eBay Strategies

Update on eBay discount paypal coupon programs - Live search cashback and eBay Bucks

Back in June, I talked about the various discount/cash back programs that eBay was testing including eBay Bucks (eB) and LiveSearch (LS).  As a buyer, I've been experimenting pretty deeply with both programs and wanted to report back on them.

eBay Bucks, XXXX (well I would use a rhyme here but it would be in poor taste)

I was admitted into the eBay bucks program and made sure all of my purchases qualified.  I was able to get $71 in cash back which was all great. Here's what it looks like as you gain cash back:

Great! Then on August 22nd I was told that I had a voucher for my $71 and in mid September, made a $100 purchase that I was going to use my $71 voucher on (being mindful that it can only be redeemed on ONE item) and much to my shock and dismay, eBay only gave me a voucher for $16.68.   What the heck!? See the screen shot below for proof of the short-change.  The red box and arrow are my additions, but you can see right here how it is only giving a portion, but on the previous page it literally said $71!?



I hopped on livechat and they informed me they don't have anything to do with eBay Bucks so I have to send an email to rewards@ebay.com.  You can guess how fast I've gotten a response on that one.....

Live search cash back experience

The Microsoft Live search cash back program on the other hand has been a great experience.  I signed up with Microsoft and made sure that every eBay purchase was initiated from live.com and that I saw the banners on eBay that proved I was logged in correctly. While this was a little more work than eBay Bucks, on the back end it has been great.

I waited the requisite 60 days, the funds from the rebate were available and then I was able to transmit them to my paypal account and spend them on a number of eBay items.  Oh yeah - the amount was RIGHT too, they didn't short change me.

Conclusion:
eBay bucks is a good idea with terrible execution that initially made me happy as a buyer but because it essentially robbed me of $50, has eliminated all possible good will and led to a net negative experience.  eBay should cancel this program immediately, lest we have all these buyers during the holidays getting short changed and leaving eBay in droves.  It's a little easier on the front end, but even if I received 100% of the promised funds it has too many restrictions (have to use the $ in 30 days on ONE purchase).  Isn't it better to keep it simple?

Live search cash back is a little more complex on the front end but wins hands down because:

• It works (yes that's a requirement)
• It is flexible - I can shop with several vendors AND can use my $ back anyway I want to
• It is easy to use

SeekingAlpha disclosure - I am long eBay and Google

For all you Wall St. Readers...

I know there's lots going on in the world of Wall St. as everyone watches to see if the $700b package goes through or not, but for those of you that can peel away from that for an hour, we're hosting a 'state of ecommerce' call with Citi's Mark Mahaney this morning at 11am.

Here's the blurb from the notice Citi sent out:

• Please join us for a discussion with ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo and a few top multi-channel clients, on Q3 e-commerce and online marketing trends. ChannelAdvisor is a leading e-commerce provider, managing over $2B/year in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) on behalf of its clients via multiple channels, including online marketplaces (eBay, Amazon, Overstock), shopping comparison sites (Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Nextag) and through search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN). 
• Our discussion will focus on four key topics: 1) Trends in eCommerce particularly through Amazon and eBay marketplaces; 2) Feedback from recent pricing and format changes at eBay; 3) Expectations for Q4 holiday season; and 4) An update on online Search advertising trends. 

I'm looking forward to this as we have three top sellers from the consumer electronics, apparel and jewelry categories that will be sharing what they are seeing around the eBay changes, sharing their Amazon experiences and we'll also be sharing some trends we're seeing in search, cse, and marketplaces at ChannelAdvisor overall.

If you're on Wall St. and didn't get the invite, shoot me a note (scot at channeladvisor dot com) and I'll get you the invite.  

Is Google hitting eBay while they are down?

Ever since 9/16 when fp30 rolled along with a bunch of finding bugs, we have seen sales plummet in many categories with apparel and jewelry being hit the hardest.

