Have tried listing to .com with some success but it has been costly.

My post from a year ago sums up the problems… http://www.tamebay.com/2007/04/the-reality-of-the-loss-of-ebaycom-visibility.html

Mark

We do not think there IS any great saving when you work out the costs.

UK SIF not appearing in Core is a major problem for us and so this system is unworkable.

Ebay are trying to encourage us back to the UK it seems, but there is no encouragement.

SIF on .com is fantastic for us, we cannot trade that for a few pounds savings on FVF, (a few profitable sales balances that out).

It is such a shame there is not a FVF discount Ebay wide regardless of the country listed.

After all the DSR’s are not really any motivation for the cross border sellers like the Chinese, as they do not get them anyway.

It seems that a very complicated system has been put in place when a nice simple FVF discount site wide would have been so much easier to implement.

I think Ebay are trying to do too much with something that should have been very simple.

You get good DSR’s, you get a fvf discount.

This is not the case.

If you get good DSR’s, list on one site and are willing to pay a small surcharge for wider visibility, while at the same time either being happy to hide your shop inventory on Ebay.co.uk, or invest a couple of hours a week changing them to .com listings (applicable for sellers of individual items), to get a dubious fee reduction, that when you look at the increased costs of listing on the UK site (we believe it is more expensive to list on the UK site anyway – but have not done the maths), the idea starts to run out of steam.

So our choice:

Leave well enough alone, take the hit on the chin that the FVF’s have gone up and look to buy good stock that makes good money and sell in a good marketplace.

Ebay have made what could have been very simple, very complicated and whether anyone will actually save ANY fees is yet open to question (we have not got time to do the maths, but it does not look good).

So Ebay, your latest site changes would get a 1 out of 5 star rating on this one unfortunately for us as it does not do anything for our particular business model and we doubt it gives anyone a fee saving at all, who choose to use this option over listing directly on Ebay.com.

Too complicated, as clear as mud and probably no saving at all would be our summation….

Mark

We would re-iterate, we have not done the maths on this – so all comments given with that in mind.

Now with the say 2 USD to a pound and every american lifting floormats to find a dime I don’t expect a return of the way things were.

eBay.uk should have introduced this back then. NOT NOW!

That said, I’ll suck it and see.

of course, as usual, I had just skimmed through the announcement. The important thing for us is that nearly 100% of our listings have been in either Collectables or Porcelain, Pottery and Glass, which I had forgotten had visibility returned in October…

This will stop in May, so unless we DO pay for the visibility, we will almost certainly see a downturn in US and Australian buyers…

This would mean that auctions and bins have to be changed to US listings from UK listings if you want shop items to show up on .com. Not a simple task.

2. The additional cost of the 15p per item (that we would accrue), plus the more expensive costs of listing on the UK site, would mean that any FVF savings would be negligible as the costs would increase at the front end anyway (I believe).

So this does not seem suitable for our business model unfortunately

It is a good job we do not rely on saving on fees for a succesful Ebay business model…

So it does not benefit us at all.

Now if the SIF format was visible for a fee, then maybe the maths would need to be worked out, but I do not think at the moment it is going to save any money over listing directly on .com.

Of course we may be wrong at this point, and we may not understand it correctly, but first glance this seems a partial solution that works for anyone that does not want or need shop listing visibility on .com.

Mark

to say I am orgasmic about this
is an understatement

In which case, would I find any benefit? I don’t know.

The cost of the upgrade is less than the cost to list on the International site directly and now US sellers will be competing directly with UK sellers in the default search.

This change takes place in May so it may be worthwhile to test if the additional exposure is worth it by listing on the International site directly now.

If the test is beneficial at the current rates it will certainly be worth it in May.