Interviews

AuctionBytes has seen a surge in interest from readers about selling on multiple marketplaces. In February, we interviewed Amazon.com's Matt Williams to learn more about selling on the Amazon marketplace. In today's issue, we bring you Amazon's answers to questions we commonly hear from online sellers who are considering - or are already - selling on "the river." Questions range from category restrictions to trust-and-safety concerns. Read Amazon's responses to seller questions, and then leave your comments on the AuctionBytes Blog.

By Ina Steiner

AuctionBytes has seen a surge in interest from readers about selling on multiple marketplaces. In February, we interviewed Amazon.com's Matt Williams to learn more about selling on the Amazon marketplace. In today's issue, we bring you Amazon's answers to questions we commonly hear from online sellers who are considering - or are already - selling on "the river." Questions range from category restrictions to trust-and-safety concerns. Read Amazon's responses to seller questions, and then leave your comments on the AuctionBytes Blog.

By Ina Steiner

My Portfolio colleague Amy Wallace interviewed just-departed eBay CEO Meg Whitman for the May issue. Of course, only a fraction of the interview got in the magazine. So I asked Amy to share the rest here. Other than a few trims, here is the mostly unedited transcript

By Kevin Maney

Google Checkout allows sellers to process payments online, and its new shopping cart feature allows users to give websites "online store" capabilities. Prem Ramaswami, Associate Product Manager for Google Checkout, joins Ina Steiner of AuctionBytes to give us an update on Google's payment service. Ramaswami says Google Checkout's mission is to create the fastest, safest and most convenient shopping method for buyers, while enabling merchants to set up stores with simple point-and-click functionality.

By Ina Steiner

Chris Dawson is the co-founder of eBay-related blog TameBay and a consultant on how to sell via online marketplaces. We asked him a few things about how eBay is developing as an e-commerce channel for businesses in the UK.

On e-consultancy.com

Hacker Shane Macaulay says he never intended to harm users by auctioning a laptop with Vista attack code on it. When Shane Macaulay tried to sell the Fujitsu U810 laptop he won in a hacking contest last week, it seemed almost like an April Fool's joke. He said that a top-quality hacker could probably examine the machine's hard drive and dig up the unpatched zero-day exploit code he had used to compromise the computer in the PWN 2 OWN contest that he'd just won. "This laptop is a good case study for any forensics group/company/individual that wants to prove how cool they are, and a live example, not canned of what a typical incident responce sitchiation [sic] would look like," he wrote in his listing.

By Robert McMillan

This week saw new eBay CEO John Donahoe taking the helm and ushering in a new era at the online auctioning behemoth. So how will eBay’s approach change under its new management? Will it become less community focused? And can the new team remove hurdles that have prevented many big brands from investing in eBay sales programmes?

On e-consultancy.com

In an interview last week with Amazon.com's Director of Business Solutions Matt Williams, he talked about options for third-party sellers on Amazon. Part 1 of the interview, which discussed the Selling on Amazon program, was published in the February 17th issue of the AuctionBytes-Update newsletter. Part 2 of the interview follows and covers Webstore by Amazon, a solution that lets sellers create their own branded ecommerce sites, and Amazon's latest offering, Product Ads.

By Ina Steiner

Jack Ma talks the past, present and future of Alibaba with the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce's Bulletin staff

On alibaba.bblog.pl

AuctionBytes Editor Ina Steiner interviews Debbie Levitt about next month's As Was Conference for eBay sellers. The podcast interview is available online. The transcript of the interview follows.

By Ina Steiner

He calls his online creation a 'happy accident'

Twelve years ago, Craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark was still a software programmer at Charles Schwab & Co. But that changed after he began sending out self-composed e-mails to a small group of friends to tell them of cool art exhibits and high-tech events going on in his adopted city of San Francisco. Newmark quit his job, did freelance programming and dove into what he saw as the promise of the Internet as a place to share information. From those original, e-mailed events lists arose Craigslist.org, a mostly free site for online classified ads. It's now grown into listings for some 450 cities and towns around the world, where people can buy and sell, find a date, and barter for goods and services. Newmark, 55, founded Craigslist -- it was incorporated in 1999 -- as a for-profit company, and works there today as a customer service representative. More than 30 million people globally use the site each month. He talked with Computerworld recently about how his site began and where it's going.

By Todd R. Weiss

New features will increase customer conversion and buyer confidence

There are hosted shopping carts, licensed shopping carts and custom carts. Every ecommerce merchant uses a cart, and we've asked Steve Woda, chairman and founder of buySAFE, a firm that offers insurance for the safety and reliability of ecommerce transactions, for his views on the look of a future shopping cart. Since its inception buySAFE has guaranteed over 13,000,000 ecommerce transactions.

On practicalecommerce.com