While most sellers are focusing in on some of the eBay finding wackiness, one seller noticed google had all but disappeared as a 'source' of traffic in their advanced store reports.

Based on that tip, we started doing some looking and saw some very unusual behavior.

Here's a search for a popular Nike product's model number:

Notice that the second, third and fifth search results are all for eBay international sites and not ".com"

I've run literally hundreds of searches and you have to really work now to find eBay in the organic (and even paid I'll add) google results.  Interestingly enough, when I did find the occasional eBay listing in the index, it was an FP30.

Note that eBay's pagerank (PR) doesn't seem to have changed - it's at 8/10.

Theories on what is going on...
I have a couple of quick theories on what's going on:

• Given their track record in the last couple of weeks, it's possible that eBay has done something to mess up the crawlability of the site.
• It could be that eBay has asked google to not crawl anything but fp30 dramatically reducing the number of eBay listings in the google index (this doesn't seem very smart, but hey anything's possible I guess)
• It could be that Google is using this tough spot for eBay to kick them in the ribs and has decided that eBay listings are 'not relevant' and yanked them from the index.

Personally I think the last theory is the most probable given the near overnight disappearance of eBay's listings from the Google index.

Readers - any insights into what you are seeing/think is going on?
SeekingAlpha Disclosure: I am long eBay and Google

Some quick eBay news links this am...

We're a couple of days into fp30 and confusion continues to abound. I'm working on some details around what we're seeing with Finding+fp30 here already and I owe you epiii - the UK changes.  Until then here are some quick links to some news items today you may not have seen:

• StumbleUpon a buyer? There are lots of rumors swirling that eBay is selling StumbleUpon which they acquired for $75m a little over a year ago.  Apparently traffic has plummeted from 4.4m users to 1m users since the eBay acquisition - ouch.  Last May, I thought this would be interesting to integrate as a recommendation engine.  Well nothing ever happened so I think this makes sense.
• UK Webinar. For all you UK readers, we are hosting a free webinar for customers, and the community highlighting the eBay changes Monday September 22 at 1pm local time (GMT I believe).  Rafael Orta from eBay will be there to answer your questions. Register Here. This will probably be of interest to all of you cross border trade (CBT) people that are selling in the UK as well.  Their changes are vastly different and some would say even more aggressive around fp30 than those in the US so it's important to understand them if you participate in the UK marketplace.
• Town Hall. eBay's hosting a town hall today (with short notice I might add) from 11:30-1pm PT hosted by Stephanie Tilenius. As mentioned, fp30 is very confusing to everyone and I bet the focus of this call is to try to clear the air on the new format.
• Eric Shoup - GM of stores+prostores has left eBay.  I met Eric several times and thought he was a solid player so I'm sorry to see him go.  What's worse is he's going to a geneology company so we have no hope of continuing to work together as we have with lots of other ex-eBayers that are at other partners like google, yahoo, etc. Best of luck to Eric in his new gig.
• Search (ok, Finding) Finding on eBay just seems systemically broken.  They are changing so much so frequently that I can't get a consistent result day after day. For example, yesterday I was trying to show a reporter how the catalog is integrated in eBay and I literally could not find a single catalog item in the new or old finding experience.  Where the heck did that go? We're constantly seeing weird things like TES upside down, FP's at the back of search, etc.  While I think Jeff King and co are very sharp, something is going on behind the scenes that looks to have destabalized things to the point where Finding has turned into a new search each day.
  
  • Some days the deduping is on, others it's off.
  • Some days things are inverted
  • Some days the 10 listing/seller/page is on, others its off.
  • DSRs seem to count sometimes and others they don't
  • Sellers that create multiple IDs see a new ID with 1/4 the inventory have 2-3X the conversions of those that are multi-million/yr long-term accounts with eBay.  Nobody knows why.
  • Indexing of the new fp30's seems to be 6-12hrs behind so it might as well  be a fp29

The bottom line

Search chaos results in seller chaos- Search is the Yin to the seller's Yang.  Sellers can't settle on a strategy with search changing. If you want to learn more about this, just go to this forum and spend about 20hrs here reading all the problems people are reporting with search.  It's easy to take the position that these are a bunch of wackos and there is definitely some noise/signal ratio problems here in the eBay forums, but peel that away and you find many many reports of finding just plain 'broke' as we say where I'm from.

