On Tuesday we posted some comments from large UK media sellers on the recent changes in the eBay fee structure in certain media-related categories.

Today we turn to a large UK seller in the consumer electronics category for their reaction.

Luzern Solutions, based out of Dublin, uses ChannelAdvisor Merchant to sell refurbished and new PDAs, printers, projectors and other high ticket item consumer electronics on eBay UK (seller id luzerntech), France, Spain, Germany, Ireland and Italy (phew, did I miss any!) - as well as on Amazon and through their own ChannelAdvisor-powered website - www.luzernsolutions.com.

The man in charge of their eBay operations, Pat Sherlock, was overall in favour of the changes, although he felt there was still more to be done.

The reduction in the fees for computers and consumer electronics categories is certainly welcome news for LuzernTech. Coupled with the T&S initiatives this will allow large sellers like ourselves the opportunity to have more confidence and sell more products in the eBay marketplace as opposed to having to resort to other, less costly, channels. We obviously believe that as large high quality sellers we enhance eBay’s reputation every time we complete a sale on eBay. We still feel that the inflexibility of the fee structure and resulting inability for high volumes seller to achieve economies of scale for this area of costs is still a problem that eBay needs to address.

I agree with Pat - the recent T&S initiatives have been another big step in the right direction. But I’m interested to hear what blog readers think about Pat’s suggestion of discounts for higher volume sellers. It happens in every other area of business but eBay has always dismissed the concept - saying it upsets its ‘level playing field’ philosophy. What do you think?

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Not unexpected, eBay’s Rob Chestnut has announced today that eBay is rolling out its eBay Safeguarding Member IDs (SMI) to eBay.com and eBay Canada this week. Launched in November on eBay Motors, it masks bidders’ ID with aliases and provides an updated Bid History page.

Following SMI’s introduction last fall on eBay Motors, our eBay sites in the United Kingdom and Australia also made the decision to launch SMI. The results we’re seeing for all three launches indicate that these changes are having the impact we are striving for – in short, a reduction in unwanted commercial and malicious spam (including Fake Second Chance Offers) to bidders on higher-priced auction-style listings.

As a result eBay.com and eBay.ca will be launching SMI later this week. SMI will impact listings on eBay.com that start at or reach a bid level of $200 or greater. On eBay Canada, it will impact listings above the C$220 level. Please read our Safeguarding Member IDs Frequently Asked Questions for more information.

Rob’s also waving the big shill bidding stick, assuring the community that eBay has invested a significant amount of money into detecting and acting upon it. TameBay had an good guest post by an eBay Motors sellers a few weeks back that argues that these changes should in fact reduce this practice.

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Skype went through a major reorganization this morning. A bunch of senior executives were invited to the Skype London office (just next door to us here at ChannelAdvisor UK) and told they were being let go - ouch.

In total about 14 people are leaving the company, many of them pre-merger employees. Many of them have till end of the year to finish their duties at the company.

You can read more details here.

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