How to Check an eBay Seller's Reputation (and Why You Should Do It).

When you buy something from an eBay seller, you are giving them your money and hoping that you will get something in return. However many guarantees of safety eBay might make to you, nothing is certain: if you just give your money to scammers all the time without doing any checks then the chances are you won't get all of that money back.

That's why you should always check the seller's reputation, or 'feedback rating'. This is a quick and easy-to-read summary of their history as an eBay seller, which gives you some idea of whether or not you should trust them with your money. Buying anything is a calculated risk: you want to minimise that risk.

How to Check Feedback Ratings.

On each item's description page, there is a box in the top-right hand corner about the seller, with the title 'Seller information'. This contains the seller's name, their feedback score, and their positive feedback percentage, as well as any stars they have earned.

Different coloured stars are given to eBay sellers depending on their rating, in this sequence: yellow, blue, turquoise, purple, red, green, shooting yellow, shooting turquoise, shooting purple, shooting red. Anyone with a 'shooting' star is an experienced eBay member who you should be able to trust.

If you click on the seller's name, you can get to a more detailed view of their reputation - their 'member profile' page. This page shows the total number of people who gave them a positive or negative rating, as well as a breakdown by time. You can also see a complete history of all the comments that have ever been left about them, with the most recent first.

What to Look For.

You might assume that anyone with a very high number can be trusted, but that isn't always true. It is more important to look at their positive feedback percentage - and you should really consider anything below 99% to be a red flag and investigate further.

Take a look through the first visible page with the most recent transactions: are there any negative comments? What do they say? Take others' experiences into account, as they could happen to you if you deal with this person. Be careful not to punish sellers unfairly, however, if they did bad things in their past on eBay but have improved since. You should look at the breakdown by time and ignore any negative feedback that was left a long time ago. Equally, though, you should sit up and pay attention if a seller seems to have been left an out-of-character amount of bad feedback in the last month or so.

Now that you know who to trust, it is worth learning a little more about how the different kinds of auctions work, so that you don't accidentally slip up and make yourself and your feedback page look bad. Our next email will be about the different kinds of auctions you can expect to encounter during your time on eBay.

Where Adsense Should Appear

When deciding whether to incorporate Adsense into your website there are several factors to consider. Many feel that it diminishes their brand, whilst others see it as a useful tool for visitors which creates revenues and makes their content profitable.

The choice can largely come down to the commercial goals and the purpose of your website. Many businesses who sell products decide to place Adsense adverts within their website. This would appear to be a strange choice, opening up opportunities for rivals to promote their service or product to your potential customer base.

Many publishers claim that they are only doing this to allow companies who provide ancillary services to advertise. These claims have some merit, as those who for example sell pillows could provide those who sell bedding with an opportunity to advertise.

Although this would make sense, there are still those online retailers who allow rivals to penetrate their audience. Many claim that there are still benefits in allowing your direct competitors to advertise within your website. One of these is that ultimately if visitors wish to see your competitors they would be able to see them through a Google search regardless. This may be true however the thought of an established brand like coco-cola having a Pepsi advert in their website is not even a possibility.

Another factor which is considered in this situation is that publishers do not feel that Adsense is effective in making conversions. They feel that visitors who would click on adverts are not highly qualified customers, as they would quickly navigate to the materials or products that interest them if they were.

Despite Adsense being a questionable choice for online retailers, it is surely a good supplementary service for other varieties of online publishers. For example, a website which provides a free service like dictionary.com gets high levels of traffic, and is able to make their service profitable through adsense. This has been the case for Bloggers who originally provided content free of charge, being unable to reach the scale that is necessary to contract with advertisers directly.

This could also apply to other previously free services, including wider forms of information broadcast, and news for example. In 2006 a man who later published a selection of Videos claims to make $19,000 a month through adsense, claiming that he was also contacted through Google to help him increase the CTR (Click Through Rate) that he achieved. The thought of success like this has been a major factor in stimulating online publishers to opt for Adsense.

Many publishers also claim that adsense makes their website look more professional. Those who are able to contract with advertisers are generally seen to provide a service with large appeal, and therefore those unfamiliar with the program may feel that the Adsense advertiser is in this position.

Adsense however, is also aligned with those publishers who use the service purely to provide links to adverts. Everyone has done a Google search, clicked on an Adwords advert and came into a website which reads top ten resources on… This is a major problem, as is generally something that surfers find frustrating. If people see that it says adverts by Google, and they then see adverts by Google on another site, they may align that site with consumer unfriendly practices. This is therefore an issue which Google has to address, to maintain Adsense as a reputable service.