I sincerely hope eBay can get this resolved or at least stable to some degree before the holidays or we'll (continue to) have complete chaos.

SeekingAlpha disclosure: I am long google and eBay

FP30 is born!

Well today eBay officially launched the Multi-quantity 30-day duration fixed price listing (FP30 for short). 

I'm proud to announce that we are already not only supporting FP30 TODAY at ChannelAdvisor in both our MarketplaceAdvisor Standard and Premium offerings, but we've done some enhancements to take advantage of how the relist works so that our customers will be advantaged with their recent sales.

This was tricky because eBay hasn't had this in the API until it went live on the site at midnight PT, so we had to have a team working on this in real time to support it, test, it, etc.  In fact, this new format won't be in the eBay sandbox for weeks.  Clearly the business changes are coming faster than the rest of the company can keep up right now.

In fact, our sales team heard from one poor Turbolister seller that TL won't even support FP30 for at best a week or two.  Ouch, talk about a disadvantage.  Think of all that sales velocity this seller's competitors will be able to build up.  I don't know if Blackthorne or any of the other myriad eBay listing tools will support FP30 yet, but it's not a long shot given how it was rolled out that they will be days if not weeks behind.

Off to a slow start
Given all the hoopla in the press and supposedly nashing of teeth around this new format, it's off to a slow start.  We have about 150 customers that have listed an FP30.  Here's one of the first ones if you want to see what it looks like 'live' on eBay.

Part of what's going on with the seller base is, for lack of a better word, eBay fatigue.  Sellers feel their businesses have changes so much (DSRs, BestMatch, etc..)  for so little/no/decline in sales that eBay is increasingly becoming a lower priority for them and thus they will tend to be reactive vs. proactive as they would have been as recently as 6 months ago.  To be honest, most of our larger sellers are spending their time getting their websites and other channels ready for the holidays and eBay just isn't a priority.  Of course this doesn't bode well for eBay, but it's the reality of what is going on in the grassroots of ecommerce.

So unless eBay puts a promo on the FP30, I don't see this mass switch to FP30 over the store format or anything until maybe Q1 after the holiday dust settles.

I'll keep a close eye on the trends and report anything of interest.

For those ChannelAdvisor customers that are also blog readers, we have details on our FP30 support on the Strategy and Support Center (SSC) here.

SeekingAlpha disclosure: I am long google and ebay.

eBay layoff - impact on sellers?

This weekend, a Barrons article cited a report by an investment research firm, Wedge Partners (Brian Blair and Ryan Hunter) that says eBay is planning a 1500 person layoff.

Reuters has re-reported the story as well here. The big question I'm hearing from ChannelAdvisor customers and readers is: What will eBay layoffs mean for sellers?

Where are the people?

With 16,000 people in the company this would be a < 10% reduction.  Given that eBay hasn't really gone through this before, I'd guess this can be done with little to no impact on operations. 

To understand the impact on sellers, we need to think about where the cuts will/would come from.  While eBay doesn't report a break down of the 16k, we can guess where the pockets of people are.  If you peel the onion on eBay you have:

• Paypal - Paypal is the crown jewel of eBay and has grown substantially head-count wise over the last years. Here's where the people are:
  • Paypal has the business people in San Jose at their own campus (view on gmaps)
  • Paypal has tons of customer service/fraud prevention people in Omaha/Salt lake.  I don't think it would be prudent to do anything here given the busiest season starts now.
  • I'm going to guess Paypal has limited business people internationally, but probably big fraud prevention teams in their customer service center.
• Skype - Skype is probably a 1000 person company at this point and given that it's the fastest growing part of eBay.
• eBay marketplaces -
  
