Powersellers Blog

Come August 22, 2006 Ebay sellers will see notice that their fees are higher than they used to be. This fee hike is only for sellers at the moment and only those who have stores. The fee to list items in your store used to be $0.02 now it will be $0.05-$0.10.

Now while this doesn’t sound like a lot to some, Ebay store owners know differently and a huge percent are not happy about and many want to hold a protest week which will include selling nothing for that entire week because they feel that Ebay does not listen to them and that only by hurting their bottom line will the auction giant finally glance in their direction.

A quick check of Ebay’s message boards and you will see everything from Greedbay to Feebay being tossed about as sellers express their anger. This is to be expected considering that fees are raised every January and the last fee hike took away massive profits from lots of sellers and also the fees were for every seller that time.

Some wonder if these fees are to cover the new Ebay Express which many don’t even understand. Express is supposed to be a sort of Ebay spin-off retail version. Most if not all of the items are new and you purchase as you would from an online store. No bidding or waiting for an auction to end.

Considering that this is precisely what the Ebay stores are supposed to do you have to agree with the sellers and wonder what is the point of Ebay Express? Lots of sellers say that they have removed their listings from EE due to the fact they are not selling much if at all their and do better with their stores.

I don’t see this fee increase breaking Ebay even though some hope that it will because those who get mad and run to other sites quickly realize that no one was kidding when they said Ebay is the ONLY game in town. So far in 10 years nothing has come to compete with Ebay. Sure Yahoo, Amazon, Overstock and many others have auction sites but none have had the success that Ebay has had.

However Ebay seems to have lost site of both buyers and sellers and many are feeling like cash cows as it seems that no problems are being addressed but Bill Cobb is just raising fees and this is causing major anger across the board.

Small though it may seem the fee hike is more than 200% more than sellers were paying. If someone listed 400 items at $0.02 in one week in the past it would cost $8. Now if someone did that same thing with products over $100 it will cost them $0.10 each coming to a total of $40 for that one week. Under a $100 and it would cost $0.05 which is still too much for some.

This adds to the $15.95-$499.95 that store owners are already paying monthly to have a store. Then of course they also have to pay final value fees (FVF) which were also raised. Final value fees is the percentage that Ebay charges you when your item sells. So if your item doesn’t sell Ebay still makes their money from you listing the products. If the item sells they make their money from you listing the products AND you pay them more money because the item sold.

The fees are getting out of control and it is getting to the point where honest sellers are not even making a profit on their items. A lot of store owners are deciding to just open up their own online store because the monthly fees are cheaper and they don’t pay fees to list each item and they keep 100% of what they sell. Less fees.

In what seems to be a bit of a confusing letter, Bill Cobb blamed the fee hikes on Stores overtaking auctions and that this fee hike is to make people sell less items in their stores and I guess put more up in auction?? Well if fixed listings are a problem what is the point of EE (Ebay Express)??

Of course dissatisfied store owners feel that this is just Ebay’s way to make an extra buck off of them and it doesn’t look good for them that they have been a little disappointing in the stock market.

Marsha James wrote this on August 15th, 2006 and filed it under eBay, eBay News, eBay Stores, Internet News |