In truth barring the Basic and Advanced designators the PowerSeller requirements have not changed since October 2010 when the last update was introduced.

The Basic PowerSeller requirements really match what was called the Bronze PowerSeller level. In the UK that’s minimum domestic sales of £2,000.00 and 100 transactions (based on sales to UK and IE buyers).

The Advanced PowerSeller requirements are are determined by global turnover requirements. You can qualify on either a 3 month period or a 12 month period. The 3 months measure allows new sellers to quickly qualify but for those sellers with seasonal fluctuations the 12 month measure allows them to retain PowerSeller level over the course of a year.

For all intents and purposes Bronze PowerSellers have now ceased to exist. In fact eBay now only require three levels of PowerSeller level as about the only thing PowerSeller level now exists for in the UK is to determine discount level.

If you’re a Bronze (Basic)/Silver PowerSeller and Top Rated you qualify for a 20% final value fee discount. Gold/Platinum Top Rated PowerSellers qualify for a 25% discount and Titanium PowerSellers qualify for a 30% discount.

At some point in the future I can see eBay rolling Bronze and Silver PowerSellers into one level and Gold and Platinum into another. It also wouldn’t surprise me to see the PowerSeller name disappear entirely – it’s no longer visible to buyers and to all intents and purposes the Bronze PowerSeller level has now been discontinued.

Anchor shops see free insertion fees for fixed price listings and eBay have also slashed fixed price insertion fees for Basic shops from 20p to 10p per item. This means it will make financial sense for more sellers to either upgrade to an Anchor shop or downgrade to a Basic shop.

Often eBay has been accused of giving discounts to their biggest sellers and ignoring smaller sellers. With this seller release there are some real up front listing cost savings for sellers who have a Basic eBay shop and it also makes Basic shops much more financially viable for the very smallest sellers on eBay UK.

Fee Changes

There has been a radical rethink of final value fees. Gone are the fee tranches and in come flat rate category specific fees making it simple to calculate the cost for selling an item. You’ll no longer have to calculate 8.75% of £0.01 – £29.99 plus 5.25% of £30 – £599.99 plus 1.5% of the final selling price of £600 or more. It’s now a simple percentage of the whole selling price.

There are some winners and losers with some categories such as Tech having final value fees slashed by 50% and increases in others.

There will be changes to the Buy it now and Reserve features in most categories and the reserve fee option will increase from 2% to 3%.

Auction listings with Buy It Now

The changes will see the end of the £9.99 auction with £10 Buy It now. From May not only will fees increase a few pence for adding a Buy It Now option but there must be a 40% difference between the Buy it now price and the auction start price.

PowerSellers

In line with eBay.com the PowerSeller discounts will end in May this year. If you want to get discounts on your Final Value Fees you’ll need to achieve Top Rated Seller status.

eBay are also changing the criteria to qualify as a PowerSeller. From May you’ll need 100 transactions to domestic buyers in the last 12 months instead of 100 items sold. This means previously if a buyer bought a quantity of 100 items from a single listing you’d meet the criteria for the one sale, in the future this will count as one transaction and you’ll need to sell another 99 items to qualify.

eBay are also removing the 100 Feedback, 98% or more positive criteria from PowerSeller requirements.

Duplicate Listings Ended

From May, sellers will no longer be allowed to have multiple listings for identical items. This policy will apply to fixed price listings across most categories and should save fees as well as benefiting sellers from recent sales on multi-quantity listings. If you do have duplicate fixed price listings running they’ll be ended automatically in mid-May.

To enable you to check for duplicate listings there’s a new tool to check for duplicates listed on your eBay account.

What will still be allowed is up to 15 listings for items made to fit specific products, models, or brands to enable sellers to specify the fitment in item titles.

Better Communications with Buyers

Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro emails, which are duplicates of the ones sent by eBay, are being retired. Business sellers can customise and personalise the winning bidder, order confirmation and order update emails.

From May sellers will be able to upload from any courier along with tracking numbers in My eBay, Selling Manager or Selling Manager Pro. Adding tracking information automatically triggers the new order update email to be sent to buyers informing them of the updated postal status for their purchase.

