eBay on Sunday confirmed that a "technical issue" had caused search queries on the auction site to be messed up over the weekend, resulting in limited or no search results. The company says that it's being cautious, though, and is holding back on some advanced search features until the issue is fully solved.
"We are happy to report that critical search functionality was restored overnight on Saturday and we are seeing normal activity levels today," a post on the company's eBay Ink blog read Sunday. "As part of our effort to restore critical search functionality as quickly as possible for sellers and for buyers, we have kept some secondary search features temporarily offline. This includes refining search by certain item specifics, such as color or clothing size, and having Store Inventory Format results included in the main search results."
In a statement, eBay also said the technical issue was caused by "a surge in live listings as sellers ramp up for the holiday season. eBay currently has more than 200 million live listings, 33 percent more than at this time a year ago."
Some eBay members still weren't satisfied with the explanation. "I had a one day auction ending today, (and) no one was obviously able to bid on it because they couldn't search for it," one commenter said on the eBay Ink blog. "Will I get a credit for this?"
"eBay should credit all sellers with active listings during this time," another said. "These issues have cost sellers many bids and sales. Once again eBay is screwing sellers."
Much like Twitter's today, outages at eBay were rather prominent in the company's early days. They're not too frequent anymore. But this one came at a time when there are some sentiments of malaise among eBay sellers, some of whom use the auction site to make a living, and when it also faces increased competition in the e-commerce sector.
An analyst release from JP Morgan Chase said that it did not anticipate the outage would have an effect on eBay's fourth-quarter earnings. But, it contained a warning: "Although we recognize it is virtually impossible for a site of this complexity to not encounter occasional issues," the report from analyst Imran Khan read, "we continue to believe that eBay needs to make greater investments in the robustness and functionality of its site in order to remain competitive within the e-commerce space."
After Amazon experienced some difficulties last week with its selling options in the Amazon Marketplace, it made me wonder if anyone decided to start selling some of their merchandise on eBay. If so, they would join thousands of others who are using the online auction site to make a few extra bucks. If that's your goal, check out some of these services for eBay sellers.
eBay tools
Auctiva Auctiva is a full-featured product that allows you to use a variety of templates and modules to help you sell products more effectively on eBay.
Auctiva is quite powerful. You can create side-scrolling galleries with pictures you upload to the site (you're allowed 1GB of storage), change the color of your listing page, and issue invoices. It won't help you determine if you're selling products that eBay users want, but it will help you easily manage your auctions. Admittedly, Auctiva is for active sellers, but at $9.95 per month for so many nice features, it's an affordable offering.
Auctiva helps you add inventory and track it on the site.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)eBay Market Researcher Terapeek's eBay Market Researcher tool is a fine way to determine how to get the most out of your listing.
After you sign up for the site and choose a membership (it costs $24.95 per month or $197.95 per year), you can immediately start searching through the app's listings of eBay products. When you find the product you're looking to sell, it provides you with information on the item's average bid, how much the average listing makes, and how page design affected profits. The app even provides you with information on which day is best to list the product and end your auction. It's a powerful tool.
eBay Market Researcher provides you with a variety of research tools.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
eBay wants to spin off telephony service Skype into a separate publicly traded company, but something's standing in the way: Skype's founders are threatening to take back some of the technology amid a licensing dispute.
The auction giant's solution, according to a Bloomberg report on Thursday: build a new one.
This was revealed in a 10-Q regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; eBay is not commenting beyond the filing. You can decide whether "Frankenskype" or "Skypenstein" is a better name for the hypothetical creation.
Here's what has happened: Skype's founders have established a company called Joltid Ltd., which still owns the rights to some of Skype's technology. Joltid has made the accusation that eBay doesn't have the right to do everything it wants with all of Skype's code as a result; eBay is suing Joltid to get that technology back. (Is this like the Silicon Valley equivalent of body-snatching?) But the catch is that the trial isn't scheduled until next June, which could put a big roadblock in the way of eBay's plans for a Skype IPO.
So that's why eBay is working on a total rebuild of Skype's software.
There is, however, this little issue. "The new software will be expensive and might not work," Bloomberg's article summarized. "The company said it might have to shut down Skype if the dispute with the founders isn't resolved."
eBay purchased Skype in 2005 for $2.6 billion, but it hasn't proven to be the best fit for the company. Rumors circulated that it was looking to sell Skype, possibly to Google, but then opted to take the company public instead.
