posted on September 2, 2000 03:00:24 AM new
Amen Granee!
The fact is you don't even have to take any time clicking NW. Simply send the user ID & what they are doing wrong on this form
http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/abuse/cgi_abuse
and Yahoo will take care of it. They do not actively police their site, I wish they did & wouldn't have come up with the limits to try & stop the spammers. Alot of them will be using multi IDs & be harder to spot now but there will probably still be plenty with only one item to sell but running 333 ads for it. If we help get rid of them maybe, hopefully the rest of us will get our selling limits increased or they'll do away with limits entirely.
posted on September 2, 2000 10:49:13 PM new
I think Granee's post on Sept. 1 is an excellent summary of what may be the reasons the Yahoobots came up with this once again ill conceived scheme.
The main problem to all their solutions seems to be related to some early mistakes they made which Yisgood described in his fine comments August 31.
Let's look at Granlee's list:
1) To discourage sellers from running 2-3 day auctions that stay at the top of the pages THAT DON'T SELL, relisting over and over, without price drops or changes.
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As for items that don't sell, I think I've proven with my thousands of obscure thrift store items, from OOP books, old golf clubs, computer games that are DOS based as well as for APPLE, Atari, Commodore and Amiga, etc. that these items just don't sellout quickly. The ONLY reason they can be advertised is because they are free to list and because the audience for them is small but Global.
For sellers who hog the best spots with short duration ads, there are easier ways to handle that without hurting the rest of us. How about relisted ads must be the maximum (10 days)? That would discourage sellers who would have to copy and paste the ad copy into a new window...and would take several minutes per ad. And allowing use of the BUY price only to maximum duration ads (10 days).
And what about simply making a rule not to do this? If you emailed all sellers not to run short length ads if they intend to relist, many would comply. Nobody has ever made this against the rules.
And why not hire some people to police the site and boot some offenders off who break the rules?
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2) To discourage sellers who run longer auctions THAT DON'T SELL from automatically relisting over and over, without price drops or changes.
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I've found that price drops do not work for the stuff I sell. Finding the buyer that wants it is. If you are selling Beanie babies, I'm sure the Economic 101 model works fine. But not with rare and obscure items. All you do by reducing the price is make sure you make minimum wage when the right buyer comes along
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3) To discourage sellers from using the "auto resubmit two times" so they will THINK about the listing when they resubmit it, making improvements or changes or price drops to try to get the item to sell.
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Time is money. The solution that works for me is to list a LOT of items and wait. If I spend all day relisting, that's less time for shoping and listing new items.
What's Yahoo got against the classified ad anyways? They allowed us to create one on their site. If they want this to be purely auctions, they could kill the BUY price. it's clear to me that the auction is a fad and suitable only to a small %age of items sold on Yahoo or ePay. The success of 1st Bid WINS auctions are proof. The reason i don't list in the classifieds is because people don't look there. It's Yahoo's job to tie the auctions to the classifieds in a way that the same search engine hits both sites at the same time. Then people would look there.
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4) To discourage spammers (of which there are PLENTY on Yahoo) from spamming duplicate listings.
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This is already against the rules. Kick them off. You say they will just come back with another ID? Well, as Yisgood pointed out, these mistakes Yahoo made long ago are killing them. You need to match names and addresses with credit cards and once banned crosscheck the names and addresses of new applicants with the blacklist. An offender would have to use another REAL id with a REAL credit card that matches that ID. It would take a professional crook to beat that system. The problem is it would cost Yahoo 10 cents to verify credit card info and a bit of computer programming to crosscheck everything. However they have written a lot of code lately so that doesn't seem to be the problem. The 10 cents does.
It seems to me the spammers don't have very many items to spam. So they list their item or 2 all over the place. The new rules limite them to 333 full time spams per month. I'll bet that really hurts not getting to have their ads in more than 333 different categories.
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5) To discourage the listing of NEW, FULL-PRICED goods which are plentiful and take longer to sell, and encourage the listing of UNIQUE ANTIQUES and COLLECTIBLES and deeply discounted new goods, which are more likely to bring multiple bids and sell on the first listing.
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I couldn't disagree more. New, fullpriced goods. The same stuff sold everywhere else should be sold cheaper here because of low overhead. If the seller isn't selling , he will lower his price because he can.... Unique items and collectibles, whether antique or not do NOT sell quickly on Yahoo. I know because I have a 2 year history and several thousand sales. If you want to start the bidding at $1 you would sell more, loose money and even then much would not sell the 1st listing.
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6) As much as eBay is EMBARRASSED at being called a "flea market" or "garage sale", and is trying its darndest to SHED THAT IMAGE, the "flea market" merchandise and prices are WHAT MADE EBAY WHAT IT IS. Yahoo Auction needs more "old" and "one-of-a-kind", and less NEW, mass-produced goods at retail price.
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Correct, and the long running ad with a BUY price is the way to beat ePay at their own game. These changes don't change anything except kill off high volume sellers like myself. I don't know how many there are, so I don't know the impact. My auctions are down from 1800 to 900 and falling fast as they expire. I can't use the Bulk loader because some moron messed up the counter when making these new changes and it shows the 1500 auctions I'm allowed this month to already be over limit.I spent about 4 minutes per auction converting to the bulk loader this summer. That's 15 per hour. That's well over 100 hours. That's not counting all the time to create the ads in the first place. So I will not just start relisting one at a time.