Global Seller Standards

Starting in May 2011, minimum selling standards will be put in place across all eBay sites around the world. From the 20th May, to sell into other countries sellers will be required to meet new minimum Global Standards and sellers already have to meet minimum standards to sell into the US, UK and Germany.

Sellers will also be able to achieve Top Rated status in Canada, Australia, France and Italy in addition to the US, UK and Germany.

Listing Analytics Improved

eBay have added new features to the listing analytics tool available in My eBay for free. You can now choose between real time data or data from the last 30 days, it includes data for auctions and includes data for ended items.

Category changes

There are some category changes coming to Clothes, Shoes & Accessories, Computing, Consumer Electronics, Mobile & Home Phones, Photography and Video Games.

Product Details, Catalogue and Multi-Variation Listings

From May there will be required product details in Fashion (Brand, Size, Style), mandatory listing all Electronics items with a matching product in the catalogue and more descriptive item condition values for media. Sellers need to ensure that they update their listings or items could be ended at worst and at best will lose sales by not appearing high in search rankings.

The categories where you can list Multi-Variations have been expanded. They will also soon be available to all sellers, not just those with an eBay shop.

Is this the end of auctions on eBay

eBay are touting the changes as good for sales and on the face of it most of the changes do look positive. Casual sellers can now list auctions with a Buy It Now option for free and there are few that can complain about that. What’s more interesting is how eBay are saying that they love the auction format but go on to talk about convenience for buyers removing the need for them to bid on auctions.

Is this the end of the auction on eBay? Almost certainly not – for many unique one off items it’s the only way to achieve the best price the market will stand for that product. However what it does mean is that consumer sellers will now get better visibility in search (as auctions are sorted Time Ending Soonest) but also gain the benefit of offering Buy It Now.

Professional sellers wanting to get visibility in search are reliant on performing well in Best Match for fixed price listings, or using auctions (for which they’ll pay insertion fees) and hoping buyers are prepared to bid and wait for the auction to end before they’re assured the item is theirs.

Casual sellers should be pleased that their items will get great search exposure and in fact better search exposure than if they paid for a fixed price listing. The only disadvantage is that, if their item isn’t purchased on Buy It Now, it might sell for the original auction start price. Setting a realistic start price is now no barrier though as there will still be no insertion fee for their first fifty listings.

The impact of fees on shipping costs

If you already offer free shipping then this change is great news for you. To counter the additional fees garnered from charging on shipping eBay have given a 1% or 2% discount based on the category you trade in. For those offering free shipping that’s lower fees with no downside.

If you do charge for shipping then the additional fees are mitigated somewhat. You won’t be charged fees for shipping overseas or next day shipping costs – so long as you also offer alternatives the first domestic shipping service offered other than next day will be used to calculate Final Value Fees.

The best strategy for sellers who offer next day shipping will actually be to offer a low cost alternative as that’s what you’ll be charged fees on.

The one thing that Final Value Fees charged on shipping will do is to remove any advantage sellers have for overcharging on postage to subsidise the cost of the item. This form of fee avoidance is effectively ended on eBay.com from July.

Lower fees vs charging fees on shipping costs

It’s easy to look at the 1% or 2% reduction in fees and dismiss them as tiny, so what do the discounts actually mean in monetary terms? Firstly the discounts are much bigger than they sound, for instance if you sell clothing and apparel on eBay you previously would have paid 12% Final Value Fees. That’s drops to 10% from July this year but in real terms it’s a 16.67% reduction giving a reasonably generous allowance for shipping costs.

As an example suppose you sell an item of clothing, it can be seen from this table that relatively high priced items with low or free shipping will save sellers money. Sellers of low priced items with relatively high priced shipping in proportion to the item cost will incur slightly higher fees.

Loss of PowerSeller Discounts

Effectively PowerSellers might as well cease to exist on eBay. Whilst it’s still a familiar term and carries some minor benefits there is no PowerSeller Logo, no PowerSeller discounts, no PowerSeller promotion in search. All the real business benefits now apply to Top Rated Sellers only.

