Ebay Express Offers Exciting New Selling Options

Recently eBay launched its new "eBay Express" and it's almost certain to be a major profit cetner to eBay sellers.

As everyone knows, eBay began as an auction web site.
Catering to small, mom and pop sellers, eBay evolved into a more traditional online shopping channel with its stores and such features as Buy It Now (BIN) which allows buyers to purchase merchandise immediately, rather than waiting for an auction to end. With eBay Express that transition to online store is complete, altohugh eBay will certainly retain the auction format for which it is most famous. In 2005 eBay bought shopping.Com and the similarity in format between the two is apparent.

The format is almost identical altohugh there are far more items on eBay Express than shopping.Com. For instance, that morning in 'women's apparel' there were "469,207 matches found" on Epxress and "79,000 items from 525 stores" on shopping.Com. One great difference: with the eBay Express system every purchase goes to the same shopping cart, even though there are thousands of merchants.
The shopping site, on the other hand, leads direclty to the individual store that owns the displayed merchandise. eBay sellers cannot sign up for eBay Express, although they can opt out. Instead, the merchandise is automatically listed if it's in the BIN format or if it's listed in an eBay store.
At that time, there is no charge for that dual listing on eBay and eBay Express, although I guses certain that that will change in the future and that eBay will charge for that service. Sellers will receive not only more exposure for each item listed, but there are other benefits as well: 1. Buyers can choose to purchase mulitple items all in one transaction, just like any traditional store. If the buyer wants eight different items, it can be handeld in one transaction, with one payment and one shipping charge.

This is so much simpler than dealing with eight different auctions, eight different sellers and eight different shipping fees that it's almost certain to encourage multiple sales. 2. This will, in turn, solve one of the biggest gripes of eBay sellers: the dreaded Non Paying Bidder!

For reasons konwn only to themselves, there are multiple dead beats who deliberately win an auction - but never pay the seller.
Usually they don't even respond to repeated emails. This is really costly to sellers - not only in the obvious sense of unpaid merchandise but also cause of the loss of other buyers who were legitimately interested in the merchandise but have most likely gone elsewhere. With eBay Express, everything will be paid in advance so the buyer won't withdraw her merchandise from the market yet never be paid for it. 3.

There is a shopping cart for eBay Express and it inculdes multiple ways to pay. 4.

eBay has promised to aggressively promote eBay Express in the search engines and there is every reason to trust that promise. After all, it is in eBay's interest to use their considerable muscle to ensure the success of eBay Express.

This is certain to mean more traffic to sellers. Although the starting point of seller participation is either an eBay store or Buy It Now items, there are additional requirements: * At that time, the Express is only available to American and Canadian sellers. If eBay Express is a success, that is really likely going to expand to other countries. * The items for sale must physically be in the US * There are PayaPl conditions: the seller must be either a PayPal Business or a PayPal Premier participant * Every item listed in eBay Express must include a picture * If applicable, the "condition" field must indicate whether the merchandise is Used/New/Refurbished * Such items as books, movies and DVDs have a "pre-filled item information" component to their listings and that must be used * There are three choices for shipping on eBay and these must be clearly indicated in the 'shipping' field of each listing in order to be included in eBay Express - Calculated - A flat fee of "X" amount of dollars - No cost for shipping * Sellers feedback must be a minimum of 100 points * Seller feedback must have at least a 98% approval rate Items will be listed in up to three different locations on eBay Express. According to eBay's president: "Results are sorted on releavncy against the buyer’s search by default.

Searchnig brings back listings that may not be an exact keyword match and sorts them based on a range of factors.

The buyer is able to re-sort by total cost, i.E.
item cost plus shipping cost." With all these exciting promises, there are eBay seller gripes abuot one feature and that is that sellers will sometimes be presented with orders from unconfirmed PayPal addresses. This is significant cause PayPal offers some fraud protection but only if the merchandise is shipped to an address that has been confirmed by PayPal. If the address is not confirmed and the buyer is a fraud, sellers will lose out. In spite of all the outrage over that provision, it isn't that different from online sellers who have their own merchant acconut. In the United States, for example, there is an Adrdess Verification System. If we, for instance, receive an order from an address that doesn't match the address on the buyer's cerdit card, we know that we are taking a much larger risk than normal.

In fact, many merchant account providers forbid turning off the AVS and breaking that rule can cost the merchant his acocunt.

In that case, all odrers that don't have an address match are automatically rejected. If eBay sellers don't want to agree to these terms, they have two choices: 1. The first seller choice involevs opting out of eBay Express entirely. This seems to me to be a foolish choice.
Yes, tehre is added risk but the possibility of increased business will most likely more than make up for an occasional bad transaction. It's imperative that we make it not hard for buyers to do businses with us.
Perhaps the strongest example I have ever seen of eBay fear was a notice by a seller that we had to mail him and get permission to bid on one of his items! Undoubtedly he had been burned by an unscrupulous buyer and tried so hard to protect himself that he most likely destryoed his business. I seriously doubt that presons are willing to do as he requested (unless his merchandise was irresistible - and it wasn't!