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.

PowerSellers who have fallen below the minimum PowerSeller requirement (98%) due to the recent recalculation will be given a 60 day grace period during which they will remain in the Programme and have time to improve their score.

No fees on items under $25

As has become the norm with eBay competitors, there is no fee to list on Wigix. Items sold for under $25 are fee-free even when sold. From $25 up, there is a downwards sliding scale for sellers:

• $1.50 for a sale $25 – $100;
• $1.50 + 2% of the amount above $100 for a sale $100 – $1,000;
• $21 + 1% of the amount over $1,000 for a sale of more than $1,000.

Buyers will – unusually – pay $1.50 per item themselves. This pricing structure obviously tends towards the higher end of the market.

But members also have the opportunity to earn money from the site, without needing to sell a thing themselves. Those who add new products into Wigix’s Amazon-style inventory, will earn 5% of the site’s transaction fees when items are sold from that listing. There’s a great opportunity for someone with a large database of products there…

Members can also become category experts, overseeing product submissions, blogging, posting on forums and dealing with other members’ queries: creating community around their categories. For a fairly hefty time committment, these members will earn 1% of the revenue from their category.

PowerSellers wanted

eBay PowerSellers will be able to import their catalogues into Wigix, and they say that from July, the site will offer store fronts.

I must admit, I’m more impressed with Wigix than with pretty much any “the next eBay” I’ve ever seen. Concentrating on higher-end consumer products rather than trying to take on the breadth of eBay’s marketplace, looks like it may attract experts in the relevent categories, as well as serious buyers and sellers. It’s a shame they’re limiting it to US residents at the moment, but perhaps that will change in time.

Neutral is no longer neutral

This change is going to leave a lot of people questioning what the point of neutral feedback is. eBay have previously said that neutrals allow buyers to leave a non-positive feedback without the damage of a negative. This is obviously not the case any more: a neutral is just as damaging as a negative under the new calculation.

Sadly, I don’t think buyers will see it like that. Many neutrals are left simply because the buyer’s assumptions were incorrect, because something outside the seller’s control (delivery time) wasn’t quite satisfactory, or even because the transaction was ‘just ordinary’. As the leaver of my very first neutral told me, “don’t get your knickers in a knot, it’s only a neutral”. Except now it isn’t.

It’s time to get rid of neutral feedback once and for all; if buyers want to complain, they can leave negative feedback, and they can mark down DSRs. Giving them this ‘negative lite’ score which they believe doesn’t really matter is only encouraging them to damage sellers’ livelihoods without realising what they’re doing.

Limits on when feedback can be left

The Developers’ Blog says “We’ll block buyers from leaving negative or neutral Feedback for 7 days for active PowerSellers who have been on eBay for at least 12 months.” Whatever this actually means, it’s good news.

The feedback changes page says “A time limit should be placed on how quickly negative and neutral Feedback can be left.” I assume therefore the limit is seven days from the date of the sale, rather than – say – buyers indicating they want to leave negative feedback having to wait seven days before that feedback appears on the site.

eBay comment that this should “drive positive feedback”. I don’t think this is true: most genuine negatives are left more than a week after the transaction, when it has become obvious that the seller can’t or won’t make things right. But it will help to stop feedback extortion: quite why that should be limited to long-term PowerSellers, I can’t really see.

Help for sellers

As has been previously announced, there are several tweaks to the system being made which should help sellers limit the problems they have to deal with:

• sellers can block buyers who have two unpaid item strikes in the last 12 months
• sellers will be able to block buyers who have been reported for feedback extortion and email threats
• blocked bidder lists are increasing in capacity from 1000 IDs to 5000.

How will this affect you? Are you – like me – waving goodbye to all your 100% scores? Or do you still believe that feedback doesn’t really matter? Leave us a comment.

This is the first time eBay.com has held a PS-only cheap listing day, though similar events were held recently on eBay Australia and eBay France. It’s another first too: this CLD is sponsored by monster.com, who have an advert on the CLD page. What do you think about sponsored CLDs – is this a step too far towards tacky? Leave us a comment.

We’ve identified the problem and confirmed that it has affected a very small number of members. We apologise for the frustration the wait will have caused as we’ve worked on the problem. It will be fixed in the next rollout of the Dashboard (this will be the rollout of the full version not the version currently in use. We will of course manually back-credit anyone who hasn’t but should have received their discounts and will pass on details of how this will be done once finalised.

Affected sellers, do feel free to keep us up to date on the status of your discounts. I’ve said it before and no doubt I’ll be saying it again: this roll-out has been the biggest fiasco I’ve ever seen in eBay’s history, and the program should have been delayed until everything was working properly.

