There have been several occasions on which I have been fortunate enough to be the sole seller of a particular product and have turned a good profit in the absence of competition.

However like most sellers I generally find that I am in competition with other sellers and price my products accordingly. I look at my competitors and in particular their sales history and may well choose to let them “sell out” of a product rather than matching them price for price. There are other factors such as Top Rated Seller status, listing content and their feedback profile, but generally I consider price and quantities offered for sale. I do not follow the philosophy of being the lowest priced seller, but by the same token I cant afford to isolate myself and need to price competitively.

This strategy has worked well enough for the last few years and although not a perfect formula it was a formula which worked, until recently. Over the last few months I have personal experience of purchasing CDs from three different wholesalers only to find each one of them opening accounts on eBay and Amazon and selling the same products. I purchased at a price below my selling price and am now faced with the problem of competition against wholesalers who have a limitless supply of products.

I know that there have always been factory outlets and the wholesalers are perfectly entitled to sell on any channel they choose, but it seems to me that they are killing the golden goose. I still purchase CDs from two of the wholesalers, but no where near the range or quantity I used too, because I am not prepared to compete in an unfair fight.

Considering that many professional sellers purchase products to sell on several channels I wonder how others like me will be changing their purchasing strategies.

Drawing on the lessons learned from the successful launch, the webinar will discuss the upcoming changes to eBay’s site and how to optimise its new search developments to make listings more visible. Combined with tips and tricks as well as advice on how to overcome issues when selling parts online, the webinar is the perfect session for those looking to sell more online.

Motors parts and accessories are a particular challenge as traditionally it’s a catalogue with wire drawing business. Most motor part manufacturers don’t even have product shots of their items. Then there’s item specifics and compatibility listings detailing which makes and models a particular part fits.

If you’re a motors trader selling on eBay this is one webinar not to miss. You’ll need to register in advance and the webinar takes place on Wednesday, 30th May 2012 from 10.30am to 11.15am (BST).

Anyone who’s purchased from Amazon will know that they’re probably the best deliverers in the country. The dispatch and shipping arm (which also handles FBA items on behalf of sellers) is a well oiled machine which pumps out millions of orders with robotic efficiency from warehouses around the world.

The main sticky point in the complaint which the ASA upheld is that “One-Day” meant one day after dispatch” and this wasn’t sufficiently highlighted on Amazon’s website. In the situation someone ordered late on Friday evening their item is normally dispatched on Saturday and delivered on Monday, that’s Three-Day delivery, not One-Day delivery and the ASA doesn’t like it.

Of course any sane buyer realises that couriers don’t deliver on Sundays and that there’s a cut off point for dispatching orders and that One-day delivery means the next working day after shipment. To avoid the same problems Amazon have had with the ASA, it would appear that you need to spell this out (probably in one syllable words) and make sure it’s prominently featured next to all delivery offers.

Amazon were also chided for using Royal Mail First Class deliveries as that’s no longer a First Class Next Day service. According to the Royal Mail website, delivery would takes between one and two days for First Class post.

The ASA concluded that “Because we considered the “One-Day delivery” claim was ambiguous and the claim that the service was “guaranteed” was not adequately qualified or substantiated we concluded that the website was misleading“. I conclude that if Amazon, the best in the business, can’t provide a One-Day delivery and get it right then the rest of us have no chance.

Proxibid started out providing services to traditional off-line auctioneers enabling them to bring their real world auctions online. These days it doesn’t make sense to limit an auction to a local geographical area and Proxibid specialise in bringing live and timed auctions conducted by real auction companies onto the Internet.

Of course bidding at a distance does introduce a few delivery issues, especially if you’re buying machinery, industrial plant equipment and the odd JCB digger to boot. That’s why Proxibid and uShip have come together to give Proxibid buyer access to delivery services for pretty much anything.

uShip offers customers the ability to name their own price for shipping or receive competing quotes from a network of thousands of carriers. Carriers looking to fill empty cargo space and backhauls utilise uShip to fill the space at deeply discounted rates, helping customers save an average of 50 percent over published rates.

Shipping large, oversized items has traditionally been a major pain point for buyers, especially within online auction marketplaces. uShip’s services are now available to Proxibid buyers by clicking on the uShip Shipping Price Estimator on the Lot Detail pages for lots that offer this service.

