eBay continues nibbling at sellers’ VFM

By Ed | April 29th, 2008 | Category: OZtion, eBay AU, eBay CA | No Comments »

Several new announcements from eBay in the last 24 hours demonstrate a continual nibbling away at the Value For Money (VFM) sellers get from the sites.

The most marked is on eBay Canada, which BuildaSkill revealed a month ago as having snuck a new fee under the radar. Now, despite having gouged the extra fee for what was once free, it has been revealed that the payers of the new fee will be disadvantaged in Search & Browse as Canada rejigs Best Match to give priority to domestic listings. The fact the announcement only appeared on the Canadian site means nothing – As we revealed days ahead of any official announcement, the new fee would become de facto in eBay land, and thus we expect this disadvantaging of “foreign listings” to also become de facto on eBay sites worldwide. eBay has, for the last year or more, been trying to reduce the international leverage that sellers have on the platform, this appears to be “xenophobeBay” beta 2.0

On the opposite side of the planet, the rapidly emptying eBay.com.au has struck a deal with Drive.com.au whereby the listings of both sites will appear on each others platforms. As a result eBay have launched a beta platform to display the combined listings (cars2.ebay.com.au) and have left me wondering about how the drive.com.au sellers will feel if faced with being forced to accept PayPal only (and PayPal’s fee) if an eBay buyer wins their motor through the new joint interface? It also leaves me wondering about the contractual & legal sides if drive.com.au has no PayPal-only enforcement in it’s user agreement.

The increased competition on a rapidly shrinking site (as both buyers and sellers abandon eBay in favour of Oztion) does eBay’s existing customers no favours either.