The dog days of summer may be hot, but they aren't lazy! As online sellers gear up for the busy back-to-school shopping season, many are struggling with what to do in light of impending eBay Store fee increases.
Readers have some interesting opinions and strategies on coping, which you can read in the Letters from Readers section in today's newsletter, and on the AuctionBytes Forum at http://digbig.com/4mbmm.
Stephanie Inge wrote to tell me that the largest eBay User Group is having its next meeting in Dallas on August 22. "Dallas eBaybes & eMales" meets twice a month and typically has 75-100 people in attendance. A wide range of eBay sellers (Newbies to Titanium Power Sellers) will discuss what they plan to do about their eBay Stores as a result of the eBay price increase. If you are in the Dallas area, you can learn more online at http://ebaysell.meetup.com/119.
Observers generally want an opinion about what sellers really think about eBay fee increases. So here's my opinion. I've always believed that sellers vote with their pocketbooks. If there's a fee increase, but sellers can still make money and enjoy some of the benefits of online selling, they'll absorb the extra costs and continue to sell on eBay.
With the eBay Stores fee hike announced last month, however, not only is the move going to take a real bite out of profits - and in some cases, prove devastating - but sellers had a hard time swallowing eBay's message that Stores are hurting eBay.
If sellers don't understand the motivations behind changes, it's much harder to predict what might be coming next - and that can be very unsettling.
The timing was also a shock: fee increases have typically been announced in the first quarter. And the statement that the average storeowner would be effected by only 6 percent didn't play well with sellers. When they calculated the effect on their monthly listing fees, it totaled much higher than a 6 percent increase!
eBay owes Storeowners an explanation and some hard facts about what metrics they are really looking at, and whether eBay Express impacted eBay's decision-making.
The immediate effect of eBay's announcement may drive things in the desired direction. Sellers are weeding out Store listings and are posting more auctions in an effort to clear out some of their Store inventory. But this may be a short-term effect. For many merchants and the types of items they sell, Auction format listings just don't make sense as an alternative for Store listings. This month's fee hikes are bound to have savvy sellers looking for ways to control their own destiny.
In today's issue, I take a look at Google Checkout's policies with regard to "buyer fraud" and compare it to PayPal's policies. Greg Holden discovers that online-auction sellers are using MySpace to help them market their businesses, and we've got the final part of our introduction to paid-search ad programs.
Thanks for reading.
About the author:
Ina Steiner is Editor of AuctionBytes.com and author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). She has a background in marketing and research in the high-tech and publishing fields. If you have story ideas, comments or questions, send them to ina@auctionbytes.com.
