When is it? It all starts Monday, January 30, 2006 at 00:00:01 EST (12:00 AM plus one second on January 30, 2006) and ends that same day Monday, January 30, 2006 23:59:59 EST (11:59 PM plus 59 seconds).

Who is included? All Canadian resident users who list their items on eBay.ca, eBay.com or eBay Motors will be eligible for the promotion. Listings created prior to the promotion and scheduled to start during the promotional period of January 30, 2006 will be eligible for the promotional fee. Items that are re-listed that match the above eligibility will qualify for the promotion. Items listed in two categories will receive the promotional fee for each item. Canadian residents who registered on other eBay sites will still be eligible, provided your registered address is Canadian.

What is excluded? Motors vehicles, Business and Industrial Capital Equipment, Store Inventory Format and Real Estate Ad Format listings will not be included in this promotion. The promotional rate does not apply to listings created prior to the promotional period and later revised during the promotional period. The promotional rate does not apply to listings created during the promotion January 30, 2006, but scheduled to start after the promotion ends.

For more details, including detailed eligibility and exclusions, click here.
For a general FAQ on seller promotions, click here.

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Over the past few days, PayPal experienced a technical issue which may have caused some confirmed shipping addresses to appear as unconfirmed or caused some payments to appear without shipping addresses. These issues have been resolved, and we appreciate your patience. Sellers who may have temporarily removed their preference to block payments from unconfirmed addresses are safe to reinstate that preference, if they choose.

As noted below, PayPal will treat eBay transactions for which the buyer paid between 1/21/06 until the time of this post as eligible for the Seller Protection Policy (SPP) even if the shipping address was, or appeared to be, unconfirmed. (Sellers must still meet all other conditions of SPP, including the policy's proof of delivery requirement.)

We apologize for any inconvenience these issues may have caused.

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Don’t forget to join Bill Cobb, President of eBay North America, for our Town Hall event on Thursday, January 26th at 5:00pm EST. Bill will be opening up the floor to questions, and wants to hear what’s on your mind.

To submit your question and to join the event on January 26th, please see our Town Hall page.

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	***Original: eBay Town Hall Event on Thursday, January 26th***
	25 January, 2006 | 10:49 Don’t forget to join Bill Cobb, President of eBay North America, for our Town Hall event on Thursday, January 26th at 5:00pm EST. Bill will be opening up the floor to questions, and wants to hear what’s on your mind. To submit your question and to join the event on January 26th, please see our Town Hall page.
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Hi...I'm Ira Grossman from eBay Canada’s Shipping team. I'm very pleased to announce that in the next few weeks, we are going to be releasing an online shipping solution for Canadian sellers that will help simplify shipping and increase selling efficiency.

Canadians listing items on www.ebay.ca and www.ebay.com will be able to create, purchase and print Canada Post and UPS shipping labels in minutes right from their computer – and directly through eBay or PayPal. Even your customs forms will be included automatically and will be printable right from your printer as part of the label printing process.

Best of all, in addition to saving time and effort, Canadians will enjoy valuable discounts when printing Canada Post shipping labels with eBay’s Online Shipping. They will save 8% on domestic services, including Regular Parcel, Expedited Parcel™ and Xpresspost™, and 9% on international services, including Expedited Parcel™ - U.S.A., Xpresspost™ - U.S.A. and Xpresspost™ - International.

Online Shipping has been in place on the US site for almost two years, and has been very well received by sellers and buyers. We are very excited about this new solution for Canadians which will make selling and shipping domestically and internationally cheaper, easier and faster.

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The eBay system will be undergoing general maintenance from approximately 02:00 EST on Friday, January 20th to 04:00 EST. During this maintenance period, certain eBay site features may be intermittently unavailable or slow.

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Bill Cobb

Hi...For a little over a year now, I've had the pleasure of being President of eBay North America. Through Town Hall events, eBay Live! email, and countless board discussions, you've told me and my team what's important to you. Listening to our Community - and making sure eBay delivers maximum value to you - is my job. And I want you to know how much we appreciate your business.

