Alibaba has announced it has purchased Auctiva, the developer of third-party tools for eBay sellers and ecommerce merchants. Auctiva provides a variety of listing, marketing and management tools as well as image hosting and online storefronts, and claims around 170,000 active users.

The purchase follows Alibaba's acquisition of Vendio in June.

As with the Vendio acquisition, this purchase is being presented as a way to create a seamless system for merchants to purchase and re-sell inventory. Auctiva's platform will be integrated with AliExpress, Alibaba's wholesale platform, so that sellers can purchase through AliExpress and then list via eBay with Auctiva.

The financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

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According to eBay residents of some of the most wealthy areas of the country are being driven to eBay to buy big name brands at knock down prices. Affluent area of London including Fulham, Wandsworth, Clapham, and Putney are flocking to eBay to source designer fashion at knock down prices.

Wealthy areas outside London are also showing the same trend. Alderley Edge – home to some of the UK's best paid footballers – as well as expensive areas of Leeds, Edinburgh, Belfast, Morpeth and Cardiff have all recorded increased activity.

The study analysed the increasing number of people using the site who live in post codes which have some of the most expensive houses in the UK. The study suggests that the shopping habits of those who measure their wealth in hundreds of millions of pounds has remained relatively unchanged by the economic downturn. They still continue to buy directly from the big names in designer wear. However, the picture changes significantly in the next tier down, in areas where people have previously measured their wealth in mere millions.

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I have reported frequently on a range of securities law violations by Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK). The company's latest earnings report on Aug. 9 raises still new questions, concerning possible insider trading and misleading statements by the company's CEO, Patrick Byrne.

On Aug. 9, Overstock.com issued its Q2 2010 10-Q (quarter ended June 30) report and surprised investors by reporting a $1.4 million loss, or a loss of $0.06 per share, compared to a small $319k reported profit or earnings per share of $0.01 in the previous year's comparable quarter, despite higher revenues.

Overstock.com failed to meet consensus analyst expectations for earnings, too. Overstock.com's reported loss of $0.06 per share was far worse than analyst expectations of a $0.04 per share loss or a 50% higher loss than expected.

A disturbing event preceded this announcement.

On May 20, 2010, Patrick Byrne's 100% controlled High Plains Investments LLC dumped 140,000 company shares and collected over $3 million in proceeds during the last several days, according to SEC filings. That was the first time that Patrick Byrne had ever sold any Overstock.com shares under his control. In my blog, I noted that such a sale was "not a bullish signal to investors."

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The U.S. government has charged two eBay affiliates with wire fraud in a case involving "cookie stuffing." eBay had filed a lawsuit against them and a third affiliate in 2008; that case is now on hold while criminal charges proceed. Shawn Hogan of Digital Point Solutions (DPS) - eBay's top affiliate in 2007 - pled not guilty in July and will appear before District Court Judge Fogel on September 9, 2010. Brian Dunning pled not guilty and will appear in court on August 19, 2010.

The government accused both men of "cookie stuffing," the act of depositing a cookie containing an Affiliate ID onto a user's computer without that user having clicked on an advertisement or link. (eBay uses cookies to track which affiliate - if any - to pay for driving traffic to its website.) The government charged DPS of purposefully creating computer code that prevented eBay's home page from loading on the user's computer screen.

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PayPal is conducting a survey to determine how much sellers would be willing to pay for a new seller protection program. PayPal exposed survey respondents to five variations of the program and asked a series of questions after each.

One plan offered expanded seller protection, covering chargebacks and Item Not Received claims, and might cost sellers between .5% - 2% of the transaction value.

Another plan would give sellers credits every time one of their customers used PayPal that the seller could use towards reversing chargebacks or claims with no documentation. Another plan would allow sellers to choose which transaction to cover.

A fourth plan would offer Shipping Protection when using a PayPal Shipping Partner website to ship an item, while a fifth plan would offer Fraud Protection.

The five plans as outlined in the survey follow below:

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Doesn't ebay have more gall than ever. They care not an ounce for Sellers but now they want them to notify Congress and the Senate that we don't want to collect sales tax for every state. I do it for PA & MD and it's all electronic; no problem. They just don't want to lose business and act like they are doing the seller a favor looking out for us. that would be the first time.