  • I'd guess that 8k of the 16k people are at eBay marketplaces and housed at the 'mother ship'.
  • 2125 Hamilton is the home of eBay Park which you can tour on gmaps with their cool 'Street View' (click here, zoom in and select street view - look to your left for the 4 buildings by starbucks and to your right for the other 4.)
  • With 8 very large building's I'd say there are a good 4-6k people in that park.  This report from 2003 cites 1500 out of eBay's total of 4200 at the time, so I'd imagine that number has more than doubled in the last 5 yrs (wow - eBay's headcount has gone up 4X since then!).  So let's say 5k in eBay Park
  • That leaves 3k that I' would say are about 1000 international and 2000 in Salt Lake.
  • The international offices are run pretty lean with most functions being supported out of the US (engineering and admin for example).
• Misc
  • There are small offices in LA, SFO and a variety of other places from acquisitions (StubHub, rent.com, etc.)

Where are layoffs likely?
This is all speculation on my part, but logically it seems like it wouldn't be prudent to do anything at Skype, Paypal or places like Stubhub that are big growth drivers. Thus you're left with eBay marketplaces which is the anchor to the conlomerate and should bear the weight of any downsizing.

Within eBay marketplaces, I don't think International has room for much change, therefore you're left with the 2k people in SLC and the 5k people in SJC.

This is where it gets tough.  Ebay has talked up the benefits of increasing customer service and TnS staff in SLC with Wall St.  That could make it hard PR-wise to cut there.

That leaves 5k in SJC at the most risk IMO.  If the 1500 were localized to that group, what looked like 10% now becomes 30% which is pretty deep and risky.  In eBay Park you have:

• Lots of 'admin' - finance, hr, legal.  I think one whole building floor is just legal.  With eBay's legal issues though, this could be an area that's hard to reduce.
• Seller experience - possibly impacted
• Buyer experience - probably not impacted as eBay doesn't want to be seen underinvested in such a strategic area.
• Marketing - probably impacted.  With eBay spending less and less on marketing, there are probably big reductions that could be made here
• Engineering - most of eBay's R+D is done in SJC with some pockets outsourced to India and other places.
• eBay Motors - Motors seems to replicate lots of the functions at other parts of eBay.  I'd guess lots of synergies could be found by undoing all of this duplication of effort.
• CS+TnS - eBay has some functions like community, customer service and trust and safety with some headcount in SJC that largely creates policies for folks in SLC.  There maybe room there to trim as well
• Middle management - eBay has lots of VP, Manager, Director level people that JD may look at eliminating as a way to streamline decision making.  Most eBay employees are at least 5+ layers away from JD which seems ripe for bureaucracy.

What's all this mean for sellers?

If I'm wrong here and SLC is hit with the bulk of the layoffs, that's where 90+ eBay TSAMs are (Top Seller Account Managers).  That would be bad for sellers as that group is the lifeline a seller has into eBay.  However, if customer service or trust and safety in SLC are decreased that wouldn't directly impact sellers, but it could hurt the buyer experience (which is why I don't think it will be an area that is touched).

Seller development is at risk, but I think it's a smaller group so probably not something that would be cut deeply.  Any admin, marketing or other cuts are likely to not

All in, I'd say there's a low (10-20%) that any reductions would impact sellers, but until we see what eBay does, it's all a guessing game.

SeekingAlpha Disclosure: I am long Google and eBay

FP30 + Finding - Episode II (Attack of the Recent Sales)

This is part 2 of a multi part series. Part 1 is here, please make sure to read it first.

As I write this, we are a mere 4 days away from FP30 and sellers are now really turning their attention to the new format and what they should do when it arrives.

In this installment of our "FP30+Finding" series, I wanted to focus on the topic of recent sales.

