After reading recent comments left on other blogs about the ebay fee changes, sadly, I agree… ebay is no longer ebay… but it is beginning to be typical ebay. They continue to try to get rid of hobby & small sellers. They have walked away from their roots. Could be good… could be bad. It’s not the ebay we have all enjoyed dealing with over the past decade or so. eBay isn’t eBay anymore.
We are a low-volume seller on Ebay – and we do NOT like these changes, BUT no other site has the traffic counts and exposure that eBay does. We have learned as others “…you either learn to adjust or you die. You learn to take the changes and adjust your business to them…or you quit and move on. It will never be the same as it was in the “good old days”. Those days are long past.
We do have some repeat buyers, but our customers do not spend all their time on eBay either – who has the time to do that anymore? Even if they go online much more often than ‘twice a year’ they do their search, find the format they like, and then the best deal. It doesn’t always matter if they’ve bought from you before. It is hard to build affinity when buyers are fickle. We are in an economy that requires them to be as frugal as possible. “How many nickels can I spend to list a $3 item that might take forever to sell? The answer looks like 60 to break even, but it’s really not. That $3 item listing is an ad, a portal to my other 4,500 listings, so the actual answer is I can afford to pay that nickel until the end of time as long as everything else is moving.” We have tried penny auctions, anything less than a dollar auctions, and while you end up giving some things away, it does bring lookers into your store and many times higher priced items are purchased. But it is a constant struggle, just like any other business competing for customers. Many sellers, like us, will tell you most of their sales are ‘one-time-only’, with a small portion of repeat buyers.
At a time when we as sellers are watching our pennies just as close or closer that the buyers, eBay has a major change in fees again. “Is that gaming the system? yeah. I guess… so what. They just gamed me out of an extra $40/mth. It’s called “business”.” When eBay does it, it’s just business – it’s not personal.” Well, when we add more to our costs to recoup, we get slammed on our DSRs, and it’s our business and it’s personal. Which brings me to another pet peeve of mine… I don’t think buyers should even get the chance to rate through DSR on shipping charges when shipping charges are spelled out in the auction. If they don’t like the shipping price listed, they have the option of buying from thousands of other sellers. I always spell out shipping charges and get really irked when I get bad feedback on my shipping charges when they bought the item for the lowest price on eBay including the shipping charge! Why doesn’t eBay educate their sellers in that respect, instead of just letting someone rip up the seller? (If most buyers ever had to actually ship an item, they would see what it really does cost) Just my rant for the day.
Some other comments were:
“Add all store stock into core, plus the hundred free 99 cent ‘special’ items gleaned at the finest yard sales and search will be a total debacle. The last search crash was just a dress rehearsal!”
“The more or less expensive question is deceptive since I will pay slightly more – but get core exposure. I pay extra for core exposure now – and everything else goes into store inventory. On 3/30 everything will be in core – which means it’s a value proposition. I pay a little more, but get a lot more for my money. Which is more expensive – $50 with almost everything hidden in stores, or $60 with everything in core?”
“(another) serious move is also coming. The enforcement of DSR percentages. This will allow ebay to suspend you easier based on arbitrary feedback left for you with no chance to appeal it. With no power to leave truthful feedback to buyers we are ALWAYS at risk to being victims of flaky negatives. When you do this for a living, a 30 day suspension can really hurt. Ebay has created monsters out of buyers making them want Fedex service for the price of Media Mail. I am seriously thinking of leaving after 14 years on the treadmill. The stores were just starting to kick in allowing us to once again sell some of the lower priced items that we could not afford to list otherwise. (Often these items pay the rent!) Ebay always takes away the punch bowl just when the party gets lively.”
It will be interesting again, to say the least… and yes, we’ll stay on for now… although we will expand to other sales sites as well.
