I am sorry to say that it looks like eBay Australia may win it claim to use PayPal as the only means of payment for all sales on its site. For sellers, this could be the worst situation possible.

As a former seller through eBay and having used PayPal as a payment option, I have found that sellers have little in the way of rights and no protection at all from unscrupulous buyers.

As a seller you can offer products for sale. Part of the sale process includes delivery of the item. In Australia, there are several delivery options available that range from standard surface mail through to signature delivery. Each options has a range of costs. Signature delivery requiring the payment of an additional three dollars - not a lot.

In the past, I have sold through eBay and always insisted that if PayPal was used, then the extra $3 had to be paid for signature delivery. Following a complaint from a buyer, eBay insisted that I remove that requirement from my listings. This meant that a buyer could pay $200 for an item, $20 for postage with no proof of delivery and pay via PayPal.

That is all fine. However, as a seller you are at a huge disadvantage now. The buyer pays, you post the item off and the deal is complete. Not quite. The buyer then complains that the item has not arrived. As a seller, what can you do? You have posted the item in good faith. The buyer has refused to pay for the extra proof of delivery or signature delivery so you have no proof of postage.

At this stage it is your word against theirs. You say you posted the item, they claim not to have received it. They now lodge a claim with PayPal and guess what - if you cannot prove the item was sent, they refund the money to the buyer and take it out of your account. Now you are left with no product, no money and both PayPal and eBay have had their pound of flesh.

To add insult to injury, the buyer has the product and their money back. Yes - it is a big con (I prefer the term fraud) that is known and exploited quite cleverly by a small group.

This has happened to me twice now. The first time I actually tricked the buyer into believing that a relative worked at his local post office and remembered handing him the parcel. He admitted he had received and would send it back to me - of course he didn’t.

The second time the person in question waited about six weeks after the refund had been issued to then send me an email stating there was a problem with the product and wanted a replacement - the cheek - I reminded them of the ‘non receipt’ complaint and of course heard no more from them.

Both times I forwarded these emails to both eBay and PayPal to investigate possible fraud. On both occasions nothing was done. This is a serious flaw in the eBay - PayPal arrangement and if Australia goes down the path of allowing eBay to use PayPal as its only means of payment, many more sellers will be stung.

If your a seller - insist on receipted delivery. Don’t make it an option, just include it in the cost of delivery. If you don’t - watch out you don’t get ripped off. If you have a non receipt claim made - fight it.  In the mean time - I am using a rival online auction house that has far lower fees, looks after both the seller and the buyer and has proven profitable - checkout oztion.com if you ever get a chance.

I don’t know how good this site is, but I have used it for a couple of days and already earned the equivalent of $5 Australian bucks. Doesn’t sound like much but then I don’t do many searches each day so it looks pretty good so far.

This site add their own search option to your search bar. If you conduct a search through them you get paid if you use one of the paid search links. The good thing about this particular search is that it uses all the search engines including Google to get the results. So if you click on one of Googles paid search results - you get paid.

From what I have read they soon weed out those that try to milk the system. However, if you do a few searches each day, why not get paid for it. You are not going out of your way or doing anything extra, just using their search window to do your searching.

If there is a negative, most searches are done through Google.co.uk and not through the Google.com (or for me - Google.com.au which is a pain as I rarely search Aussie sites). However the results are often very similar.

You have nothing to lose by giving it a shot - you may make a few dollars on the side. The way I look at it, if you make $20 a months, it pays for the blogs hosting. If your interested - here is the ad link - It is affiliated - they pay 10% of any affiliate earnings.

Let me know if you know of similar or have heard negative/positive stories of these types of sites.

WordPress is, despite some of my earlier posts, still my favorite blogging platform. I still haven’t come across anything that I consider better or easier to use. I particularly like the range of plugins that available - there is a plugin for just about anything you can think of.

Here are another two plugins I have found and that I find very useful. This first plugin I had heard about and even had recommended to me but it has only been recently that I actually downloaded it and used it.

WordPress Automatic Update Plugin.

As the name suggests, this is a plugin that makes the transition from one version of WordPress to the next so much easier. The upgrade from 2.3 to 2.5 is very easy - no long winded uploading or deleting or fiddling around. If you haven’t upgraded to 2.5 yet, download this plugin first - it will make your life so much easier.

This second plugin is more in the way of making your blog even more search engine friendly.

WordPress Tweaks

This WordPress plugin has a range of tweaks that you can use to improve some of the functions of WordPress. It can certainly make your WordPress blog a little friendlier to the search engines. Some of its functions include:

• Remove “nofollow” from comment author links
• Remove “nofollow” from comment body links
• Open external comment links in new windows
• Open external post links in new windows
• Show post excerpts (instead of full content) on archive pages
• Add “nofollow” to the “Register” and “Login” links

The show post excerpts is particularly useful for preventing ‘duplicate content’ issues with the search engines. Adding some of these nofollows is again a little housekeeping that makes your site a little friendlier to the search engines.

I hope you find these plugins useful. If you have any decent plugins you can recommend, let me know in the comments  = my comments are set to do follow - my fingers are set to delete when its spam.

If you are an Adsense publisher then you need to take care in your quest for increased visitor numbers. Some visitors may actually be costing you money, and I am talking about a sizable percentage.

