Judy:
Sorry I'm late with a reply. Have been away on a buying trip and even though they are necessary they become time thieves also. The trip was a success but when I get back home the days seem to have all compressed into a blur and then there is the processing of all the material. Anyway, enough excuses. I had received an email from eBay about the counters a while back. They told me that even though a seller requested an andale FREE counter they would slowly replaced by the eBay only counter. They also told me that there was going to be a joint venture between AOL and eBay. I guess that because AOL has been bleeding membership and eBay has been driving people away with all of their new charges there was a need to huddle together for protection. I'm not sure how they expect to gain anything this way; however, I see something down the road - that will probably be a joint venture between the two companies on security. Currently all of the Phishing stuff goes to spoof(don't use this)@ebay.com - I wonder if it will be directed to some kind of AOL program in the future. It doesn't make sense to me to combine these two companies. IMHO getting into bed with AOL has to place eBay in a more uncomfortable position than where they were with Andale. The other thing that I see is that working with AOL means that eBay doesn't have to develop any kind of security software and/or spoofing sniffers. They only have their toolbar that has account guard. Time will tell - but I feel that this has all come in under the radar by the counters. I'm not really THAT paranoid but it sure seems very unusual.

The old Andale counters are still on some of my GTC store items but all of the auction items were either changed or the new counter has been automatically placed in it. There doesn't seem to be any pattern on the replacement of Store items counters though. All replaced counters have the double counters though - at the top in the first part of the auction and then at the bottom below the photo that was used for the thumbnail.

This "freebie" doesn't do anything to me though. It just is another counter and it appears that you can't opt out. I noticed some auctions that I submitted with the counter selection UNchecked still resulted in a counter. What worries me more is the wonderful new fee structure in stores. That is going to be a deal breaker for some people. I know for me it has caused me to take a good long hard look at store items. I haven't closed my store as others have but I'm going to probably limit a lot of what goes in there now.

Garry