I think the way to analize the Yahoobots is to realize they are a "portal" site, trying to be a community place where people come and stay online. It's a silly concept to me, but they do have a lot of irons in the fire and Yahoo Auctions but are a small part. Their advertising revenus might not be impacted if they quit Yahoo Auctions altogether.
So the people in charge are allowed to mess around with it according to their whims. I think they are not concerned with # of sales. I think they are concentrating on making Yahoo Auctions a true auction site rather than letting it evolve as a selling venue whichever way that goes. Their plan is to make it very Buyer friendly and not Seller friendly. And maybe that is best for their business. Why let somebody sell new stuff for free when every where else there are fees? What they want is a place for people who traditionally have garage sales, to list that same stuff for nearly nothing and take what they can get. That's a buyers market and it's how I too like to do my shopping. Sellers won't make money doing this full time and so be it. We're all a big happy community of Yahoos.
Of course the spammers will continue to spam. Sellers with less than 333 "stale" items will still post their stale items.
And a few sellers like myself will be hurt as well as their CUSTOMERS. Like this stale item which recently sold:
http://page.auctions.yahoo.com/auction/34497709
Thats a Frank Sinatra tape on BETA videotape. He thanked me for using 1st bid WINS.
And this stale item:
http://page.auctions.yahoo.com/auction/32125288
That took a year to sell. It's software for the Atari ST computer. The buyer was happy to get it. Next time he won't be so lucky, because there's no way I can pay to list stuff like that.
So the stuff you say Yahoo needs will tend to diminish. And what about the guy selling new computers? He didn't have 333 of them anyway, so the world will continue to have one more place to buy a new computer.
posted on September 2, 2000 11:38:52 PM new
One thing I forgot to mention is the coments made about categories. It seems the buyers who browse don't much use the search engine. (If you do use the search engine, how can you possibly complain about stale items?)
One solution to this problem was mentioned to create more subcategories. For example, books have a long tradition of categores and you can visit any book shop and simply copy their groups to come up with something we are all famaliar with. Yahoo has been told repeatedly how poor both sales and categories are in books. For example, where would you list a biography? In biographys? There isn't any. There is a category for manuscripts. There's 10 items currently there. Say your book is a novel. Put it in fiction? Sorry, no can do. Of course if you have a map of Africa, you can put it in Maps and Atlases- Africa. There's 7 of those. So you pretend your book was a best seller and dump it it that category (or should I say non-category) along with 13,000 others or maybe put it in Other with 12,000 other books.
So unless somebody searches for your book or author, you have no chance selling it. Nobody is going to browse for long in books.
Another area I use a lot is old computer software. There were only a few computer platform for personal computers. The 8 bits were IBM and compatibles, Apple II, TRS-80, Atari, TI 99/4a, and Commodore 64. Later came Macintosh, Amiga. That wouldn't take much work to make subcategories for each one. As it stands there are good sub categories for IBM (PC) and a few for Macintosh (no game category for Macintosh...why?) and the rest have to be lumped into Computers-Software-Other.
The Yahoobots time could have been better spend fixing their category tree to help solve the complaints about browsing.
Maybe they were pissed at the mockery when they did make more sub-categories for videotapes.
The tree used to be pretty much like this:
Video Tapes (35,130),Action & Adventure (4,876),Adult (9,822),Animation (3,324),Children's ,3,366),Classic Hollywood (1,044),Comedy (3,496),Crime (585),Documentaries (541),Drama ,1,786),Horror (846),Music Videos (3,988),Musicals (180),Science Fiction & Fantasy (2,126),Silent (32),Sports (300),Western (391),Other (2,299).
I had lots of tapes and never had a problem finding a place to put them. However some categories had 3 or 4 thousand items. So guess the browsers complained. What they did was make up a bunch of new sub-categories in many of these. here's just one example, the sub categories in Action & Adventure:
No this isn't a joke, or maybe it is. As you can see, most sellers just dumped their items in OTHER. What is Blaxploitation anyways? This doesn't solve any problems for the shopper browsing. Who goes to Yahoo to browse for a Post-Apocalyptic@ Action and Adventure movie? If they know what they want they use the search engine.
So I think you can see the Yahoobots are not real strong in the major category called BRAINS. Quite frankly, for the seller it's been one bad change after another all year, and its difficult to say this is a better site than it was last year from ANYBODY's perspective.
posted on September 3, 2000 12:39:07 AM new
ZZ
I know you have made reference to Tom C. lately like he's still with Yahoo. I saw an article about a month ago that he was out and his asst Brian Fitzgerald took over. And just look at all the changes of the past month.
posted on September 3, 2000 09:38:07 AM new
I'LL be honest, I would MUCH prefer to pay Yahoo a flat fee, $29.95-$35.00 a month and list all you want, than have to mess with this ridiculous formula and worrying about how many auctions I'll have left.
You don't have to pay a monthly fee, just FEATURE your auctions.
Quote from Yahoo head Brian Fitzgerald, "Fitzgerald told AW that sellers could pay to list their items as "Category Featured" auctions and not have these auctions count toward their total."