Your income per click may come down to as low as 0.05c per click ‘across all of your Adsense sites’ when they could be earning as much as 0.80 or more per click.

The income you receive per click can be affected by poor click through rates. The optimum click through rate (CTR) is  between 4-9% or higher. If your CTR drops below 2%, Google will often tag your site as a poor performer and only pay the lowest possible rate. The problem is, you will receive the lowest possible rate for all Adsense units on that account.

This means that although you may have a very good site receiving 4%+ CTR, that site will still only receive the smallest per click price if one of your other sites is performing below the 2% thresh-hold.

Visitors  I label as ‘tip N run’ are those that arrive on your site through social media. Stumblers, diggers and Entre Card visitors are notorious for not clicking on ad units. Stumblers will stumble to the next site, diggers will return to digg and EC users click through to the next EC card holder. If you are reading this from one of those sites, when was the last time you clicked on an ad unit? You are shopping, you are visiting so it is only natural that you wont click these ads.

These visitors are all increasing your visitors numbers, however the number of clicks on ad units each day is staying the same. This has the effect of dropping your CTR - your CTR is, in simple terms, a mathematical equation that divides the number of visitors by the number of clicks. The more visitors, the lower the CTR.

Some promotions work better than others. Through the use of Entre Card my CTR has fallen to about 1% so I have been getting only 5 cents per Adsense click. Prior to this I was receiving around 40 cents per click. Buying traffic through Better Traffic (see ad at top of sidebar) has seen my CTR increase to just below the required 2%. At a cost of $15 per month I am making a marginal profit. If I can lift the CTR to above that 2% thresh-hold my income will jump dramatically.

You need to keep an eye on your CTR through your Adsense account. If a site is really performing badly then it may pay to remove the ads from that site. The lost revenue may well be made up by the sudden jump in per click income on your other sites.

Once all sites on your account get above the Google thresh-hold CTR the, income per click goes up. If you are blogging on a high paying Adsense niche, then you may be losing big dollars in the quest for extra visitors. Check each CTR level for all ad units on your sites. It only takes one poor performing unit to kill all of them.

If WordPress charged for their blogging software they would most likely be seeking bankruptcy right now, or be ripe for a Microsoft or Google takeover. The latest version of WordPress 2.5, to put it mildly, sucks!

I would like to put on record right from the start that I am a WordPress fan - I like the software and the relative ease of use. Although I have only been in the blogging world for 6 months, I have used several different platforms including Drupal. Hopefully I can continue my happy association with WordPress, just not with release 2.5. Fortunately I didn’t upgrade this blog so I can continue to operate in a happy blog environment. I did upgrade three of my other sites and so far the experience has not been great.

There has been a lot of discussion about the WordPress 2.5 release and the lack of support on Andrew Boyd’s On Blogging Australia site - the discussion makes for interesting reading so I wont go back over those issues. If your interested I suggest you click on over and have a read.

My title says it all really. WordPress 2.5 would be a commercial failure. Proof of this can be seen by the relatively quick patch release that fixed around 70 - yes seventy issues. Talk about product recall big time.

I think WordPress as an organization has become stuck in a mindset that says ‘this is free software’.  The reality is, free or not, they should be taking a commercial approach. At present, part of their ‘mindset’ seems to revolve around having specific release periods which seem to be scheduled for 3 or 4 times per year. Commercial software goes through an annual release and thats it.

Having regular scheduled upgrades is a great motivational tool, particularly when you are relying on unpaid programming support. You can still achieve this motivation whilst have longer release time frames.

The beta testing phase was far too short and did not leave any time for ‘fixing’ issues prior to its release. The more workable timetable could see annual releases, say in January each year with beta versions released for testing in July. This would enable three months of testing and feedback followed by three months of fine tuning prior to the following release. To have 70 issues that needed ‘fixing’ is testament to the lack of beta testing.

WordPress needs to undergo a cultural change within the organization that can relate to users on “commercial” rather than a “free” basis. WordPress has been, arguably, the best platform available for self hosted blogs for a long time with millions of blogs using the software.  The problems that users are now facing is providing real motivation for alternatives to update and promote their software.

Once users find viable alternatives, they will slowly move away from WordPress - and as has been shown in the past with other software, a dribble soon becomes a flood and WordPress will be left with a small dedicated group of users and developers and a poor reputation.

I hope WordPress can open its ears a little more, listen to what the users are saying, and return to a more user friendly blogging environment. I would like to think I could continue using this software for as long as I need it. Sometimes, we can be too smart for our own good and this time around, WordPress got it wrong. Fair enough - let’s get it right and move on.

happy blogging - les

As we head into the weekend I thought I would throw in some neat design ideas that arrived in my email today. I am sure they have been around before somewhere but I picked these simply because I like them.

Lets start with a real neat little time saver when it comes to pouring your water. I guess wine too.

And who likes to sing in the shower - you can now scrub while you sing.

This I think is really practical, particularly if your into bragging over losing weight - now every one can see if its true or not.

Some of these are more practical than others. This is smart and really does solve many problems. You no longer have to trust strangers to take your pic - then have them run off with your camera - do it yourself.

This one I really do want - coffee biscuits anyone

Finally, the ultimate computer workstation. Almost all your needs catered for in the one area. The only thing missing is the water fountain - Oh yeah - I forgot!