Value Added Resource Week In Review 9-4-22

Liz Morton ~ Founder
Liz Morton ~ Founder


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Welcome to the Value Added Resource ecommerce marketplace news week in review!

Don't forget USPS, UPS and FedEx will be closed for the Labor Day holiday and it's also the official launch of the Indie Sellers Guild, built by the organizers of the Etsy Strike movement.

Etsy Strike Now Indie Sellers Guild Official Launch September 5th
Sellers behind the Etsy Strike movement are launching Indie Sellers Guild on Labor Day.

eBay News

eBay has lost another longtime technical leader as VP Engineering Seller Experience Scot Hamilton quietly departed the company to take a role at Amazon tackling last mile delivery as Vice President Planning and Routing Technology.

Scot's counterpart on the buyer side of the platform, VP Buyer Experience Mohan Patt, left for Meta/Facebook in April and Pete Thompson also left his role as Chief Product Officer in March.

What do these high level departures say about CEO Jamie Iannone's leadership and should the Board of Directors be concerned?

eBay Loses Scot Hamilton VP Engineering Seller Experience
eBay loses another longtime tech leader - Scot Hamilton VP Engineering Seller Experience heads to Amazon.

On that note, in what will certainly come as no surprise to many sellers, it appears eBay is in need of some help finding a corporate strategy.

More specifically, there's a new job opening for Principle, Corporate Strategy, presumably reporting to eBay's Chief Business and Strategy Officer, Stefanie Jay.

My top priorities for eBay corporate strategy - fix the glitches, drop the vertical focus nonsense and get serious about addressing core issues to gain back seller trust.

What would yours be?

eBay Searching For Corporate Strategy
eBay seeks help finding corporate strategy - is CEO Jamie Iannone’s vertical focus failing?

I've been tracking open jobs at eBay and while it appears hiring in general may be slowing down at the company, there are a few areas where it looks like they are ramping up hiring - Crypto & NFTs and now Payments.

New job openings in payment fraud strategy, accounting systems management & payments money movement point to possible enhancements in eBay’s Payment & Billing Platform.

Are Changes To eBay Payments Coming Soon?
eBay may be looking to beef up its Payments offerings, if open job positions are any indication.

eBay announced this week that eBay Open UK will be returning with a live in person event slated for September 22.

eBay Open UK Slated For September 22, 2022
eBayUK is getting in on the eBay Open 2022 action with an in person event planned for September 22, 2022

Tech Issues

Shopify experienced checkout outages on some sites when an error caused the checkout button to loop by to cart instead of completing checkout.

Shopify Stores Experience Checkout Outage
Shopify merchants report buyers unable to complete orders, error causes checkout button loop back to cart.

Etsy sellers reported issues with Shop Manager, seeing blank pages when trying to edit listings and experiencing problems creating new listings.

Etsy Shop Manager Issues, Blank Page When Editing
Etsy sellers report Shop Manager issues - blank pages when editing listings & problems creating new listings.

eBay Standard Envelope service is intermittently not available, even though listings meet all criteria to qualify.

eBay Standard Envelope Shipping Not Available 9-3-22
eBay sellers report Standard Envelope shipping not available, even though listings meet criteria to qualify.

And eBay is once again making changes to things that aren't broken and breaking them in the process - this time with yet another tweak to the design of sale notification emails.

eBay Changes Sale Notification Emails, Again
Changes to eBay’s sold item notification emails raise seller concerns about spoofing & spam.

Other Ecommerce News

Shopify is going to war against Amazon Buy With Prime, taking bold new steps to deter merchants from enabling the service with security and terms of service violation warnings.

Are the security concerns legitimate or is this just an attempt to cut out a competitor & drive merchants to use Shop Pay & Shop Promise?

Shopify Warns Sellers Away From Amazon Buy With Prime
Shopify tries to deter merchants from using Amazon Buy With Prime with security warning about script.

Amazon has a new service coming in 2023 to help sellers solve supply chain struggles - Amazon Warehousing & Distribution.

Amazon Warehousing & Distribution Supply Chain Solution
Amazon introduces Warehousing & Distribution to help sellers solve supply chain struggles, coming in 2023.

And finally, Etsy sellers in Canada have been struggling with tax issues since changes were implemented July 1st and now some report they're being charged retroactively for tax that should have been assessed on seller fees for the last 2 months.

Etsy Retroactively Charges Canada Sellers Tax On Fees
Canadian Etsy sellers are being retroactively charged tax on seller fees going back to July 1, 2022.

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Week In Review