Of course you don’t have to be using Proxibid to use uShip, you can access their network of delivery drivers direct on the uShip website.

This is no surprise to eBay sellers, eBay has been giving visibility for products listed on eBay UK on eBay Australia for some time and I know many sellers who regularly ship to Australia – It’s an easy country to deal with, despite the distance, as of course it’s main language is also English.

Royal Mail’s latest Delivery Matters report (opens in .pdf) reveals that online tracking is increasingly important to consumers with 80% of the UK’s online shoppers like to receive updates at every stage of delivery. However to balance this only 67% said that free delivery was the most important delivery factor – that’s dropped from 73% in 2010.

Robert Woods, Royal Mail’s Head of International Products, said: “Tt is essential that we support UK e-retailers to continually improve the online shopping experience for overseas customers” adding “We have responded to the demand from Australian shoppers for UK goods by extending our fully tracked international service to the country”.

To help UK retailers better meet the delivery needs of the growing number of online shoppers from Australia, Royal Mail has extended its international tracked service, Airsure® to the area, flying into four major gateways to ensure fast delivery across the country.

Airsure provides full tracking from posting to delivery. Items receive priority handling while travelling through a secure network in the UK and abroad. This allows shoppers to track and follow the progress of the item up to the point when it’s delivered.

If you’re not already making your products on marketplaces and on your website available to Australia then it’s time to start doing so.

In the four and a bit years as eBay’s corporate blogger he’s achieved a hell of a lot – 1,250 blog posts, 8,000+ comments, 13 earnings calls, 8 seller releases, 7 eBay: On Locations, 2 analyst days and an eBay Live. Well not quite, he’s all set to head off for his seventh eBay: On Location in Denver this Friday. I wish I was going to be there to buy him a beer or two, so if you’re going please do so on my behalf.

It’s a tough call to leave a blog and pass the reins on to someone else. Blogs are like your babies and it tugged at my heartstrings to see Tamebay torn down yesterday and six years work disappear even though I knew it was about to be reborn as Tamebay Mark III that you see today. I’m really not sure how I’d feel about handing over to someone else and trusting that they’d look after it.

Thankfully it’s not my turn today, but I’ve spoken to RBH on many an occasion over the years and the one thing I do know is that he leaves with eBay Ink in splendid order for the new team to take over and take it forward. I’m looking forward the fresh ideas and perspectives that are bound to come but thankfully it’s not farewell to RBH.

I’m looking forward to bending his arm to give us the inside lowdown on StubHub. It’s a younger business than eBay and expanding rapidly so it’s going to be very different to eBay Corporate. StubHub has already expanded to the UK but we don’t hear too much about it. Come June the 18th when he starts at StubHub we’ll be badgering RBH for some top tips on how to snag the best tickets.

Bon Voyage Richard, see you on the other side and I hope you get a well deserved break in the middle!

PS It’s still your turn to buy the beers!

Some users report having temporarily lost their websites and users were unable to access to their 123-reg control panel and webmail during the outage.

123reg said that “Due to the nature and size of this attack the firewall systems in place needed to be reconfigured to block the bad traffic and allow the good traffic through. Our 24/7 network team picked up on this straight away and started to make changes to bring services back online to the Internet“.

They also added “Things may be a little slow over the next hour or so as we continue to configure the systems to effectively stop the attack. Thankfully, as the largest UK hosting provider, 123-reg has the data centre and team in place to combat these Internet criminals with minimal damage“.

These attacks are by their nature a bit of a nightmare so my sympathies go out to the engineers at 123-reg who have had a stressful morning. The good news is that things appear to be getting back to normal.

Many thanks to Andre of eSeller Solutions for the heads up on this story

It was less than 12 months ago that ekmPowershop who have been hugely successful in the UK spread their wings with ekmPowershop.es – a Spanish version of their easy to use shopping cart solution. Almost a year on and the ecommerce giant has 4 more foreign markets to add to their growing list of global accomplishments… as they set their sights on South America.

Latin American businesses are already selling online for the first time ever, using versions of ekmPowershop.com built especially for regions as varied as Mexico, Colombia and even further afield.

