eBay News & Announcements
Jim Ambach, Senior Director of eBay's Seller Experience team, is reminding members about some of eBay's selling tools, such as the recently launched Sell Your Item (SYI) form, the Turbo Lister and Selling Manager. On Feb. 1st at 12:00 p.m. PT the selling tools team will be hosting an online workshop that will focus on helping sellers assess which tool is right for them. For those sellers who are still using old versions of Turbo Lister and Seller's Assistant tools, it's important to remember that eBay will be retiring those versions in early April 2007.

About 40 percent of sellers are using the new Sell Your Item form and completing listings 20 percent faster, according to eBay. This week eBay expects to transition the rest of eBay sellers who use SYI to the newest version. In other site news, eBay has recently expanded the following categories; Consumer Electronics, eBay Motors, and Toys & Hobbies.

EBay also recently updated its Fee Circumvention policy to include extending the auction duration as a breach of that policy. Under the revised policy, sellers are unable to change the auction duration after the listing has been submitted. Here is the section from the "examples" page on the policy:

"Extension of Auctions - eBay listings ("auctions") have a fixed duration. EBay may on rare occasions (for example, as the result of a site outage) extend the duration of an auction. Extension of auction duration by a seller, via either manual actions or the use of automated tools, is not permitted. Extension of auctions by a seller for any reason is not only a form of fee avoidance, but also harms the finding experience for buyers."

eBay In The News
U.S. District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper ruled that StreamCast Networks Inc. failed to make its case for relief under federal antitrust laws and as a result the $4.1 billion suit against Skype, eBay and other defendants was dismissed. StreamCast's case claimed the founders of Skype broke an agreement to give StreamCast the right of first refusal for the technology behind Skype's voice over Internet protocol service.

In Texas, there is a little known law that requires eBay sellers to collect state sales tax when selling more than two items, however most do not collect the tax. According to a report on the My SA (San Antonio) Web site, State Rep. Scott Hochberg filed a bill (HB 373) that would allow those who sell less than $3,000 worth of goods a year to be exempt from charging buyers a sales tax.

eBay & E-commerce Tools Round-Up
E-Junkie, a supplier of electronic commerce systems and technology, unveiled their "FatFreeCart." E-junkie's cart works inside the site without the presence of pop-ups or the installation of additional software. The cart is browser independent, runs under all operating systems and works with leading payment systems like PayPal, Google Checkout and 2CheckOut. The FatFreeCart works with both digital and tangible goods, it calculates American and international shipping rates and also accurately determines domestic tax and VAT.

Marketworks just released 12 new Google Checkout-enabled storefront templates that will make it easier to have a professional-looking Web site with built-in Google Checkout. Previous to adding the new customized templates, Marketworks offered only basic templates. Marketworks offers e-commerce merchants a variety of solutions, including fully hosted Web Stores, with complete analytics.

My Auction Gallery (MAG) recently expanded their services to offer an image-hosting feature called MAGPics. MAGPics enables members to expand auction details by including MAGPics images. The company offers bulk uploads, customizable folders and an easy-to-use interface for editing tasks such as resize, crop, watermark and more.  My Auction Gallery currently supports Overstock.com Auctions, Yahoo!, BidVille, The Auction Man and eBay.

This week Amazon surprised its sellers with a notice at its Sellers Forum saying it is opening the Toys and Games category to all sellers again. Last year, this category was made available to only pre-approved sellers. According to Amazon, the changes were made to "ensure the continued confidence of buyers."

Only on eBay...
We all know that certain items sell well on eBay, but lately we've been hearing more about how services can sell on eBay also. Our favorite IT this week is Timothy, a self-proclaimed nice 26-year-old guy from Los Angeles, Calif. In his auction description, Timothy tells us about finding true love, which for him, involved meeting a coworker in his employers' Shanghai, China location. Timothy and Rosel began a long-distance relationship and became engaged. In an effort to raise money to be with Rosel, he is auctioning off his services on eBay. Well, what services, you may ask? Here it is, straight from auction description:

"Well, first I will not do anything degrading, sexual, or illegal. I would like to help you with things. I can help with teaching, or painting, or running errands. I do have a day job, so the time would have to be after work. I am not a professional at anything. I want to work hard for my marriage. My services are offered from the date of purchase until before I leave for Philippines (February 23). I will have a curfew since I do have a day job."

We're not sure if its Timothy's creativity or the fact that it's only a couple weeks away from Valentine's Day, but Timothy's services are now selling for US $2,750 with the auction ending today.

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