If you were thinking of selling last year's gadgets on eBay so you could purchase the new Apple iPad, it's just gotten a lot harder to figure out how much it will cost you. On March 30, eBay instituted a new pricing structure with different listing and commission fees depending on format, category, type of item sold, and volume. Shoppers on eBay will also see a major change: they will find many more listings in search results because eBay eliminated Store items, converting them to Fixed Price listings that appear alongside all auction and Buy It Now listings.
It's all part of CEO John Donahoe's 3-year plan to "fix" eBay. Since taking over from Meg Whitman in 2008, he has unleashed "disruptive innovation" that makes the new eBay difficult to recognize, while at the same time slashing eBay's global workforce.
eBay launched a new site to explain the latest changes: The Best Place to Sell. But despite headlining the changes, "Our lowest insertion fees ever coming this spring: free auction-style listings; fixed price as low as 3 cents with full search exposure," three-quarters of eBay sellers surveyed by AuctionBytes after the announcement said that new fees would result in increased monthly fees (link to survey results).
Sellers with Stores will pay more for fixed price listings, but because those listings will appear in search results, it's difficult for sellers to estimate the impact on their business. No one knows just how the influx of listings will impact sales, and whether it will have a negative impact on auction listings.
In a stroke of public relations genius, eBay kept reporters and bloggers busy yesterday when it rolled out the changes. Not by explaining what was happening, but by making several new announcements. On Tuesday, eBay re-launched its Kijiji classifieds site in the U.S., renaming it eBayClassifieds.com, and announced mobile apps for sellers (link to AuctionBytes news story).
The reaction from sellers was muted as well, as they waited for the impact to be felt. Some were upset that eBay took away PowerSeller badges from their profiles. Others expressed cynicism over the timing of the implementation of Stores in Core, two days before the end of the first quarter, wondering if the boost in listings would help their first-quarter reports.
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If you were thinking of selling last year's gadgets on eBay so you could purchase the new Apple iPad, it's just gotten a lot harder to figure out how much it will cost you. On March 30, eBay instituted a new pricing structure with different listing and commission fees depending on format, category, type of item sold, and volume. Shoppers on eBay will also see a major change: they will find many more listings in search results because eBay eliminated Store items, converting them to Fixed Price listings that appear alongside all auction and Buy It Now listings.