eBay Fees Changes for February 2008, Sellers Getting Hosed
29 January 2008Bill Cobb, who happens to be about to retire right along with Meg Whitman, announced earlier today the new changes that will take into effect on February 20, 2008. A quick overview:
- Lower Insertion Fees!
- Free Gallery!
- Lower Fees for Enhancement packages
- Increased usage of Detailed Seller Ratings:
- More Search Exposure with Best Match
- Fee Discounts for Power Sellers
- Increased protection for Power Sellers
- Usage in Power Seller Eligibility
- Buyers only get Positive feedback
- Repeat customer feedback counts
- Feedback older than 12 months doesn’t count
- Negative and Neutral feedback will be removed if buyer doesn’t respond to unpaid item or is suspended
That’s a lot of changes. My thoughts are mixed. The fee changes could potentially be good. The insertion drop isn’t really all that great. It’s only a nickel on anything with a starting price below 24.99, but they’ve also raised the final value fee to over 8% on those same items. An increase of 2.5%! Final value fees increased by 2.5% across the board. That means that if you list an item for 24.99 and it sells for 24.99 you’ll save $0.05 on the listing fee, but you’ll pay an extra $0.65 in final value fees. What about something that sells for $550? Well, you’ll save $0.80 on the listing fee. You’ll pay an extra $1.94 in final value fees. So much for less fees. The only sellers that the new fee structure will help are the ones that have a high number of auctions that end without a buyer!
If you use gallery, and you really should, you’ll also save an extra $0.35 there as they’ve made it free. You’ll still pay more for the auction though. The difference is that now you don’t have an excuse to not take a picture and put gallery on the auction. Start doing it now! Your sell through will improve.
The rewards through DSR are really only applicable for PowerSellers. At least the rewards that are worth a darn. Like the 15% discount on fees for high DSR rating PowerSellers.
We’re used to eBay putting it to us with fees, so the changes there shouldn’t surprise us. We’re also used to PowerSellers getting preferential treatment when most studies will show that they are worse sellers per capita than any other category of seller. The feedback changes are the changes that I’m really interested in. First, the buyers can only get positive feedback. What? WTF? Let me check… Yep, they can still leave negative feedback. Why not just get rid of feedback altogether for buyers. No more filtering by people with negative feedback numbers. They can’t get any worse than zero! Hopefully they’ll let us filter by the people who have less than X% feedback. That’s assuming that sellers stop giving automatic positive feedback whenever the buyer pays. I know I will be.
On the other hand, they will supposedly be held more accountable for unpaid items and other policy violations. Buyers will also have to wait 3 days before leaving negative or neutral feedback. Why? It’s supposed to encourage discussion between the buyer and the seller. That might be alright. I know I’ve gotten a few negatives where if the buyer would have contacted me, I could have remedied the situation. Also, the time you have to leave feedback on an item is being shortened to 60 days instead of the current 90. I’ve found that in most cases, that limit doesn’t apply anyways, so that’s kind of a non-point for me. What I do like is the change to the negative and neutrals that suspended users give. They’ll go away. When a buyer becomes suspended, all negative and neutral feedback they’ve given goes away.
Two other changes to the feedback system that I actually like. Feedback older than 12 months will not count towards the feedback percentage. I think this is particularly good for sellers who started out a little rough but learned better ways and have much better records lately. It also helps erase some of those negatives that linger. Also, up to 1 repeat positive feedback per buyer per week will count towards your total. I’ve never understood why repeat feedback didn’t count. Seems to me that if a buyer comes back repeatedly, those positives should count for more than the others. Happy customers are one thing. Repeat happy customers are an entirely different (better) thing.
Overall, I think this years changes are horrible. The increase in the final value is being hidden by the nice new shiny fee cut on listing fees, while overall, fees will go up. They’ve gone and given PowerSellers more advantage, making it harder and harder to be a part-time or hobby seller. And the changes to feedback, while having a few bright spots, are generally ho-hum or worse.
eBay gets a D- on this one. They may say their listening to us, but there must be a lot of noise on the line.
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February 13th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
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