eBay UK has launched a fees experiment dressed up as a promotion for sellers.

In their brief announcement’s linked terms and conditions the devil is in the detail.

The promotion is for multiple item listings, and the announcement hammers home and beats sellers up about the need for identical items within the listing, only choice of colour is permitted - no other choice factors are allowed. Why this aggression is needed I’m not sure, such restrictions have always been the policy on eBay UK. Perhaps it’s because of the increasing in-forum “noise” from sellers wanting the same choice option as the USA site?

Whatever the reason, there a few other “gotcha’s” involved -

The announcement is very careful to explain that, on UK at least, multiple item listings are not eligible for the unsold item relist credit if they sell the second time around.

It also states that all items listed in these formats during the promotion period will not be shown on eBay.com by default (means buyers have to choose to view International listings) but doesn’t say what happens if sellers pay the unwarranted International Visibility Fee - remember that visibility was free for all UK sellers just 18 months ago and we were lied to as to the reason for it’s removal.

A resounding for including those warnings in the announcement - well done team!

What was not stated (as far as I can see) is that there is a minimum £1.00 price per item for multiple item BIN listings on eBay UK. The eBay UK Help & Fees info page obfuscates this and never states it outright - you have to trawl back through the plethora of other information pages to discover it, though I have been told it’s been in force for several years. That minimum is double the minimum on the US & Canadian sites, and doesn’t exist at all on several of the smaller sites around the world.

So if you’re listing multiple Buy Now items in a single listing with a price of sub-£1.00 you must do in shop (SIF) format. (Multi-item Auction Listings on UK have a minimum starting bid of £0.99 (or 1 Euro for Ireland).)

The promotion runs until 23rd September, which ties in nicely with the free gallery promotion running until 29th September, but be careful that the shop listing duration for this promotion is for 30-day only, and the free gallery does not apply to shop listings. This looks like a test to me, to see if sellers prefer the overall lower insertion + gallery fee in stores, or if they like the free gallery plus low insertion fee for the shorter duration in core.

It could be a warning regarding the future existence of eBay shops. Remembering that US Executives have repeatedly reaffirmed their commitment to the stores / shops sub-platform, why then have senior UK managers continually been dismissive of the “very low” proportion of revenue received from shops compared to core, as frequently posted by them in the UK forums (especially in the PowerSeller board)?

The basis of the promotion is that you only pay the fee for a single item listing (BIN or SIF format) regardless of how many items you offer in the listing.

How to work it to best advantage?

Given the maximum multi-item fee that exists, this may not work well for high value, low volume listings, and it’s certainly not going to work (in core) for sub-£1.00 items (though it will in shops). The low-mid price ranges seem to be where this will work best - say between £2.50 and £30.00 per item - but watch the categories you’re using … this might just be being tested to bring in the UK’s equivalents of Buy.com and allow them to test the eBay platform.

The 30-day only SIF restriction might muck up your budgetting if you were hoping to get the reduced fees on 90-day listings uploaded in September for the pre-Christmas season. It would be better to upload them earlier this month and set them as say 30-day x 3 auto-relists - you’ll lose a few pence on the 90-day gallery fee for SIF, but might save a lot more by catching 2 x the promotion rate for your first and second 30-day periods.

Conclusion - I’m hoping this is UK testing to see if reverting to the US style of multi-item listing pricing for shops (and for core on fee promotion days) would work for the UK marketplace. If so, it’ll be a test of the oft-promised “lower risk” fee strategy whereby the front end cost is lowered for sellers.

Fingers crossed

Ed

The policy hammer came down this week on several “fringe” categories with a long announcement from the gang in Belgium. It seems their parliament is determined they will not be as liberal as neighbouring Holland.

Top of the list is this years number one target for eBay worldwide - Weapons - the Belgian announcement says;

Rifles, pistols, rifles to reload, bows, swords, rapiers, catapults, sarbacanes, katanas and samurai swords can not be put up for sale on eBay, even if it is not clearly collector coins and decorative. Hence, the category “swords and knives collections” will be deleted.

I know there has been uproar in the UK from genuine collectors and antique dealers about that one, but eBay’s hands were tied due to the writing of a new piece of legislation (even though the legislation did allow exemptions for bona-fide collectors and traders, eBay decided it would be too difficult to police and would be open to abuse).

The announcement also dealt with erotic accessories (Google translation made me giggle at the sentence mangling in that one) and “test Euros”. However the most controversial part of the announcement deals with non-prescription medicines.

Under Belgian law, the sale of any drug, even drugs that do not require a prescription, is prohibited on eBay.

This is going to wreak havoc with many sellers, and I’m sure there will be many questionable policy slaps in the area of herbs and medical aids (therapeutic herbs are a big niche on eBay, as are things like pain relieving creams, bandages and the like) with many dolphins getting caught in a net that appears to be not of eBay’s making.

Remember to knock out your listings for such items on Belgium in your favourite listing tool, and increase your eBay shop links (in Belgian listings) through to sites that do permit such items for sale, but beware of Customs seizures if selling cross-border, and be sure to warn your customers fully about such restrictions.

