Firstly, my huge apologies in the lack of posts this week. I’m having some issues that prevent me from typing. If you are interested, you can read about the details here.

Since I can’t type for long periods of time, I’m going to give you a few quickies.

• Bonanzle takes on the steak house industry, renames themselves Bonanza. They also bought 1000 Markets (which is the name of a company, they didn’t literally buy 1000 other markets which is what I thought when I first read that). You can read their official press release here.
  My thoughts? I still have a store on Bonanzle/Bonanza. It still never sells anything. I think the new design looks nice (it is very very similar to the old so no need to panic if you liked the old design). I don’t know if the name change was the greatest idea since it undoes all their previous brand buzz and also makes people think of the steak house and TV show but no doubt they did research into it so they must have thought it was worth the risk. (I wonder if the name change was an attempt to distance them selves from all the backlash of the past year? I guess we’ll never know for sure.) I’ll try to poke around on the new site later and see if there is anything of note and write about it if there is. I’ll also still leave my inventory up as usual to see what happens.
• eBay introduces a new duplicate item policy that has some people up in arms. You can read about that here.
  My thoughts? I’m not sure if I’m up in arms yet. I’ll give you a post on it as soon if I figure out how it works specifically for me. On paper, how it stands, I have a lot of concerns and questions but I’m holding off on judgment until they give us the little “wizard” they promise in the near future so I can see it in practice. So stay tuned.
• eBay makes some changes to feedback and disputes. Lot’s of stuff in this release, you’ll want to read the whole thing here.

My thoughts? We already knew about the automatic 5 stars in your DSRs if you offer free shipping and buyers select it but they also added this little gem,

Starting in November, when you specify 1-day handling time, upload tracking information by the end of the next business day after the buyer’s payment clears, and we know  your package arrived within 4 business days from when the buyer pays (or arrived by your estimated delivery if that was earlier), eBay will automatically rate the transaction with 5 stars for shipping time.

This is beyond awesome. For all of us that ship within 24 hours anyway, this will pretty much mean automatic 5 stars every time for every shipping method but Parcel Post, Media Mail and the slower International methods. Score one for good ole Priority Mail. I would make-out with this part of the release and use tongue. Lots of it.

They also promise a new “feedback hub” that I guess we’ll need to see in action to really understand but it promises to let buyers and sellers share notes about each other that only eBay can see to help with issues like disputes. This sounds good in theory but I’m curious to see what it’s really like.

Also starting in November, when buyers go to leave feedback, along with your estimated delivery time and –if you uploaded tracking—the actual delivery date, buyers will now also see your specified item condition.

Since the only option for item condition on most items is Used or New I guess this really only benefits Media sellers but a good thought all the same. If only they could force the buyer to read the entire description again before they left feedback. Or, you know, before they buy the item in the first place. 😉

Anyway, some good news out of the ole ‘bay. This got much longer than I intended it to and I’m going to get in trouble so I have to cut this short. Please share your thoughts below.