eBay CA & US offer Auction Fees Sale for all January

By Ed | January 3rd, 2009 | Category: eBay CA, eBay US | No Comments »

Better late than never, Dinesh Lathi has posted details of the eBay North America January Sales CLD today.

For the remainder of January, insertion fees on 1 and 3 day Auction Listings are half price, IF your 12-month DSRs are 4.5 or higher. New sellers without any accumulated DSRs are also eligible. Throughout the month, the rolling previous 12-months DSRs will be applied, therefore eligibility may change with changes to your DSRs as the month progresses.

Not included in the promotion are all Collectibles categories, all Media categories, and all Motors categories plus Real Estate.

My take on it is that what is not included tells a more complete story than what is included. Recent reports state that eBay Motors account for 22% of all vehicles sold online and therefore (for eBay) the sub-site is healthy and vibrant. Media categories already have the lowest insertion fees on eBay globally and are swamped with offerings from Diamond PowerSellers in an attempt to recover market share from Amazon. Collectibles are far more suited to Auction Format than to Fixed Price and therefore will be retaining strong seller support regardless of the mayhem last year.

This promotion seems to confirm that outside of the above three sectors, support from sellers is being subjected to an exodus of vendors and inventory. The short-durations promotion is a clear indicator that eBay need to make up the numbers, and fast.

Their Q4-2008 results are due out this month and no-one is expecting them to be good. Additionally, most pundits (including myself) have been expecting a massive migration of sellers to other venues following the pre-Christmas sales season, and I doubt this promotion will do much to slow that.

The short-duration eligibilities also demonstrate an attempt to bring auction-format selling more in line with Buy Now fixed price selling despite Medved’s recent data showing successful sales of Buy Now items on the eBay platform have fallen from 40% to 20% of listings across 2008.

Ebay’s report card on this promotion gets 2 stars out of 5 and a “Could have tried harder” comment.