The new trial tariff slashes insertion fees by 50%, but increases FVFs on tranches up to €1000: there’s a full list of the new pricing after the cut. Sellers who sign up for the trial will be shown a comparison of the old fees versus the new ones. Anyone who finds out they’re not saving money will not be able to quit before the end of the month.

I’m pretty impressed with this decision to allow sellers to opt in to a trial and see what works for them. There doesn’t appear to be any word on what will happen at the end of the trial, but presumably if it’s a success, the trial pricing may be adopted permanently. The new fee structure does not apply to Motors or Media, which have their own fee structures, or to Boutique (Shops) listings.

Many thanks to Jo from French Collection for the heads up.

Insertion Fees

photo credit: Elaine with Grey Cats

You’d think that offering discounts to your biggest and most loyal customers would be a good thing, wouldn’t you? A thing that would make them want to spend more money with you, maybe even like you. But eBay have managed to turn their PowerSeller FVF discount scheme into one of the biggest fiascos I have seen in my eight years’ trading on the site.

First there was the Seller Dashboard, which didn’t roll out until more than a month after the new pricing scheme. Imagine if you asked *your* customers to guess the price they’d have to pay you. This should have been implemented at exactly the same time as the new pricing, even if that meant delaying the fee changes.

However, it gets worse. Imagine if you promised your customers a discount, and then charged them the full whack. That’s exactly what happened to me.

When the FVF discount scheme was announced, one of the first questions asked was how it would affect those of us who don’t trade on our national site: French residents who list on .co.uk, UK residents who list on .com, and so on. For a company that promotes international trade, it seemed a little bizarre that eBay didn’t think of this one for themselves. For a few days, Pinks made different statements. Some said that sellers would only be entitled to discounts on their national site, so if they sold elsewhere, they’d have to pay full price. Others said you’d get a discount based on your local site, but it would apply on sales from other sites too.

Then came the good news: an eBay employee, asked specifically about my account, said I would get the discount because it was based on your main trading area, in my case, eBay UK.

Have I got a discount? Dear reader, I have not. Nor have I got access to the seller dashboard. It seems French sellers stay French, even if they’re selling on eBay UK.

Now I know a lot of people are tempted to get protectionistic about this, but lets be logical: if I only get the discount by being UK-registered, that’s a pretty huge incentive to start lying about my location, put something in my listings about “your item may ship from my holiday home in France”, and get 35% off my fees. I won’t. But I would bet money that thousands of sellers from across the world who make their living on eBay UK are thinking of doing exactly that right now. I thought we’d largely cured the location misrepresentation problem, but this discount scheme might bring it all back again.

We asked eBay to comment on this more than a week ago, but they’ve been either unable or unwilling to clarify the position. I still don’t know whether I’m not entitled to the discount I was promised, or whether someone’s forgotten to push a button somewhere.

And it seems I’m not the only one with a problem. PowerSeller Lynne from Josordoni Collectables told me earlier today “I keep on checking and as of now the dashboard is still showing ‘not calculated’. My April invoice should have been available from yesterday, and that isn’t up yet either.”

A thread on the PowerSeller Board [PS login required] suggests that Lynne’s problem is far from unique. Some sellers are having the dashboard waver between ‘not calculated’ and ‘no discount’; some are told ‘no discount’ when they have four green ticks indicating they’re entitled to the discount; others are seeing their figures drop at the last minute, and inevitably this raises questions about their accuracy.

I loved the idea of this scheme when it was announced; rewarding good sellers seemed exactly what eBay needs. But in reality, the whole thing has become a farce that even eBay staff don’t seem to understand. It’s causing good sellers an immense amount of frustration and worry. It’s going to encourage location misrepresentation. This half-ready scheme should never have been launched until it was properly ready: sometimes, it feels like policy is being made up as we go along.

• any address: sellers are now protected whether or not their buyer has a confirmed address
• international coverage: posting is covered to any of the 190 countries supported by PayPal
• unlimited coverage: the previous limit of £3,250 is gone; sellers now have unlimited cover from PayPal.

Of course, there are some requirements of sellers too:

• for item not received claims, you’ll need to send within seven days of payment, with a proof of delivery viewable online (signature viewable online if the item is worth £150 or more), and
• for unauthorised payment claims, you will need to post to the address on the payment page, and be able to provide a proof of posting (PoP not proof of delivery seems rather nicely generous to me).

Most of all, you’ll need to register to be eligible, so get on over to PayPal and do it!

Different fee structures for business and private sellers

Private sellers can list auctions starting at €1,00 with Gallery picture with no fee. They pay 8% final value fee. Cars, motorbikes, boats, and other motors and sports vehicles can also be listed free; FVFs are dependent on sale price, with a sliding scale from 8% to 2%.

Category-specific pricing for business sellers

Business sellers‘ in certain categories will see a move to the lower-IF, higher FVF model seen on eBay.com and .co.uk.

