eBay – More Fee Savings for 6 SE Asian Countries
By Garry HJ | November 5th, 2008 | Category: eBay AU, eBay HK, eBay MY, eBay PH, eBay SG, eBay US, eBay VN | 2 commentseBay Australia is providing specially discounted fees for six SE Asian eBay countries from 4th November to 20th December. Flat-rate insertion fees of AU$ 0.20 across all price tranches are available if you use the “free shipping” pricing model that eBay are pushing globally, and have 4.0 or higher DSRs on all four criteria. (See my commentary at the bottom of this news article)
This offer runs in conjunction with the 10% off FVF’s offer for SE Asian sellers (if your item sells) that started on 15th October, plus the bonus of a special “free shipping” attention-getter in all browse and search result lists. The 10% off FVFs offer is good for both eBay.com as well as eBay AU, and also requires shipping to be specified as free. It does not state if it is in addition to regular USA PowerSeller FVF discounts, or if it replaces those.
I’ll be testing some listings where Sea Mail shipping is free, and then shipping upgrades to Economy Air and Standard Airmail are offered as options, to see if Australia are accepting that configuration, which is supposedly acceptable for a similar offer on the UK site this month. I’m also guessing that postal insurance will need to be either optional or not offered, in order to qualify as “free shipping”, as happened in a similar promotion in the US last month.
Summary of current fee saving offers for SE Asian sellers
Sellers resident within Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia are eligible for the following promotions. They do not apply to sellers in other countries with accounts registered in the six named countries – i.e. your registered, business or residential, address on eBay must be within the six named territories.
All of these offers exclude Classifieds and Store listing formats, and Cars, Bikes & Boats (excluding parts & accessories). Real Estate, and Services ads are also excluded.
1. 10% off FVFs for offering free shipping – Started Oct 15th 2008, no end date specified.
Offer free shipping on Auction and Buy Now listings and get the discount when they sell – applies to listings on eBay.com and eBay.com.au only. Includes higher search ranking and free shipping logo for listings.
2. Free Sub-title listing upgrade & double PowerSeller discounts – Started Oct 15th, ends 31 Dec 2008.
Offer free shipping on Auctions and Buy Now listings on eBay.com and eBay.com.au and the free subtitle discount will reflect on your invoice immediately after listing, the double PowerSeller discount will show on your invoice when the item sells.
3. Flat-rate insertion fees of AU$ 0.20 on eBay.com.au - Starts 4th Nov, ends 20th Dec 2008.
Offer free shipping on Auctions and Buy Now listings on eBay.com.au and the fee discount will reflect on your invoice immediately after listing. Sellers must have minimum 4.0 on all four DSRs to qualify.
Again, I am not sure if these offers are cumulative, or if it’s a case of either/or – that may become clearer after conducting the test listings (I’ll be back to update on that as time progresses).
Commentary
I’m sure that all this year’s changes have severely impacted all of eBay’s western-country sites in terms of a seller exodus. Whilst many sellers will have been non-vocal and simply ramped up activity on other channels, then drifted away from eBay, there have been some who have been extremely vocal. In my own case, I have made no secret about withdrawing my custom from eBay UK after their geographically prejudicial implementation of new-BIN in September, though I did state I would continue using other eBay site’s where it was to my advantage. Many exiting sellers have not been that selective this year.
Promotions, such as those above, indicate a number of possibilities, beyond the fact that this year’s PayPal debacle decimated eBay Australia’s seller community by opening their eyes to new channels and venues.
Whilst eBay sellers everywhere complain about what they see as cheap Far East products being listed by P&P scammers (and even on the Singaporean site, sellers complain about Chinese sellers doing that), the reality has been that probably around half of the product diversity on eBay has been provided from Oriental sellers for at least the last 3-4 years. Western sellers’ offerings have become too homogeneous due to refining offerings to focus on the best selling items, and the most profitable. This has iteratively narrowed the choice on the sites, and it is into those gaps, left by western sellers, that Eastern sellers continue to pour.
