Noteworthy Ebay Developments: Facebook apps, New Homepage, Google vs. eBay battle, ...

A lot of news is coming out around the EBay Live trade show. Here's a few things I took away of interest:

1. EBay is working on a new homepage. The prototype looks like a much more web2.0 experience, and I think they're on the right track with this one. Hopefully they'll be incorporating some of their new community focus into it. I'd really love to see eBay wiki more involved. You can check out their new prototype here: http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200706111436382.html

2. Since Facebook announced developer tools, eBay and some other third party software providers are already beginning to make apps for it. They are fairly simple listing displays and searches thus far. I'll cover them in more detail when I find one that's actually interesting. Expect this to be an area of rapid growth, though.

3. Paypal announced some interesting new tool to assess the riskiness of dealing with payments. Not too much info provided yet, but it might have a large impact on how payments are dealt with by sellers.

4. EBay and google are still battling it out (see my previous post). Rumor has it that EBay shut off their entire adwords campain today, boycotting google ads. Tests around 12 noon eastern time showed this to be the case. I've also heard that EBay has ended talks with Google on adding Google Checkout to EBay's E-commerce platform, ProStores. Unfortunately, I think this is a battle that EBay is going to lose. EBay depends way too much on Google for traffic. More importantly, it's EBay's sellers who ultimately feel the impact. Read More...

Google Holds Party to Protest EBay's Ban on Google Checkout

Head over to cnet for an interesting article on google's latest action to protest eBay's ban of Google checkout; they're throwing a party!

Ebay still claims that a year of operation is not long enough to prove the payment service is trustworthy. For once, I actually see where eBay is coming from (a little). EBay has had an increasingly negative brand connotation with fraud. If they allowed sellers to use google checkout, and checkout screwed up a bunch of payments, it would reflect highly negatively to those many buyers. Many buyers would not understand that eBay really had nothing to do with it.

With all the bad press lately that Google Checkout is getting in the UK—decling credit cards, double charging, and not allowing withdrawls—there might be some validity to eBay's claims.

Eventually, I hope eBay caves. I'm not a huge fan of Google Checkout, but I do think it's going to be increasingly necessary. See my post on Google Checkout's Effect on Hits and Sales for more info. Read More...

Wize.com Releases New Widget

Need another way to make some cash on your website or blog? Wize.com has a new widget that shows popular products in a category and ranks them based on aggregated user ratings from the web. I think it's worth checking out at: wize.com/typepad. Look all the way to the right for a widget preview.

Wize.com is a new CSE (Comparison Shopping Engine) distinguished by its "WizeRank." Wize aggregates user ratings from across the web to provide a ranking for products. I was playing with the site a little this morning, and I really think they have something good going here.

Hopefully, they will be coming out a way for businesses to upload their products directly. Surfing their site, it didn't look like they have that yet. If any of the Wize.com folks are reading this, let us know if that's in the works! Read More...