Why are recent sales important
In Episode I we talked about how auction listings are primarily TES driven and FP30 is recent sales driven.  Thus recent sales is a sellers lever for getting higher search placement.  Therefore it is extremely important.

What are recent sales?
Here's how it works.  You have a FP30 listing with multiple quantities (let's say 100) of an item. You obviously start on day 1 with no sales, and then as you get sales, you receive a recent sales 'score' (details unknown, but pretend it's a scale of 1-10).  What's important is the relative recent sales for your listing vs. the other fp30's you are competing with for traffic.

A very important nuance (that could change) is that recent sales is a 7 day window. In other words, it looks 'back' 7 days to calculate recent sales.  Allow me illustrate with an extreme fictional example.  SellerX lists a fp30 on 9/20 with quant=200.  On 9/22 (day 2) the seller sells 50 and then on 9/30 (day 10), the seller sells 2 items.  the recent-sales looks back 7 days (9/23-9/30 in this example) and thus the score is based off the 2 items and does not include the 50.   Had the 50 and 2 happened within 7 days, they would have been considered in the recent sales score as they would be in the 7 day window.

Do recent sales benefit large sellers because they sell more?
One misperception out there I keep hearing from smaller vocal sellers is: "recent sales favors large sellers because they can list more".  This couldn't be further from the truth because recent sales are for a 'listing' and not for a 'seller'.  Let me point this out with an extreme example:

SellerX (big seller) - lists 1m items with quantity 10, let's say they are DVDs. SellerX has the Little Mermaid for $39.99, but every other item for .01 BIN and free shipping.

SellerY (small seller) - lists 1 item with quantity 10 - it's a Little Mermaid DVD for $29.99 with free shipping.

SellerX and Y put their DVDs into fp30 starting on 9/20.  SellerY sells 5 in the first 7 days and sellerX sells 2. 

A consumer searches for little mermaid.  Little ole SellerY's listing will be shown ABOVE SellerX's because the LISTING has more recent sales, even though that seller is selling $3m/m in other DVDs.

What about relists?

If you have a fp30 with lots of quanity listing humming along selling 2-3 items a day and it ends, what happens?  The good news is the recent history carries through to a relist IF:

• You do a relist within 7 days of listing end (It will go back and pull the last 7 days of the listings recent sales even if you're 7 days past end of listing)
• You don't change anything - it has to be the EXACT same item.  

For those of you using third party software like that from ChannelAdvisor, you'll want to make sure your vendor is correctly calling the eBay relist APIs to make this work.  Until fp30, "relist matching" wasn't important, but it sure is now.  Yes, CA will be ready for this very shortly.

What about updates to live listings?

Let's say you have a fp30 chugging along with quantity 100 and it starts to sell down and gets to 2 items.  You receive some more inventory so you bump it back up to 100 on day 22 - what happens to recent sales?  Another frequent updated with these fp30 listings is changing the price.

Ebay tells us that the recent sales is not disrupted by any updates.   Note that this is ripe for gaming (start something out at a penny and then jack up the price to $1000 and benefit from the 7 days recent sales at a penny?) and I bet eBay will quickly make it such that a price change (I'd say increase only is smart) clears out the recent sales.  This will be interesting to watch and see how sellers 'optimize' this part of the system.

What's this mean for my strategy?
Ok hopefully your head isn't swimming and you can see how this is essentially a completely different way of thinking than auction/TES listings.  Here are some strategies to consider:

