Unlike recent listing promotions in the States this one is open to those who have an eBay Stores subscription as well as non-stores subscribers. Sellers who do’t have an eBay Store subscription are still eligible for 100 free Insertion Fees per month, up until January 7. If they list more than 100 free listings that’s when the 25c listings will kick in.

There are a few category restrictions, and the promotion really applies to auctions with a start price greater than $10 as that’s where the savings are to be made.

For transactions where eBay can see that there was no shipping charged, the DSR screen will appear as below, with buyers unable to leave any score for this element. In order to qualify,

• the item must have a free shipping option
• the buyer must have selected the free shipping option during checkout
• sellers must use a verifiable payment method (i.e. PayPal, MoneyBookers, PayMate, ProPay) and use eBay checkout

Sellers have been complaining for a long time now about being scored for shipping prices when they haven’t charged them: we’ve heard all sorts of bizarre stories, from the seller who introduced free P&P and saw his DSR score fall from 4.8 to 4.5, to the buyer who said “you didn’t charge me, so I couldn’t score you, so I gave you a 1″. So sellers already offering free P&P will doubtless be delighted to see this.

Others who do charge for shipping will be less enthusiastic: as Whirly commented on Ink, “Sellers are already jumping through a massive amount of hoops in a desperate attempt to gain TRS: this will force the desperate ones to move to a free P&P model.” He’s absolutely right that this highlights what a farce the DSRs have become; I’d have preferred to see the shipping DSR just disappear for free shipping, rather than be an automatic 5.

I should stress that this is eBay.com and eBay.ca only at the moment; according to @eBay_Andy on Twitter, it’s coming soon to the UK, Germany and Australia. Watch this space.

What do you think? Thumbs up, or thumbs down? Leave us a comment.

Thanks to the lovely Magnumopus for the heads up.

It’s worth remembering that the first 100 auctions starting at 99¢ or less are free anyway, so it’s a great time to list items for which you want to have a higher starting price. There is also a limit of 100 auctions for this promotion and as normal there are a few excluded categories so check the details before listing.

On March 16th, sellers listing auctions on eBay.com, eBay.ca and eBay Motors will save 50% on insertion fees regardless of start price. Sellers will need to have DSRs of 4.5 or higher to qualify. Other fees apply as normal. There are exclusions so please read the small print before you list.

Best Match on the Canadian site has for some time given a boost in search to domestic items, in the belief that buying from your own country is a better buying experience than a cross border transaction. This will be suspended if you’re in one of the test groups so that eBay can gauge how much the item location affects buyer behaviour.

For sure it’s often a simpler quicker buying experience to buy from a domestic seller but I’m constantly amazed when I buy from overseas just how quickly items are delivered – often faster than some UK sellers appear able to despatch.

We know that many TameBay readers are based overseas, but sell into the UK. Also many sellers based in the UK make a large proportion of their income through selling outside the UK. How important is cross border trade to your business? Would you prefer equal visibility for yourself and sellers from other EU countries, what about the Far East or sellers from the US where customs charges come into play?

Firstly, there’s a reminder from eBay UK that sellers in the Music, Books, Video games and DVD, Film & TV categories can get 20% off their FVFs when they offer free domestic P&P. This offer runs from 20th August to 30th September. This is of course in preparation for all sellers in media categories having to offer a free postage option by 19th October.

eBay.com, Motors and eBay Canada are offering up to 12 eBay-hosted photographs for just 25c from today until September 18th, saving sellers 50c-75c per listing. (I feel compelled to say at this point, if you regularly pay a dollar for picture pack, please please get your own image hosting or at least sign up for a free Photobucket account.)

eBay Motors Parts and Accessories are included in the sale, but there are a bunch of category exclusions, most notably media listings (including Books, Music, Movies & DVDs and Video Games). Fixed price listings are not included.

Some categories (vehicles, real estate, business) are excluded, as are BIN listings and 7 and 10 day auctions. This close to Christmas, sellers taking advantage of the promotion would be well advised to pay for the BIN upgrade and let nervous buyers get on with their shopping, rather than being forced to wait for the end of an auction, however short.

It’s no surprise to see eBay offer a discount, to boost listings, a week before what’s normally the busiest shopping weekend in the US of the holiday season. What’s not surprising is that again the listing promotion is aimed at auctions and not at fixed price listings.

The promo is only open to Canadian residents, and has the normal exceptions (Motors, Property etc) and doesn’t include Shop Inventory Format listings which are still available in most countries outside the UK.

There’s great news for private sellers who might list just a couple of vehicles a year: on .com Motors, the first four listings in a 12 month period have no insertion fees at all, a saving of $40 per listing. The catch – and you knew there’d be a catch – is that the Successful Listing Fee (Motors’ fixed-price equivalent of FVFs) will increase from $50 to $125 (or $100 for motorcycles). Still, you’ll only have to pay this if you’ve sold your car, so it reduces the risk of listing on eBay Motors to pretty much nil.

Once you’ve sold four vehicles in a year, insertion fees are $20 and SLFs $100 ($15 and $80 respectively for motorcycles): the total fees payable on a sold vehicle thus increase from $90 to $120. I’d suggest that if you’re a business, you’re probably keeping a pretty close eye on your sell-through rate; you won’t want to pay $40 a time to list something that won’t sell, and you’ll list accordingly. So this new “you’re better off when you don’t sell your car” fee structure is going to hurt. Of course, the really huge dealerships like GM’s network have already negotiated their own fee structures with eBay, so the people who are really going to be squeezed are the small dealerships, who’ve just seen their fees jump by something like 33%.

