We’ll obviously have more on this when the ads actually start running. But if I were a betting man, I’d put several quid on a call that this “test” won’t – in the long run – be limited to private sellers who are getting free listings.

eBay France has a one-day promotion on 18th February. Private sellers will be charged no insertion fees for auction listings regardless of start price: you’ll need to be French-resident to qualify.

eBay Germany has two days of free listings: the 18th and 19th of February. Again, private sellers can list auctions with no insertion fee: you’ll need to have a German address and be registered on eBay.de to qualify.

For some time now, classifieds have had equal billing on the eBay.fr homepage, with a map of France promoting free listings and speedy local pick-ups of items. But now the default search setting has been changed from “auctions and fixed price listings” to classifieds, so anyone searching eBay.fr without paying much attention to those radio buttons, is going to be presented with classified ads only.

This has some surprising results: one TameBay correspondent was looking for a “velo solex” (bicycle with motor) and found his search only turned up two. “I couldn’t believe that, in the whole of France, there were only two velos for sale”, he told me, “and then I realised it was only showing me classifieds. The proper search turned up nearly 500.” That’s a lot of paid-for listings which have suddenly lost their visibility.

What’s even more worrying is that there’s little indication on the search results page that there would be more items found if a different search were used. There’s an obscure and abbreviated link to switch to auctions and BIN at the top, but for most buyers, that’s an irrelevance: they’re not thinking about what format they want to use to buy their bicycle, they just want to buy it.

I wondered if this was just a bicycle thing. After all, for such a bulky item, local pick-up makes sense. The search form does remember the last format you chose – but that’s no good if you never realise you need to change formats.

And it seems that sellers are increasingly embracing free classifieds as a feeless way to list on eBay. Searching for “jean” turns up nearly 15,000 classified entries today: a quarter of the denim items listed on eBay France are listed as free classifieds. I don’t believe all of those are going to be sold to local buyers; I think most of them will go in the post, without eBay taking their cut. Many of the listings say “frais de port non inclus” (P&P not included), so I think those sellers think the same as me.

So if, like me, you’ve been paying your fees to eBay France, you might like to think again about your listing strategy – because you might just do better not paying eBay a penny more.

In addition, the long-running 15c insertion fee “promotion” for business sellers’ BIN listings is being extended to 8th September. From 9th September, insertion fees for fixed price items will depend on Boutique subscription level:

At the same time, FVF take increases by 5%:

Media categories will see their FVFs reduced fom 12% across the board to 9%.

Lest this work out as a fee cut for anyone, Boutique fees are increasing enormously:

More details on eBay France.

click to embiggen

Some categories – basically, all the vehicles’ categories – are excluded, so do check before you list.

eBay France has been on a mission recently to attract more private sellers. The newest redesign of their home page has lost the colourful burst of shopping that most other eBay sites have, in favour of a dull and cheap-looking push of their free classified ads. eBay has always struggled a little in France compared to the UK or Germany, perhaps because the country already has a very well-established network of “depots ventes” – second-hand warehouses where people can sell unwanted items for a commission. I’m not convinced that trying to look like a classified ads newspaper is really going to bring the buyers flooding in, though I’d love to be proved wrong.

* For completeness’ sake, I’ll record that FVFs were
6.5% of the sale price up to €50
4.5% of the sale price between €50 and €500
2.5% of the sale price over €500

A thread on the French PowerSeller board calling for the promotion to be extended has currently more than 19,000 posts. “Pink” Yannis said on 23rd February that the lower rate would continue and that an official announcement would be made within a few days; however, nothing official has yet been forthcoming.

At the risk of being sent to sit in the naughty corner forever, I will say that the way eBay France are handling this is nothing short of farce. A “special offer” that runs for five months has stopped being a special offer: it’s pricing sellers are now counting on. And yet eBay leave the sword of a 233% price rise dangling over our heads. We need some certainty: not of course that prices will never change, but that this “special” rate might be in place for the foreseeable future. It needs to stop being a special offer, and start being a price offered to business sellers, full stop.

And (I’ll say it again) eBay need to have a more effective way of communicating changes and promotional deals than Pink posts on message boards and randomly shown banners in My eBay. eBay France has forced its business sellers to prove that they are businesses: it’s about time they started treating us like business people too.

eBay give some advice for sellers to take advantage of this:

• sellers should list single multiple-item listings instead of running many listings just for one item
• sellers should relist sold items within seven days to take advantage of their established popularity
• sellers should use longer listings – 10 days – to gain greater visibility for their item
• sellers listing auctions needn’t make any change: their listings will continue to be sorted by ending soonest

It’s good to see this change announced openly, and in detail: other eBay sites could certainly learn something from eBay.fr here. But even more than on eBay UK, I think this goes against buyer psychology on eBay France: I’ve done some fairly extensive testing of multiple listings versus single item listings, and my own experience is:

• single item listings are more likely to sell than not
• two items listed together have about an even chance of selling one of them
• more than two items are unlikely to sell anything.

