eBay Provides New Ways To Sell

…of multiple items with a single shopping cart, instead of bidding on a number of auctions.

Items features on eBay Express all sell for a fixed price. Users of eBay already know the Buy It Now options many sellers use, and that option delivered about a third of eBay’s sales in the most recent fiscal quarter. Certain Buy It Now listings from qualified sellers that do not have an auction option will appear on Express.

Sellers can participate in eBay Express if they have feedback of 100 ratings or more, with at least 98 percent of that feedback positive. Items have to be listed as Fixed Price or Store Inventory, and include a photo, a description of the item’s condition, and shipping costs in the shipping fields.

The Express site also requires that sellers allow items to be shipped to unconfirmed addresses or make sale-by-sale decisions. That allows buyers to send an item to a work address or to someone else as a gift. Sellers who do not want to ship to unconfirmed addresses can opt out of Express for their listings.

EBay has promised to “make best efforts to fight chargebacks” since the shipment to an unconfirmed address would remove the sale from the usual PayPal Seller Protection coverage.

A business model becomes apparent immediately, as all sellers must be PayPal merchants. EBay receives a cut from sales handled through PayPal. In the first quarter of 2006, PayPal processed about $8.8 billion in payments on eBay and elsewhere.

EBay listed reasons for launching the Express site in a FAQ for sellers:

All of the features of eBay apply to Express, since an Express listing is an eBay listing. The policies and feedback that apply on eBay also apply to Express. Feedback from each site carries over to the other.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.