Our web site’s facelift was implemented on June 18th. Obviously, we now have to work on some of the technical issues the update caused and have already asked our design team to look into most of them. The New Arrivals scroll on the home page does not reflect any of the newest items to come in. Likewise, the sliders have not been added, and some technical issues, such as a somewhat smallish font size, may make it difficult to read text across our web site. If you feel the new font is too small, press the Control key and the “+” sign to increase the font size. Conversely, press the Control key and the “-” size to reduce the font size should it get too enlarged. Hopefully, we’ll have most of the most glaring issues addressed over the course of the next few days.

In other news, we’ve been asked to join the eBay Partner Network which, as far as I can tell, serves as a means of driving additional traffic to eBay by adding product links to third party e-commerce sites, blogs, and social networking sites that point directly to items that can be purchased on eBay. In a nutshell, it acts much like the Amazon affiliate advertising program introduced some ten or more years ago, something most retailers have abandoned in recent years. That pretty much shows how far eBay is in its relationship with Amazon, its principal online competitor. Although sales are up at eBay — largely due to increased ordering as a result of the pandemic — they pale in comparison to Amazon, who seems to routinely add associate positions while eBay has shed itself of thousands of workers. Its no wonder eBay is reportedly up for sale, after having divested itself of its StubHub and Classified businesses to generate added capital. While we will likely add several links to our blog to support this initiative, don’t be a bit surprised if eBay decides to accept an offer from the likes of Walmart, Google or someone else, thereby conceding that it can no longer stay apace of Amazon or even Walmart.com in the aggregate e-commerce business. Sad considering it had an early lead and squandered it by not recognizing industry trends that others had either fostered or accepted over the years. Goes to show that it pays to stay current.