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