eBay announced some huge changes today, the summary is below.Nobody will have a problem with the reduced listing fees, but a lot of sellers are going to be outraged that they can no longer leave negative feedback for buyers. I don't see how the seller has any leverage to prevent buyer fraud without the ability to report bad buyers via feedback.eBay honcho Bill Cobb said there's "a lot of passion" among sellers about the feedback policy change. That's got to be the understatement of the decade.Also, last but not least, check out my new book about eBay, eBay 101: Selling on eBay for Part-time or Full-time income.

1. Reduced Listing Fees.    Lower Insertion Fees and adjusting Final Value Fees, which reduces the up-front costs of selling on eBay. Free Gallery picture on every listing, and some additional feature discounts.   
   • Lower insertion fees
   • Free Gallery picture with every listing
   • Lower fees for Gallery Plus, Picture Pack, and Feature Plus
2. Rewards for seller performance.    There will be discounts and incentives for sellers with the best customer satisfaction rates according to the anonymous five-star Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs).   
   • More search exposure through Best Match
   • Fee discounts for PowerSellers
   • Increased protection for PowerSellers
3. Feedback Changes.    The strategy is to "increase buyer confidence" and "showcase good sellers."    
   • Buyers will only be able to receive positive Feedback.
   • Positive repeat customer Feedback will count and Feedback more than 12 months old won't.
   • Negative and neutral Feedback left by the buyer will be removed for transactions in which a buyer doesn't respond to the Unpaid Item (UPI) or if the member is suspended.
     

QUESTION: Why do author Web sites send all their customers to Amazon? Intelligent authors sell books exclusively from their own sites. Why send your hard-won customer to Amazon, just so they can steal your customer data, take a big cut of your profit, and undermine your marketing effectiveness?

ANSWER: I agree that if the author or publisher wants to obtain contact information for the online book buyer, they won't get it if Amazon sells the book. So if it's essential to know who your buyers are, you've got to sell direct.

Of course, when your books are sold in a brick-and-mortar bookstore, you don't know who the buyers are. Barnes & Noble won't fork over customer data any faster than Amazon will.

However, the author or publisher can sell on Amazon Marketplace, give Amazon a 15 percent commission, and obtain the customer's name, address, and e-mail. Then you can ask the buyer to opt in to your mailing list.

It all boils down to whether you want to outsource fulfillment to Amazon or not. If you do, you won't get the customer information.

As to whether Amazon takes an unreasonably large share of the profit: Amazon does discount books aggressively. But no matter what price Amazon sells the book for, the publisher still gets their wholesale price. If the wholesale price doesn't leave the publisher enough profit, the publisher needs to raise the wholesale price -- either by giving Amazon a shorter wholesale discount, raising the wholesale/retail price, or a combination of these.

You're right, it is smart for authors and publishers to publicize their books on their own Web sites. And if you're willing to handle fulfillment, then you don't need to send customers to Amazon. But many (perhaps most) online book buyers prefer purchasing at Amazon. So if they're going to go there anyway, why not post an affiliate link so you can earn an additional 6 percent from the sale?

I also disagree with many of Amazon's policies and practices, but I appreciate how they provide free exposure for my books. Each sale you make at Amazon strengthens your position in their recommendations system, bringing you more exposure and more sales. And this prompts additional sales outside Amazon.

So as long as they bring in lots of sales, I'll keep trying to use Amazon to my advantage. If a better opportunity comes along, I'll welcome it.
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Steve Weber is author of Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors

QUESTION: How can I contact Amazon to get permission to post an author's blog on my book's product page? Can I control which of my books the blog posts will appear?

ANSWER: It's fairly easy to enroll in Amazon's blogging program, Amazon Connect, but it might take a couple of weeks before you're ready to blog.

First, go to your Amazon profile. Scroll about halfway down the page to the section called "Your Bibliography." Click the link at the top, "edit this list."

Here you can search for your titles by name, title or ISBN. When you find the desired title, click on the "Add" button, and it will move to the "Your Titles" column. You'll see a button for "specify verifier." They're asking for a contact at your publisher to verify that you're indeed the author of the book. Self-publishers can identify themselves as the "verifier."

It can take several days for the title to get approved. For my most recent title, I had to e-mail a reminder to Amazon (at connect-help@amazon.com) after they neglected to send the verifier e-mail after 10 days.

Once you've got book(s) enrolled in Connect, when you send a blog post you can specify which book(s) the post should appear with.

Here's more background info on Amazon Connect (see the last section on the page).

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Steve Weber is author of Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors

Here's an online video that does a pretty good job of selling a book. In this case, Tim Sykes is pitching his book An American Hedge Fund to Amazon shoppers.

At first glance, you might be skeptical of this book -- or any other book that promises a ton of money. But seeing a pitch directly from the author adds credibility. If I were shopping for a book like this and trying to choose between this one and a competing book, everything else being equal, I'd probably buy this one -- based on the strength of the video and the connection it provides to the author.

Sykes, who self-published the book, says Amazon charged him $2,500 to display the video on his book's detail page. (Of course that doesn't include the costs of producing the video.) But there's speculation Amazon will soon allow authors to post videos for free using its Connect author blogging tool.   In a recent survey, Amazon asked Connect participants whether adding videos to the program would be a good idea. Videos are already permitted in Amazon book reviews.

The great thing about Sykes' video is it's obvious he's talking to you -- the person shopping on Amazon. It's intimate, unlike most book videos, which resemble anything from a bad movie preview to a C-SPAN clip. I don't expect most author videos will be this good. Many will be generic crud from PR departments of big publishers -- the exact opposite of this one.