French buyers, in comparison to their British counterparts, really do lack a sense of urgency: I had an email this morning regarding an item I sold in June, asking if I had another one. So I really don’t want to start telling buyers I have plenty of stock of anything: I want them to think I only have one and if they don’t buy it now, they’re going to miss out. Hammering home the scarcity message really seems to be the way forward on eBay.fr. I’ll be using the seven day relist window as much as I can, but I’ll also be running some tests to see if eBay’s multiple item listing suggestion really does work. Can they overturn more than a decade’s worth of buyer psychology in one little site change? It’ll be interesting to find out.*

* or it would be, if half my income wasn’t riding on it

Auction insertion fees capped at €1

These have been simplified massively, and will be lower for almost everyone:

10 day auctions will have a 5c surcharge.

Buy It Now insertion fees 50c

BIN insertion fees will be 50c across the board, regardless of quantity or price. So long as your BINs were priced at €10 or more, this will be a saving for you. As with other eBay sites, for lower priced items this is a fee hike… but see below regarding multiple item sales, it’s not quite as bad as it looks.

Media categories keep their 5c IFs.

Gallery fees have been included in French insertion fees since August 2007, and this remains the case.

Final Value Fees increased

Auctions and BINs will now have different FVF schedules, and they will all be higher than they used to be:

Media items keep their 9% FVFs for sub-€50 sales. The one little glimmer of light is for media sales above €50, which will see their FVFs drop to 6% for €50-500, and 3% above that: this will obviously affect a very small percentage of the category, but I guess it’s better than nothing.

Popularity in search result sorting

Items which have sold in the preceeding seven days will be advantaged in search results. It should probably be noted here that ten days remains the longest available core BIN period on eBay France: there is no equivalent to eBay UK’s or eBay Italy’s 30 core BIN.

But this may be some glimmer of hope for sellers of lower-priced BINs who, like me, just saw all their fees jump. Listing multiple items in one listing instead of single items could be a way to keep fees down, though in my experience, multiple item listings on eBay France have a much lower sell-through rate than the same items listed singly, so this will need some more experimentation.

Compulsory business registration

eBay France already announced that business sellers would be forced to prove their registered status. Now private sellers turning over €2k or more in three consecutive months will have to register as business sellers, or have their seller accounts suspended.

A seller’s status as business or private is now displayed in eBay.fr search results.

Business seller fee promotion 1st – 31st October

The new fees come into effect on 25th September, but if you’re a business seller, don’t get too used to them, because on the 1st October, a month long promotion begins. This offers 15c insertion fees for BIN listings and 10% off FVFs for sellers with all four DSRs at 4.5 or more.

This promotion is obviously welcome, but frankly, it muddies the waters. At the busiest time of year, to have to deal with two fee changes in a month, is a joke. If it’s trying to distract sellers of lower-priced items with decent STRs from the fee hike that just happened, I can promise them it isn’t working. And if it’s some kind of experiement to discover whether professional sellers will list more with a lower fee schedule, well then why change things twice? Especially in the next four months, I’d be so happy if eBay would stop tinkering and just let me get on with selling.

Those whom eBay can link with their official registration need do nothing more. Those who can’t be matched will need to supply an official registration document plus a copy of their national ID card or passport, and then complete telephone verification with eBay Support. Registration will have to be completed by 30th October, or within 30 days of eBay notifying sellers that proof of status is required, whichever is sooner. Business sellers who do not complete the verification process will not be permitted to sell on eBay.fr after 30th October. From 6th October, new business sellers on eBay.fr will have to complete the verification process before being allowed to list items for sale.

To the best of my knowledge, eBay France are the first site to check all business sellers for proper registration. It’s perhaps easier here than it might be in some other countries because the necessary information is already in the public arena, but I think we can expect to see other eBay sites following France’s example in the not to distant future.

I would love to be able unreservedly to praise eBay France for taking this unprecedented step in cleaning up the site and ensuring their sellers are legal. In theory, I do that. But in practice, it all feels rather hit and miss: the overall time-scale, just ten weeks, seems short to complete everyone’s registration, and the lack of any more detailed up-front plan (“if we haven’t notified you we’ve found you by such-and-such date, then we need you to send your information in…”) leaves me as a seller feeling extremely insecure. I’ll let you know what happens.