Wondering where you can get tickets to President Obama’s inauguration? Well you can’t get tickets to the president’s inauguration on eBay or Craigslist, at least if eBay and Craigslist follow through on their promise to not allow anyone to sell or scalp tickets to Pres. Obama’s inauguration on either site.

Countless people ran to their local supermarkets and convenience stores today, to corner the market on Twinkies, Hostess cupcakes, Snoballs, and Ho Hos, as the news of American fixture Hostess Bakery announced that it would be closing after being unable to resolve a contract negotiation dispute with the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM, or, simply, “the Bakers Union”). Pictures of empty Twinkie shelves at grocery stores started showing up on the Internet, and, at just about the same time, Twinkie’s started showing up on eBay, and through Amazon, at prices of as much as $1000 or more for a single box of Twinkies.

As the race for governor of California goes into overdrive, auction giant eBay’s former CEO, Meg Whitman, has found that an incident from her days at eBay is raising its ugly head to give her more than campaign plate dinners on which to chew. In an incident to which she admits, but calls an “anomaly”, Whitman had an altercation with an employee at eBay, while she was still the CEO, during which she “physically guided” the employee, Young Mi Kim, from the room in which they were both working.

This is a classic example of the problem when one entity with too much control owns the entire sales stream – from start to end – from offer to sale to payment: Paypal has started withholding payments that buyers have already paid until the seller not only ships the item, but “as long as the buyer doesn’t report a problem or leaves positive feedback”! “Your funds are pending – please process this order” demands the notice from Paypal “…This money is being temporarily held in your pending balance… It will be held for up to 21 days… It may be available sooner if we can confirm that the item was delivered or, if this is an eBay item, your buyer leaves positive feedback.”

Last Friday, if you were on eBay and quick, you could have bid on what was claimed to be blood and brain samples from none other than Il Duce – Benito Mussolini himself. The blood and brain tissue was posted for sale by an as yet undisclosed source, although Mussolini’s grandaughter, Alessandra Mussolini, has suggested that the blood and brain samples could have been lifted during the autopsy performed in 1945 on Mussolini at the Policlinico hospital in Milan.

Power buyers on eBay have long known – or at least suspected – that some eBay sellers create fake accounts, with the shill accounts doing “shill bidding”, that is bidding up the price on their own items, artifically inflating the bidding price so that the winning bid (never their own, of course) earns them more money. But now eBay has been forced to admit that shill bidding, by unscrupulous eBay sellers, does indeed occur.

Auction giant eBay was recently fined more than 74million dollars for allowing the sale of knock-off designer purses to go unabated.

There has been a new rash of “Receipt for your payment to” eBay Paypal phishing spam which is intended to elicit a shock response causing the target to rush to log into their Paypal account to figure out why they are being charged hundreds to thousands of dollars for an eBay purchase which they know that they didn’t actually make.

Ian Usher, a British man living down under, has put his entire life up for sale on eBay. The winning bidder – and there are bidders – gets Usher’s house, the contents of his house, his car, even his job. Says Ian Usher, “On the day it is all sold and settled I intend to walk out of my front door with my wallet in one pocket and my passport in the other.” But would you really want his life? We’ve done some digging, and we think not.

Ever wonder what percentage of the Post Office’s revenue comes from Amazon or eBay shipping? We wondered, and here is what we found out. What we discovered was fascinating, and makes one wonder just why postage rates continue to go up, up, up.

Paypal has announced that they are going to block the Apple Safari web browser, along with a few other browsers. The online payment service, purchased by eBay for $1.5B back in 2002, in the good old days of rampant Internet mergers and acquisitions, has become a frequent target of phishers and hackers. Anxious to recapture their good name and to offer to sellers and buyers alike a more secure environment, PayPal plans to discontinue support for web browsers that do not include anti-phishing capabilities. If this plan goes through, PayPal will block Safari and older versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Netscape.

We suppose that you can’t really blame a company for pushing their own products, but still, it seems just a tad disingenuous for eBay to offer a “safety tip” which amounts to dissing the competition, and hawking their own services.

Now, we all know the importance of feedback. Giving feedback is what allows businesses to even better serve their customers. And we’re all familiar with feedback forms on all sorts of sites, the quintessential example being the feedback form for eBay feedback. There are all types of feedback – positive feedback, negative feedback, and even constructive feedback which may be neither. But demanded feedback? Giving and receiving feedback should be a voluntary act. Demanding that I leave feedback for a transaction with you may lead to destructive feedback, or maybe I should learn how to give scholarly constructive feedback that feels positive when it isn’t! I mean, why provide feedback at all if it’s going to be so strained? Why do you feel entitled to – indeed – how dare you demand feedback from me? [And check out how eBay is forcing sellers to leave buyers only positive eBay feedback – no more eBay negative feedback for buyers with the new eBay seller feedback rule!]

eBay has announced that beginning in May, sellers will no longer be able to leave negative – and perhaps not even neutral – feedback about users (buyers), even though buyers can still leave scathing comments about sellers. This is, eBay claims, because the possiblity that sellers could post bad things about them scares a lot of users off.

Want to become an eBay seller without having to sell things on eBay? Want to know how to start an eBay business, and how to make easy money on eBay, without actually selling on eBay? One of the little- known facts about eBay – one of the best eBay secrets – the one that all those lists of eBay selling tips never tell you – is that the best eBay alternative may be eBay itself! (We are talking about eBay USA, but this information is applicable to other eBay .com sites as well.) We’ll also tell you how to sign up for Commission Junction (CJ), what a CJ PID number is, and where to find your Commission Junction PID number!