Ebay is moving to 100% FREE listings!

70% commission? Am I reading this right? One gets a 70% commission selling Kindles AND kindle Ebooks?

Snap!

Same as me!

Remember the golden days of Ebay when it was WORTH paying for a Featured listing?

Used to get awesome traffic.

Will have to check this out again.

Chris

Not sure about "Bonanza", but I'm sure because of the "Dan Patrick Show" on DirectTV promoting "Skoreit", that could be part of the reasoning why eBay is doing away w/their listing fees!

What they are doing is stopping all the scams that sell an item for $1 & the shipping is $37.

Ebay only profits from the scammers, until they catch on.

BINGO!!

Whilst I agree the move is a positive step, please do your math on your items.

Doesn't look like it:
Ebay.com Site Info

However, I am sure revenue was dropping due
to so many people jumping ship with the crazy
fees.

To me, this is an extreme move - a massive
change in their business model, to make $
after an item sells instead of generating a
large part of their revenue from listing fees.

I agree. Ebay used to dominate the online retail market and now with many other sites in competition, they had to bring in some change in their business model to attract more users. Lets wait and see how it goes !

Ahh... they are putting the commission over the final price after shipping and handling... there were tons of hidden costs there.

Do the math before promoting this as a great "FREE" deal.

Just another way eBay continues to screw sellers. The company has been losing ground to Amazon for years and will continue to do so.

If your shipping cost is $10 eBay now wants you to pay 9 percent of that to them. So you pay $10 to FedEx, charge the buyer $10, but are out of pocket with a loss of 90 cents due to the new eBay charge.

Right now sellers pay a listing fee. That fee only exceeds 90 cents if the starting price for the auction is $50 or more. 50 cents for a buy it now listing.

You can look at the listings on eBay. Very, very few listings start out at $50 or more.

Before, sellers only incurred listing fees for smaller priced items if they listed more than 100 per month. Now, that is reduced to 50 per month.

Before, eBay's fees were capped at $50. Now the cap is doubled to $100.

Bottom line: this is a major fee increase for many eBay sellers.

good news i guess, i'm sick of paying if stuff doesnt sell, and even when it does sell they get extra money and when the money goes into paypal we lose out as well with even more fees too. just getting too greedy

I don't see anything about it on eBay.ca either.

I think thats the goal. Probably they will revenue thru ads and other services. Pretty smart move

Um..are people just reading the OP Headline and responding? Scan down the thread and read the posts by Kindsvater, Sandra and others.

Here's the short version: With the way these changes have been described, THE MAJORITY OF SELLERS ARE GOING TO PAY HIGHER FEES.

:rolleyes:


Frank

I wouldn't go back to Ebay if they named a building after me. Done is Done.
So far so good with Amazon. I'm in the FBA program, published my 5th book on Kindle and am about to print publish my first book on Create Space. 9 years with Ebay. I know how the guy in "The Shawshank Redemption" felt when he finally made it out.

Thomas

I suppose this change works somewhat well when you'd just like to list a bunch of items that you're not really sure will sell (saving you any upfront listing fees in the process), but bear in mind that your final fees will probably end up being higher, as the ebay fees are going to apply to your shipping charges as well.

That's exactly what they did. You might want to read more than the first sentence of the thread.

eBay has a history of doing exactly that - lower listing fees and tell everyone how great it is while they secretly raise final value fees to compensate. They have done this at least twice within the past few years.

This is just their latest scam.....look at the part which says that final value fees will be calculated on the total including shipping.....not only does this raise final value fees but it also is in effect saying that all sellers are dishonest with regard to shipping costs and must be "encouraged" (controlled). While this is certainly true in some cases, I believe that they are in the minority and that eBay simply does not want to put forth the effort to check on a case-by-case basis.

Better to sell your items elsewhere.....

Thank you for posting this information. I left ebay due to the squeeze on both ends... lol Looks like I might pop back in there and check it out.

I like the change... I don't mind paying extra fees when something sells.

However, I hate paying fees just to list.

Key point here is to sell items that you make a HUGE profit with and you really don't care if you have to give Ebay 10% or even 20% of the sell.

It would be just like an Affilaite making a sale.

I will take that deal all day long.

Look forward to testing it out.

Are Warriors Reading or Glancing through?
People wanting to get back to "FeeBay" read posting # 18?
Unless you're selling download products, I don't think is a good idea.
Quite obvious you'll be paying more if shipping is added to final price.
Meharis

That is no doubt a great news! Thanks for sharing.

God I know. I'm sitting here laughing my ass off at some of these people. Oh man, this is exactly what eBay intended. lol

What you say is true. However, I'll add, at least you won't lose money now.

To ones who think the OP and other posts are not being read...

Yes, I have read the entire OP. Yes I have read the post by Brian. And yes I still think it's a good thing for some sellers, including yours truly.

The ones I think it is the worst for are the sellers who charge $1 for the product and $15 Shipping and "Handling" when shipping is only a dollar or two.

George Wright

Huh?? How is this amazing.. some of you are only seeing "Ebay" and "Free" and not looking further into it, heck just look at some of the other post. This is nothing but a nice lil scam by Ebay with higher fee's... plus I wouldn't be surprised if they jack up their prices for their other options in a listing.

What makes this worse is all the people that think this will be free and now list items like a crazy mofo, so now a crowded marketplace will be even more crowded. Nice job Ebay lol.

Hmmm, another way for ebay to raise fees but put a spin on it to try to make it look like a good thing.

This change may help a few people who are just trying to sell a couple of thing out of their attic, but is going to cost the average seller more money. I am sure that ebay has run the numbers and know this is going to make them more money.