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Steve Weber is author of Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors

QUESTION: I just learned that one of the biggest Friends of the Library sales in the country, the Gainesville FOL sale, has banned the use of "scanning devices." Is this a good idea, and is it getting to be common?

ANSWER: I haven't run into this personally, but I'm hearing about it more and more -- price-checking being banned at book sales.

Back when I started selling some six years ago, there was no such thing as ScoutPal. You just had to go with your gut, and learn to pick books by experience. I've always bought a ton of books whenever I'm at a library sale. (I infrequently use cellphone price checking at big sales because it slows down how fast I can grab books. On the other hand, I don't have a scanner, I have to key in the ISBN. Maybe if I had a scanner I'd check prices more often.)

So I have mixed feelings about this. Even before there was such a thing as cellphone price-checking, I remember getting lots of dirty looks from FOL volunteers, simply because I was buying lots of books.

Why would people get mad at you for buying lots of books at a book sale? Three reasons, I guess --

• It creates more work for the FOL volunteer who has to total your bill and box up books.
• Some people resent it when they realize you're buying books to make a profit.
• Aggressive book dealers can make it harder for "regular" book sale attendees to find good books.

My reaction has always been, "Hey, it's a book sale! Sorry to be such a pain, but isn't this the whole point -- you want people to buy books?"

I guess from the point of view of the FOL volunteers, "dealers" can keep the rest of the public from finding good books at sales -- and that scanners have made that problem much worse. And that cellphone and PDA price-checking have made it so much easier to identify "dealers."

I'm sure we've all seen example of the rudest behavior on the part of book dealers who knock people over grabbing books, block off big stacks of books, scan them, then leave piles of books unsorted. Those few bad apples are the reason scanners are getting banned from more and more sales. That's too bad.

I'm curious if other people have run into this also.

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Well, here's a new shipping problem that hasn't gotten much attention yet: Next month the Postal Service will eliminate its international version of "Media Mail," which has traditionally been called "surface." This mode of economy shipping is called "surface" because the packages are shipped literally on the "surface" of cargo ships going overseas.

"Surface" mail is certainly slow -- it can take six weeks or more to arrive -- but it's far cheaper than airmail service, and so it's the only option for sending large, heavy books overseas. But it won't be an option anymore next month.

The timing on this really hurts, because:

• The Postal Service is jacking up rates across the board, including Global Priority airmail. On May 14, rates will rise from $9.50 to $11.00 (except for Canada or Mexico, which currently cost $7.50 and will rise to $9).
  

• Marketplaces such as Amazon apparently are expecting sellers to absorb the increased shipping rates. Amazon hasn't announced any plans to increase shipping credits, which are $9.98 for international salees.

This issue got some attention in the New York Times:

Many thousands of smaller used- and rare-book merchants say they will suffer, since they rely on foreign demand.

"If postage costs as much, if not more, than the book, it'll be hard to sell books," said Rob Stuart, owner of FrenchboroBooks.com, a seller of rare and antique books in Frenchboro, Maine. "And maybe 25 percent or more of my books sell internationally."

"We're already competing with the special deals the Postal Service does with Amazon, eBay and the big book purveyors that get cut rates on postage because of volume," Mr. Stuart said. "So when they drop economy international shipping, they're playing with a model that talks about economies of scale -— one that's balanced by a few huge operations, and wipes out the little operations."

Yvonne Yoerger, a spokeswoman for the Postal Service, said customers aren't yet aware of other options. She said "customized agreements" for surface mail are being developed for higher-volume shippers that will be enhanced over the next several months to address the needs of small businesses. "The Postal Service has a longstanding commitment to small businesses and is working to accommodate customers' needs as the international mail changes take effect," Ms. Yoerger said.

Jordan Gordon, who oversees AbeBooks's North American bookseller operations, said that from the roughly 8,000 American booksellers who list books on his site, 20 percent of the orders are from foreign customers. "These guys will definitely lose sales, because about half of the international orders they get are shipped at the surface rate," he said.

Booksellers who specialize in hard-to-find titles will be more heavily affected, Mr. Gordon said. "The Da Vinci Code" will ultimately sell domestically, but there are only a few people in the world interested in, say, an obscure book on medical ethics. And at vastly elevated prices, that book simply will not sell.

Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman, declined to comment about possible changes in shipping reimbursement policies or on how the new rates might affect Amazon's business.

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Amazon  announced it will adjust Marketplace shipping credits and variable closing fees when the Postal Service changes rates March 14:

To reflect these changes, we will increase Marketplace shipping credits for Books, Music, Movies, Video Games and Software, effective May 14th. The increases will range from $0.39 to $2.51 depending upon the product category and shipping method. In addition, we will implement modest increases to the variable closing fees in these product lines.

A full list of the changes compared with today's rates is set forth in the charts below. Here is a short summary of the changes:

1. The Books, Video Games and Software standard shipping credit will be increased from $3.49 to $3.99.

2. The Music, DVD and VHS standard shipping credit will increase from $2.59 to $2.98.

3. The Books, Video Games and Software variable closing fee will increase from $1.20 to $1.35.

4. The Music, DVD and VHS variable closing fee will be increased from $0.70 to $0.80.

Shipping credit changes:

Domestic Standard
Current: $3.49, New: $3.99

Expedited
Current: $5.99, New $6.99

International
Current: $9.98, New        $12.49

Variable closing fee changes:
 Current
 New
 
Books
 $1.20
 $1.35 
 
If you have questions about these changes, please contact Seller Support by going to our Help pages and clicking "Selling at Amazon.com," and then "Contact Customer Service." If you have feedback about these changes, and you do not need a response, please feel free to write to postage-increase-feedback@amazon.com