Ebay Raises Seller Fees

[silverscreenselect]

In a case of unparalleled greed, Ebay has just raised its seller fees by an unheard of amount. I'm no longer selling there, having watched my profits get nickel and dimed to death by them over a five year period, but this latest takes the cake.

In case you were unaware, Ebay charges two separate fees, a listing fee, which is a flat dollar amount when you list an item, and a final value fee, which is a percentage of the final value amount if and when the item sells. When I started on ebay, the listing fee for inexpensive items like I sold was 25 cents and the final value fee 5%. Over the years, it became 40 cents and 5.25%. Listing fees for higher priced items are higher as well. In fairness to them, there is a sliding scale so that items that sell for over $25 have lower percentage fees for the amounts over $25.

Now, Ebay has "graciously" reduced the listing fee from 40 cents to 35 cents, but has increased the percentage fee to 8.75%. This means that if you sell an item for $10, you pay a whopping 12.25% in fees. Tough to make money that way.

A number of people have store listings on ebay, which are permanent fixed price listings for up to 30 days arranged under the seller's ID. The feees for them went up from 10 to 12% as well.

For big item sellers (things that sell for $100 and up), the increases won't be that much, but for smaller sellers, who have been Ebay's bread and butter over the years, this is going to hurt a lot.

One would think that with increased size, Ebay would be able to reduce its fees and still make money on a volume basis. They have gradually added features such as the availability of more pictures of items, but these really don't do a whole lot to help sell most things.

On the positive side, they are changing their feedback system to make it more difficult for a deadbeat buyer to flame a seller and have it mess up the seller's rating permanently.

Ebay is a perfect example of what happens in an effective monopoly system. They really have no competition, so they can pretty much charge anything they want because there are no effective alternatives out there for people. Would-be competitors have never been able to get the traffic volume to get substantial number of sellers despite extremely low fees. It would take someone with deep pockets willing to fund and heavily promote a competitor for a couple of years.

[Ritterskoop]

viewtopic.php?t=3255&highlight=ebay

[MarleysGh0st]

On the positive side, they are changing their feedback system to make it more difficult for a deadbeat buyer to flame a seller and have it mess up the seller's rating permanently.

In the thread Saucy started about this, she said their change would prevent sellers from leaving negative feedback about buyers, which could give buyers the power to bully concessions from the sellers. Have the reversed that policy in the last day or so?

[gsabc]

Excerpted from eBay's notice:

Buyers will only be able to receive positive Feedback.
When a buyer doesn't respond to the Unpaid Item (UPI) process the negative or neutral Feedback they have left for that transaction will be removed.
When a member is suspended, all their negative and neutral Feedback will be removed.
Buyers must wait 3 days before leaving negative or neutral Feedback for sellers with an established track record, to encourage communication.
Buyers will be held more accountable when sellers report an unpaid item or commit other policy violations.

I interpret this as taking complaints about buyers offline, and dealt with through eBay's own processes. However, it doesn't prevent short-term damage by the buyer leaving negative feedback during those processes and before (or unless) eBay determines bad faith or other "policy violations". I haven't dug too deeply on the "more accountable" buyer policy.

[Lloyd Bridges]Looks like I picked a bad time to start selling my stuff on eBay[/Lloyd Bridges]

[gsabc]

From a business standpoint, it looks like they WANT to drive off the small and infrequent sellers, and the "yard sale" items. Are they running out of server space or something? Or do they really just want the storefronts, to act as an alternative to what Amazon has created with their non-book sales and sellers? I agree, it's not how they started or built the business, and will alienate many. But what alternative do we have? I can't very well sell my comics individually on craigslist.

A 67% increase in fees is insane. I'll probably have to bundle my stuff a lot more than I'd planned to get over the $25 hump. I predict a lot more items with starting bids over that level.

[Sir_Galahad]

In a rare moment, I agree with SSS. I have been selling on ebay since their inception in 1996. In fact, I ran a pretty successful storefront on there for several years as well as selling a lot via the auction route. When they raised their rates several years ago, I put my foot down and pulled about 90% of the inventory out of my storefront and opened my own website where the costs are minimal. I still run auctions there on a weekly basis and it looks as if I will have to pad my postage charges to cover the increase in rates. I know my customers won't be thrilled about this but I cannot absorb that kind of increase without making it up someplace else.

[silverscreenselect]

On the positive side, they are changing their feedback system to make it more difficult for a deadbeat buyer to flame a seller and have it mess up the seller's rating permanently.

In the thread Saucy started about this, she said their change would prevent sellers from leaving negative feedback about buyers, which could give buyers the power to bully concessions from the sellers. Have the reversed that policy in the last day or so?

The overwhelming reason for sellers leaving negative feedback for buyers was nonpayment. And Ebay has always had a system by which nonpaying buyers are booted off (after three complaints of nonpayment, you are suspended 30 days, and after the fourth it's permanent).

Other than nonpayment, the only other reason sellers would leave negative feedback was retaliation for the buyer leaving negative feedback (no matter how justified) for them. They'd usually say things like "What a jerk, he wouldn't work it out with me" or something like that.

I guess the idea behind this is that "the buyer is always right" in case of a dispute. There's a few buyers out there who got bad reputation for griping about their purchases too much, but it's not really a problem and quite frankly, sellers tend not to look at the details of feedback (if you're selling 1000 items a week, you can't get bogged down on why one buyer had negative feedback six months ago).

This was people can still see if sellers don't ship, slow ship, sell broken or nonworking merchandise, sell bootlegs, sell stuff that doesn't match the item's description or any of the many other legitimate reasons for leaving negative feedback for a seller.

[ladysoleil]

The overwhelming reason for sellers leaving negative feedback for buyers was nonpayment. And Ebay has always had a system by which nonpaying buyers are booted off (after three complaints of nonpayment, you are suspended 30 days, and after the fourth it's permanent).

Other than nonpayment, the only other reason sellers would leave negative feedback was retaliation for the buyer leaving negative feedback (no matter how justified) for them. They'd usually say things like "What a jerk, he wouldn't work it out with me" or something like that.

I'm going to politely disagree. I really wanted to neg a buyer who lied repeatedly about sending payment (did eventually pay, sort of, keep reading), harassed me constantly about why I hadn't shipped her item yet (duh, she hadn't paid), argued with every single one of my auction terms and was generally a giant PITA.

When she finally did pay me, she sent a post-dated check- says in my auction terms I don't accept personal checks, forget about the post-dated part. I used to be nice/stupid and actually shipped her the item when she promised she'd sent a payment.

I never even cashed it because I was pretty damn sure it would bounce and the overdraft fees would cost more than the item did. I forgot why I didn't neg her, I think she went Not-A-Registered-User before I could.

Not being allowed to leave feedback about shady practices, feedback extortion, etc, is going to encourage scam artists.