• Keep a mix of auction+fp30 listings - remember that Finding will show auctions+fp30 in a ratio based on demand for every search.  Your top sellers will still need auciton exposure - use BIN+high start if you hate true auction.
• Consider moving your store listings to fp30.  I agree with media+auto parts sellers who believe fp30 will be the death of eBay stores.  There will be enough fp30 inventory out there that store visibility goes to zero.  Thus you'll want to get in front of that ASAP to build your recent sales and stay competitive
• Consider 'cross polination' strategies.  Start a $NR auction for 1 and link it to your fp30's and drive as much traffic from the auction to the fp30 as possible (run multiples so there's strong TES peak time coverage).  This will amp the recent sales of your fp30
• One concern I share with fp30 that most sellers have is that it blows the perception of scarcity.  When a buyer finds a listing and in there it says: "this seller has 9 trillion of these available" as a buyer you tend to think there's room to wait and let the price come in on something like that.  Ideally eBay would solve this and say something like "available" or "in stock" vs. "1000".  Until that time you may want to do some experimenting with smaller quantities that you update frequantly. 
  
  • Example, you have 200 widgets.  Instead of kicking off a fp30quant200, you kick off a fp30quant20 and every three days look at adding 20 in there.  This is probably more work than its worth, but something to consider.
  • You could also have 3-4 fp30's.  They would be de-duped, but if one sells out with quant20, the other will now show.  This of course incurs more listing fees and doesn't transfer recent sales between the concurrent listings, but you could transfer it via relists if you wanted to 'tag team'.
• fp30 is terrible for products with choices (e.g. shoes with size and whatnot)  I honestly don't have any advice for you but to keep listing each size separately for now.
• Other than the 'perception of strategy' angle, there is no reason (and in fact it is wasteful for recent-sales and listing $ due to de-dupe) to have multiple listings for the same product in fp30.
  • This is a different mindset for sellers because TES trained us to list things every day to make sure we had a TES for that day.
  • The exception to this rule is title optimization.  Sellers frequently list the same title with 2+ titles to get more keyword exposure.  For example, you may have a SKU (back to the future movie poster) that you want to list as:
    • Back to the future movie poster 1985
    • Robert Zemeckis back to the future
    • Michael J. Fox  Christopher lloyd back to future
    • etc.
• Consider using featured for new products to kick-start recent sales as you won't have a history there.
• Make sure you kick off your strategic fp30's on 9/16 when they go live. Let's say your competitors do this and you don't get around to it until 9/22 (6 days later). There is a scenario where:
  • Your competitors have a 5 day start on recent sales
  • Thus your items are disadvantaged out of the gate and starved off
  • You are
• FP30+recent could have you rethink or balance your DSR/S+H strategy.
  • For example, the boost from a lower core item price (move some to S+H) could boost recent sales and thus outweigh the loss of discounts from potentially lower DSRs. 

Until Episode III...
In our next episode we'll take a look at what's going on with FP30 in the UK.  They have a very different implementation there and history has shown that eBay frequently moves things between countries as they learn more so it gives you an edge to know what's going on in the UK and start thinking about what would happen should those changes come to the US.

SeekingAlpha Disclosure: I am long Google and eBay

Two interesting links

I didn't see these two stories get any play today so thought you may enjoy a little weekend reading:

1. Over at MSN Money, Michael Brush has a story about eBay vs. Amazon.  Michael's macro point is to watch out for Amazon checkout vs. Paypal and speculates that Amazon will start to undercut Paypal on ACH/balance tranfsers.  This is an interesting point I wanted to highlight:
   • Amazon develops ties with merchants on many levels, so merchants may be more likely to adopt its new payment system..."  This is an important nuance and often not covered by the press.  eBay is interacting with its customers (retailers/sellers) less and less these days while Amazon is increasing that interaction.  It will be interesting to see if it leverages into adoption of things like FBA and CBA.
2. Catherine Holahan at Businessweek has an article (with nice video) that fuels speculation that Skype could be on the block.  I have to admit that I don't follow Skype that closely.  I've tried it before and it's 'ok' for some things, but unreliable enough and invasive on my desktop enough that I stopped using it.  A couple of points in this article that were new to me:
   • Only about 10% of skype's users pay anything - wow, that's either a big opportunity or a big problem, seems like by now there'd be more paying customers?!  I don't get why they don't try to turn this into a subscription style business like Vonage has and ditch the free piece.  The freemium model is valid, but not when you only monetize 10%.  Time to bite the bullet, turn off the free part of freemium and get to 100% subscribers.
   • In the video, Josh says that 6% of all global calls go through skype.  I may have misheard/interpreted this, but that's darn impressive!  It also highlights that they are vastly undercharging for this IMO.  If they have 6% of a X trillion market and are only getting 500m, that's broken.

