eBay sellers will have to get used to a new way of selling on the U.S. site in March when eBay eliminates Store inventory format and institutes new fees. The changes to eBay Stores don't come as a surprise to most sellers, especially after eBay's fourth-quarter earnings call with Wall Street analysts last week where CEO John Donahoe gave broad hints about what was to come.

With the new eBay Stores pricing, it's much more expensive to list in Stores format for low-volume sellers - sellers pay the same $15.95/month subscription fee, but rather than paying as low as 3 cents to list, they must pay a 20-cent insertion fee.

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Amazon experienced a 29% surge in unique visitors from September to December, according to data provided by Nielsen, while eBay experienced flat numbers for the last four months of the year. Amazon reached 66.472 million unique visitors in December, up 9% from November and up 8.8% from December 2008.

eBay is currently at 2005 levels in terms of unique visitors after peaking in 2006. As the following chart shows, eBay had topped out at 66.193 million unique visitors in December 2006 and hasn't broken the 60 million mark since August 2007. eBay had 51 million unique visitors to its site in December 2009, down 0.27% from November and down 11% from December 2008.

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Bill Me Later is facing a class-action lawsuit claiming the online sales processor skirts California consumer protection laws to hike its interest rates.

Kyle Sawyer, a Bill Me Later customer in Torrance, Calif., filed the lawsuit Jan. 6 in U.S. District Court for the northern district of California. The complaint accuses Timonium-based Bill Me Later, a subsidiary of online auctioneer eBay Inc., of using a middleman to avoid California law prohibiting exorbitant credit penalties and interest rates.

The lawsuit seeks refunds of unjust fees and cancellation of loans for Bill Me Later customers in California. It also asks Bill Me Later and eBay to pay damages equal to three times the interest it charged Sawyer and any additional plaintiffs who join the lawsuit.

Bill Me Later is an online payment processor that Internet retailers use to boost sales. When making a purchase online, consumers who choose to use Bill Me Later undergo an instant credit check by the company, which it uses to decide whether to approve or deny the sale. If approved, Bill Me Later then foots the bill for the purchase and charges the customer like a credit card company would.

The lawsuit argues that Bill Me Later evades consumer protection laws because it isn't a chartered bank or other financial institution. If it were, it would be subject to consumer protection laws limiting interest rates and penalty fees.
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PayPal is launching several new features for developers scheduled for release on January 21. Last week, the company released the enhancements in the PayPal Preview Sandbox environment so developers could preview them before they go live. New features include:

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Customers of the largest online retailers are more satisfied than ever according to ForeSee Results' annual report on holiday shoppers.

The ForeSee Results E-Retail Satisfaction Index (U.S. Holiday Edition) jumped 7 percent to 79 on the Index's 100-point scale, a new all-time high. Websites for Macys, SonyStyle, The Gap, The Home Shopping Network and Overstock.com had the greatest increases in satisfaction year over year, with all five seeing increases of 10 percent or more.

"Even in this tough economic climate, e-retail continues to be the bright spot in a dark environment and last year's declines are proving to be the anomaly," said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results.

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eBay has tapped technology from Click Forensics, which verifies audiences and traffic quality for online advertisers, to block fraudulent and invalid traffic from paid search ad campaigns. The campaigns have been designed by merchants that sell products and service in the network.

Some merchants were clicking on ads to exhaust daily ad budgets of competitors.They also found fraudulent clicks on ads in eBay's Partner Network, where they allow partners to send traffic to eBay merchants. Steve O'Brien, vice president of marketing for Click Forensics, calls the move "classic competitor click fraud."

O'Brien declined to describe the extent of the click fraud problem. He did say that by working to filter out low-quality and invalid traffic, Click Forensics will help eBay advertisers on AdCommerce gain higher-quality audiences that can lower fraud rates.

"We process every click for every campaign," O'Brien says. "Our technology looks for patterns of fraud or invalid traffic. That could be as simple as seeing a click from a prior source and we know it's fraudulent, that this click is not human. We recognize it's a bot or a spider, clearly not a person with an intention to buy something."

The application doesn't replace another, according to Alexis Van De Wyer, director of advertising for eBay. "We have spent a lot of time and effort building an internal click filtering system that is the primary mechanism through which we assess click ac ...