Here we Go Again?
I have just skipped that article that you can find if you do a google search, as I personally think boycotting ebay is a waste of your time. If you want to hurt ebay and those die hard sellers that act as if ebay can do no wrong, and it is all your fault then the answer is obvious.
STOP PAYING THEM YOUR HARD EARNED MONEY AS BUYER OR SELLER TOTALLY AND FOR EVER. Easy as that. BUY and SELL somewhere else and if you see something you want and it is only available on ebay then say to the user "If you sold on
ebid.net where I buy and sell then I would have bought that off you for a better price than you are going to get on here and it could have cost you nothing to sell it to me."
But what do I know?
So here is an article that explains how some are looking at the changes and how little ebay management think of you and a little more from me at the bottom, as I can't resist a chance to rant.
Is eBay facing seller revolt?
eBay's latest move, some of the auction site's devotees say, is straight out of the Ministry of Truth's playbook.
The company made an announcement last week about lowering the listing fees for items--even though, in many cases, final value fees will be raised. The company's discussion forums simmered with outrage over the executive decision, and frustration over the lack of other options for auction-style e-commerce.
"What a joke,"
commented one person on the eBay Seller Central forum, asking for advice about transferring the items from an eBay "store" to another auction site. Another suggested putting together
an April Fool's Day protest.
eBay representatives say that these opinions come from the minority. "A lot of the sellers that we're talking to are very, very happy with these changes," said Todd Lutwak, eBay's senior director of seller experience. He said it gives a better array of options for different kinds of sellers. "What we've done with these price changes is, we've segmented the seller population and then we've provided those segments with what we feel are better options to meet their needs."
Here's the math: Individual eBay items with a starting price of 99 cents or less no longer have a listing fee, and if they don't sell, the seller pays nothing; but if they
do sell, the final value fee is 9 percent with a maximum of US$50. Previously, it had been 8.75 percent for the first US$25, and 3.75 percent after that. For more serious eBay sellers who purchase subscriptions to run "stores", final value fees have been altered so that they start at a lower threshold, but in some cases can ultimately get higher. eBay piloted these changes in some European markets starting in 2008 (with success, representatives say), and later added some U.S.-based beta testers whom it's showcased in a new promotional site explaining it all, called "
The Best Place To Sell".
"People who have store subscriptions, who sell thousands of items a month, are being advantaged," explained Alan Lewis, who worked at eBay as a product manager for five years and now serves as the platform manager for Auctiva, a site that makes tools for eBay sellers. "(This) continues the direction that they've been going for the past couple years, which is catering more and more to large sellers...It's something that makes sense for eBay. They just have to deal with the consequences. If they are bringing on larger sellers, there will be consequences for smaller sellers."
An eBay pundit who goes by the handle "AuctionWally"
wrote a blog post in which he speculated that the fee changes "will benefit the savvy consumer of collectibles, antique and unique items as this plan brings a lot more product to the marketplace with low starting bids," and that "this stuff can be more like reading tea leaves than a flow chart, but it looks pretty good from an auction seller's perspective, and just as nice for most store sellers." Still, many of Wally's own commenters disagreed with him--some with extremely strong language.
Granted, when a company makes a product change announcement, it's the ticked-off ones who are the most vocal. But those dissatisfied sellers sure want to be heard.
"The lower announced listing fee decreases are absurdly trivial to the extreme, and will cause eBay to become more cluttered than ever with overpriced, worthless stuff that people will put purely on speculation that some fool will bite," an Alexandria, Virginia-based antiques dealer related to CNET in an e-mail. "I have been selling on eBay since 1997 and I know eBay like the back of my hand. It is a true love-hate relationship."
Any community site--particularly one where members may be making a profit by participating in that community--is sure to experience some dissent when changes are made. For eBay, however, the uproar from some sellers about this week's fee changes was more vociferous than usual. It amounted to Orwellian doublespeak, some claimed; and the "Best Place To Sell" microsite was little more than propaganda.
"Maybe eBay thinks a simple and transparent 'spin' that they are trying to offer will work--dropping their listing fees, which are small, and then upping the final sale fees from 3.5 percent to 9 percent--and just slip by all their sellers," said Northville, Mich.-based eBay seller Bill Wever, who says he has used the site for over a decade and owned eBay stock since its initial public offering in 1998, in an e-mail to ZDNet Asia's sister site CNET.
