Shoestring Theory

Tip of the Day: Take some time off Sorry for the long delay between postings. We took a few days off over Easter weekend to visit family in Cincinnati. Since then, we’ve been getting the business ramped back up to full speed. This is a good lesson for those of you thinking about becoming self […]

The Register is reporting that: eBay is dropping ValueClick’s Commission Junction as the manager of the affiliate programs for eBay’s auctions and Half.com sites. Monday’s announcement came as the Federal Trade Commission announced ValueClick would pay a record $2.9m to settle charges it engaged deceptive advertising and failed to secure sensitive customer data. About 100,000 […]

Tip of the Day Occasionally, you may need to print labels for shipments that weren’t paid for through PayPal or purchased through eBay. PayPal Multiorder Shipping allows you to create new United States Postal Service labels, but not UPS. It’s also a hassle, slower than the normal PayPal shipping screen, and can’t print some types […]

Smallest box you can get from the post office. Tip of the Day When I launched this blog, part of my plan was to offer tips and stories about what I’ve learned running a small online business and hopefully help others do the same. But, since I started at the same time eBay announced all […]

AuctionBytes has an in-depth piece up on a security vulnerability in how eBay handles scripts in auction pages. A German watchdog organization, Falle-Internet.de, demonstrated the exploit this week. The vulnerability allows scammers to capture a wealth of information about an eBay user that visits an auction with the malicious script in it: By loading the […]

Click for larger image (where time is visible). Updated: This afternoon eBay put up a post on the Systems Announcements board that the restructuring of some categories was resulting in not everything being displayed correctly: Some items affected by last night’s category updates have not been moved to their new categories yet, which is affecting […]

The Gold Coast Bulletin in Australia is reporting that eBay will refund thousands of Australian eBayers who lost money on fake vacation packages they purchased from an eBay seller. Refunds could amount to $1 million (I would assume that’s in Australian dollars). The Bulletin originally broke the story of the holiday sales Mar. 8. GOLD […]

Intensity by Brandon Parkinson. Saturday night, we all headed out to Henry’s Coffee Shop at 8th and New Hampshire here in Lawrence to see Brandon Parkinson’s first public exhibition of his artwork. Brandon is a very old friend. He works in a huge variety of formats, so you can’t really peg him as any particular […]

Forbes Small Business has an exclusive interview with Richard Brewer-Hay, who will launch a new “no-holds-barred” blog for eBay in April called “eBay Ink.” Unlike eBay’s existing blogs and forums, which focus on more traditional (and sanitized) corporate communications, eBay Ink aims to give readers a peek inside eBay’s internal operations. Brewer-Hay has pledged to […]

This was too appropriate not to post (especially given the news of the last month). Click the picture for a full size image where you can actually read the text (or go to Bunny’s site). You should go there anyway and enjoy the wonderfulness that is Bunny. Bunny is created by Huw Davies and licensed […]