Shoestring Theory

Among all the changes happening to eBay worldwide, one of the most startling announcements has been that eBay Australia will require that PayPal be used for virtually all transactions in Australia (except for items picked up locally).
eBay Australia is hosting several Q&A meetings with eBay users to discuss the new policy. According […]

Screen capture of eBay home page.
Today’s 10 cent list fee special is sponsored by Monster. So, apparently eBay is encouraging you to look for a job on Monster. I guess that makes sense if eBay’s news policies are driving you off the site. This seems like a really odd marketing partnership for […]

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 eBay and […]

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 […]

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 how these […]

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 Coasters […]

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 write […]

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 […]

Classy folks, real classy.
So normally I despise the celebrity gossip/rumor mill, but this one intersected with two of my favorite sites, Wikipedia and eBay.
The St. Petersburg Times is reporting:
It’s war of the Web roses between St. Petersburg’s Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and his ex-girlfriend, Rachel Marsden. She claims he dumped her via his Wikipedia […]

I had known this was coming, but eBay sent out a notification to buyers today announcing that complete user IDs will no longer be displayed on any auction format listings.
Soon we will no longer display the complete user IDs of people bidding on any auction-style listing. Instead, we’ll use asterisks such as x***y to protect […]