Download Skype for Windows | Mac | iPhone | Windows Mobile from CNET Download.com.
This case could either be seen as cute or maddening.
Pipi Quinlan, New Zealand's youngest big-time online consumer.
(Credit: Rodney Times)Sarah Quinlan, a New Zealand mom, went to take nap after having made some online bids on toys. When she came back, her 3-year-old had taken over the computer and bought a much more serious toy: a real earth mover for a cool 20,000 New Zealand dollars (about $12,300).
According to Rodney Times, Pipi Quinlan was happily clicking away on the keyboard while her parent was asleep and ended up being the winner of a Kobelco digger, a gigantic earth-moving vehicle.
Sarah had the shock of her life when she found out via e-mail which auction her account had won. She immediately called popular New Zealand auction site TradeMe, and the seller, to explain what happened. She added that her little girl was kind of a girly girl and not generally into earth movers.
TradeMe reimbursed the seller for the successful auction, and the product was relisted.
I'm pretty impressed that TradeMe resolved this matter so quickly. If it were eBay, you'd have to wait up to two weeks to get your fees back.
Lesson learned. However, don't leave your computer without locking it or at least logging off the Web site you were using.
OpenX, a software company that makes an open-source ad serving product for online publishers, has launched a platform called OpenX Market to directly connect buyers and sellers.
The model is more or less a standard ad auction format: publishers set a minimum, potential advertisers bid, and the highest bid wins. Plenty of platform-oriented start-ups are turning to the exchange or auction format to simplify and speed up the online ad buying process, but OpenX is worth a second look because of its roots in open-source software.
The OpenX software itself is free, but the platform is a way for the company to make a buck or two off it. Up till this point, the company has made money primarily off of service and consulting fees.
"Historically, the online advertising market has been fractured, opaque, hard to participate in and therefore inefficient." OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan said in a release. "In particular, mid-sized and smaller publishers lack the ability to reach a broad set of advertisers. Conversely, advertisers see lots of value in niche sites and audiences, but find it very hard to discover and buy those sites and audiences...The OpenX Market is all about making these connections simple, seamless and scalable."
The company has also issued an update to its ad server software--used by over 150,000 sites that pull in 300 billion monthly ad impressions--so that it integrates with the new OpenX Market.
At the eBay Developers Conference this week, the auction company will announce a new marketplace for sellers' add-ons to its online auctions. Essentially the program gives developers access to all the data that eBay's existing online app for medium- and large-scale retailers, Selling Manager, already has.
Like other online apps that have become platforms, such as Salesforce.com and Facebook, eBay's new initiative, called Project Echo, will give developers not just access to rich data they can package up for customers, but also a marketing channel for their applications.
Project Echo will make it possible for third-party developers to get access to the same data that eBay's own selling app has.
(Credit: eBay)Project Echo will allow app developers to pitch their apps to just the potential customers they are looking for. For example, if an app is designed only for high-volume electronics sellers, Project Echo will make sure that those sellers get queued up to see pitches for the app; other sellers won't be bothered with it.
In order to get into the Project Echo program, developers have to meet certain standards for trustworthiness. Also, all apps must have 30-day free trials. In return, developers will get access to "special APIs that are only available to people who integrate in Project Echo," according to Max Mancini, senior director of Mobile Platform and Disruptive Innovation (yes, that is his real title).
The program will go into testing in the fourth quarter of this year, but in the interest of not disrupting the holiday buying season, it won't go into open beta until the first quarter of 2009.
My take: Seems like a good extension for the eBay economy. And eBay needs to keep ahead of the curve in this department--28 percent of all listings are through third-party tools, according to Mancini. That adds up to 6 billion API calls a month. Also, I like that eBay is enforcing the 30-day-free rule.
Speaking of disruptive technologies, I asked Mancini what eBay was doing about the growing fraud that is creeping into eBay for non-power-sellers. He didn't have a concrete answer, although he said there will be announcements at the eBay conference that starts Monday. All I got out of him for now was, "Creating a trusted marketplace is critical to us."
Bye-bye, Expo. We, um, didn't use you.
(Credit: Windows Live Expo)This post was updated at 11:56 AM with comment from Microsoft.
