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buySAFE Announces New Partnership With Travelers

Today, buySAFE announced a new partnership with The St. Paul Travelers Companies, one of the largest financial institutions in the world with more than $113 billion in assets.

The new Travelers relationship adds another major U.S. financial institution to buySAFE's growing team of business partners.  The Hartford Financial Services Group and The Rutherfoord Companies are major investors in buySAFE, and in 2005, Liberty Mutual Insurance Company joined with buySAFE to provide significant surety bond capacity for buySAFE's rapidly growing business on eBay, Overstock.com, and TIAS.

Google Planning Product Search for Holidays

The Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA) held its semi-annual gather in San Francisco this past week.  The PESA Summit 2006 was a huge success with many of eBay's largest sellers in attendance in addition to many of the most important companies in ecommerce.  buySAFE has sponsored every PESA Summit since the group's inception in 2004. 

Although the group includes eBay in its name, most of these merchants are actually multi-channel retailers seeking to sell product whereever they can make reasonable profits.  These days, that actually means eBay sellers want to sell off eBay.  AuctionBytes has recently produced some very interesting research on the trend to move beyond eBay.  ChannelAdvisor's Scot Wingo covered eBay's challenges on his blog last week as well  I will be writing more about this trend over the coming days because it is obviously important for all of us in ecommerce.

buySAFE Hits the 3 Million Bonded Product Listings Milestone

There is big buySAFE news this week.  buySAFE passed the 3 million bonded product listings milestone.  The announcement was made on the buySAFE blog earlier this week.

This is exciting because it means that there are more than 3 million items for sale at buySAFE Shopping and bonded by buySAFE.  The Bonded Items can be found on eBay, Overstock.com Auctions, and TIAS.  In a few weeks, you will begin to see Bonded Items direct from merchants' website stores.  Obviously, the more Bonded Items avaiable for sale, the better the experience for shoppers looking to buy safely.  Therefore, this exciting news for everyone.

Congratulations to the entire buySAFE team!  Nice work.

The Trusted Merchant Gallery on the Overstock.com Shopping Site

This week, Overstock.com introduced a Trusted Merchant Gallery on the Overstock.com® Shopping Site. As you may know, all of Overstock.com's Trusted Merchants are buySAFE Bonded Sellers, so obviously we are excited about this new improvement to Overstock.com's site.

The Trusted Merchant Gallery will provide Trusted Merchants with access to a new – and huge – group of shoppers. Trusted Merchant listings will be visible in the search results at Overstock.com's main shopping site. Early traffic and sales results have exceeded expectations!

According to Overstock.com, the New Trusted Merchant Gallery:

• Spotlights Trusted Merchant's listings ONLY
  
• Provides exposure to over 10 million shoppers per month
  
• Delivers highly qualified shoppers who have already begun to search for products

You can view the Trusted Merchant Gallery in action. You will see the gallery at the end of the search results. In the past, when Trusted Merchants / Bonded Sellers have been included in the search results, we have seen dramatic increases in sales volume, and I expect we will see the same thing with this new feature. I will be watching the results quite carefully, and I will plan to follow-up with another post that gives more details on the data as it becomes available.

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