Ed

It must have been one heck of a siesta in Spain this summer.

The Spanish site have just announced that from 24 September, their PowerSellers will be eligible for 20% FVF discounts if they maintain minimum DSRs of 4.5 across all scores.

Last month, I blogged about the reported disparity in national average DSRs between sites, and posted a special report about the exceptionally low national average in Spain.

The new Spanish announcement about PowerSeller discounts contains one interesting and very worrying phrase -

Being registered user Spanish and confirmed in eBay.es well as take home in Spain (via Google online translation)

This appears to be saying that PowerSellers on the Spanish site not only need to be registered on it (fair enough), but also need to live in Spain and be Spanish citizens - if true, then that’s completely out of order for a subsidiary of a global multinational company - or is it?

Could this be a taster of a new-style policy for other eBay sites?

What’s your opinion?

Ed

Apologies to readers if I sound like a nagging wife on this topic. It’s one of my hatred-addictions for eBay policies that facilitate the very “crime” that eBay Trust & Safety staff have used as a whipping post for unneccesarily punishing honest sellers.

There are two forms of item location abuse on all eBay sites - the intentional, and the institutionally created.

Intentional item location abuse is performed by sellers for a number of reasons, and in a variety of ways. For example, a seller might seek to game the internal eBay search mechanisms by stating an item is in the domestic country of the site on which they are listing, when in fact it is located continents away.

Those intentional abuses are easily spotted if you’re experienced and observant, but it’s the institutionally created location abuse that is more insidious, more stressful for the honest seller, and the result of criminal negligence by the eBay programmers, not to mention generating the same appearance as the intentional location abuse to the casual user.

When a seller registers and verifies their address, the eBay system notes the country of residence that the seller has input - this is not foolproof…

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The July newsletter from UK-managed auction & stores network eBid is in, and the achievements are impressive.

The site hit the critical-mass one million active auction listings during July and are correctly trumpeting it proudly - this moves them from the “small fry” into the “big fish” pond, and leaves self-proclaimed competitor TazBar flapping in the shallows. Of course, eBid still have a long way to go to catch up to eBay or even some of the middle tier US-only sites, but with a million listings in the search engine results, it’ll drive traffic, sales, and additional listings. That’s something the site are pushing hard for, with twice monthly uploads of the whole (eligible) inventory database to GoogleBase certainly helping, with a reported 25% increase in GMV, month-on-month, between May & June 2008.

Pushing hard to capture volume from the eBay negative press, eBid are still offering Seller+ lifetime membership at only £49.99. This means sellers get up to 5 stores FREE, options for FREE listing, FREE photo inclusion and NO Final Value Fees, depending on how you list, and that’s FOREVER!

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You can always tell when the going gets tough, because the tough get going. In other words, when the economy slows down and sales performance goes with it, smart businesses don’t cut back on sales & marketing expenditure, they increase it.

The logic for this is simple. If your competitors are reducing market exposure, that is when you should be increasing yours and get increased value for your marketing budget.

US web hosting company NameCheapHosting are doing just that with some great offers this month. Not only do they have aggressive pricing, they also throw in lots of special offers and freebies when you sign up with them.

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Apologies to William Shakespeare, but after the winter and spring of discontent comes the summer of reflection. It appears many eBay sellers are seriously questioning whether they should continue using the company’s sites, and those questions are not related solely to fees, but a growing awareness of the dirty tricks being played on them.

One seller has written to me, and I quote them below with identifying data changed to generic information -

I usually have 500-600 store format listings running at any one time. The prices range from around 100, nickel-&-dime multi-item listings (to help with total items sold counts), through several hundred listings in the site-wide ASP range of $10 - $30, up to items running in the hundreds of dollars. This has always been a good mix for generating both revenue and PowerSeller status.

Back in January it was announced that from the summer, stores format on eBay.com and eBay.ca would have introduced a minimum per item price of $1 and I mentally noted it, but it then took so long to arrive that I forgot about it because no reminders were issued.

Now, weeks after it was put into force, I find that many of my sub-$1 store-items are still auto-relisting according to Selling Manager Pro (SMP), and according to my Seller Account, I’m still being invoiced the insertion fees, but those US & CA listings are not visible anywhere on any of the sites to buyers - they are only visible within SMP, which had caused me to believe they are live on the site for buyers to find. I stress this only affects store items under $1.00 price per item.

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By Adam Urbanski (c) 2008

If you’ve tried your hand at building an Internet-based business but haven’t yet reached the success you want, find out about these 11 deadly mistakes and how to avoid them.

Mistake #1 - Not Treating What You Do as a Business.

The difference between a hobby and a business is that a hobby doesn’t make you money - it costs you money. If you’re earnest about starting a profitable online business, approach seriously and focus on generating revenue. Treat your online business as you would any regular business.

Mistake #2 - Being Distracted by Too Many Good Ideas.

You can light up a room with a light bulb, but you can cut through steel with a laser beam. The same is true with your effort and ideas.

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