They figured out a way to stop the few sellers who were selling items for really cheap and putting in really high shipping costs as a way around paying ebay's fees. Plus now they get 9% of everyone's shipping costs.

This is a huge chunk of change. Just as an example, I checked my ebay fees over the last 2 months. I just sell a few collectibles on the side for a litte extra income. In the last 2 months I listed 20 items, 18 of which sold. I paid $59.03 in ebay fees. Under their new fee structure I would have paid 66.40.

Clearly ebay is not going to lose any money over this, it just encourages people to list more items which means more sales for ebay. This means a ton more money for them since they get the final value fees, plus all the extra paypal fees.

just my $.02
-Todd

This is very telling, it appears that they've either hit a plateau or are experiencing a decline in listings, and this is probably intended to elicit new interest and boost sellers' listings on there, at least for the short term.

Three years ago I would be mostly agreeing with you. If you've been out of the eBay loop for a while then you may have missed the last major price changes. When it was costing £2 - £3 per listing for ten days, it was a lot harder to make money. Still possible but you really had to keep your eye on the ball and cheap items with small profits were much harder because all your profits were eaten up by unsold listings. But the game changed drastically when the new pricing was introduced a few years ago.

Everyone moaned like crazy because of the 10% final value fees. All those that moaned missed the bigger opportunity, while the minority that see the new potential, milked it.

Up until this point, cheap items were very difficult to make money on and everything was hit and miss. You couldn't measure anything because there was no way of predicting what your costs would be from one week to the next. The new pricing changed that drastically, for the better, and allowed us to use eBay much more like a real business with some form of measurability and predictabilty. Most people moaned and whinged because they simply didn't understand the basics of costing, optimising and refining, and most still don't.

When you run a brick and mortar business in a premium location, square / cubed foot becomes a big pricing factor. Every item you sell has a far greater 'real world' cost than what you pay for it, and the rents are capped only in proportion to your square footage, i.e., you can only carry limited stock before your costs go up.

As your stock increases and you need bigger premises, you are faced with much bigger overheads (rent, rates, insurance, staff) all at a premium price if you want to remain in a premium location. All of this adds significantly to the cost of your inventory. If half of your stock moves slowly then this adds accordingly to the real cost of every product you are selling. Profit from the fast moving stuff has to subsidise storage costs for the slower moving stuff. In premium stores this is kept to a minimum, it's why they throw stuff out or sell at a loss when it moves too slowly, the main reason being to free up valuable space. Every square foot counts and eats money.

When you are selling on eBay, you are putting your stuff in front of a huge amount of potential buyers. eBay provides us with the customers, we pay for the privilege, a fair trade for such a huge amount of potential buyers. For us to put our inventory in front of those buyers, the overall cost/overhead per product is ridiculously cheap. We still need storage space and staff and insurance etc. but for nowhere near the cost of running our business from a prime location (which incidentally can be a hell of a lot more than the $2 - $4k rent if you want the same amount of potential customers that eBay offer).

If we use eBay properly then we can run the business from cheap premises with cheap overheads but still be getting premium traffic. The cost per sale still works out far cheaper. Of course there are other factors for and against eBay vs the high street but generally speaking, if you can't make money from eBay then you are doing it wrong and it's easy to burn money quickly.

Most sellers on there are running everything hit and miss. They think price is everything (which it isn't) and all you need to do is keep listing items for sale and make money. No business is that simple and you can't afford to keep throwing mud at the wall whether you sell online or in the high street. Everything has to be optimised, tested and monitored. It's our job to make it profitable by making it work.

The free listings are going to devalue the place and make things much more difficult. It will also force prices down because the average seller will believe that's the only way to compete among the extra noise (and worthless cr*p) that free listings will naturally attract. Most sellers will follow suit and drop prices or bail out, but none of them will blame the free listings as the cause, they'll just say it's all eBay's fault for jacking the final value fees. They will forget that final value fees only happen after a sale has been made, in reality, they already failed before selling anything.

Looks like good news for me also. I use to sell fishing equipment on ebay and did so for years. The fees were killing me so I quit. I would sell about half to 3/4's of my monthly listing but still had to pay listing fees. Now I won't have to pay for what doesn't sell, that's a good thing.

With fair shipping charges the fees for shipping will not be that much. A little more than the old listing fee but the savings will outweigh the cost.

Oh Yea, I read every post in this thread and still see it as a good thing.

Honestly who really cares.......the fees are still outrageous. Amazon just needs an auction section and bye bye ebay.

I agree with parts of this - if you are paying fees and not making money with Ebay i.e your products are not selling - free listings are not going to help you much.

I suppose you won't lose money however.

You pay fees and buy traffic is one way of doing it - the quickest way.

However nearly all my websites are optimized through SEO and I didn't pay a cent for it.

If you are not a fan of paid advertising and you are willing to work your socks off learning SEO might be the way to go...

Chris

Yeah, people don't understand how bad this actually IS.

If you sell something for $9.99 + $4.99 shipping, you were only paying final value fees on the $9.99 - now you are being taxed on the full $14.98.

This is going to kill the $.99 - $24.99 market which is the largest on eBay

This was mostly aimed towards the huge amount of Asian sellers who were selling items for $4.99 + $14.99 shipping, but completely screwing everyone else over in the process.

There is absolutely no benefit to anyone but a wealthy corporation strong arming little people into offering free shipping (and less profit) so their company can better stand toe to toe against Amazon.


...eBay... for the Loss.

I'm not sure where you are seeing this,I just checked out eBays fees and they still look the same,High as usual

Steve