I am sure eBay is hurting from the loss of core-territory sellers caused by their new policies, but obviously they are not admitting it despite their Q3-08 accounts showing it to be true. I also believe they have hit a credibility wall in their primary marketplaces (especially in the US and UK) and are failing to replace lost sellers at a rate higher than maintaining a status quo. I am also sure that they know things will get worse for them after this Christmas season, which many sellers have stated (in forums and blogs) that they wish to conclude on eBay, before moving off the platform entirely. For these reasons, eBay are tapping aggressively into the “emerging markets”.
SE Asia is currently a membership plus revenue growth-zone for eBay, even though the SE Asian sites themselves are “fee-free”. eBay tried and failed in mainland China, the world’s biggest marketplace, because they did a Ratner – trying to enforce their US usage model and policies in a market that was so fundamentally different from home territory, that the effort was doomed before it hit the planning stages.
TaoBao are now emphatically showing them how it should be done in the “Middle Kingdom”. In Japan, it is Yahoo that are showing them, and in Korea it is another crowd, whose name I’ve forgotten. eBay’s placement in Hong Kong went nowhere until they began experimenting with a Beta version of the site in bi-lingual English & Chinese format – it was previously Chinese only – because they failed to research just how important English skills are to Chinese people, and how proud each of them are of their English language usage and understanding.
If you ask any long term foreign-resident of SE Asia what core fundamental describes the business environment here, they will tell you it is small and family entrepreneurship and enterprise. Every household seems to have its own business, even when family members also work for outside employers. This may be a consequence of ongoing low salaries, or it may have its roots in historical factors. Whichever it is, opportunities like eBay and emulators, appeal directly to the core psychology of the SE and East Asian work from home mentality. It is this that is driving eBay’s growth here.
The Asian characteristics of vending and negotiating (haggling) perfectly suit the new Buy Now + Best Offer formats. This, coupled with embedded desires to improve their lifestyle and wealth, make these countries prime targets for eBay. Promotions like the ones above, during the Christmas season, will ensure plenty of new sellers coming on board, and advancement of those already using the platform.
It will also rapidly expand the East v West competition for buyers on the sites targeted, increase the product choice for everyone, and increase the wholesale variety for western sellers seeking new suppliers …. if they can see past their geographic and racial prejudices that eBay have condoned and encouraged in forums for years.
The low bar for DSRs in the promotion at the top of this article, reflect that the SE Asian eBay management understand both the prejudice of western buyers, and the realities of long distance international shipping, on top of English as a Second Language (ESL) providing its own unique challenges for sellers.
Now if only western eBay site managers could bring themselves to face that those problems exist … dream on Gaz … it’ll never happen.
The small and medium sized western sellers that I daily witness enjoying the best success on eBay, are those that have embraced trading with the Orient, rather than those that have shunned it. Amongst the largest sellers, you only need to look at their ranges to see they have done the same. Ask yourself, where can you get the best deals for stocking your shelves and attracting more customers? You’re in business on the World Wide Web, but are you buying only from your own back yard?
How would that affect what you do next year?
Gaz
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Quick Update - I’ve just uploaded one listing via Turbo Lister to eBay AU – it gave me the insertion fee discount (Insertion fee of AU $0.20 converted to GBP 0.09 at a rate of 0.43034) but charged me for the subtitle that is supposed to be free as well (Fee of AU $0.49 converted to GBP 0.21 at a rate of 0.43034).
My account is on Singapore, and their Live Help desk is offline overnight so I’ll query it with them in the morning and post back.
I also noticed a couple of glitches have appeared in Turbo Lister – one of which you MUST watch out for -
If you have selected to use Listing Designer (LD), then you add a subtitle and save the listing. After copying it to the upload list, recheck the options selected – mine is converting the LD + subtitle into the full Value Pack set of LD + subtitle + gallery … and if you didn’t want to pay the AU$0.59 for the Gallery option (approx GBP 0.50 = bloody expensive), then this is going to sting if you upload a batch without realising it.
The other glitch relates to a formatting problem within the item specifics pop-up window – it’s completely goosed and hides half of the fields (overlays them on top of each other). You have to use the tab key, not the mouse, to navigate through them to see each of them in turn, and the shift+tab to back track through them the other way.