The best advice for all sellers is to base your business on the published fee structure and take any discounts as a bonus. In reality a 5% discount on Final Value Fees may be significant but it’s only $50 out of an invoice of $1000. Your actual invoice would be significantly higher than $1000 as you’d also pay Insertion Fees, listing upgrade fees and any subscriptions such as eBay Store fees as well.

Whilst discounts do have a monetary value in reality only Top Rated Sellers are getting discounts worth having so that’s the level all sellers should be aiming to achieve. However if sellers have a complaint about the new fee structure the loss of their PowerSeller discount is probably the most legitimate.

photo credit: Duchamp

Some time over the last few days, my PowerSeller badge vanished. I’ve had it for exactly a decade, although I must admit for the last few months, it’s been a statistical anomoly based on high sales early last year: I haven’t deserved it because I stopped selling on my own account more than six months ago. Because – bear with me, chums; the confessional is coming – I’ve done something I swore I’d never do again. I’ve got a job.

This post is going to be a little more personal than what I normally write on TameBay. If you’re not interested, here’s the summary: nothing much is changing, some stuff’s changing a bit. We’ll still have eBay news, but we’ll have more general ecommerce stuff too. Move along, nothing to see here.

Okay. Now we’ve got rid of those people… I’ve got a job. It happened by accident (not the first job I’ve got by accident, not to mention the job I got for a bet). The friend of a friend of a guy I know on Twitter phoned me up and asked if I would like to spend one day a week writing blog posts for him. And even though I knew nothing at all about the industry he’s working in (it’s nothing to do with marketplaces), I said yes. I think there are times in life when you just need to run round saying “yes” to everything, to see where it takes you.

Where it took me was somewhere that rapidly expanded to two days a week – will you write guest content for other people for us, and yes, some of it is actually in print. Seeing my words in print, even with someone else’s name on them, gives me more joy than I can ever really express. And then, will you do a third day, looking after random bits of marketing and Twitter… When you get to three days, it just slides into a full-time job because no one else ever remembers which are the days you’re not supposed to be working for them, and so you start getting included in business development discussions and recruitment, and you get business cards with “Marketing Manager” on them, and all sorts of weird things that you swore you’d never do again.
Because you were never going to work *for* anyone again.

As Mrs Connery famously said, never say never again. It’s actually quite fun, and to skip from “full-time at home” to “full-time in the office” was easier than I’d ever have imagined, especially when I work for someone who thinks it’s entirely reasonable to say “I can’t write in here today, I’m taking my laptop to the park”.

I knew the day would come when my PS badge would disappear. I remember how much I wanted to win it, those first few fun months selling on eBay in 2000: how I’d felt getting it was some form of validation… How I’ve worn it ever since, at first proudly and then increasingly as a badge of solidarity with people who were being dumped on from a great height. Now it’s gone. I’d expected to feel sad, but largely, I feel nothing. I’ve moved on.

I don’t intend to turn into one of those ex-eBay PSs who hang around eBay forums and talk about how great the escape is. I quit selling because better things came along, more exciting challenges, bigger rewards. It’s a positive thing for me, and I’m not going to let it turn into a negative thing for anyone else.

So where does this leave TameBay? Obviously, I’m not in a position to write about the intricate nitty gritty of how site changes affect sellers. I’ll leave that to Chris (who, let’s be honest, is better at that stuff than just about anyone any of us know). I’m still going to be writing about eBay the company because with ten years of watching them, I think I can bring perspective to what they’re doing. But I’m hoping to use my new experiences to write about things that will be useful beyond just eBay. At the moment, I’m thinking about email marketing, and social media marketing, and Google Analytics, and how partnerships with your competition can increase the size of the cake for everyone, and whole rafts of thoughts about websites and what to do with them… And, of course, about life beyond eBay and where you can go if you’ve had enough of selling.

We say frequently around here that sellers should be looking beyond eBay for their businesses. I hope I’m going to be able to bring some useful thoughts about the ecommerce world outside eBay to TameBay. If not, well, I’m sure you’ll let me know.

