eBay India has today announced wide ranging fee changes affecting almost every aspect of selling on the site.

In particular, they have heavily cut fees for basic services such as basic listing fees, international visibility, plus a range of category related fees, and radically, they have introduced a cap for the maximum fees any seller will pay in any month. 

Monthly shop subscriptions have increased slightly, but are still far lower than the equivalent from EU or North American eBay sites.  FVFs have diverged heavily with Technology categories dropping to a flat rate 1% for all final prices, and all other categories moving off the tiered tables to a flat 5%.  The media categories get FREE insertion permanently with FVFs of 6%.

Is this a taste of John Donahoe’s eBay that “will be unrecognisable next year”?

In summary, the fee changes are as follows (for rough currency conversion, reckon on 1 Re = 1p UK / 2c US) -

• Listing fee reduction:
• - Flat listing fees of Re. 1 per listing with a maximum cap of Rs. 1500 per month.
• - Zero insertion fees for Books, Movies, Music & Video games categories (Media Categories).
• - Maximum listing fees charged in a month will be Rs. 1500 – this means that if your listing fees exceeds Rs.1500 in a month, you can list additional items (over and above the maximum cap of Rs 1500) for free.

(more…)

eBay India have announced a two-week long listing promotion in the Jewellery categories that is as cheap as you can get without actually being free.

With one Rupee being effectively one UK penny (US$0.02), they offering a fortnight of listings at Re 1 per listing - that’s 1/100th of a Rupee - The offer is for the Jewellery category only, and the kicker is that you have to have a registered seller account with an address in India

Looks like India have taken up the reins of offering cheap listings to residents-only (I don’t remember them doing this before) in the way that Australia and Canada have done for the last couple of years (and suffered badly because of doing so).  Meanwhile the UK and USA continue with their open to all-comers policy on Cheap Listing Days and reap the fees benefit from it.

Ed

eBay’s paranoid rampage against digital goods accelerated today with the Indian and Italian sites both announcing bans of the products - with twists.

India’s ban announcement says it comes into force on 18 April, but excludes website domain names and tickets (presumably all types) that can be transferred electronically - some good news for the holiday & travel markets, especially the airline ticket bucket shops?

India also announced today, that they are rolling the same “Punishing Sellers’ Accounts with Dumb Idea of the Year” policy that I blogged eBay US and Oz announced earlier in the week.

The Italian ban on digital items is effective immediately, and both the announcement and the linked policy page are prominently displaying the Centurion’s whip.  However, the policy page is interesting.  It states (emphasis added by me) -

Examples of items that can not be put up for sale on eBay:

• MP3 files copied from a CD purchased or obtained from a recording made during a concert at which the seller was involved;
• EBook if the seller does not own the copyright or is not an authorized dealer;
• Music purchased through iTunes;
• Films copied from a DVD purchased;
• Video games copied from the original CD ROM;
• PDF files of a handbook on a product if the seller is not the copyright owner or an authorized reseller;
• Data and information related to online games such as characters, accounts, currencies and objects.

Examples of items that may be put up for sale on eBay:

• MP3 files of songs written and recorded by the seller (in which the seller owns the rights);
• EBook of recipes written by the vendor;
• Films made by the seller and the seller owns the rights;
• Software developed by the seller and the seller owns the rights;
• Software put on sale by an authorized reseller of software that has the rights for online delivery;
• A digital photo of the Golden Gate taken by the seller;
• A t-shirt imprinted with a photo of a protagonist of a game online.

The Italian announcement and policy page makes no reference to the need to provide the digital goods in a physical format such as on CD or DVD, which is the workaround recommended by eBay US, Canada & Oz.

So far, eBay US & Canada are the only other sites (that have made announcements) that have given sellers a legal workaround for selling digital goods in downloadable format - list them in the classifieds section - apart from Italy specifying certain goods that will continue to be permitted.  Italy’s policy is by far the most lenient and seller-friendly.  The UK, Singapore, Spain, India, and OZ have all implemented complete bans.  Italy is the only EU site that appears to be trying to apply common sense to market preservation.

