The WWW Goes Olympic Crazy And EBay’s ‘Gymnastic’ Reversal, Chinavasion On The World Wide Web

The Olympics haven’t been the only things making a splash on the Internet this month with eBay contortions and Amazon plans also causing a stir. check out more inside.

Angry seller comments on blogs and forums like powersellers has got eBay trying to do a back flip and dismount on existing site changes

The world has gone nuts over the Olympics again as the collective world stops what its doing and turns its eyes to Beijing to see what the athletes are doing over in China.

The desire to watch their countries do well and win lots of medals has made lesser-followed sports, which usually get very little coverage, being discussed heavily on the Internet.

Sites like Google (blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-08-08-n56.html) have got in on the action by putting out several olympics home pages for the event in a number of functions as well as a couple of handy widgets/applications. One of which will let you watch the movement in the medal tally directly on your desktop.

The Olympics igoogle page (google.cn/ig/china) Chinese netizens will see until August 22

Some of the sponsors have got in on the action too and Chinese computer giant, Lenovo, has launched a blog space (summergames.lenovo.com/?language=en) and twitter page (twitter.com/lenovo2008) where athletes can put their experiences online. The site is a little corporate in appearance but according to Danwei (danwei.org/blogs/athletebloggers_at_beijing_oly.php) is not censored at all.

Netizens seem to be more critical of this Olympic games though. In what might be the fallout from the trouble earlier in the year there have been a number of posts on the various ‘virtual’ efforts (athlists.com/?p=36) of officials.

If the eBay management team were in an Olympics event it would definitely be the gymnastics. They’ve been twisting, turning, and doing quick back flips recently after site changes first rolled out were rolled back in (rksmythe.blogspot.com/2008/08/ebay-abandons-more-changes.html) recently with very little explanation in apparent reference to seller outrage in blogs (mysilentteam.com/public/372.cfm), news sources and forum sites like powersellersunite.com.

One of potentially the biggest changes made was a reversal of the links policy (cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MfcISAPICommand=SearchHelp&requestEncoding=1&searchString=links+policy) which would potentially prevent sellers from using eBay as a marketing device by making all links to email addresses and websites outside of eBay against the rules. We here at Chinavasion blogged about changes early last month and it is good to see eBay appearing to listen to its seller base for a change.

We here at Chinavasion wrote about this problem earlier last month

Another change eBay management are now rolling out which may disgruntle sellers further is the stopping of multiple listings. In a blog entitled Identical items and finding items (ebay.com/aw/core/200807.shtml#2008-07-31132029) Senior Director of Finding, Jeff King said that they would prevent sellers from listing the item more than once on eBay. This is sure to put another spanner in the works for powersellers and sellers alike with eBay and ecommerce-dedicated blog, eBay strategies (ebaystrategies.blogs.com/ebay_strategies/2008/08/finding-changes.html) already discussing the problems and work-around solutions to this new policy.

It’s always worth remembering that there are eBay alternatives out there and while they don’t have the traffic they don’t have as much drama either.

Another big development in the ecommerce world is the very hush hush launch of an Amazon checkout system (payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business?sn=cba/o). While it hasn’t even had a press release yet some sellers say it will provide very strong competition to PayPal with eBay strategy writer Scott Winego (ebaystrategies.blogs.com/ebay_strategies/2008/07/amazon-launches.html) saying that Amazon already pips PayPal at the post for active buyers (by the tune of 20 million) in his blog discussing the pros and cons of the new system.

Chinavasion on the World-Wide Web

• Crave (news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10007390-1.html) thought our e cigarette was pretty cool (although we’re kinda surprised they didn’t pick up our newer model, which comes with its own cigarette case, check out the video soon on YouTube)
  

• Engadget (engadget.com/2008/07/25/chinavasions-worlds-thinnest-mp4-player-just-may-be-accurate/) thought the description of the world’s thinnest MP4 was truthful and Coolest Gadgets (coolest-gadgets.com/20080725/chinavasion-produces-the-%e2%80%9cworld%e2%80%99s-thinnest%e2%80%9d-pmp/) took a closer look.

• Engadget (engadget.com/2008/08/04/chinavasions-wireless-dental-camera-enables-at-home-grill-exami/) thought our wireless dental camera was just what the doctor ordered.

Chinavasion in video