• The lowest prices will be seen in media categories (films & DVDs, music, PC & video games) and tickets.
• Electronics (hi-fi, audio, in-car navigation, household electronics, TV, video, software and games consoles) do next best, and
• a collection of home and office categories (office & stationery, gourmet, furniture, toys, sports and home decoration) also see some changed prices.

All affected categories will see insertion fees cut for auctions starting at or fixed priced items at €10. The biggest cut is in media, where all items have a 5c insertion fee (private sellers do not get special pricing in the media).

For multiple item listings, eBay.de’s fees are charged according to the number of items being listed and the starting price of each individual item. In relevent categories, IFs for multiple items are being reduced, and the IF cap is also being reduced from its current €4,80 to as little as €0,05: yes, it’s the media categories again.

Correspondingly, FVFs are being increased in the sub-€50,00 tranch. In electronics categories, the higher tranches have FVFs reduced by 1%.

For auctions starting at €1,00 *only*, the price of Gallery is being reduced to 25c.

Further discounts for qualified PowerSellers

Those who are members of the German PS program, who maintain a minimum of 4.6 on all four DSR criteria, and who offer PayPal on at least 80% of their ended listings, will be entitled to discounts on their FVFs of between 20% and 26%, depending on PS level. Qualification will be on a rolling 30 day basis. Those whose DSR scores are all 4.8 or higher will be entitled to an additional 10% discount.

The PayPal criterion is likely to be very unpopular with German sellers: bank transfer is much more widely used in Germany than it is amongst UK eBayers. The rest of the changes are, I think, likely to leave sellers pretty divided: some will like the lower-risk pricing model, others will resent the increase in FVFS, and still more will wonder why their own categories have been ‘ignored’. What I think the rest of us can certainly take from this is that category-specific pricing is likely to become much more common on all eBay sites than it has been previously.

She goes on to make some response to complaints made by sellers over recent days: “we’ve heard you” on DSRs, eligibility for the Powerseller program, Best Match and no negative feedback for buyers. “If buyer trust in the marketplace is not improving as intended within the next six months, we will take action.” I’d be very interested to know exactly how one measures buyer trust specifically, but largely the message is that eBay are confident that their changes are the right ones for the marketplace, and that whatever sellers think, they’re going ahead. The lady’s not for turning: haven’t we heard that somewhere before?

This program known as Expanded Seller Protection will initially be made available to PowerSellers based in the UK, US, Canada and Hong Kong. In addition to all addresses being considered confirmed, coverage to all 190 countries served by PayPal will be included with no coverage limit on claims.

The vital missing information from todays announcements regarding PayPal Expanded Seller Protection is what it will/may cost. That fee could range from free, to a per transaction basis, to a set monthly fee, or a percentage of total transactions processed.

The dream of being able to ship to every customers to any address may be one step closer, it remains to be seen if it’s affordable.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first promotion of this type eBay have run purely for Powersellers, and it will add an interesting slant to the famous “level playing field”, which says that every seller, huge business or hobbyist, will pay the same fees. It should at least limit the sheer number of listings made on the day, which frequently on CLDs threaten to completely overwhelm eBay sites. We’d be very interested to hear from Australian sellers how you’re viewing this one, so please leave us a comment.

Sadly for those who sell to Australia but live elsewhere, you must have a registered Australian address to qualify. All other ordinary eBay.com.au fees will apply and there are some other restrictions, so do read the small print before you list.

What’s particularly interesting is that eBay are using the DSRs (“the feedback stars”) to determine eligibility for the prizes: only those with 4.5 or more on all stars, and an average of 4.8 will get the 1.5% credit; anyone below that will only get 1%. From statements made at Live and elsewhere, we expect those stars to be more and more important for sellers over the next year.

Gold, Platinum and Titanium PowerSellers can in addition request a dedicated Personal Account Manager.

To access the PowerSeller Telephone Support number simply log into the PowerSeller portal, for Bronze PowerSellers the number will be available from the 10th.

Firstly, the email has come via – uh – email: there’s not a sign of it in My Messages. Considering that appearance or not in My Messages is supposed to be the yardstick of a genuine communication, this isn’t good. Being the suspicious type I am, I went to the Powerseller Portal and signed up there, rather than using the button in the email. Then there’s the fact that over the last 48 hours, I’ve received three copies of the same email. I know they love me, but I got the message the first time

However, most worrying (and this is what I’ll be writing to Support about today) is the fact that the emails were all addressed to an ID which was changed almost a year ago. If eBay can’t get my ID right, how on earth am I supposed to tell their messages from the phishers’?

So two points in conclusion:

• even if you think it’s from eBay, don’t click the link in the email: go through the links on the site, and
• even if you think it’s phishing, it might sometimes be worth checking out!