It’s not so long ago that an event like tomorrow’s eBay.co.uk 5-pence Cheap Listing Day (CLD) would be a major excitement.

Preparing listings from within minutes of receiving the announcement, and running without sleep or proper meals to get the maximum advantage from the event – i.e. the maximum listings into Turbo Lister, often saw me working 72 hours straight through.  Those marathons are a thing of the past now.

Before I really knew what I was doing, and was still operating on a dial-up connection, I used to be ecstatic if I managed to get 2,500 listings onto eBay for a single CLD.  Back then, they were actually FLDs – Free Listing Days.  In those days, the strategy involved building all the listings in Turbo lister and holding them in dedicated folders until a minute after midnight, then batch uploading for the next 23 hours and 58 minutes, until they were all listed, or time ran out to get them into the CLD.

Back then, I didn’t give thought to the best time to list for maximum traffic, I simply made sure I had good titles and the correct category – after all, it was a global marketplace and no matter what time the auction ended, there would be someone awake and browsing somewhere around the planet.  Again, not any more …

By and large, it was a method that worked, and throughout 2003-4, I had good sales consistently from using that technique.  Then, in mid 2004, I discovered eBay shops and Selling Manager Pro, and the free listing-scheduling that went with it.  From that point on, getting 5-6,000 listings per CLD was not uncommon. 

Then the Free Listing Days ended, and 5p became the normal reduced fee.  Then the 5p days became 10p days, or, otherwise unused listing enhancements were offered cheap or free, and slowly the attraction of the CLD’s eroded, until some of the more recent ones were actually defrauding sellers by announcing discounts that actually calculated as fee increases because of the hoops sellers had to jump through (the US site being the worst recent culprit for this).

Earlier this year, eBay UK had a 2-day Free Listing Weekend, overlapping with a similar event on eBay Belgium, and the “old hands” ramped up their game to flood the sites, inadvertently or knowingly, assisting eBay’s quarter-end numbers. 

Earlier than that, eBay.com and eBay.ca had a fortnight of 1-cent listings and the wizened sellers from Brittania knew exactly how to play that – carefully watching their eBay seller account each morning, they got the day’s new eBay currency-exchange rate.  When the rate ran right, listing into those 1-cent promotions became free listings, when it was wrong, they became 2-cent listings, and eBay continued updating exchange rates just once per day.

Today should be a frency of typing and mouse clicking, hopping between Turbo Lister and image hosting etc.  But it’s not.  And it’s not through having so many listings already in Turbo Lister archives, that none need prepared.  It’s not happening because I’ve lost the will to list, sometimes even to login.

The fun and excitement has gone from eBay.  I can’t remember the last time an auction listing received more than one bid, and It seems decades since all you had to do to please a customer was have an undamaged package delivered to them containing the correct item.

Amongst all the sarcastic blog and forum posts about sellers having to pay customers to “buy” their goods, there is a growing crescendo of complaints about completely unrealistic customer expectations, which research reveals are based mostly on either eBay’s destructive messaging, buyers failing due diligence before bidding, or the “numpty factor” – buyers who haven’t a clue about how the eBay marketplace works.  All of these have worn me down.

eBay take note, instead of the “normal” 2,000-ish listings I’d put up for a UK CLD, tomorrow will be the second in a row where I’m actually uploading less than 100 in total.  I may not be your highest volume lister, but your new policies and punishments are costing you 1,900 x 5p + FVFs + PayPal fees.   And I use more than a dozen of your sites around the world, so just on CLDs, you’re losing a month’s salary for an employee, from me alone.

Just like working for someone else, the money is not the only reason for taking or staying in a job – there’s a whole lot more to it, and “job satisfaction” is probably the major consideration.  Lately, for sellers, you’ve removed almost all the job satisfaction as well as caused massive salary cuts.  The much publicised Q1 eBay seller strikes are nothing compared to the silent strikes that are growing day by day, and are set to accelerate as the year ages.

To reverse this is simple, go back to being a unified global marketplace, remove the regulatory burdens, roll back Best Match & New Search, dump the DSRs, feel the feedback from your paying customers, and level the feedback dialogue for trading partners.  Otherwise you’ll suffer “death by a thousand cuts” – sellers listing cuts that is. 

Tomorrow, I’m giving you 1,900 cuts, and you’ve inflicted them on yourself.

Ed