I haven’t yet seen announcements from any of the other eBay national sites, but expect them to roll in before month end.  The lobbyists for the physically disabled homeworkers, who were so vocal immediately after the first US announcement have gone very quiet on the eBay forums, and it can only be assumed they have taken their wares to other sites, which as eBay continually fail to see, reduces the pool of buyers for the remaining die-hard sellers.

Ed.

eBay Canada logo” />I’ve searched the eBay Canada announcements board as far back as January 2005, and I can find no announcement for the introduction of an insidious fee that I discovered by accident today.

In preparing some listings for uploading to eBay Canada for their 1-cent promotion week, which highly unusually is open to non-residents (only the second such opening since January 2007) I noticed mention of an International Site Visiblity Fee that I had not noticed when listing there previously.  I always take advantage of open-house promotions on the Canadian site, and always check to see which listing enhancement fees have changed, so this fee appears to have crept in since the post-Christmas promotion for 2007. 

I know there’s no announcement of it in the BuildaSkill forum news boards, and I can’t find one in the eBay Canada Announcement Board archives either.  I’m also positive I’ve not blogged about it as well.  It therefore appears to be a stealth introduction of a new fee.

The fee taken alone is not huge - 10, 20, or 40 cents depending on listing start price, but if you’re a volume lister, then it wipes out John Donahoe’s supposed fee reductions announced in January.    It is made even worse by the fact you must offer PayPal in listings using International Visibility, even if there’s no Seller Protection available for the chosen countries, therefore not only do you suffer an increased risk of losing the goods AND the payment, you also pay an additional fee (to PayPal) for this increased risk.  This is exactly the sort of terms of use that eBay are being class-action sued for, in several cases in the USA.

An International Visibility Fee is not new on Planet eBay.  The eBay India site has done it for several years.  In fact, the Indian fee was frequently cited by several desperate UK PowerSellers in the immediate aftermath of last year’s trans-Atlantic listings visibility cut, as being what eBay.com and eBay UK should do in order to resore the visibility to those that needed it.      As if eBay needs encouragement to add or increase fees? 

Those “over-cashed” few were repeatedly, and uncompromisingly, slapped down by all the other sellers in the eBay UK forums.  However, eBay UK’s Richard Ambrose said several times in the PowerSeller forum, that although an additional fee was not the route they wanted to take, it was not being discounted as an option.

Like eBay Oz, eBay Canada is often used as a testbed for new policies and site functions & features, before they roll to other sites.  I can’t help wondering therefore, if this International Visibility Fee is being trialled on Canada to see if it gets a different take-up rate to the one on eBay India.  Afterall, despite still billing itself as “the World’s Global Marketplace”, eBay have been increasingly fragmenting the marketplace, and introducing cross-border trading restrictions for a couple of years now.  Perhaps we’re starting to see that the passport to continued international trade is lucre coloured?

Ed

 Our eBay Discussion Forums - Have your say

You’ve got to admire the guys and girls that run eBay India. 

They love to come up with interesting and innovative programs to promote the site and acquire more buyers and sellers.  You could even say that their inventiveness severely shames the marketing teams in Europe and the US.  Partly this is because the western markets know that their greatest challenge is overcoming seller resistance to fee levels, whereas in India it’s all about getting users to take the plunge into online buying and selling, and fees are so low that for the IT-aware, they are not an issue (even in a low-income country).

India’s current program is to use a lot of online and offline marketing for a very special group of listings beginning at just One Rupee (approx 1.5 UK pence / 3 US cents) and titled 10 things you must do before you die.  As you can see from this graphic, they’re aiming into the quality and executive end of the market, and each activity comes with an all expenses paid holiday to foreign lands in order to perform the activity.

