New eBay changes - not much in them for the small seller - even less for auctions

April 14, 2:08 PMAuctions and Antiques ExaminerWalt AuctionWally

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New eBay changes - not much in them for the small seller - even less for auctions

I've gone though the list of "big" eBay announcements today and I have to wonder, why did they bother?  The news definitely falls flat, I double checked my Twitter stream to make sure my opininon is shared, yup, I'm right, no one is buzzing about it. http://twitter.com/auctionwally

Then I bounced over to the official eBayInkblog and so far, there's 1 comment. 1!

Yesterday, I made some predictions on what eBay would say today, and a few of them were correct, here's the link if you care to gaze into my crystal ball.

If you want to see the full overview on eBay here  it is->

Announcements.

Almost all of the news released today seemed to be geared toward larger sellers or sellers of new items, but nothing particularly exciting even for them.

I found nothing very useful to smaller sellers of antiques, collectible or unique items and even less for those that do auctions. In fact, the only thing I could find in the whole list of announcements that even mentioned auctions, was a new realtime auction countdown timer. Woo-hoo! That's it? That's the best the biggest online auction company could do for it's auction format is a glorified egg timer?!  Really?

Here are a few of the changes that are coming:

• A new item page with photo zoom.
• New eBay product pages.  List via product details, this used to be called "pre-filled" item information.
• A new way to list in fixed price.
• Buyers incentives and loyalty programs. AKA - coupons. This was seen as so ridiculous by some sellers that it was parodied in a video recently, by John (ColderIce) Lawson. Click here to see this hilarious video.
• There will also be a new FAQs section that sellers can put on their pages
• Everyone will get selling manager, eBay's software to track your sales.
• A dispute resolution process that will take place on eBay rather than PayPal

Yawn...

These announcements sound like something you'd expect from Walmart, which more and more, eBay has the feel of.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Please feel free to leave your comments.

Click to see my free photo gallery antiques price reports: http://auctionwally.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-to-find-value-of-your-antiques-with.html