“Books and Music categories benefit from a specific pricing in France, at 0.05 euro insertion fees and 9% final value fees for fixed price and auction, and at 0.01 euro insertion fees and 12% final value fees for store format. The new pricing starting Aug 28 will include gallery at no additional cost.

Store format – for all applicable categories – will also include gallery at no additional cost.”

So Sue and the rest of my Tamebay friends I bow to your opinion of the move. I think it is a great deal.

Do you want lower insertion fees?
Do you want lower FVF?
Do you want lower feature fees?

could ebay be heading for a fixed fee, free gallery and 9-12% FVF structure?

Think about the overall buyer experience and it’s a no brainer to have gallery on everything

Sue, I’m a blogger, its my duty to speculate and head off any thinking along these lines for the US. I do agree for those who already use Gallery this is great and for the site as a whole it will make things nicer for buyers and I’m glad it will help your biz. As a rule I don’t like being required to do anything.

This is a veiled attempt at a fee increase.
No. For certain sellers, it’s a fee increase. For other sellers (me) it’s a fee decrease. Overall, it’s a fee restructuring, and it’s hardly veiled when it’s there on the AB for all to see.

And I think it’s really not productive at the moment to speculate what *might* be done in the US: the fee structures as you say are totally different, and we all know that eBay like to run their little experiments in Europe before they risk offending the sellers they really care about. The fact that this has been done on eBay France before even eBay UK says to me that they are playing it very, very carefully indeed. (After all, there are only about a dozen sellers on eBay France, and four of them are me )

In the US we do not have a separate price structure for Media, every category pays the same price.

What this will do is move Media out of Core and into SIF which I have no problem with (because I don’t sell anymore)

And lays the groundwork for a SIF fee increase by making Gallery a requirement there as well. If they wanted to improve the buyer experience they would have made Gallery free a long time ago. This is a veiled attempt at a fee increase.

I’m kinda in two minds about media sellers. They do bring masses of traffic to the site, but they already have their own special little fee structure just for them, and I think it’s absolutely ridiculous to hold the rest of the membership to ransom because “MovieMarz will throw a fit”. Let em. There comes a time when a company is too big for eBay: Glacier Bay reached that point (sadly, before you had a website to go to), and if MovieMarz has too, let em go.

At Glacier Bay DVD, we never used Gallery and it did not affect sales. Had I used Gallery, it would have doubled my already outrages fees to eBay. Maybe this is my media myopic view but if this requirement makes its way across the pond to the US and is required in the Media category MovieMarz and other media sellers will throw a fit.

I’ll trot out my standard “why gallery is good” story: I sell some very tiny black seed beads, they’re less than 2mm in diameter, and the gallery shot of them looks pretty much like a plain black square. With gallery picture, they sell; without gallery picture, they don’t. I think if, rather than complaining about this, sellers embrace it, they may find it increases sales way beyond what it costs them if they weren’t buying gallery already.

The number of gallery-promoting CLDs that have run over the last few months, it’s fairly obvious – with 20/20 hindsight – that this was coming.

In the US, media sellers rarely if ever use Gallery for this auctions (many they do for SIF) This requirement would greatly curtail the number of media items listed in CORE.

Am I missing something in the translation. It look like non-gallery users just got hit pretty hard.