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

Apologies to readers if I sound like a nagging wife on this topic. It’s one of my hatred-addictions for eBay policies that facilitate the very “crime” that eBay Trust & Safety staff have used as a whipping post for unneccesarily punishing honest sellers.

There are two forms of item location abuse on all eBay sites - the intentional, and the institutionally created.

Intentional item location abuse is performed by sellers for a number of reasons, and in a variety of ways. For example, a seller might seek to game the internal eBay search mechanisms by stating an item is in the domestic country of the site on which they are listing, when in fact it is located continents away.

Those intentional abuses are easily spotted if you’re experienced and observant, but it’s the institutionally created location abuse that is more insidious, more stressful for the honest seller, and the result of criminal negligence by the eBay programmers, not to mention generating the same appearance as the intentional location abuse to the casual user.

When a seller registers and verifies their address, the eBay system notes the country of residence that the seller has input - this is not foolproof…

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Both North American eBays - Canada and the USA - have announced two weeks of cheap listing fees for fixed price listings.

On both sites from July 16th to July 29th (inclusive), insertion fees for Fixed Price (FP or BIN) lisitngs are fixed at $0.25 in all price tranches.  Listing upgrade fees and other options, including final value fees still apply.  Some Business and industrial categories are not included.

The announcements don’t state if multi-item listings are permitted, though they usually are on these sites’ promotion days.  Try a test listing to find out.

Unusually, the Canadian offer applies to non-residents, something the site has frequently disallowed in past years, but has been opening up to more frequently in 2008.

If you’re outside the US or Canada - watch the eBay exchange rate daily for your currency against the $ - eBay UK updates their exchange rate around 11am during BST, and it is now diverging rapidly from the exchange rate used by PayPal - even though they are both supposed to pull the rate from XE.com

The weak US dollar means that as long as eBay UK are exchanging at under 50-pence to the UK Pound, UK sellers will benefit from rounding down and save an extra 1-2 cents per listing.  Watch you Seller Account daily billing to see where the exchange rate is at.  (I’m betting that exchange rates on eBay will move counter-intuitively to the money markets for the next fortnight, and bump the dollar over 50-pence for better fee receipts for dot com).

Ed

In an announcement made “in the interests of transparency”, the eBay Spain team have posted an announcement of their national DSR averages for sellers during the month of June 2008, and for the 12 months to the end of June.

The numbers are quite revealing, and I’ve repeated them below with the national averages currently displayed for eBay UK and eBay US as shown by the Seller Dashboard (note - UK & US averages are as of today 11 July, not for June as a whole).

The average is calculated as a simple average of all ratings that buyers give sellers.

The calculation for the past 12 months, with the following results for eBay Spain:

Item as described:	4.43	(UK - 4.73 )	(US - 4.73 )
Communication:	4.43	(UK - 4.69 )	(US - 4.68 )
Despatch time:	4.32	(UK - 4.63 )	(US - 4.62 )
Shipping and handling:	4.25	(UK - 4.58 )	(US - 4.59 )

In the past 30 days, with the following results for eBay Spain *:

Item as described:	4.51	(UK - 4.74 )	(US - 4.76 )
Communication:	4.51	(UK - 4.70 )	(US - 4.70 )
Despatch Time:	4.40	(UK - 4.64 )	(US - 4.64 )
Shipping and handling:	4.31	(UK - 4.59 )	(US - 4.63 )

* These results are of June / 2008

Looking at those results, it is hardly surprising that eBay Spain recently made an announcement in which they let slip that they only had 10,000 or so sellers (it’s recorded in our forums somewhere) - if that’s their national average for DSRs then no sellers there will be getting the seller performance discounts.

It also points to an opportunity and a threat. UK & US sellers who list onto eBay Spain should be automatically elevated above Spanish sellers by virtue of DSR ratings, leading to above average sell through rates for those “foreign” sellers on the Spanish site. However, conversely it also raises the threat that the apparently intolerant Spanish buyers are going to heavily ding the sellers DSRs regardless of service quality.