The experiences you can Bid on are:

1. Watch the F1 Grand Prix in Monaco
2. Co-Pilot a Combat aircraft – The L39 – in Russia
3. Drive an actual Formula 1 car in London
4. Enjoy a Romantic night at the Burj - Al – Arab hotel in Dubai
5. Skydiving for two in Thailand
6. Experience the Wimbledon Men’s Final live on Centre Court
7. Drive 5 high speed cars in a Euro Challenge
8. A thrilling Chopper Ride over Bombay OR the outskirts of Delhi
9. Experience Zero gravity
10. Climb the Great Pyramids in Egypt

The marketing team point out that on the promotion landing page they will be promoting one paisa auctions in the following categories:

• Mobiles
• Computers
• Jewellery
• Electronics
• Cameras
• Watches
• Coins & Stamps

Sounds like a great way to drive traffic onto the site and into the listings of some lucky sellers.

Ed

 Our eBay Discussion Forums

eBay UK’s Head of Trust and Safety has really put his foot firmly in his mouth with the UK PowerSellers.

I don’t want to make a habit of quoting directly from eBay forums, especially at length, but this one really does need exposed, considering Young Mr Ambrose’s habit of infuriating his paying customers.

A 22nd Feb UK PowerSeller Board post addressed directly to him, asking if the new performance discounts would apply cross border for UK registered sellers, after he had dodged the question for 3 weeks in another thread, solicited this response exactly 20 minutes after the new thread was started -

“I’ve just had a chat about this with our pricing czar.
UK sellers who qualify for discounts in the UK won’t get any discounts when they list on eBay.com. The same is true in the other direction, and for other sites.
I realise this seems slightly unfair. We’ve taken this approach for two reasons:
1) Having discounts that carry across to other country sites creates very challenging arbitrage situations - unless each country keeps its pricing and discount structure identical, it could result in sellers from one site pouring onto others
2) The technical work requiring to change our pricing system to enable discounts to be applied on multiple sites is surprisingly complex and would take a very long time to do - it hasn’t made the cut vs. other priorities this time around
I hope that clears things up, even if it’s not the answer you were hoping for.
Regards
Richard”

Did he just happen to be browsing the boards sitting next to the pricing Czar?  Or has he got some sort of alarm system that alerts him to a thread starting with his name in the title?  Anyway …

He was immediately leaped on by a PowerSeller quoting all the announcements from various Asian eBay sites (which I blogged here on 1st Feb) who summarised with -

“Basically if we, reg in the UK list on .com we get NO benefits…correct?
Where does that leave us regarding DSR’s then?
If those sales that we get on .com are NOT recognised for a discount then are the DSRs not included when it comes to visibility or not?
This is a complete shambles I have to say.”

SilverSisters, the rebutting PowerSeller, has a couple of good points in there.  But not to be outdone, Mr Ambrose came back carrying a 155mm howitzer to fire at his own feet -

“Ah, good point - my mistake for not mentioning Asia.
So to add to my post 3:
The pricing arbitrage risk and the technical complexity associated with offering discounts on all sites is very high.
We would like to recognise good sellers wherever they choose to list, though, so we’re looking into ways around them both. To that end there’s a trial solution being rolled out in Asia (quite small markets, quite a small number of sellers).
I didn’t mention this in my initial post to avoid raising expectations unduly - even if the Asian approach works well, it would still take a considerable time to build an equivalent that works in the much bigger markets like the UK.”

And from there the board got really interesting. 

One poster pointed out that the Asian announcements made no reference to the cross-border discounts being a trial, and that those (cross border) announcements were made in January, plus they pulled Ambrose up on his statement about the disparity in market sizes making it more difficult to implement in western markets. 

As was pointed out, the comment about “small” Asian markets is categorically false.  Five Asian countries (at least) are receiving the cross border discounts - Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Phillipines, and Singapore - representing roughly 20% of the world’s population, and cumulatively far larger than the EU and North America combined.  In terms of eBay registrations, they may not be as large as the west, but they are growing fast, and announcements have not yet been translated from eBay China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, or Thailand, but there is no reason to assume those sites will not get the discounts that the rest of Asia are getting.  Additionally, there are fewer members in Australia and New Zealand than there are in India, so why did they not get the cross border discounts?

