A new measure called the Marketplace Fairness Act is currently pending passage by the House of Representatives. It would impact the way many online retailers operate because it would mandate sales tax collection by all retailers that do at least $1 million in sales, where they don’t have a physical presence like stores or distribution centers.

The U.S. Senate recently passed this sales tax legislation in an effort to increase the number of retailers collecting sales tax for online purchases. Many proponents of the Marketplace Fairness Act say that this new legislation will create a more fair marketplace for businesses to compete across both online and offline channels. Conversely, this will leave many retailers with a task of collecting different tax rates across the country as well as integrating with their online shopping carts and accounting processes as many online stores only collect tax in states that they have brick and mortar stores or distribution centers.

We will keep you posted on the status of the pending passage of the Marketplace Fairness Act.

Shopping.com has rebranded itself from a shopping comparison engine to an eCommerce advertising platform that will be known as the eBay Commerce Network (ECN). Advertisers with eCommerce websites will be able to create product listing ads, similar to what Google released last year with Product Listing Ads via Google Shopping.

The eBay Commerce Network says that merchants who advertise on their network can have their product listing ads available to hundreds of sites within the ECN network with one feed. ECN partners include Bing, CNET, TheFind, eBags, eBay and Shopping.com and other comparison shopping engines.

We recently reported new product listing ad formats on the Bing.com search engine results page, which may be attributed to this announcement of the eBay Commerce Network.

There are no set up fees charged by ECN to participate and marketers will be charged in a cost-per-click (CPC) model. In addition, advertisers will have an online dashboard to monitor product listing ads as well as retail pricing.

The new eBay advertising platform is expected to be a strong competitor against Amazon and Google Shopping.

Yesterday Google announced an upcoming change for AdWords called Enhanced Campaigns that will go into effect in the second quarter of this year and affect all campaigns within the ad network.

Google says that over the last few years, user behavior has shifted to where people are using multiple devices, i.e. computers, tablets and smartphones, based on what works best for where they are and what their goal is. Because of this new behavior, Google is shifting its campaign settings so that all devices will be rolled into one campaign and Google will consider desktops and tablets as one device. Advertisers will be able to opt out of mobile devices by bidding down on the device, but will be unable to opt out of desktop/tablet devices all together.

There will be a gradual transition to Enhanced Campaigns and Google will not force a migration of the change until late in the second quarter.

Advertisers will be able to specifically create ads and extensions for mobile devices. In addition, sitelinks will be introduced at the ad group level and we will be able to see reporting for each individual link. Currently, sitelinks and its statistics are set at the campaign level. What’s more, Google says that it is working on advanced reporting to be able to see multi-device attribution to determine how many devices a visitor uses before converting.

Our Executive Vice President, Danielle Leitch, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal in regard to the release of Enhanced Campaigns.