eBay have changed the criteria for items to be eligible for their eBay Click & Collect at Argos program. In the future items will have to have a minimum value of £10 if they are to be listed with collection at Argos available.
Firstly it has to be said that this is an enormously popular program with buyers. It’s practically zero effort for sellers so millions of products have been shipped to Argos stores up and down the country. This new minimum value will rule millions of products out of the program, although I’m optimistically hoping that many sub £10 products will be jiffy bag type items and fit through letter boxes.
Where the minimum £10 limit really fails however is for Auction items. We all know that for highly desirable items a minimum start price of 99p makes sense. An item could start at 99p and sell for hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds. Forcing sellers to set a start price of a tenner or more simply doesn’t make sense.
Sure there are auctions that only ever attract a single bid and BIN generally makes more sense, but auctions do have different visibility in search which is why some sellers still use them although in this case generally pretty much at the price they wish them to sell for. It’s the auctions which are almost guaranteed to attract large numbers of bids which are best suited to the 99p start price and these listings will now be excluded from Click and Collect.
The one bright spot is that from next month eBay will be giving eBay shop subscribers an allowance of free auction style listings, so starting your auction at 99p instead of £10 or more won’t make any difference financially. It might make a difference to how many bids you get through.
eBay has provided some extra insights
- This change only applies to BIN listings ( both new and existing ) as currently Click & Collect program does not support auctions in any case.
- eBay are building a solution that will allow them to scale Click & Collect to auctions and Best offers later this year and at that stage they will share more details around how the eligibility criteria would apply to auction listings .
- The less than 10 GBP eligibility is for item price only and does not include P&P.
31 Responses
Is this new listings or are existing listings going to have the option removed?
Great move…hopefully this will demote those idiot pile it high destroy product line knoxx .
Anything on promos Chris? for example we run lots of buy 3 save £5 type promotions.
Product 1 £14.99 Products 2&3 £8.09 each.
I suspect the pressure for this came from Argos.
The manager at our local branch reckons Ebay items create longer queues and probably don’t bring that much in the way of extra sales to Argos.
Faced with taking on extra staff or reducing the number of items, it seems logical Argos would go for the latter.
Personally, we’ve never gone for click and collect, simply because we do not want the involvement of third parties in our business, especially if we carry the can if things go wrong. Also, we’ve never had a single customer ask for it!
Is £10 the item price or total including P&P?
It doesn’t say what Ebay will do for current listings. Are they simply going to remove the option? I don’t sell much sub £10, but it is still a pain for the customer that they can’t do this. I thought on Ebay the customer was king.
My first thoughts were “Great! Puts a stop to all those A6 jiffy bags going to Argos”
But most of our C&C orders are the main product plus accessories. Always sent in the same parcel with multiple eCP numbers on the label. I guess now we will be expected to send one parcel to Argos and another to the buyers home/work address. The customers are going to love that!
Being able to combine multiple C&C orders into a single eCP would be the fix. It’s something that should have been implemented right from the start of C&C but, of course, it never will be.
We do loads of Click and Collect and a lot of it is under £10 value, we do loads of £6-£9 items. Taking it away is a blow, but for us eBay has been in decline anyway and we are concentrating effort away for the time being.
My sis in law works in a Sainsburys and they do get a lot of these with people coming in on a Saturday.
Backwards step and another regressive move for eBay, Fees hikes and less of a service.
Click and collect was one few bright moves made by eBay in the last few years, suppose they had to destroy it in the end.
I sell mainly maps that retail for under £10. LOTS of customers used click and collect with argos when buying from me. Its a great loss to the buyer. Maps are often bought last minute and this is a real blow to those buyers that have busy lives. It will not effect me much as all sellers will be in same position.
And if someone buys several items which are all under £10, but which together total over £10, then what?
Not that I’m too bothered really as it will be a level playing field for sellers and buyers will just have to cope, like in the olden days, with going to the local RM sorting office if they’re out when the postie calls with something too big for the letterbox.
I can imagine it has been an issue for the staff in these stores, in terms of the volume. Some of the volume must be buyers not thinking it through. I’d been keeping a log of argos/homebase/sainsburys ebay collection orders for the last few months and a lot of it is little things that quite obviously will fit through any letterbox and won’t be requiring a signature either, yet buyers seemingly think it will be more convenient to go to Argos and pick it up there. I’m sure some of them don’t understand that they can have it sent to their house.
Are there any details in public as to the financial relationship between eBay and Argos?
Setting a minimum value would suggest that Argos gets some percentage of the total sale price.
So a customer orders 50 widgets from us at £5 each – cant have it delivered to Argos and cancels… Is that an Amazon drone I can hear buzzing in the distance?
Surely a £9.99 would be more sensible.