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Here’s some interesting news. It looks like eBay is selling out to Tom.com – PayPal at the least. Read more:

Auctionbytes and here

TechCrunch

Shanghai Daily

Blogging Stocks

Looks to be an interesting road ahead for us third-party developers!

We’ve got some new updates to List’d that everyone is going to be excited about. We launched just 8 weeks ago, and during that whole time we have been listening and responding to each and every feedback email. Your feedback has been instrumental in us making these changes, and we’re grateful for your insights.

Calculated Shipping
First off, a number of you have been asking for eBay’s “Calculated Shipping” feature. This has been added and is now part of the new listing tool. You still have the options for “no shipping” or a flat fee, so this third option should give you even more control and will also provide a better user experience for your buyers.

The new Calculated Shipping interface

Listing Length: More Options
You’ve asked for the ability to create listings of varying lengths. Now you can put an item on eBay for 3, 5, 7, or 10 days.

The new interface for listing length

There are a number of other small tweaks, all made to tighten the application up and make your experience better. As always, please contact us if you have any suggestions or problems. We’re always interested in hearing your thoughts.

For those of you who have heard from us about coming features that aren’t listed here, be assured that we are working on them, some changes take longer than others.

The Professional eBay Sellers Alliance, also known as PESA, is having it\’s Fall summit in San Francisco September 20-22.

It does look like an interesting conference with some big names in it. What I find most interesting though, is the fact that the organization grew up in and around eBay, but is looking at multi-channel selling solutions now. So, they\’re going beyond eBay.

An exerpt from the email they sent me:

PESA has brought top level executive decision makers from eBay, Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, Overstock and other major marketplaces to San Francisco on Sept. 20th and 21st for two days that could very well signify an important eCommerce milestone. These two days will become known in history as a first of its kind event.

Now, I don\’t know if it will be a \”first of its kind event\”, so if you go to it you\’ll have to tell me. However, I do think it looks very interesting.

One of the discussions we’ve been having around the List’d office lately, is the fact that eBay is not the end-all be-all of eCommerce. These thoughts were born out of some research that we did into eBay trends and eCommerce statistics.

We believe that eBay is a great place to list your items, but it might make sense to think of it as a marketing channel for your eCommerce store.

It’s time to stop thinking of eBay as representative of the opportunities available within the ecommerce marketplace. Though eBay holds 14% market share in the $313 billion global ecommerce market – that only serves to highlight how much more is available.

It appears that eBay is having a demand problem – for some reason, people just aren’t buying as much.

(HT: Scott Wingo)

The Sellers’ Story
At the micro-level, there has been a growing amount of resentment towards eBay and its heavy-handed policies. What was once grudgingly accepted as the price of making a lot of money on eBay is not accepted any longer – since not as much money is being made.

Merchants are beginning to transition off of a heavy eBay diet to a multi-channel one. For many individuals and small businesses, that means opening their own web store, many times on their own domain. Most are realizing that there are other marketplaces and pushing some inventory towards those channels. Examples include Yahoo, Amazon, Craigslist and Google Base. The truth is, once eBay merchants go multi-channel, the other channels are typically more profitable.

There are a growing number of sellers who see eBay more as a marketing channel than an actual sales channel. Because eBay does provide a good deal of traffic, they can keep the cash flow positive by selling on eBay. However, this comes at the cost of higher margins which are found elsewhere. Many are moving their own core inventory to their own websites and using eBay only as a marketing tool.

Summary
We believe List’d is one of the best tools you can find to list single items on eBay. If you’re strictly an off-eBay merchant, take the time to see what can happen when you sell a few items on eBay. See if it increases the number of people coming to your store – you might not have as big of a margin on that sale, but you’ll raise awareness of your store for when they decide to buy again.

You find some real deals sometimes on eBay, and the sale of Huckabuck is one of them. Huckabuck is a meta search engine that returns a compilation of search results from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Digg, Del.icio.us and Technorati. It marries the best of the established search engines with the best of the Web 2.0 social search/networks.

If you’re in the market for a meta search engine, you won’t find a better looking one, or one that does more to differentiate itself from the crowd. Take a look at the listing on eBay. Now, if only they had used List’d to create this listing… (Note to all web developers: f you’re looking to sell your Web 2.0 application on eBay, get in touch with me to help you put together the perfect listing.)