April 13th, 2008 by Skip McGrath

Australia has long been eBay’s test bed for major changes to the platform.

eBay tries things out there to see how they work and how loud members howl before rolling them out in the US. Here is an interesting email I received from one of my readers.

Hi Skip

Just on the odd chance another Aussie fan of yours hasn’t brought this to your attention already.

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/au/200804101058562.html

We’re a little upset down here in Australia as we have a very efficient internet BANK deposit system (which works between every financial institution in the country) and permits leaving detailed payment references for easy payment tracking, it also incurs sellers and buyers ZERO fees for transactions.  I know your books and columns advocate Paypal, but we still like to offer choices especially when direct deposits work well for us. I think once again as with FB 2.0 we are the test dummies for the market!

——————————————————-

Today is our first day in Venice. We are here for the Venice Festival of Media –an annual meeting of some of the top online media executives in the world. All the big guys of online marketing and media are here. I was eating breakfast and a group from Yahoo was heatedly debating who they should merge with. All of them are terrified of Microsoft and hope one of the other suitors wins out –but one guy who was obviously a political liberal, was deathly afraid of Rupert Murdoch’s group (owner of Fox News) as he thought Yahoo would be forced to become the conservative voice of the Internet. Interesting?

Karen and I flew direct from Seattle to Paris on Air France. We used our credit card airline points to upgrade to Business Class which was wonderful. We each had our own pod with a full recliner and a media center with a choice of over 20 movies, games, a selection of popular TV shows and some really great food. We changed planes in Paris for Venice and boy was inter-Europe business class a come down. The seating was essentially standard economy seating, but in business class the middle seat was empty. The breakfast was some little inedible snack in a sack and the aircraft looked like something that operated in a third-world carrier –run down and beat up.

Well enough of work. We are off to a walking tour of Venice then a city boat tour of the Grand Canal.

Ciao – Skip McGrath

See Also

• Special Discount Offer From WorldWide Brands OneSource
  Find drop shippers and light bulk wholesale sources for eBay sellers with OneSource. Limited Time – save $50