Another PowerSeller added that the research and technology was already complete if it was in use in Asia, and just needed replicating to the west.  Others then jumped in with derisory comments about such “small” Asian markets swamping their categories (exactly the reason visibility of UK listings was cut from eBay US).

Responding to “unless each country keeps its pricing and discount structure identical, it could result in sellers from one site pouring onto others” is best left to 1porschegirl, who said -

“This is blatantly false - this will increase the number of sellers who create accounts (most likely with false contact information) on overseas sites. This encourages British or German sellers registering accounts on .com with a false American address or American sellers registering accounts on .co.uk/.de with false contact information. Or to even more easily obtain their expected discounts, sellers will simply transfer to an Asian site.
Finally, giving UK sellers the .com discount on their .com sales (as eBay does for Asian sellers) would in no way increase the US sellers’ desire to register on .co.uk, but would decrease the UK sellers’ desire to register an account on .com.”

The rest of the thread relates to variations of the theme that Mr Ambrose is trying to insult UK PowerSellers’ intelligences. 

One point that no-one jumped on yet was the arbitrage point raised in Ambrose’s first post.  There is zero difficulty with that.  Currently if a UK registered seller lists on dot com during a US Cheap Listing Day, they receive the discounted insertion fee on their current account statement, at the point of listing - i.e. it is applied immediately.  Therefore, under the new discounts, when a qualifying seller lists on another site, the accepting site simply needs to check the seller’s home country qualification for discounts, then apply the accepting site’s discount to the insertion fee before posting it onto the seller’s account in the accepting site’s currency, which is then transferred into the registration site’s currency to generate the billed value.

There is very little complication to this when compared to what happens with CLD fees.  So why will eBay not do it?  The answer to that of course, was answered weeks ago in this blog. 

However, to give young master Richard some slack, he may have been instructed in what to say by someone above him, however, there aren’t that many candidates within eBay Towers who qualify for that, now that he’s in charge of Trusses and Safety Pins.

Perhaps he needs this …..

 101 Ways to Stop the Money Leak $9.99 from BuildaSkill’s book & software shop

 Ed  

 Our eBay Discussion Forums (including a private forum for eBay PowerSellers)

Following last year’s cut of trans-Atlantic visibility and a year of tweaking and twiddling restoration for specified categories, then cutting it again on UK promotion days, which all came after the much called-for Location Abuse Policy came into force, eBay has apparently handed it’s most prized territories back to the sellers that were most complained about - the Asians.

Starting from 20th February 2008, PowerSellers in Australia, India, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines will receive the same PowerSeller Incentives (Invoice Discounts) as sellers in Germany, the UK, and the USA, who list on those three as their home sites.  This concession might also apply to China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand but I’ve not yet been able to get translations from their announcements pages.  The wider eligibility has been hinted at in some announcements and comments on the South East Asian markets mentioned first, but I must stress I’ve had no firm confirmation of it yet.

Spain has also made the same announcement, and I expect other smaller European sites to follow suit over the weekend.  Keep watching our main eBay Forum for all the international announcements as they arrive from each eBay site around the world.

As European and North American buyers and sellers pause for breath in the heated forum exchanges regarding the feedback, business registration/address visibility changes etc. how many have looked beyond their own borders for further implications?

On eBay India’s International Selling Forum,  there’s no new threads or comments about the changes, despite prominent links to announcements about them.  The “Selling on eBay” board also has neither threads nor comments about the changes.  In fact, I couldn’t find any discussion anywhere on the sub-continent’s site, either for or against the changes.

In Malaysia, the International Trading Board the most recent thread is actually complaining there’s no benefit to being a PowerSeller, and that being one is no fun.   In the General Discussion board, there’s one thread of discussion with the OP (posted by a western expatriate) having links to the early announcements on dot com.  Most of the posters also seem to be UK & US expats.

Strangely, Singapore’s International Trading Board has neither comment nor posts about the new cross border discounts for Powersellers.  Normally it’s a very lively board (and a great initial source of info for new on-eBay scams from China) .  There’s not even any mention of the topic in the General Discussion Board.  In fact, there’s no discussion at all on any of the Singapore boards.