Interestingly the survey also asks what service level you’d expect to receive from sellers that are not “Approved Sellers” – I guess eBay don’t want the unapproved to be unable to sell anything as that would be a disaster. The survey also reveals the three criteria which need to be met to keep approved status:
* Maintain a sales level of 100 items per year; AND
* Maintain an average of 4.6 or better (1 to 5 scale) on each Detailed Seller Rating (DSR): Item Description, Communications, Shipping Time and Shipping Charge; AND
* At least 99% of buyer ratings on each Detailed Seller Rating are 3 or higher (1 to 5 scale)

If that’s all that’s needed to become an approved seller it’s pretty inclusive and most sellers should have no difficulty attaining approved status. Maintaining an average of 4.6 or above on all four DSRs is already a basic requirement to qualify for seller final value fee discounts and sellers regularly attracting 1 or 2 DSR star scores are likely to face Seller Non-Performance restrictions.

If in reality pretty much every PowerSeller is an Approved Seller it’s not going to be much of a differentiator. Hopefully it will have more value in the eyes of buyers than the PowerSeller badge and represent the real “pillars of our community”, but in order to do so the entry requirements need to separate the superb from the mere average.

As we might expect, the Australian community boards began to fill up with threads from members incensed that this had been foisted on them unannounced. Several sellers expressed a concern that buyers would assume that this “first month plus installation free” television package was included with the item they were selling, and that they would be left with the customer issues and the negative feedback when buyers discovered it was nothing to do with them.

eBay Support had no information to offer. Members contacting Live Help were told that they had received many complaints and were waiting to hear back from the business unit. Then they were told that the ads were “part of a test being done by our product development department”. Other support staff said they were “the result of a known eBay site issue”. New advertising space, test or glitch? Your guess is as good as mine.

And so some canny eBayers began to complain, not to eBay, but to Foxtel:

Send your complaint to Foxtel. If eBay stick their head in the sand about this, Foxtel certainly won’t, especially if they get lots of negative publicity about their product.

wrote one poster on the Australian PowerSellers Board. And that worked. Members who had complained directly to Foxtel received this email from their Corporate Affairs Co-ordinator:

These ads were placed on eBay by a third party, and it was never FOXTEL’s understanding that they would be placed in this way. We have asked that they be removed immediately.

I’ve got to applaud all those Australian eBayers who made their voices heard on this issue. It’s another appalling example of eBay’s inability to communicate, not only with its members, but internally: anyone could have predicted that 3P ads on the view item page would have resulted in an outcry from sellers, and Support should have been primed with correct information about just what was going on. Better still, eBay Australia should have announced the new ads ahead of time, so that sellers could make an informed decision about whether they wanted to pay for an eBay listing carrying someone else’s promotional material.

We’ve already seen adverts on eBay UK view item pages: I’m sure this won’t be the last time this happens. eBay’s belief is that they own the view item page, and can put what they like on it: but for sellers, it’s the page we’ve paid for and it should be all ours. The way this issue is resolved is going to shape the future of eBay: will it remain a marketplace where individual sellers can shine, or become Amazon Lite where you barely notice who you’re buying from? We’ve won a battle, but the conflict is nowhere near over.

The minimum rating is a little lower than the 4.6 required for PS discounts on eBay UK and eBay.com. Anecdotal evidence from sellers says that Spanish buyers on average leave lower feedback ratings than British or American buyers, and the more generous discount criterion might suggest that eBay’s own figures support this.

If eligible sellers have previously declined invitations to join the PS program, they need to contact Customer Support.

[P.S. M. von Schirmeister, can we please have some discounts on eBay.fr? Merci.]

Of course, ranking by feedback doesn’t tell you who’s sold the most or who’s made the most profit (though you can see some basic figures for each seller on the site too). But for stats obsessives and very nosey people, it has some interesting information.

Media categories, which have 5c insertion fees normally, are not included; Motors (which have free insertion fees) and some motors-related categories are not included. All other normal fees apply, and please read all the small print before you list.