Archive for July, 2006

 Auction Bytes
Sellers have identified a glitch that affects shoppers’ ability to find all relevant items when searching within eBay Stores. Sellers noticed the problem as early as July 10, though some have been complaining about eBay’s search function for months.
 

 
eBay did not update its Systems Announcement board to alert buyers and sellers to the problem. [...]

 Business Wire
Vocal Laboratories Inc. (www.vocalabs.com) today announced the results of its latest SectorPulse study on the quality of telephone based customer service among five financial services companies tracked over the first six months of 2006. While not a direct competitor to traditional banks, PayPal, a subsidiary of e-Bay (NASDAQ:EBAY) processes millions of online financial transactions [...]

 Gambling 911
eBay, for whatever the reason, has made itself a staunch ally of those looking to ban online gambling, this while its subsidiary, PayPal, embraced online gambling in the European nations as recently as February - though there is no sign of PayPal deposit methods featured on the BetFair site currently.

In other words, [...]

 IT Business
Items for sale on eBay range from the sublime to the ridiculous, but the manner in which you pay for them is no laughing matter for the auction giant.
Among the options are: Bidpay, Propay, Interac Email Money Transfer (a Canadian service formerly known as Certapay), and, of course, its own service PayPal. What it [...]

 Red Herring

Call it the ultimate test of convergence. Skype—best known for cheap, PC-based calls—is now available on a slim Wi-Fi handset that goes on sale this month. The sleek new handset being hawked by NetGear will work through ordinary Wi-Fi high-speed wireless connections. Vonage, best known for bringing Internet calls to ordinary handsets, won’t be [...]

AllBusiness:
If you sell products on eBay for your home-based business do you allow for local pickups? eBay does offer that as a shipping option and I’m sure it works very well for businesses who have a physical location away from home. But it doesn’t work very well for home-based businesses. The more we sell on [...]

 Engadget
Earlier this week, a gentleman named Charlie Paglee received a Skype call from a colleague in China — nothing out of the ordinary, except for the fact that this particular call was coming from an unofficial, homemade Skype client. Paglee, who cofounded the VoIP startup Vozin Communications, claims that the Chinese friend he spoke with [...]

 Central Florida
A renowned marine research institute is working to help keep endangered animals in the water and off of Internet auction sites.
Scientists at Sarasota’s Mote Marine Laboratory are helping internet auction sites like eBay identify endangered marine animals before they’re sold.
 
Selling endangered animals for any purpose is illegal.
They hope what they’re doing will help keep [...]

Santa Cruz Sentinel 
On the day that Ken Walton’s book “Fake: Forgery, Lies & eBay” was released — April 25 — there was a knock on his door.
The man at the door was dressed in a suit and tie. When Walton opened the door, he expected to hear the opening spiel of a Jehovah’s Witness.
Instead, the [...]

 Canoe Money
With more and more budding entrepreneurs plying their trades online, Canada’s underground economy is soaring through cyberspace in a big way, experts say.
“There’s always been an underground economy with some businesses, but the Internet’s going to cause a proliferation in the opportunities available,” said Rick Broadhead, a Toronto-based expert on electronic commerce. “There’s a [...]