It must be Q4! eBay's rolling out major changes...

Every year at ChannelAdvisor when October 1 rolls around, we grab the arms of our office chairs and grit our teeth in anticipation of some random unannounced change that's going to rock the boat for both partners like CA and more importantly eBay sellers.

Well, here we are at the 11th day of Q4 and we already have two really great candidates:

1. eBay posted to Chatter about a new checkout 'coming soon' and then Ina@AuctionBytes uncovers that (drum roll please), yep, it's coming in Q4!! (good news to CA customers here, we redirect all eBay checkouts to our system which I can promise you we are not going to be changing in Q4).

2. PayPal slid out an announcement today that for select transactions (I bet over $100?) they are going to delay payment for as long as 24hrs.  Here's the catch.  We have no idea how sellers+buyers are going to be alerted to this new 'state' and also there haven't been any developer announcements on if there are any APIs to let us know that a payment has entered 'pending'.  PayPal's latest rollouts of new features have been pretty rough so the office pool has this one winning the majority of votes as 'most likely to disrupt Q4 holiday sales'.  Imagine if you're a laptop seller and you have a lot of payments go under review, how are buyers going to react?  Well, you're DSRs are going to take a big hit, I can tell you that.  This is a lose lose, if eBay/paypal does say: "Your payment looks fishy so we're going to review for a day", then the buyer is upset, if eBay says nothing, then well, your shipment is delayed a day without the buyer knowing why so the seller is going to be blamed.  What happens when the team doing this is overwhelmed in Q4 and the delays stretch to 36hrs?  48? 72?  'stuck in pending'??

eBay Strategies readers - any other vibes of major changes out there that could disrupt a smooth Q4 selling season?

Comments

[A Adams]

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Check it all out!

[John]

Dear Mr. Wingo,

It has been over 1 week now since eBay had its Q4 earnings call. All the reporters, bloggers, pundits and charlatans ;) have weighted in with comments. However, you sir have not yet posted your comments on these results?!?

I can not rightly make Q4 moves without considering your comments on this matter. Would you kindly get to your eBay Strategies pages and post your "wise dome" thoughts (wisdom). You actually have a fan base that is waiting on your comments.

I know you are a busy man, but if you could find some crumbs to share with us, that would help.

LMAO, but I am dead serious.

Thanks dude,
John

[SUE]

I too have one of those "pending" payment and for me going on day 3! It is not more than 100.00 it is for 15.99!

I too feel that this is going to be problematic. They start delaying payments a short time of deciding to "rate" sellers on shipping times... sorry but this makes little sense to me.

[Larry Phillips]

Scot,

I had one of those Payment Reviews yesterday. First off, it WASN"T an over $100 sale, it was a $13.00 sale. Second, it was received on Thursday for a payment received on Monday!

The good news is that I responded with the information they requested, and they cleared the payment within about six hours. I hope the three days later timeframe, and the low dollar amounts are start-up glitches, because I shipped that order Tuesday.

We've already got an ebay issue with shipping times, and how they impact DSRs, and what that will mean to search results. This has the potential to be very problematic. Let's hope they figure out how to implement this before it has a negative impact to sellers.