I'd like to start the year by making some announcements and filling you in on exciting new developments at eBay. Thanks to the continuing input and innovations of our Community, the eBay marketplace keeps evolving - creating new opportunities for buyers and sellers alike.

2006 Fee Adjustments
As you probably know, we periodically make changes to our fee structure. We'll be making some adjustments to our fees, and I want to highlight the most important ones. The following changes will go into effect on February 22, 2006:

• For core insertion fees for Auction-Style and Fixed Price listings on eBay.ca and eBay.com, we're again lowering the lowest tranche fee (i.e. for items with a starting price of $0.01 to $0.99) - from US$0.25 to US $0.20 and C$0.30 to C$0.25.
• For feature fees:
  • We're making Picture Show and Sales Reports Plus free for everyone.
  • We're reducing the fees for the second and third tiers of Picture Manager and increasing the storage you get at these higher levels.
  • And we're trying something that has worked well for us on eBay Motors. For the first time, we're offering two new Feature Packs of optional listing features that can save you up to 39% per listing. (Read here for details.)
• For final value fees for Auction-Style and Fixed Price listings on eBay.ca and eBay.com, we are increasing one fee this year - the final value fee for items with a closing price of US$25.01-$1,000.00 or C$35.01-$1,450.00, which will increase from 2.75 to 3.00%.
• There are no changes for eBay Stores fees.

I encourage you to take a moment to learn more about the upcoming fee adjustments here.

Investments in Advertising
We know that bringing high-quality buyers to your listings is a critical part of the value eBay provides. To make sure we keep delivering this traffic, we made significant investments in advertising in 2005 which will continue throughout this year. This past holiday season we debuted the "it" campaign, eBay's largest advertising investment to date. Through a fully integrated marketing campaign including television, print ads, internet marketing, catalogs, onsite merchandising, publicity and more, "it" spotlights the depth and breadth of products available on eBay. And the campaign is working. "It" was one of the most-recalled ad campaigns of the holiday season, according to Advertising Age magazine.

Also in 2005, with internet advertising costs spiraling, we put considerable effort behind developing new ways to bring more buyers to your listings who use search engines like Google and Yahoo. Behind the scenes, we've been optimizing our site content for this unpaid or "natural" search. We've encouraged the Community to use About Me pages and a few months ago, we launched Reviews & Guides. The content members create through these features not only makes the site a richer experience -- these pages get picked up by search engines. This means buyers searching the internet for product information or other keywords are naturally driven to eBay.

Product Innovations
Another important part of our job is staying in touch with your changing business needs and developing innovative products that meet them. Last year, we delivered some important improvements like the Best Offer feature, cross-promotion enhancements to give sellers more visibility to your listings, and many new features you asked for in Want It Now.

This year, we'll continue to stay focused on products and features to help you grow your business and improve your buying experience. For instance, for eBay Stores, you've told us that 19 categories and only one level is not enough. So this spring, we'll be releasing a new structure that allows you to have up to 300 custom categories in three levels of categories and sub-categories.

I'm also pleased to tell you that we're soon introducing something many of you have wanted for a long time: At the end of any eBay search, all matching Store inventory listings will be displayed. For sellers, this means much more exposure for your eBay Stores and Store items - for buyers, every search will return many more qualified listings. It's a win/win for everyone.

You can read here for more details on the change to add Store Inventory items in Search which will launch in a few weeks.

eBay Express
You may hear over the next few days about a new specialty site called eBay Express which will be launching this spring in the U.S. Please note that eBay Express is currently being launched as a domestic specialty site for U.S. residents only. eBay Express is not available at this time for Canadian residents. We will be watching its progress very closely and relying on feedback from you, and others in the eBay community, as well as our own analysis, to determine if we will launch eBay Express for the Canadian marketplace. We will share our findings with you in the weeks and months ahead.

