—however the company has not released the number of completed sales that were driven by the Click-and-Buy program.  

PayPal Ups Fees on Personal Accounts, Launches Student Accounts

Last month, PayPal quietly introduced new fees on its Personal PayPal account. Previously, people using this type of PayPal account were not charged anything to receive any payment, so long as the sender paid using funds in his or her PayPal account and not credit cards or bank account transfers.

Sending "personal" money (e.g. Gift) to family and friends is still free, but now, any transfer marked as a payment for goods or service is charged a fee of up to 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction to receive the payment.

In other PayPal news, the company has introduced a new account type for students. The Student Account is designed for teens who want to make purchases online. Parents can open up to four PayPal sub-accounts for each of their teenagers and can transfer money to these accounts on either a one-time or recurring basis.   

With this new account type, the parent who opens the account can turn spending on or off, set approval for spending and also receive text or e-mail notifications on account usage and balance.

The Student Account also offers a student card that can be used at ATMs. PayPal charges a one dollar ATM fee (in addition to any fees charged by the ATM operator) and a three dollar fee for bank withdrawals requiring a signature.  The Student Account fees can be found here.

Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.