I am sure the word will get out on this but in case anyone ignores their eBay mailing this is of imprtance to all who operate stores out of eBay...



http://pages.ebay.com/sell/announcement ... /fees.html

ya, don't they at least usually try and give the impression that they are not just raising prices?  like lowering the insertion fee but uping their percentage of final value?  This increase is just we want more for listing and more for selling the item.  I guess Google might be threatening or something.

Raise the price and lower the quality of service.

  Hmm...Sounds like a business with no competition...like the Washington State Ferries, for instance.

  Too bad there isn't another major company gearing up to take them on and backed by the single most powerful player in the industry!

  Oh, wait!  There is!  

  Isn't Google owned by MSN...as in Microsoft?  An I wrong...or maybe only half right?  

  Maybe Ebay/PayPal is doing this right now so that they can possibly "slash" prices in the future.  They can't be having cash problems.

Mark  

MShipley88 wrote:Isn't Google owned by MSN...as in Microsoft?  An I wrong...or maybe only half right?

Separate companies; mortal enemies (especially from Microsoft's POV)

VermilionFire wrote: half.com has no insertion fee and no paypal (just automatic transfer to your bank account).

I like Half.com quite a bit, but I don't think it ever really recovered from the fiasco of 2-3 years ago when eBay announced it was permanently closing the site. The last-minute decision of "Wait! Maybe we won't close it down after all" came far too late to prevent Half from hemorrhaging thousands and thousands of users.

Since then, I've found myself having more luck with Amazon than Half when selling books, CDs and DVDs — it's not even close, really. Of course, other sellers' mileage may vary; maybe I'm the exception to the rule. And Amazon certainly has its own set of fees to deal with; there's no free lunches anywhere.

Is it possible that too much inventory in too many stores is causing problems for Ebay?  Are they having to pay for something?  Is the goal, maybe, to discourage sellers from leaving products sitting in stores?

Mark  

GraysonAC wrote:Yeah, that's the stated goal. Because the listing fee doesn't cover the storage fee.

But, y'know, I always thought that was sorta balanced out by the much higher final value fees. Bleh.

    In retrospect, having something sitting in your store for 25 cents a year was an asskicking for Ebay (while good for store owners, no doubt).  No fees worth mentioning being generated by Ebay in the meantime.  It was a great loophole, only a matter of time until Ebay closed it.  
  However, if this is meant to gently prod store owners to put more stuff up for auction, I think they are mistaken.  In the long wrong it's still much cheaper to have something sit in your store 4 months (5 cents a month for four months is 20 cents for a $9.99 item) than to relist it for auction four months in a row (40 cents a week times 24 equals $9.60 for a $9.99 item with BIN).  Just to pull back the curtain here, I have around 1300-1400 items in my store at any one time, I calculated using this year's fees and costs it will cost me an extra $57 a month straight off the top.
  My solution?  Cut my AUCTIONS by 50 a week nets me $20 extra a week in listing fees, putting those items in my Ebay store instead will cause me to about break even. Honestly, my luck running auctions has been pretty rotten lately anyway except for the occassional item.  I'd much rather set my own price than rely on the vagaries of hoping not one but TWO separate bidders both want my particular item the same week and get into a bidding war.  More often I have been having items go for auction at a much lower price than they would have eventually brought being listed in a store (even with the higher final value fee.  So basically this just solidified a decision I had been mulling for months. Starting soon you will see very few (maybe 25-50 a week max) auctions from Badmike's Books and Games and more Ebay store listings instead.
    Ebay is falling into the same sort of trap a lot of credit card companies and others are falling into right now.  PEOPLE HAVE NO MORE MONEY!  THEY ARE RUNNING OUT OF DISCRETIONARY INCOME!  I, like many other people, am on a budget, as is my business.  When Ebay tells me I will be spending an extra $57 a month on fees, I CANNOT just suck it up....it has to come from somewhere, and I've decided it will come from Ebay itself in the form of listing less auctions.
  Of course, did anyone notice the sneaky way they announce this AFTER Ebay live? And then toss Ebay users the 20 cent auction listing fee bone for the next two days?   Pure evil genius.

Mike B.

Eh, it's not good news thats for sure, but I'll just have to push a little harder to sell a couple of more items.  I love the store concept too much to close it, and I don't do bad profitwise either.  I am going to look into doing some advertising to boost traffic, and look at doing some (more) selling on other venues, there's so many people who hate the ebay in general and I'd like to get them as my customers also.  

=)

lokiwookie wrote:If all sellers close their stores together eBay will certainly change their price policies. It is a highway robbery.

Close your store and go to other websites (in France we have a lot of them, priceminister, aucland, etc, I think it is similar in US). This is the only solution.

Yeah, there's not really any viable alternatives here. There's Amazon.com, but it doesn't provide nearly the traffic that eBay does.

Xaxaxe wrote:Sorry, but I can really see eBay's point here — although, perhaps, they could have introduced a slightly smaller price bump.

Store listings currently account for 83 percent of all eBay listings, yet they represent only 9 percent of total sales. That's a lot of virtual shelf space filled with items that just sit there ... and sit there ... and sit there.

Throw in the fact that despite total sales rising 30 percent last quarter, eBay's profit actually dropped 14 percent ... and, well, is it such a huge surprise that driving sellers toward the traditional auction format is part of eBay's plan?

That's not to say I don't see some valid points from BadMike, Grayson, et. al, and I respect the fact that this announcement is a huge concern for them. I also think they will adjust and remain profitable, as they are obviously intelligent people.

I guess I'm just saying I'm not that surprised. It is eBay's sandbox, after all ...

Just one of these days, one of the MegaCorps is going to raise fees and their press release is going to be something along the lines of "Well, yeh, we wanted to make some more money."  I'd deal with that easier than the convoluted logic that sometimes is spewed out of spokesmen trying to justify more dolloars coming out of my pocket.
 What's funny, is that just a few years ago Ebay was desparate to drive sellers to open Ebay stores...undoubtedly to compete with Amazon's model at the time....and gave lots of incentives to do so.  So now they are complaining because too many people have stores with lots of inventory in them?  Well duh.  Ebay created the monster.  
  When total sales rise and profits drop, that is the evidence of something wrong with the business model (happened to Home Depot a few years ago, they have finally gotten it fixed looks like).  Corrections are expected, but from what I am reading in Wall Street Journal, it isn't all the fault of stuff sitting in Ebay stores. The market and model is changing, just like it was back in the day when Prodigy was the first big dial up internet company and then they let guys like AOL take over while they faded.  Ebay might not be going through a soft spot; this might just be a permanent correction in the marketplace.  It was inevitable that the more people who started selling stuff on ebay, the more choices buyers would have and the less actual stuff would be sold at high prices (which could be why sales are up and not profits...more stuff being sold but for less). Nowadays you are more able to get a deal on Ebay than ever, due to large competition.  Ebay may not be able to win back those giant profits in any case under any scenario.....ask AOL what happens when the model changes and you can't or won't.

Mike B.