Regardless of the disadvantages and the websites for which the service may be inappropriate it is still a useful tool for website visitors. Those who visit a website, and click on a link provide revenues for the publisher, whilst those who provide free services are able to generate revenue.

The only fear that Google has, is that rival PPC programs offer better deals to publishers and they decide to go elsewhere, therefore taking advertisers with them. However, ultimately it is best for advertisers and publishers if they largely remain in same PPC circuit.

You need to have optimized niche website templates for best results. You may find the best adsense templates and blog templates at www.AdsenseTemplates.com (http://www.adsensetemplates.com). They are offering 100 fresh new templates every month.

The Part of Palm that Smartphone Companies Should be Bidding For

Anytime a CEO gets ousted in disgrace, his or her pet projects are vulnerable to a quick trip to the gallows if they falter.  Mark Hurd was the CEO who bought Palm, so it was at risk from the moment Hurd left.  HP's mobile device performance had not been good this year -- the Veer smartphone launched and vanished on the same day, and the TouchPad turned out to be a sales disaster.  If Leo Apotheker had chosen to invest further in the business, it would have turned into his responsibility.  It's far easier to just walk away.

You can make an argument that HP should have given the business more time, and it's a shame that we'll never get to see the Pre 3.  But Palm's sales have been troubled for years, and I think its fundamental mistake was that it tried to be too much like Apple.  From the start, Pre was aimed at the same users and the same usages as the iPhone (even down to a failed effort to tie the phone directly to iTunes).  HP proved that most people don't want to buy an incremental improvement to the iPhone that can't run iOS apps.

Then just for kicks, HP went and proved the same point again with the TouchPad.

The lesson to other mobile companies, I think, is that unless you're a low-cost Asian vendor, you need to differentiate from Apple, not draft behind it.

I'd love to see Web OS live on, but the hardware debacle makes that less likely.  As I mentioned the other day, licensees choose an OS because they think it'll generate a lot of unit sales for them.  Since Web OS couldn't do that for HP, who else would want to license it?

If you believe that every smartphone company needs to own its own OS, we ought to see a mad bidding war between LG, HTC, Sony Ericsson, Dell, and maybe Samsung to buy Web OS.  (The loser could get RIM as a consolation prize.)  Maybe a buyout will still happen, but I think HP has probably been quietly shopping Web OS for a while, and if there were interest it would have tried to close a deal before today's announcement.

(By the way, HTC, if you do buy Web OS, you should insist that HP give you the Palm brand name as well.  It's still far better known than the HTC brand in the US.  The same logic applies for LG.)

But I'm not persuaded that buying an OS is the right way to go for any smartphone company.  Turning yourself into a second-class imitation of Apple isn't a winning strategy, especially if your company doesn't know how to manage an operating system.  (Case in point, look what it did to HP.)  You can create great mobile systems without controlling the OS; all you need is a great system development team and the freedom to put a software layer on top of whatever OS you use.

That means the real crown jewel in the Web OS business unit is the system development people -- the product managers and engineers -- that HP just threw in the garbage.  In my opinion, that's the part of Palm that smartphone companies should be fighting for.

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Morgan Stanley Report Says GM Should Get Rid Of Cash-Bleeding Opel

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General Motors is keeping its Opel/Vauxhall European brands, despite losing money. In an attempt to reduce costs, utilize its plants’ output and face the European financial crisis, it has formed an alliance with PSA Peugeot Citroen.

Yet analysts are not convinced that any rescue plan GM may have devised for its ailing European brands can succeed. In fact, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said that, while it might be costly right now, selling Opel is in GM’s long-term interest.

Its European operations have cost GM US$16 billion in the last 12 years, and Jonas estimates that if it decides to hold on to Opel, it will lose a further US$12.3 billion until 2021. Since selling the brand would cost an estimated US$7-13 billion or even more, Jonas says it is the right thing to do.

“One of the worst things in the auto industry is owning a cash-burning, resource-consuming business”, Jonas wrote in his research note. “We believe the time has come for GM to find a new home for Opel”, he added.

GM CEO Dan Akerson, who almost sold Opel to Magna International in 2009 before changing his mind at the 11th hour, insists that he is not giving up on Opel, which only yesterday announced its expansion to Australia and Chile.

Company spokesman Jim Cain said: “Despite the tough environment for the automotive business in Europe we believe we have an opportunity to turn the Opel/Vauxhall business around and bring it back to long-term profitability.”

Jonas, on the other hand, believes that Chevrolet should be GM’s only European mass-market brand: “We’d rather see GM with a 3 percent share in Europe generating a profit than an 8 percent market share generating massive losses”.

By Andrew Tsaousis

Story References: Reuters

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