I’m not all that impressed with the “Cyber Monday” sales (and shipping & financing discounts), but if you want to check out an overview to decide for yourself you can do so at blackfday.com.  In my opinion, the best offer is the 20% off certain stores if you use PayPal to checkout (most appear to be capped at $50 or so).

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If you’re interested in setting up Zen Cart to sell downloadable products (mp3’s, e-books, etc), I highly recommend taking a look at the Downloadable Products in Zen Cart by Adam at I Make Websites. It is very easy to understand and you should have your downloadable products ready to go very quickly and painlessly.

As always, feel free to contact us regarding our Zen Cart services.

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While going through my logs for Watershed Studio’s Blog this evening I noticed a few hits from Google for searches for “closing ebay store” (#14 as of 8-22-2006), “ebay stores closing” (#30 as of 8-22-2006) and “ebay stores” (#43 as of 8-22-2006). While the first two terms don’t really surprise me since they are more specific, the last one is much higher than I would have anticipated (in the top 100, maybe, but not in the top 50). My guess is that CNN Money’s (Fortune & Business 2.0) post on The Browser Blog plays a role in that though (thanks guys!).

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The Dilute the Magic Blog has been launched and is going to focus on making sense of e-commerce by offering anecdotes, tips and reviews of the available e-commerce options. The blog will be administered by Watershed Studio and will be accepting submissions and questions from readers. If there’s something that you’re curious about or have a submission, please contact us.

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The Dilute the Magic Blog has been launched and is going to focus on making sense of e-commerce by offering anecdotes, tips and reviews of the available e-commerce options. The blog will be administered by Watershed Studio and will be accepting submissions and questions from readers. If there’s something that you’re curious about or have a submission, please contact Watershed Studio.

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I think your advisors are wrong Meg and Bill. The “magic”, the “uniqueness”, of eBay is not in the thrill of auctions – it is, as your last ad campaign clearly states, finding whatever “IT” is on eBay. “IT” doesn’t necessarily sell in 14 days – “IT” cannot be found at Wal-Mart, “IT” cannot be found in a “smart search” that brings the results a nuclear scientist led think tank team decides you want, “IT” cannot be found in filtered search results. IT can be found because thousands (or is it hundreds of thousands?) store owners have been able to provide a larger inventory of items than they could possibly afford to auction. IT can be found because IT is available 24/7/365 and not in 1,3,7,10 day auctions.

Let me tell you some of the “IT’s” I have sold and maybe some others will post their magic “IT” stories. I sold a circa 1910 photo postcard to a woman in Idaho – her grandfather was pictured on the face of the card when he went to seek his fortune in California (she bought the card for her 70 year old father’s birthday); a woman in Washington state found several photo postcards of her family from a small town in Minnesota (also circa 1910); a woman about to celebrate her golden wedding anniversary found a postcard of the motel where she spent her wedding night (postmarked the same year), many people have found postcards picturing their homes, their small hometowns, their favorite vacation spots…many of these people didn’t even KNOW they were looking for postcards when they typed their surname, their hometown etc in the search box. They are not postcard collectors. How else could any of these folks world-wide find exactly the “IT” they want from a seller in Minnesota?? This is the “magic” of eBay! I desperately hope you can find a way to keep the “magic” alive without imperiling the company. You are smart people – surely there’s a way.

This is an excellent thread started by Moody Mommy’s Marvelous Postcards eBay store user neglus in the eBay forums. Check it out and be sure to add your own stories.

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I’m getting close to launching one of my (at least) two online stores so I decided to pull the plug on my eBay Store today before I got hit with the new rate hike. Doing the math, even if I only sell half of what I did on eBay at 10-20% less, I should be in same monthly ballpark since my only real monthly cost is my time. And as an added bonus, I decided to take the time to learn yet another open source CMS/shopping cart solution so that I can comfortably add that service to the Watershed Studio arsenal.

More to come…

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Lately we’ve been getting a little disgusted with eBay’s antics, specifically towards their eBay Stores users.

Here’s their latest bit on nonsense…

…(Core listings — auction-style, auction-style with Buy It Now, and Fixed Price) are the foundation of eBay…they account for about 91% of the gross merchandise value sold on eBay.com

Store Inventory listings now comprise about 83% of active eBay.com listings…(and) current Store Inventory insertion fees don’t cover eBay’s costs for hosting them.

These Store Inventory format insertion fees take effect Aug. 22, 2006:

Starting Price 	   New Insertion Fee 	Current Fee
$0.01 -- 24.99 	   5¢ 	                2¢
$25.00 and higher  10¢ 	                2¢

Some Store Inventory format final value fees also will also increase, effective Aug. 22, 2006:

Selling Price 	   New Final Value Fee 	Current Fee
$0.01 -- 25.00 	       10% 	         8%
$25.01 -- 100.00        7%               5%
$100.01 -- 1,000.00 	5% (no change) 	 5%
$1,000.01 and higher 	3% (no change) 	 3%

…the best way to display Store Inventory listings on the site…is, when a buyer’s search returns 30 or less core listings, we display up to 30 Store Inventory listings.

…starting in about a month, we’ll also include an unlimited number of Store Inventory listings after all matching core listings, when the buyer clicks the Buy It Now listings tab at the top of every search results page. When the buyer hasn’t selected this option, eBay.com will display Store Inventory listings along with core listings as described above.

So, to paraphrase, eBay is saying, “Good riddance eBay store owners. We’ve crunched the numbers and you’re not worth our time and efforts. We hope to gain back the auction listings that we’ve lost over the years.”

One huge thing that we’ve noticed over the years is that many people don’t want to hassle with auctions to possibly save a few dollars. Many people want to find what they’re after, buy it and have it in their possession within a week of purchase. From what eBay has been saying, it would appear that they are oblivious to this fact.

In addition to this major issue, in the past week or so eBay decided to not allow users to use Google’s Checkout as a method of payment in an effort to strong-arm people into using eBay’s comparable (and more expensive) PayPal service (tough they deny that of course).

In the near future we will be closing our eBay store. That may be a few months down the road as we explore our options, but eBay will be getting a whole lot less of our money in the coming months and we will not be suggesting eBay Stores as on option for clients. (We will stick with eBay’s Skype service until they give us a good reason not to.) From what’s out there right now we’re leaning towards a Zen Cart installation even though it’s a little bloated and doesn’t function exactly how we’d like, but it does offer key features that we need, is reliable and is free (plus domain and hosting fees of course).

While there are options out there for e-commerce shopping cart services, most are not very user friendly and/or affordable at an entry level plus we don’t know of any that are very well publicized. If someone came out with an affordable, easy to use and well publicized shopping cart system they’d be setup to make a fortune if they did it right. If someone wants to consider offering VC for such a service, let us know.

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