UK locks out businesses from post-Christmas CLD

By Ed | December 27th, 2008 | Category: eBay UK | No Comments »

eBay UK has announced a cheap listing weekend for private sellers this weekend.

Saturday and Sunday 27th & 28th December offers 5p insertion fees to non-business sellers and non-Powersellers (i.e. private sellers only). The offer is for auction format and auction with BIN upgrade only (no BIN-only listings) and is for single item listings only (no Dutch Auctions).

All other fees are applicable for upgrades and Final Value Fees.

Traditionally, eBay UK offers an all-comers Cheap Listing Day (CLD) immediately after Christmas with usually another in the first or second week of January – eBay’s answer to the January Sales I suppose.

It also looks like the recent redundancies have taken their toll on the marketing department too. The post-Christmas UK CLD is usually accompanied with lots of messaging about “Christmas present disappointment” and to “cash them in” by selling them on eBay. This year it’s just a simple and boring “save money on fees” type message.

Hohum – Yawn. I can save even more fees on other sites – both insertion and success fees. C’mon eBay, I’m a business registered PowerSeller, who is also expatriate and correctly registered at the address where I live – how about giving me (and the tens of thousands like me) a real incentive to continue using you?

On that topic, eBay UK in particular has had four years of pushing hard to get sellers to increase to PowerSeller level, and has spent much of this year (2008) forcing them to register as business sellers (under pain of listing privileges suspension if they didn’t), and now they turn round and offer this form of CLD? Talk about yet another kick in the nuts from the eBay UK management.

eBay are going to have to do a lot better than this if they hope to avert the much expected mass seller exodus, now that the Christmas prime selling period is over. The “eBay alternatives” should be bracing themselves for invasions – we’re already seeing our forum users increasing chatter about moving from eBay to other sites.