OK – Quick and dirty report after a 3-hour session with eBay Live Help
Clicking into the system from my “home” site of eBay Singapore, the CS rep took a look at the issue and couldn’t see why the listing received the insertion fee discount, but not the free subtitle. She recommended I leave it with her for escalation, pay the fees in the meantime, and then claim them back afterwards – anyone who knows me will know how well that idea was received.
My response was “I have been an eBay user too long to believe that is what will happen – past experience has shown me that eBay will renege on your statement, and after making the payment, I will be told to prove I was told the fees would be removed – besides, if I am entitled to the free subtitle, why should I pay for it in the hope of a later refund? I think this may have to be reported to the Australian ACCC – the government body that blocked compulsory PayPal in Australia.”
She then decided it should be escalated and offered to transfer me (a case of “if you can’t stand the heat …”?). I was transferred to a senior CS rep who also could not find a reason for the billing and who then transferred me to the billing escalation team, for whom I had to wait almost an hour to get a rep allocated to my call. Their conclusion was “you need to contact Billing Department for ebay.sg, as they will be able to tell you the reason for the charge” – as this was the third eBay rep involved, I reminded them the chat had initiated on the SG site and they told me to contact the Gold PS team in the morning as they did not work overnight.
I reminded them of the 13 hour time difference between Thailand and the US west coast, at which point they offered to transfer me to the Bronze PS team, exasperated, I accepted. The rep at the Bronze PS team did finally take ownership of the issue but not until they admitted being stumped by the mixed billing (for the two promotions) and they tendered that it may have been because I’d only offered free shipping for AU, and input a charge for the US, when it was a joint site promotion.
Predictably my response was that “The listing was loaded onto Australia – the promo in that context is for free shipping to Australia – the US charge should not affect it. Besides, US and AU are opposite sides of the planet – how can any sane business person expect sellers to ship free to opposite ends of the world at the same price?”
They countered with, “I am going to need to escalate this issue on, and find the correct answer for you. I will have the specialist who handles this contacted tomorrow. Would it be ok, if I follow up with you by email with my findings?”
While she was typing that, I added, “OK – if the cause is that both AU & US need free shipping, then the promotion creator needs put against a wall and shot – it is commercially impossible to do that without massively increasing the product start prices.” – that proved to be a “whoosh” and went straight over her head.
I agreed for her to escalate it and email me tomorrow.
Amongst the many exchanges during the 3-hour live chat today, it did occur to me that this was a programmer’s error. Either the promo eligibility for the free subtitle element has been input wrongly, or Australia forgot to switch it on for sellers in eligible countries, or the host countries for those sellers forgot to switch it on. Four different eBay staff members, in four different departments, and on two different continents, could see no reason for the subtitle being billed (beyond reaching for the reason of both the US and AU had to be offered free shipping). This in itself is indicative that there is an issue with the programming, and given eBay’s history of glitches this year, it also seems the most plausible.
Once the Bronze PS rep gets back to me (maybe tomorrow) … I’ll be back and update. In the meantime, I have hundreds of listings waiting to upload, which either have to be delayed (losing me money), or have the subtitles removed to avoid what I expect to be dug-in heels insisting the free shipping must be simultaneously applied to continents on opposite sides of the planet.
For people who dream up ideas like that, here in Thailand, we use the term “empty coconuts” – they look normal on the outside, but inside are completely vacuous. It also makes me think that MBA stands for “My Brain’s Absent”.
Now to get back to migrating inventory to my websites.
Gaz
Well, here we are 72 hours later and as expected, still no email from eBay support, no explanation, and no refund of that fee that was supposed to be free.
As a workaround, because it’s now pre-Christmas peak selling period (though you wouldn’t believe it from the number of sales achieved) I’ve removed the subtitle from the listings that were queued.
I’ve also had another marketing email from eBay SG with yet another offer for SE Asian sellers – this time listing on the USA site – offer “free” P&P and get 30% off FVFs. The same email echoes the 20-cents insertion on Oz with 10% off FVFs for Auctions and BINs, but there’s no mention of the free subtitle offer.
I’m wondering now if they’ve decided to cancel the free subtitle promotion for Oz and dot com?
Gaz