The announcement from eBay SG is in, and like North America they seem to be going with the “Modify BIN but leave shops alone” change model.

There are three main sets of fee savings for western-country sellers that can be achieved by making use of eBay Singapore, though so few sellers seem to realise or leverage this. In this post, I’m not just giving you the news, I’m giving you some serious food for thought for the future of your eBay business. Throw out all your preconceptions about having to work in multiple currencies (they’re likely wrong anyway) and put on your accounting head for a few minutes – you could save your business a small fortune and really send a message to eBay about their fee-extortion in western countries.

Core Listings

Effective 16 September onwards, Singapore are reverting core Auctions, Auctions with BIN, and BIN listings to all having zero insertion fees AND free Gallery. They introduced a Gallery fee following the January change-set announced in Washington DC, and it has proved highly unpopular, with the number of listings using it plummeting over the last seven months, making the site look like a Craig’s List page. Check the full Singapore Auctions fees page for full information.

Although Singapore core listings are only visible on the Singapore site (i.e. a browser has to login or be redirected to there – via links in your western-country listings?) they are a great place for listing products of interest to expatriates and the like.

Singapore is the most active of eBay’s SE Asian sites (Thailand, Malaysia, SG, Philipines) and is used heavily by Aussies and Kiwis, therefore having a presence on Singapore gets you penetration to most of western Asia Pacific, as well as into Hong Kong, Taiwan, and to a limited extent, into China and Korea, plus Japan and India. And together, those are a BIG marketplace – dwarfing Europe and North America put together.

Seller Tools

Use of Listing Designer (with or without Turbo Lister) and scheduled listings retain their SG $0.10 fees, and 10-day durations retain an SG $0.30 fee. They do not seem to be adding the USA’s new 30-day format for BIN listings, nor modifying the existing shops format (though check out the fees table below for stores).

Selling Manager Pro as a stand-alone subscription will be SG $6.50 per month, with basic Selling Manager and Turbo Lister remaining free.

Shops / Stores

eBay UK are so not going to want me to tell you this, especially with today’s SG $ to UK £ exchange rate being $2.63 to the Pound.

From 16 September 2008, Shop / Store subscriptions on eBay Singapore will be -

As you can see, there is a significant pricing differential between the Singapore and UK shop subscriptions on the respective sites, but why? The only significant advantage you get with a UK subscription, over a Singapore one, is the use of Omniture traffic reports, and any smart seller with the coding skills can improve on that via Google Analytics.

IMPORTANT TIP - As I’ve evangelised for almost 2 years now, if those Omniture traffic stats are not of critical importance to your business, then why pay extra for them? If you are (for example) a UK-based seller with a UK-registered eBay and Paypal account, you DO NOT have to take out your shop subscription on eBay UK.

“Soapbox alert!” - Telling people this, was one of the reasons I was banned for life from posting in eBay forums (and I still have the UK Head of Trust & Safety’s email on file to prove that … if anyone still doubts me?). If such information was critical enough to them that they banned me from telling people, how critical is it to YOUR eBay business and YOUR bottom line profits? Obviously eBay UK (and other fee-over-priced western sites) really don’t want sellers to understand they can make HUGE monthly fee savings by using the eBay rules, and other eBay sites, wisely. “end Soapbox”

If you take out your shop subscription on Singapore, you can still list shop format (or new-BIN) listings on UK at the UK per-listing regular prices (or promotion-fee rates on Cheap Listing Days (CLDs)), but only have to pay the monthly subscription costs for the shop at the Singapore rate. Of course, if using Selling Manager Pro in UK Pounds is important to you, you will have to take out a UK subscription for that at the regular UK monthly rate (same applies with basic Selling Manager). But the combined cost of an SG shop and a UK SMP (no local shop) subscription will still be cheaper than doing it all through the UK – substantially so for either a Featured or Anchor Shop under the incoming new rates.

Example - Pay the UK £ 38.02 / month subscription for an Anchor store on Singapore, and you get all those lovely 1p insertion fee, 30-day, multiple item, new-BINs on the UK.

Sounds like a real bargain to me and will let me compete with Buy.com’s 500,000 listings – especially if I register with drop shipping companies like Doba. (500,000 listings at 1p = UK £ 5,000 a month in insertion fees, so maybe I’ll have to build up to that level rather than do it immediately? ).

Best of all, this cross site listing format availability does not just apply to an SG-UK site-use partnership. Regardless of which site you have registered your shop on, you can use the equivalent SIF / new-BIN listing format for your shop-level on any site offering those formats, pay the local rate per listing that is set for your (Singapore) shop subscription-level, but continue at the super-cheap Singapore rate for your shop subscription. And it does NOT matter which site hosts your eBay membership – any eBay seller can do this.

If you decide to list SIF on eBay Singapore -Insertion Fee, FVF, and Gallery are all free, regardless of the listing tool you use. But please remember, listings on Singapore can only be seen if browsing the Singapore site, therefore all your in-listing links to your shop (on other sites) will need to use the “stores.ebay.com.sg” address path to take browsers into your shop on the island nation.

This offers the best of all worlds for sellers of “penny-items” and the chance to offer really cheap, truly “penny-items”, but you WILL have to work hard and use plenty of strategic in-listing links to drive traffic to such listings – be warned – the savings for listing on Singapore are “total” (i.e. free to list and sell) but you do need to work hard to get buyers to see those listings. Don’t let that put you off using an SG shop subscription though.

Even with an SG shop subscription, what you list on the UK or US or Germany etc, become UK, or US, or German listigns and are treated the same as any other listing put onto the site by a seller with a UK, US, or German shop subscription. Isn’t eBay wonderful sometimes?

Optional upgrades for shop listings on Singapore are sometimes more expensive that western countries, so please check the full Singapore Stores fees list.

Please post your questions and thoughts using the blog comments link below.

Happy Selling everyone

Gaz

UPDATE – For those who follow conspiracy theories regarding eBay, in particular eBay UK … within 10 hours of the above post appearing on BuildaSkill, two major events happened regarding eBay punishing my primary eBay  seller account -

• First, despite no feedback received in the previous 4 days, all my DSRs dropped like a stone.  Most noticeable was the Despatch Time DSR falling from 4.71 to 4.56 – losing me this billing cycle’s FVF discounts.  The P&P DSR also dropped from 4.86 to 4.62 – those are mega drops and I do not believe they are due solely to the ratings from the other end of the 30-day feedback being removed from the calculation.
• Second was that I received a few days ago, from the US site, 67 policy violation slaps for “Fee Circumvention”.  These related to sub-$1.00 SIF listings.  As blogged a week or so ago on BuildaSkill, since the start of July the minimum price for SIF listings on the US is $1.00 – what makes these slaps particularly insidious is that at least 53 of the 67 can be proven to have been removed from the US site (by me) around 14 days before the slaps were issued, and relisted on the UK site as SIF listings.  I am appealing every one of them, as I see this action as being a malicious attack on my account in order to get me made NARU.

So far, PowerSeller Support in both the UK & US have not replied 3 days after contacting them about both sets of issues, despite the 24-hour reply promise.

Kinda confirms it huh?