Responses:

Cassie says

2:28 pm on 24/08/2012

Not sure if this is quite the right place for this but………….

I have drastically scaled back my selling on eBay and now only sell as a private seller and mainly list on free listing weekends.

My sales have been ok, but nothing great. Most items take a couple of times being listed to sell and only get one or two bids. During the last free listing weekend I listed an expensive item (over £200 start price) but had very little interest. I went and searched for it – something I don’t really do regularly anymore – as I was concerned about the lack of interest wondering if I was way out of line with the competition which I had checked a few days before I listed. Although the auction only had 16 hours to go it was at the very bottom of the search results. Luckily it was a quiet category with only one page of items. In the last minute (literally) I ended up with lots of bids and it sold for way over the start price.

I have 100% positive feedback, no violations and good DSRs (4.8′s and 4.9s) any ideas why I am being penalised and how to overcome this?

Thanks, Cassie.

Chris S says

2:35 pm on August 25th, 2012

Hi, If you don’t achieve a 30-35% (its about a third but perhaps somebody can correct me on the exact figure) sale rate then your auctions get demoted to the bottom of the (best match) search.

Cassie says

5:17 pm on August 25th, 2012

Thanks Chris, yeah I think my sell through rate is nearer 25%. No way that is going to improve if no one can find any of my auctions! Nice one eBay.

Chris says

11:56 pm on 24/08/2012

Another Free Listing Weekend. It is really tragic that while ebay elsewhere in the World have imaginative such Offers in the UK & Ireland we just have the same 100 items each time.

Its August Bank Holiday. The weather forecast is rubbish. Christmas is rapidly heading towards us. Yet just when many Private Sellers would need to sort out all their bits and pieces and get them listed in time to sell them and then look around for what to buy for Christmas they are still limited to just 100 items.

Its almost as if the 100 items came down Mount Olympus engraved on stone tablets from the Gods and ebay is unable to do anything more imaginative. So why not for the next such weekend have 500 items(or even 1000) instead of 100 as a Special Pre-Christmas Weekend?

After all if the average Private Seller was to list 500(or 1000) items with ebays sales percentage of(lets be generous) 15% that only represents 75 (or 150)items per Private Seller Selling. Hardly a fortune but it might enable them to be able to buy something for the Children for Christmas(hopefully they would all use their Sales Proceeds in Paypal to buy their Christmas requirements and needs from ebay Sellers).

radroach says

10:47 am on August 25th, 2012

I don’t know what goes on with every eBay site, but I wouldn’t say that the listing offers on the US site are any more “imaginative” than ours (50,000 limit, being also open to business sellers without a store, every time)

100 free listings is plenty for any genuine private seller – higher limits would only benefit sellers who are actually running a business (and should of course be registered as such)

Chris says

11:41 am on 25/08/2012

I would imagine that there are many Private Sellers who have considerably more than 100 items that they would like to sell. I can imagine Childrens Toys, Clothes that they have grown out of, Baby Equipment, Thats without the bits and pieces of cars and maybe secondhand Mobile Phones etc etc. It does not take long to fill 100 items.

the 50,000 in the US. I must admit that I have always wondered about trying to input that many items. However Christmas is only 4 months away. There is also the fact that this is a Bank Holiday therefore a 3 day weekend. The weather is rubbish. I am not calling for every Free Listing Weekend to be “imaginative” but there is a case for some imagination perhaps once or at most twice a year. If I was to nominate I would say Easter and August Bank Holiday.

So go on ebay. Think about adding a bit of imagination to Free Listing Weekends.

radroach says

2:17 pm on August 25th, 2012

Even if real private sellers do have over 100 items to list, so frequent are these zero insertion fee offers that eBay gives them the opportunity to list something like 2.000 of them over the course of a single year!

They also get to list a further 1,000+ annually at up to a 99p starting price.

This should surely be enough.

m w says

11:10 am on 26/08/2012

I’m not so sure it’s a lack of imagination. Sounds more like a lack of uptake on the offer to me. Why offer more if your current one is not taken up completely?
Ebay have this strange double standard going on between buyers and sellers. The instant a private seller falls victim of the buyer protection program, they will naturally take umbridge and think it’s just not worth the risk and go elsewhere Amazon (maybe), car boot sale, give it to charity or just not bother. People who I talk to and only ever buy on ebay are horrified when I tell them of the risks involved in selling and the way that ebay seems to actively support this sellers risk.
I would suggest that one of the reasons that ebay are struggling with gaining new private sellers, and therefore growing new buyers, is because of their buyer protection policy. I agree there has to be a policy, but I am not convinced that the current format is the right one to have. Often private buyers and private sellers are the same person, yet they are treated very differently. A 100 good experiences can be and often are, because of human nature, spoiled by 1 bad one.

radroach says

3:30 pm on 30/08/2012

Now eight days of zero insertion fees coming up from September 1st onwards!

http://pages.ebay.co.uk/promos/0IF_120901/index.html