Last week marked the 7th “Internet Day” across most of Latin America and other nations where the Internet is emerging rapidly; a United Nations initiative aimed at raising awareness on how new technologies can improve peoples’ lives.

Steven Hickey, Head of Marketing and Business Development at ekmPowershop comments: “Taking ekmPowershop.com to developed and emerging markets is really exciting. Results from our Lat-am initiative just weeks in have surprised us all – in a region where the Internet is only just becoming available to lots of ordinary people. Things are really springing to life there, online shopping included. That’s on top of a solid 10 months in Spain, so we’re delighted with year one of our overseas efforts“.

From Europe to South America, ekmPowershop.com’s global strategy looks to be delivering early results. On the continent, ekmPowershop.es has established a healthy market share in Spain with its French project, ekmPowershop.fr due later in the summer. That will be the 6th foreign version of their ecommerce solution in the space of a year. The folks at ekmPowershop.com have been busy!

The old Tamebay may not have been broken but it was high time for an overhaul and today our new site is finally here.

For months, we’ve been working behind the scenes, and often late at night, on plans to make sure that Tamebay goes from strength to strength in the years to come. Step one was making sure we had the right hosting and ample bandwidth for the dramatic growth in traffic we’ve seen in the past few years. That was sorted a few months back.

Step two was a new site. Tamebay started as a labour of love and we never want to lose that enthusiasm. Nowadays Tamebay has tens of thousands of readers a week, we needed to make sure the site can take the load. Our last design has served us all well for four years, (does anyone still remember our original design?) but it’s time for another change and one that will work for a few years into the future and this is the result.

It’s been a new experience for us at Tamebay. In the past, Sue sorted out Tamebay’s look and feel and did a grand job. She also sorted all the techie stuff and the servers and the like but she isn’t currently available to guide us, so we have had to learn a lot in the absence of her expertise.

And we’ve had some sterling help. We’ve been working with a great bunch of guys at wearejh.com based in Nottingham. They’ve worked really hard to get this new site happening and we’re thrilled with their work. They’re young and brimming with clever ideas.

Needless to say, we’d love to hear your views and we know you won’t be shy. It’ll probably take you a while to become accustomed to the new look and feel of Tamebay so if you can’t find what you’re looking for please ask.

Tamebay needs to reflect the changing field of ecommerce and better serve an expanding readership as much interested in Facebook as Feedback. One of the problems of the old design was that stories you were commenting on rapidly disappeared from the home page, sometimes within a matter of hours. Now we’ll not only be able to present content in logical sections on Tamebay’s home page, but we’ll be able to keep the news you’re most interested in on the home page for longer.

We still have some parts of the site to work on, there are a few pages that need re-working and there are bound to be a few creases that need a quick run with the iron to get the wrinkles out. If you spot anything amiss or if something looks weird in the browser you’re using please let us know and we’ll try and sort it out sharpish.

Many thanks to everyone who made our new site possible, the techie guys at wearejh.com and vidahost.com, our advertisers without whom the site wouldn’t be possible, everyone who gave advice and input on the new design and of course to you our readers for supporting us over the past six years.

It’s rather like Doctor Who. We mention this because Sue wouldn’t forgive us if we didn’t. Everything must regenerate. Welcome to Tamebay Mark III.

Chris Dawson & Dan Wilson

James Daunt, Managing Director of Waterstones, said “At Waterstones, we are committed to improving our bookshops quite radically to offer the best possible book buying experience. It is a truly exciting prospect to harness also the respective strengths of Waterstones and Amazon to provide a dramatically better digital reading experience for our customers“.

I have to say I like Waterstones, I like being able to browse the shelves and pluck a paperback or two to read. Waterstones are putting coffee shops into their stores – I can see the attraction of a quiet afternoons reading over a cup of tea to while away a rainy afternoon. That’s nostaligia though, digital ebooks are the future and by allowing customers to thumb through the shelves and then purchase a digital edition Waterstones could easily capture some of the trade they are losing. Without offering digital versions customers will simply browse and then buy digital versions elsewhere.

Of course the book industry is likely to see this as a loss. Amazon is their biggest online threat and by embracing Kindle rather than an open standards platform Waterstones are buying into the company who have disrupted the book trade possibly more than any other in history. However if it helps to keep a good book retailer on our highstreets it has to be a good thing.