In closing, I hope this gives you a sense of what we're focused on as we head into the new year. On behalf of everyone at eBay, thanks for being part of the eBay Community. As e-commerce continues to grow and evolve, we look forward to continuing to shape the future together.

Please join me for my first Town Hall event in 2006 next week - Thursday, January 26 at 5 pm EST. My North American leadership team and I will be answering questions about whatever is on your mind. I always look forward to these sessions, and I hope you'll join us.

Sincerely,

Bill Cobb
President, eBay North America

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If you haven't listed an item for sale on eBay yet, now's your chance! From January 15-21 you can list your first 5 items on eBay as well as add Gallery to your listings for FREE.

Forget garage sales or storage - turn your items into cash by selling to over 180 Million registered users! Many Canadian homes have up to C$1,150 worth of items they're not using anymore, ready to be sold on eBay. Don't let this opportunity slip by.

Learn more about your 5 free listings right now.

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Mike Rudolph

Hi everyone, I’m Mike Rudolph with eBay’s Education & Events team. This year I have the great opportunity to plan eBay Live! 2006, and I want to personally invite each of you to come experience our 5th annual celebration. This year’s event will be held at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas on June 13-15, 2006.

As always we’ll have something for everyone, from the newest buyer to the most veteran PowerSeller. You can choose from over 180 seminars, labs and discussions, explore our massive Solutions Center floor, attend our live events with Meg Whitman, President & CEO, and Bill Cobb, President of eBay North America, and meet and network with thousands of your fellow eBay members.

Registration for the event will open on February 24th, so check the Announcement Board for more details later. In the meantime, you can get some general information about eBay Live! at www.ebay.com/ebaylive/.

The eBay Community Cookbook
We’re also putting together a cookbook with your favourite recipes called The eBay Community Cookbook. I’m calling on all you cooks out there to help us put together this first edition to be given out at the event!

A third-party company named Typensave is helping us gather all the recipes. To submit yours:

• Visit Typensave at http://www2.typensave.com.
• Click on the “Login” button to the right of the page.
• Enter your name as the Contributor Name.
• Use “ebaylive” as the Group Login, and “book” as the password (you don’t need to use the quotation marks). Please note that you should not use your eBay ID and password.

I’m looking forward to seeing you all at eBay Live! in June!

Sincerely,

Mike Rudolph
Director, eBay Education & Events

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eBay is having a Free Listing Day + Free Gallery for the first 30 days of your Good 'Til Cancelled Store Inventory Format listings! It all starts Wednesday, January 4, 2006 at 00:00:01 EST (12:00 AM plus one second on January 4, 2006) and ends that same day Wednesday, January 4, 2006 23:59:59 EST (11:59 PM plus 59 seconds).

Insertion fees for the first 30 days of your Good 'Til Cancelled Store Inventory Format listings will be credited back to your sellers account. Also, if you choose to add Gallery to your Good 'Til Cancelled Store Inventory Format listings, the fees will be credited back to your account. The reduced fees for this promotion will not be immediately reflected on the site. Users will receive a credit to their account by February 14, 2006 or before. Listings created prior to the promotion and scheduled to start during the promotional period of January 4, 2006 will be eligible for the promotional fee.

The promotional fee is good for all Canadian residents who list their items in Good 'Til Cancelled Store Inventory Format on eBay.ca, eBay.com or eBay Motors.

Auction-style, Fixed Price, Real Estate Ad format and Store Inventory format listings in either 30 or 90 day duration will not be eligible for the promotion. Items listed in Motors vehicles and Business and Industrial Capital Equipment will be excluded from this promotion. The promotional rate does not apply to listings created during the promotion (January 4, 2006) but scheduled to start after the promotion ends. The promotional rate will also not apply to eligible listings that are later revised to make the item ineligible for the promotion.

For more details, including detailed eligibility and exclusions, click here.

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