SeekingAlpha Disclosure: I am long eBay and Google

Bombshell: eBay may switch to new 'Item Page' before Holidays!

Update: 9/12 - I heard from eBay today that they will be testing the new item page and have "no confirmed plans to launch this before the holiday shopping season".  There's some 'eBay Speak' in there so it seems like they are keeping the door open.  They also clarified in the developer blog here. Seems like its still a good idea to test your templates ASAP.  The one other item to think about is to make sure you see your listing with the elements 6+7 seen below in the image.  If you test without those the templates look fine, with them turned on we are seeing templates 'clipped' on the right.

eBay Seller's hearts are pounding today

Today we started to get frantic and panicky inbound calls and emails from sellers that had heard through the grapevine that eBay's new item page that eBay previously been talked about as being in less than 10% 'test' mode, open to lots of changes, etc. is suddenly being talked about as going live for the holidays.  Turns out it was a post the developer blog last night that was the first time it was revealed that this is something that could change by the Holidays.  eBay also introduced another complexity called an iFrame that puts the content of the template into a different domain name to help with some fraud issues.

A seller's item page is where they do all their merchandising and most larger sellers have significant investments in their 'template' (ChannelAdvisor speak for the design of their item page). 

While we have a clarification into eBay around this sudden 'get it done for the holidays' kind-of-announcement, I thought it would be prudent to alert people as since we're hear at mid-September, I'm guessing this would definitely be out as early as Thanksgiving and maybe as early as Halloween.  If we assume Halloween, maybe you have a month to month and a half to adapt.  Based on our early investigations the changes needed could be substantial.

Test your listings now
The good news is any seller can see how their template will look in the new item page by following these directions:

1. Login to eBay under your seller ID
2. Bring up a live listing
3. In the upper right you will see a link that offers to show you how your listing looks under the new View Item Page.
4. Click that link

Challenges with the new design
There's lots of negativity from sellers in general around the new design, but since it looks like its hear to say, I won't spend time on that.  However, some design elements are going to make updating your template a potential MUST.

To understand the challenges, first you have to look at this page eBay provides to identify the various elements of the design (click on image to see an expanded version):

The problem is the width of the description element marked number 4 in the diagram.  The upsell elements 6 and 7 take a good 20-25% of the width and squish the description into a small area.  If your template is wider than this then you get some really weird scroll bars in there that we worry will keep buyers from seeing  a large portion of your template.  We're seeing some designs cut off in weird places, images hidden and a variety of other problems with this setup that sellers will want to have resolved before this goes live or potentially suffer a decrease in conversions and an increase in customer inquiries.

Conclusion
The bottom line is regardless of if this was a mistake and the new new item page isn't really coming out for the Holiday, I think it would be prudent to look at a good 5-10 of your items and start to think about how much work you are looking at and how you could possibly do it by late October.

Webinar this Wednesday: Take full advantage of selling on Amazon

This Wednesday at 2pm ET we're co-hosting a webinar with Amazon (Sam Wheeler- Director of Merchant Services) around how to take advantage of the various Amazon offerings.

We've got a range of introductory to advanced materials so whether you are an Amazon guru or just getting started, I think there will be something for everyone.  We'll also have time for Q+A.  At all of our events Sam is usually swamped with questions from attendees so I'm sure this will be a great chance to get your questions answered around amazon's solutions for third-party selling.

Registration is here.  Both customers and non-customers are welcome to attend, there is no charge for this event.