If you think that’s bad, spare a thought for the poor Canadians: they’ve got the same new fee structure, but their old fee structure was much nicer. Insertion fees were only CA$4.25, so even for the four “free” listings, that’s an increase of $70.75 per sold vehicle.

Generally, I support eBay’s trend towards putting more of their fee onto sold items, and less upfront. But I can’t help feeling this hasn’t got the balance right. It seems rather to reward not selling your vehicle, because that’s where the big money savings are – and surely that can’t be what eBay want?

For the sake of clarity, these changes apply only to Motors’ sales on eBay.com and eBay.ca, and no announcement has been made for eBay UK or any other eBay site.

With so much speculation that ‘compulsory PayPal’ will be rolled out beyond the UK and Australia, this will be one glitch they’ll want to fix as soon as possible.

And if that was seeming awfully familiar to you too, it’s the same promotion they ran two weeks ago.

photo credit: woody1778a

Between 6th and 12th July, you can list your car for free on eBay.ca Motors. The normal insertion fee of CA$4.25 is being waived, though other fees still apply. The offer is good for Canadian residents only.

Sadly the CLD is just for Canadian residents. Canada Post recently introduced a flat rate shipping box for eBay sellers, where items weighing up to 5kg can be shipped regionally for CA$9.99, nationally for CA$12.99 or to the US for CA$17.99.

For larger merchants who do a lot of business with the US, there’s even better news: currency conversion fees to move US dollars to Canadian bank accounts are being cut for merchants who do more than $3,000 monthly sales. Those who sell up to $125,000 a month will see currency conversion rates cut from 2.5% to 1.5%, and those who sell more than $125,000 a month will be charged 1%. Sellers will need to apply for merchant rates before they will qualify for this fee structure (IMO, this is one of the most outrageous PayPal policies there is; merchants should auto-qualify for merchant rates without having to ask for them).

A full schedule of fees can be found on PayPal’s website.

Normally if I visit eBay.com I’ve not got a clue what time auctions actually end. In truth I’m never quite sure whether PST is ahead or behind EST, although I’m pretty certain that CST is somewhere in the middle. It’s just all too much like hard work, I want to think in UK time as that’s what I wake up and go to bed by. Shopping on eBay.com or other eBay sites display times local to that site and sometimes even the date can be wrong (or at least wrong in the UK).

myTimeZone for eBay 1.4.0 is an add-on for the FireFox browser which turns foreign times into local times. It doesn’t even need me to tell it what “my time” is, it automatically recognises it from my computer clock.

Now if I view eBay auctions on sites other than eBay.co.uk it simply displays the time and it even corrects the date. That tells me if I need to be up early, go to bed late, might be at work, or could be up the pub, when an item I’m interested in will be ending. I don’t need to try and figure out if I’m likely to be at my computer to place a bid at some point in the future, in a random time zone. From now on I’m shopping on UK time all around the world!

myTimeZone for eBay supports eBay.co.uk, eBay.ie, eBay.com, eBay.ca and eBay.com.au. It is only available for the Firefox browser and can be downloaded from the myTimeZone website.

The announcement suggests visiting eBay.com help pages for assistance if you’re seeing French pages, but sadly they’ve got their HTML wrong resulting in page not found (http://www2.ebay.com/aw/ca/www.ebay.com)

Should you happen to be using the Canadian site and need assistance this is the correct link to eBay.com help pages.

The promotion which is based on the last eBay.com cheap listing day waives listing fees for items with a start price under $10.00. For items over $10.00 insertion fees are discounted by 25%.

This promotion has to be a precursor to all eBay sites world wide having gallery included in the basic listing price, a move which ebay France has already made. Gallery pictures are such an important enhancement to eBay search that some third party tools such as the MyEBayFox plugin for the Firefox browser show gallery pictures even if the seller didn’t pay for them.

Justus states that buyers benefit from a richer shopping experience with gallery pictures and can shop in a more visually appealing way. This being the case just why do eBay allow listings without gallery pictures? eBay is all about buyers and anything not designed to give the best buyer experience possible just isn’t good enough.

Competitors such as Amazon have gallery pictures as default, it’s time eBay followed suit.

Though unusually generous – I can’t actually remember the last time there was a *free* listing day – these promotions are well in line with eBay’s current push towards low start prices and the universal use of Gallery.

UK sellers might also be wondering where their free, or at least cheap listing day is: there’s yet to be one in August. Last year, we had two cheap listing days early in the month, then 10p listing weekend for Clothes, Shoes and Accessories, and another general CLD in the first week in September. But then eBay were of course dealing with a lot of flack from their Shops’ fee changes (was that really a year ago?!).

I don’t think eBay UK think they have to push sellers quite so hard towards core listings this year, but I’d expect the Gallery promotion to be replicated over here in some way. My money would say they’d want lots of great things ending over the Bank Holiday weekend: this would mean ten day auctions starting Thursday or Friday this week.

And then again, I might, of course, be totally wrong