Half.com Announcements of Changes to Take Effect 10/20 and New Message Board

[amy]

Half.com's new message board on eBay

http://forums.ebay.com/db1/forum.jspa?fo...1000000002

They've made several new announcements in the past 2 weeks:

Elimination of Order Confirmations on Half.com (effective 10/20)
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?t...1000086302&tstart=0&mod=1128918350243

Change to Pre-Orders feature on Half.com (effective 10/20)
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?t...1000086320&tstart=0&mod=1128917481865

Changes to Searching & Browsing on Half.com (effective 10/20)
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?t...1000086305&tstart=0&mod=1128905084533

Improvement to Multiple-Item Sell Process on Half.com (effective 10/20)
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?t...1000086415&tstart=0&mod=1128867865054

Changes to Product Detail Pages on Half.com (effective 10/20)
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?t...1000086304&tstart=0&mod=1128840851624

Changes to "My Account" features on Half.com (effective 10/20)
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?t...1000086303&tstart=0&mod=1128802213397

Change to Payment Histories for Half.com users (effective 10/20)
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?t...1000086321&tstart=0&mod=1128799356337

Changes to Searching & Shops on Half.com (effective 10/20)
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?t...1000086307&tstart=0&mod=1128794410923

New Bulk Uploading and Order Processing Tool available for Half.com Sellers (effective 10/20)
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?t...1000086308&tstart=0&mod=1128776844901

New Fixed Shipping Charges for Game Systems sold on Half.com (effective 10/20)
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?t...1000086322&tstart=0&mod=1128754769978

[mandy]

Half.com Fix Status and Timeframes
georgel@ebay.com View Listings | Report Oct-21-05 11:49 PDT
Hi everybody!

Once again, thanks for all of your posts and information. Every change has a few bumps, and you're attentiveness and ability to share accurate information has really helped.

I've got some information for you on status of the problems and timeframes for fixes. Take a look and please ring in with questions. Note that we've got a team of people looking at this board and a large team working on fixes so you may start to see posts from people other than myself at this point. Also note that we won't respond to every single post, as many are repetitive and have the same problems as their root cause.

First, please note: SELLER PAYMENTS WILL BE MADE AS PER THE NORMAL SCHEDULE on October 23rd (Monday). Depending on your bank, you'll see your money sometime between Monday and Wednesday. The payment disbursement system and the accurate storage of your payment information has NOT been compromised in any way.

The root causes of all of the issues that people are reporting still stem from the same three things. They are:

1. Delay in moving payments/transaction information from the old system to the new.

2. Delay in moving inventory data from the old system to the new.

3. Users who ARE sellers not being flagged as such.

Note that all of this information is stored in the old system and is currently being transferred. All of the problems people are reporting stem from these problems. Those problems include incomplete transaction and payments history, missing inventory and inability to access seller accounts.

Fixes are presently being applied for all of these. The timeframes for these fixes are:

1. Incomplete payment/transaction information - fixed by 7PM pacific time Saturday.

2. Incomplete inventory - fixed by 9PM pacific time Friday.

3. Inability to access seller account - fixed by noon on saturday.

We hope this helps to set you at ease. Thanks for your support through this transition period.

Please feel free to shoot us a post with any issues or questions.

Thanks,

GL

[mandy]

eBay is modifying a policy it rolled out on October 20 affecting its Half.com service that was initially met with complaints from sellers. eBay announced the modification on October 25.

full article: http://auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m10/i27/s01

announcement from eBay:

Order Confirmation Solution

As stated in another post, we’ve come up with a compromise on confirmation. To recap, we’ve heard a lot of comments, but most of them seem to fall into the following:

1. How will buyers know that I’ve actually received the order and will ship it?
2. If certain sellers don’t want to deal with a confirmation step, then why not make it optional?

As you know, in the new process a seller can click a button to refund a seller if an order can’t be shipped. These orders are in the minority, so what happens to the majority of buyers who never know if they’re getting their order until it shows up on their doorstep. In order to help fix this issue, we’re going to add functionality to the “mark as shipped” function that we rolled out last week.

