There will be a 0.01% decrease in Final Value Fees ?? hardly worth changing really.

And the shop subscription fee is going up by £8.99 per month. So much for the good news.

A lot of the smaller sellers are leaving but this probably won’t hurt eBay – with the massive increase in shop subscriptions they will still make good profits. A pity the same can’t be said for their customers – the hard-working sellers.

I still have a number of shops on ebay now, but there more linked to websites now to promote them and push customers away from ebay direct to our own websites. Although i do make money out of them i admit, but once ive got a customer on ebay, i try and make sure they never buy from me via ebay and go direct instead.

Also sell mainly on Amazon now (despite silly fees) do get a premium price and better customers.

Now moving onto ebid and other auction sites as a combination of marketing and for sales.

Was a time when i would never have considered selling anywhere else but on ebay, now its a case of i think how i can sell anywhere but ebay.

My advice to anyone is, yes sell on ebay, cost and analyse it. But use it as a method to push customers you get on Ebay away from Ebay and to buying direct from you. Only takes a website, a discount coupon and a sticker or note in the packaging and the email when they purchase off ebay going from your website to advertise it.

Also as someone not a fan of ebay, each time you successfully do it, it costs ebay money

I have made a test with a small shop which I have already closed, and YES I can open a .com shop with fees of about £8 per month and listing fee of under 2p per item (just needs a bit of extra thought when working out P&P)!! At the moment I cannot see any way of transferring all the items other than by painstakingly individually relisting, but it is the only way I could afford to carry on! Also, this .com shop will be visible to UK buyers all the time I continue to list on.co.uk in auction format, which still shows the link to the shop!
I have also listed the same items on specialistauctions.com and will soon do so on ebid.com, where charges are negligilble! Yes I know that sales there are poor at the moment, but if enough of us SMALL-FRY do likewise and point all the old customers in our sales address books towards them, who knows, I might eventually be able to stick 2 fingers up to eBay and say ‘enjoy your fight with amazon’.

I know these fees are attractive to large-volume sellers of new items, and good luck to you (been there, got fed up with it!). The trouble is that you have got several internet outlets (I always had more success with Amazon anyway), we in the collectables/craft field have not, apart from eBay, which if my memory is not playing tricks, was started specifically for those fields.

Cannot offer a full service on eBay now.

Website beckons.

“Concerns around feedback manipulation have prompted us to review this area and after 24th September, the minimum BIN price will be 99p, for single and multiple quantity listings. The minimum BIN price for an auction + BIN option listing will also be 99p. Sellers with lower value items will still be able to list in auction with starting prices lower than 99p.”

I guess that will upset a LOT of sellers.

“Concerns around feedback manipulation have prompted us to review this area and after 24th September, the minimum BIN price will be 99p, for single and multiple quantity listings. The minimum BIN price for an auction + BIN option listing will also be 99p. Sellers with lower value items will still be able to list in auction with starting prices lower than 99p”

Which raises an interesting question. When the new fee schedule kicks in and most professional sellers are on 5p per BIN, will that be the end of CLDs?

But at the moment my fees average around the £25 mark so upgrading to featured will nearly double my fees before I even list anything.
Their arguments just don’t stack up.
Inv. should have featured in the listings anyway, or at least always be on show below.
The current system relies on a buyer knowing about the shop facility to click on the link when there are a high number of listings.
But to ask more to get what we should have had in the first place is wrong.
If they really wanted to help us then why not give a free trial period or even a refund for the inv. items that did not sell?
With the fvf at nearly 10% and then the paypal fees the only way to make a profit on low value items is to add to the shipping cost.
But that is not the way to run a business.

You will almost certainly need to upgrade your shop to featured to get your listing fees back down. Try that? Remember too, no gallery to pay for.
Then you can put multiple items (where you have them) on listings and pay no more. etc etc.

A free gallery that i didnt use in the first place doesnt make up for the fact that the cost of my listing an item has increased from 3p to 20p and the fee for selling it has also just increased by over 2 %. As its individual personalised items, multiple quantity listings dont work, as each item requires a seperate listing. That’s a 600% increase in selling costs per unit,
so no matter the visibility or quantity of items I sell there is no way to make up the increased fee.

So the items I sell, which had a quite small but resonable profit margin, which was compensated for by sales volume to regular buyers is now completely unviable to sell as i would be selling at a loss.

So either i have to increase my prices and pass on ebays increase of fees to my buyers or stop selling on ebay. As I cant predict what the next change to the costs of running an ebay shop might be in two or three months it isnt financially viable to continue trading on ebay.

Which is a shame, I’ve had an account on ebay since about 2001, and have seen ebay turn from a great maketplace into a faceless, uncaring, generic website clogged with poor quality chinese electronics, fake designer products and a user base that was once a communty and is now nothing more than corporations, scam artists, scalpers, uncaring opportunist powersellers and increasingly disillusioned hobbiests that are being forced to pack up and leave.

And when you loose the sellers who made ebay what it was, the buyers will drift off. Why buy new on ebay from some seller in china when i can buy the same thing from woolworths or tesco and know what im getting. The days of ebay having a community are over, all ebay will have soon are clients.

This will be the problem when SIF become BIN (not that I think the general idea is bad), the problem will become when someone decides to earch for an item, this type of seller will swap the BIN listings & as we all know there is nothing worse than seeing numerous repeat listings continuoiusly displayed on page after page.
We all just loose the will, to search. Listing like this should only have limited exposure, ie, say1-2 in every 10 identical repeat listings, otherwise BIN listings will just be swamped.

When I buy by BIN I search for lowest price and P&P, not most relevant or ending soonest. Medium size sellers will benefit from lower fees but may well become exposed to fewer sales as the buyers opt for lowest price buying from the largest scale retailers.

But isn’t this, what has happened to the UK’s high streets over the last decade. All the big boys move in, up goes the rents, out goes the small sellers.
Now of course the big boys, who have pushed everyone around are starting to feel the pitch, and aren’t they letting us know, winging over how bad things are etc’.

To them & ebay (if it’s not careful) ‘ You made your bed, now lie in it ‘.

If smaller sellers can’t afford to list on eBay, buyer choice and competition will be lost. At a time when people are feeling the pinch they want to look for bargains. Not use another shopping mall for larger sellers.

Finally, could this change be any more complicated?? To me it looks like the man at the top has an idea. Then it is tinkered with and manipulated into this complex non sensical mess but they will still call it his idea. eBay continue down the slippery slope…………..