Chalk one point up to Craigslist: Microsoft has decided to shut down Windows Live Expo, the classifieds service that it originally launched in February 2006.
Expo will disappear on July 31, a notice on the site explains. Until then, no new listings can be posted or extended, and no new accounts can be created. Microsoft representatives responded on Friday with a statement from the company: "We have learned a tremendous amount from our experience with Windows Live Expo and believe this decision, while a hard one, will serve to more effectively focus our resources towards other priority online service investments for our customers."
The most recent post on the Expo blog is from last September.
Online classifieds continue to be dominated by Craigslist, a scrappy start-up with a hippie attitude and a user interface worthy of 1997. The company is currently ensnared in a legal tiff with major investor eBay over the auction giant's in-house classifieds site, Kijiji.
In a tiff over its 28.4 percent share in Craigslist, auction giant eBay has filed suit against the online classifieds site in a Delaware court of chancery. According to Reuters, eBay has accused Craigslist's board of directors of diluting its share.
The court confirmed that eBay filed its complaint Tuesday afternoon but could not provide further details, because the suit was filed under seal.
In a phone conversation, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark said, "We're still trying to digest it," and recommended contacting CEO Jim Buckmaster for further comment. Buckmaster did not immediately reply to an e-mail inquiry.
Newmark, Buckmaster, and the Craigslist company are reportedly named as defendants in the suit, the Reuters article asserts.
Who would've thought a generic domain name would still have the capacity to pull in big bucks? Chris Clark, the seller of "Pizza.com," seemed a bit in shock after he managed to rake in $2.6 million from the auction of the domain name.
"It's crazy, it's just crazy," he told the Baltimore Sun after the close of the auction on Thursday.
Clark, who owns a software company, registered the Pizza.com domain name 14 years ago for just $20. Nothing fruitful ever really came of the domain, so he sat on it for a while, and then he and a friend turned it into an advertising and pizza directory. Then, they heard about the fortuitous sale of Vodka.com and decided to try their own luck with Pizza.com, according to the Sun. By March 29, the bidding hit $2 million and even more bids were coming in.
During the go-go days of the Internet, hopeful companies and entrepreneurs snapped up easy-to-remember, generic domain names with the expectation that they would translate to boatloads of cash--or even a heady IPO. But the gold rush began to die down as it became apparent that names like Jewelry.com and Meat.com were a losing proposition. Vodka.com and the even bigger sale of Business.com for $7.5 million in 1999 can be called anomalies among the many failures.
Clark's Pizza.com auction was held by Sedo.com, which currently features such aspirants as "fattoskinny.com," "waterfrontretreat.com", and "getforeigncurrecy.com".
While the Adobe AIR version of eBay is a wondrous experience on the eyes, regular auction pages tend to retain the same feel they've had since the late '90s. To spice them up there are a number of services, both software and Webware, several of which we've covered. Vzaar, which is based out of London, has been quietly serving up video for eBay listings since April of last year, and today is "relaunching" with a new coat of paint and some extra functionality. As luck would have it I have something on eBay this week, and had wanted to include a video to drive in some potential buyers. The good news is this product works flawlessly.
Vzaar acts just like any other Web video host and lets you upload videos from your digital camera in a couple of minutes. What's interesting is that any video that's been hosted on the service can be used on other auctions, meaning that your video of a pair of shoes, a computer, or iPod can be recycled by other users in their listings and promoted within the Vzaar community.
User-created videos on Vzaar can be played and embedded just like on YouTube (click to enlarge).
(Credit: CNET Networks)All you need to do to tack on a Vzaar video to a listing is give the service permission to access your eBay account just like you'd authorize any third party Flickr tool. This gives it read/write access, and the capability to attach whatever videos you find to listings you own. Adding a video I shot on my digital camera took just two clicks and showed up right underneath the item description with no need to mess with embed code or anything else.
Once a video has been uploaded you can keep track of how many views it's gotten both on eBay and Vzaar. There's also embed code to add it to your auction listing manually, or on your blog or personal Web site.
Vzaar offers three levels of service--a free one that lets you add up to 30 videos a month and two pro-level services that tack on more and larger videos that stay hosted on the service for up to a year, along with the option to add a single video to multiple listings. The premium services run at $10 and $20 a month respectively, and are aimed at eBay's PowerSellers.