The feature will be very simple. A seller will simply choose the “mark as shipped” option once they have actually shipped the order. Choosing this will mark the order as shipped just as it does today. The additional feature is that this action will also cause an email to be sent to the buyer informing him or her that the seller has, in fact, shipped the order with a reminder on how long a standard media mail or priority mail shipment should take. In essence, the wording of this email will be very similar to the old “order confirmed” email that we sent out under the old model.

How does this differ from confirmation?

First, it’s optional. If a seller chooses not to use the feature, they don’t have to. Second, we will still assume that an order is confirmed when we send it to a seller. If a seller can’t ship for some reason, they’ll need to offer a refund. Third, the email should be a more accurate representation of when a seller has shipped since most sellers probably won’t flag an order as “shipped” until they’ve actually shipped it. Under the old system, we marked an order as shipped on the next business day after a seller confirmed – no matter when the seller shipped it.

What happens if I use File Exchange and I download orders? I don’t use the “mark as shipped” function. Am I at a disadvantage?

No. In conjunction with this change, we’ll include the buyer’s email address in the order file that we send through File Exchange and Selling Manger Pro. With that email address you can send any notification you’d like and customize it any way you’d like.

When does this roll out?

We expect this to roll out in a matter of weeks. The timing is not firm yet, but I wanted to announce the change to all of you first. I’ll post the timing on this thread as soon as I have it. We should know something this week.

So to sum up, while this isn’t confirmation as in the prior system it does hit the major criteria – it’s optional, it lets sellers inform the buyer on order receipt and shipping and it’s easy to use.

As always, holler with questions at georgel@ebay.com.

GL

http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?t...1000114411&tstart=0&mod=1130392349771

[amy]

list of expected fixes:

Order Confirmation

You’ve all been pretty clear about your feelings on this one. There is an equally adamant group that has voiced THEIR feedback on the confirmation feature and has said they’d like us to remove it. We can’t please everybody, but we think we have come up with a compromise solution. In a few minutes I’ll put up a separate post on this one. Sorry for the “teaser” here, but that post will be fairly long as well and I’d like to keep THIS post short and to the point.

ISBN/UPC Numbers

We’re going to put the ISBN/UPC numbers back to the sales emails. We heard that this is CRITICAL to your ability to fill an order. In addition, we’ll add them to the sales pages in “my account”.

Seller SKUs

A number of you went to some trouble to store your personal SKU in your notes to make items easier to retrieve. This will be added to the sales emails.

Author/Artist, Platform, Format, Year, Item Titles

Author or artist (for non-books), platform, format, year, etc. will be added back into emails and sales and purchases pages.

Linkable Titles on Sales and Purchase Pages

Lots of you had said this was a major time saver to be able to see the product page for a sale or purchase without having to do a search. We’ll link item titles on sales/purchase summary and detail pages so one click will take you there.

Date Listed

Probably the single biggest thing asked for by all of you. This will be added to the sale email.

Half.com Discussion Board Links

We’ll add links in the My Account section of Half.com so that more people will be able to find the Discussion Board.

What about Pre-Orders?

We hear you on pre-orders and we hear some of the good ideas for changing it so that it’s friendlier, less prone to item misrepresentation, etc. I won’t make an empty promise that pre-orders are coming back. What I can promise is that I’ll take all of the feedback that has been given, and we’ll consider bringing it back in the future if we can do it in a way that makes sense and that works for everyone. To be clear, this means that it might be months before you see a “re-born” pre-order functionality on the site if ever. I promise to make an honest effort to reach out to all of you directly as we think about this. If you’d be interested in such a discussion, shoot me an email with PRE-ORDERS as the subject line. I’ll make sure you’re on the list of people to reach out to. One last thing on timing. We won’t be making any sort of progress on this until AFTER we’re though some of these problems we’re working on, so don’t think we’re ignoring you if you don’t get an email right away.

http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?t...1000114387&tstart=0
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?t...1000129012&tstart=0