"After reading (this week's) announcement, I will be expanding my presence on other sites and will be significantly reducing my presence on eBay," another seller e-mailed to CNET on the same day the fee changes were announced. "It never ceases to amaze me that eBay management seems to dismiss or disregard how constant change negatively affects their fee-paying sellers. Last year, there were two major change announcements. This year there will be three."
At the center of the mayhem, really, is a problem that eBay has had a rough time with in recent years: It obviously wants to make a profit. That profit comes from commission fees, and those commission fees are biggest coming from the sales of relatively expensive goods by well-established sellers--many of whom pay a subscription to operate "stores". Hiking up listing fees
has had a noticeable impact on eBay's quarterly earnings in the past.
"All the things that they've done in the past couple years have been to bring more large sellers onto the site and bring them the economic incentives to do so, and they really haven't done anything for small sellers," said Alan Lewis of Auctiva, which targets smaller-scale sellers.
And eBay has been feeling the pressure for years. It made some arguably poor acquisition choices in the past half-decade that ultimately resulted in the selling off of properties like Skype and StumbleUpon, all of which dealt a blow to shareholder confidence. Plus, online auctions are no longer the hub of deals that they used to be: An increasingly diverse cornucopia of e-commerce innovations has emerged in recent years, from handmade-goods emporium Etsy to fire-sale deal-a-day outlets like Woot and Gilt.
But the flip side of this is that eBay still has a lock on auctions. It smoked out much of its would-be competition years ago, and many of its sellers deal in niches that are better off operating as auctions rather than flat-fee sales that could be handled over Amazon or Craigslist. eBay can make many of these controversial descisions and rest assured that it still owns the market.
"All of us have been hoping for someone else, perhaps Google or Amazon, to step in and provide true competition, but that has not happened," said the antiques dealer from Alexandria. "It would require a huge investment to do a proper worldwide advertising campaign to get something going."
eBay admits that the most recent changes will make the auction process more expensive for some sellers, but stands by its decision.
"There are cases in which this new fee structure is actually more expensive than what they were paying before," admitted eBay's Lutwak, "but the fact is, what (the sellers) asked us for is they want the lower risk associated with lower fees on the front end, and that they were willing to pay the final fees."
eBay hopes to extend an olive branch in the form of new buyer-protection coverage that it says will make buyers more comfortable spending money on eBay, particularly in large amounts--and that sellers will make more money as a result. "Coupling these two messages not only shows that we're making some adjustments to the fee structure but that we're also making major investments as a company to ensure that our customers are coming back more," said Kellie Cobaugh, manager of the buyer protection program.
Article from
here
ME AGAIN
More messing around, more increases and with more options to scam sellers for bad buyers. This is even more reason for users not to be there, as ebay no longer want those users that are both buyer and seller, as you read above from Kellie Cobaugh, manager of the buyer protection program.
who says "we're also making major investments as a company to ensure that our customers are coming back more"
They are talking about their customers who are now only buyers not the normal users on ebay that both buy and sell. I still can't see what they view those users that also sell as?
Great Really Great!
If you want to look through it and see what they are talking about then check here on ebay. If you can make sense of it when you consider the enforced free shipping and the fact that ebay is no longer a place you are guaranteed a sale of anything other than the start price if you get a sale at all then maybe you can let me know.
Not sure if there is going to be another boycott, I think most sellers have giving up caring enough to boycott ebay, and most will just float off to the alternatives like ebid.net where they really do offer free listing and those that should not stay and fight to stay will just fade away and stop selling as it becomes impossible to make a profit.
The normal suspects on PSU are voicing their opinion, as everyone expected them to, and I really do wonder how some can ignore the fact that there are very few buyers on ebay. Most users are both buyer and seller, so even if the changes ebay make do not effect their sales directly, they will eventually be effected by the loss of customers, that I have still not seen ebay do anything worthwhile to replace.
But if you are tired of ebays changes and attempts to get rid of you, then maybe this is a good time to jump ship completely and start setting up your stores on places like ebid.net, as the sellers that fight to stay with ebay will eventually find themselves with nothing.
But as always I will wish you good luck for the future.
I will see you back on ebid.net soon, as I am busy researching some marketing stuff with Social Networking like FaceBook that is taking up a lot more time than I had hoped, and looking at some new product lines that I may consider selling.
