Having got the Christmas & January Sales silly seasons out of the way, I was looking forward to a nice quiet February where I could dedicate some serious development time to my existing ecommerce website, plus start the build on the new site for the wargames models business, them WHAM! eBay turned the world upside down with some of the most radical changes to fee and feedback policy since Pierre sat at his keyboard over a Labour Day weekend.

Even before the afternoon Q&A session at the eBay ecommerce forum in Washington DC, I was receiving requests for analyses and opinions from magazines and newspapers worldwide – such is the life of a dual role foreign correspondent.

Having spent every spare minute of the autumn and early winter building a blog and discussion-forum website for a friend (delaying my own website projects even further than ever anticipated) my journalist-quota was way behind in terms of meeting the minimum published articles requirement for renewal of my Thai visa and workpermit, so the opportunity to “instantly” write commentaries, editorials, and reportage & opinion pieces on the fly, was a real blessing in disguise.

What I didn’t expect, was that it would take around 5 weeks for the peak of interest and content demand to die down. In those 5 weeks, over 100 newspapers and magazines around the world carried my writings, and I was asked to either ghost or guest write major analysis/opinion pieces for several “serious” blogs.

With newspapers and blogs requiring an average of 1,000-1,500 words per article, and the magazines mostly wanting 2,500-3,000 word features, that was a lot of research, writing, editing and revision and it completely wiped out February as a selling month.

Despite that, February’s sales performance was significantly better than in 2007. Total traffic to my listings was up by around 40% and sales by around 25%. How did that happen?

Well, last year I spent a lot of time experimenting with listing on different eBay sites, discovering what products sold where, what prices they would fetch, learning their category structures and fee systems. Immediately after Christmas, I also uploaded a lot of listings onto a broad spread of sites, using Turbo Lister and Selling Manager Pro, with those listings spread out over several weeks start time with auto-relists and stock quantities held in SMP’s inventory feature. The basic idea was to ensure I had a minimum inventory rotating onto different sites every day, with enough inventory to keep me covered until early summer.

It’s worked quite well so far, though I’ve been hammered by exchange rates since the new year – the Thai Baht has seriously strengthened at a time that the US$, Euro, and GB£ have weakened on the world market. Across those 3, we’re now 14% worse off in terms of the amount of Thai Baht we get against the BIN and SIF (shop) prices I set in late December. Add that 14% to the effects of the fee changes announced by Bill Cobb, and we should be raising advertised start & BIN prices by 18-20%.

That’s why this weekend’s Free Listing Weekend on eBay UK was such a godsend. It couldn’t have arrived at a better time, and will allow us to clear a lot of the “clutter-stock” that’s been building up and was going to be listed on another auction site where it’s free-to-list, or put onto our own website.

Once this weekend’s listings have run their course, we’ll need to recount stocks and decide where they’ll have a new home for selling, plus a lot of the lower price goods padding our eBay store will have to move across to other venues before the end of the month. They’re simply no-longer profitable to list on eBay.

All the press research and reporting that I did last month has me convinced that we cannot continue to use eBay in the way that we have for the last 5 years, if at all. The media demands made on me last month meant that I even missed the opportunity to run a 5th anniversary promotion for all our previous and new buyers. I was simply too busy. Sorry about that.

This morning, after 5 days and nights of preparing listings for the Free Listing Weekend ( 3,000 uploaded and scheduled before Saturday arrived – the maximum number of scheduled listing eBay permit – and another several hundred uploaded this morning, with more to upload over the next 36 hours), I’m off to crash out for a well earned sleep.

Gaz

p.s. If you were thinking of asking for links to the press stuff I wrote … chances are you’ve already read many of them (online or offline) but didn’t recognise the author name – that’s because I use several nom-de-plume’s …. or should that be nom-de-guerre?