Either way, I feel that it demonstrates a need for a concerted and sustained education program in Spain for both buyers and sellers - those national averages clearly demonstrate the Spaniards are just not getting “It”. Perhaps it needs an eBay Inquisition to teach them the error of their ways? Or is that what’s already caused those numbers?

Perhaps this is an opportunity to revive a dormant seller account, build up a DSR rating in the UK or US, then try to finesse those higher DSRs as higher visibility on the Spanish site? Perhaps, perhaps not.

What do you think?

Ed

Hundreds of eBay Community discussion board threads and thousands of sellers of all sizes have been saying it for many weeks, but eBay hasn’t listened. Or, if they did, they are ignoring the “noise” from dissatisfied customers.

According to Omniture (the traffic and other stats service provided free to eBay Shop subscribers), so far during July 08, eBay’s own in-site search system has fallen significantly behind external 3rd-party (mainstream) search engines.

The screen shot below, taken from my own eBay shop’s performance stats in Omniture this morning, clearly shows that eBay Search is delivering less visitors that Yahoo - and unlike the amalgamated data for all eBay, the Yahoo stats are broken up by country. (Click the image to view full size)

This is, or should be, a major concern for eBay. All eBay staff have always maintained that what makes eBay such a “vibrant and exciting” marketplace is the volume of buyers they are able to drive to seller’s listings.

In recent months, many sellers have challenged that eBay are continuing to do that - it’s not just that some are losing visibility due to DSR feedback ratings received under a flawed and emotion-based system used by eBay as intrinsic data, sellers simply cannot find their own items when using eBay search, including when they input the exact title they gave to their listings.

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Despite everything that eBay UK Trust & Safety markets about links in emails, PayPal UK sent me a marketing email last night offering several tantalising buttons to click.

The one that caught my eye was the teasing tagline of -

You list on eBay and we’ll pay your fees

PayPal is offering six lucky eBay sellers the chance to have their combined eBay and PayPal fees paid for them. For a year!

Having thoroughly checked the mail header to ensure it was from PayPal, I clicked through and was given the following explanation -

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It’s not so long ago that an event like tomorrow’s eBay.co.uk 5-pence Cheap Listing Day (CLD) would be a major excitement.

Preparing listings from within minutes of receiving the announcement, and running without sleep or proper meals to get the maximum advantage from the event - i.e. the maximum listings into Turbo Lister, often saw me working 72 hours straight through.  Those marathons are a thing of the past now.

Before I really knew what I was doing, and was still operating on a dial-up connection, I used to be ecstatic if I managed to get 2,500 listings onto eBay for a single CLD.  Back then, they were actually FLDs - Free Listing Days.  In those days, the strategy involved building all the listings in Turbo lister and holding them in dedicated folders until a minute after midnight, then batch uploading for the next 23 hours and 58 minutes, until they were all listed, or time ran out to get them into the CLD.

Back then, I didn’t give thought to the best time to list for maximum traffic, I simply made sure I had good titles and the correct category - after all, it was a global marketplace and no matter what time the auction ended, there would be someone awake and browsing somewhere around the planet.  Again, not any more …

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VICTORY !

eBay users in Australia will tonight be celebrating like there is no tomorrow.

In a short, terse, and subliminally petulant announcement, eBay Australia have posted on their announcement board that they have scrapped the intended PayPal-only policy for the site.

The announcement includes the opinion that, “We have decided to withdraw the notification to stop any further confusion and disruption among the eBay Community“, which will likely anger some of the paying customers who were in no confusion that they didn’t want their freedom of choice restricted, nor their fees increased by being tied to an eBay revenue channel.

The announcement also states that the newly introduced Seller Protection Policy (SPP) changes will remain in force, and rubbing salt into the sores, there is a muted gloating that PayPal must now be offered as an option on all listings displayed on the site. The latter point bringing to mind reports of problems for UK sellers trying to add Australia as a shipping option to their listings, even when PayPal is selected as a payment option - this was reported extensively in the eBay UK forums last weekend.

Further Australia-UK issues are sure to appear regarding the differences in the PayPal SPP - the Australian policy requires only proof of despatch, whereas the UK requires online proof of delivery - concepts that are further apart than just half a planet’s airmiles, and sure to be exploited, under the new feedback regime, by buyers.

Ed