Channeladvisor insite is back with us again a month earlier in September. Better for the Christmas rush but maybe the timing is why the Birmingham event has had to be cancelled. But no fear, Manchester is not far away so I shall be attending the Manchester event!

Ebay is doing some funky (and possible flunky knowing eBay) things in the next 12 months, changing the customer experience, fiddling with the feedback and unpaid item process, writing bad automated emails that you can’t change….

The double edged sword in this mix is the eBay shopping cart. On one side its a big ‘YAY’ finally eBay has done this but a big…hmmmm as third party checkouts will be banned from June next year.

We knew that things would get difficult but as an eBay buyer this is a good move, the eBay checkout process is familiar and quick. On the other hand as a seller, third party checkouts let you use other card payment systems other than paypal. From next June it will just be known that you use Paypal for eBay and that’s it.

eBay wants the money to keep within its walls, it has more control over it that way, it can refund a buyer and take the money away from the seller at its own discretion. eBay wants a dictatorship and not a democracy.

Will this totalitarian eBay control be a good thing or bad thing? We can only wait and see, its only the kind of control Amazon has over its sellers and that’s doing okay for itself.

However this move might take eBay away from its community routes which made it great, and this is a shame.

Is this freedom of community a little to hard to control now the hyperweb has become so big? Fraud, privacy and security always feature in the news to terrify people and I wwould like to hear eBay speak at insite about its direction and why it has taken those decisions.

Two great forces on the interweb for me are Amazon and Ratuken which operate a shopping cart. Rakuten are going from strength to strength.

Rakuten are a big lust for me with a fantastic kimono section and for a English site just machine translated is surprisingly not that complicated to buy from. I do think we shall see more of this marketplace in the western hemisphere with their acquisition of things over this way :)

Rakuten, make sure you let your shop owners have a unique design…I could do with making money from you to buy more kimono stuffs….and err…lets sort that shipping out its like a black hole when you buy if you don’t know how much things cost to be shipped from Japan :(

*edited to remove the over use of the word ‘however’