In the Philippines, the same OP as in Malaysia has contributed to a thread in the Filipino International Trading board but in the context of getting a PayPal account verified, there’s no discussion of the new changes.  In the very active General Discussion board (well over 100 threads started since the announcements)  there is one thread about the changes by the same OP as above (he gets around doesn’t he?), it even has a “pink” posting in it, but it has under 30 posts in total - most of them echoing concerns aired by sellers in the UK & US.

The Australian International Trading Board also has nothing about the changes, nor does the PayPal forum.  In the Member to Member board, the feedback restrictions get their own (currently 3-page) thread and a “pink” response, plus a shorter thread.  The lack of fee changes for Oz has a thread as well, but no replies, from the pinks or anyone else.

So does this lack of on-eBay discussion throughout the Asian region mean that Asians are not that bothered by the changes, or does it mean they’re too busy loading up Turbo Lister ready for February 20th?

In the last quarter of 2007, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the Philippines were added to the range of countries supported by Turbo Lister.  India and Singapore were added in 2006, and Australia the year before that.  China and Taiwan are in there too, but not in English.  With the wider Asian region already having more Powersellers amongst the expatriate community than most individual European countries have at home, has it been fair to penalise these westerners-gone-east in the way that eBay has done over the last 3-4 years?  They were certainly the core user-base that enabled eBay’s expansion in the Orient to progress as far as it has done.  The anouncements of cross-border PowerSeller Incentives may just be the boost they needed to staunch the haemmorhaging towards other channels that has occurred in the last 18 months.

Should Germany, the UK and the US be concerned about a second tsunami of Asian listings in their eBay markets?  I predict they should. 

The first wave were mainly from the expats and from China/HongKong.  Today, nearly two years after that tide ebbed, the far greater number of users stretched from Karachi to Kamchatka, and from Mongolia to Melbourne are locals, and they have grown dramatically from two years ago.  They’re also far web-smarter than the early adopters, and have access to more payment channels having learnt from earlier lessons. 

Many are the new generation entrepreneurs operating from regular business premises, with bank-provided credit card and merchant services facilities, in addition to online services such as MoneyBookers & PayPal.  In northern hemisphere Asia, an incredible number of them undertook post-graduate education in Europe or the States and have bank accounts there with verified postal addresses - overall, the genuine ones will be far easier to trade with than previously, and will be able to offer far more attractive pricing on many products, than could home-based westerners.

The scammers will resurface too, smarter, sharper, and more experienced of what does and does not work - whether it be outright scams, counterfeits, or simply fake goods. 

With the new feedback policy that buyers can only receive positives, and opening the big three markets to PowerSeller discounts for (all?) Asian sellers, the opportunity is going to be just too attractive to the Orient, whether the seller be genuine or fraudulent.  There will be no way eBay could police it all, despite the assurances from Mssrs Cobb and Donahoe et al.

I think it’s time the West began selling to the East, and listing on those lovely eBay sites with zero or near-zero insertion and final value fees.  Our goods will probably have more visibility that way round (and cost a darn sight less to sell at the same time).

Ed.

In the UK, the 5th of November is the annual Bonfire Night and Fireworks Festival, held annually to commemorate (or commiserate) the unsuccessful attempt by Guy Fawkes to blow up the British Houses of Parliament, or Westminster Palace as it was then.

On planet eBay, 5th November 2007 will be remembered for many things -

•  India announced a 20% REDUCTION in Front Page Featured Fees which will last for 5 days.
•  Italy announced a week-long FREE listing period for Motors & Motorcycles.
•  Canada announced a 5-week period of FREE Gallery in core listings.
•  USA also announced a 5-week period of FREE Gallery in core listings.
•  USA announced a 5 week period of INCREASED STORE LISTING VISIBILITY in core search & browse.
•  USA
  announced that browsers can use GUEST BUYING to buy on eBay.com without an eBay or PayPal account.
•  India announced MAJOR CHANGES to PaisaPay terms including a maximum delivery period that must be adhered to.
•  Germany announced that seller email addresses will no longer be shown to buyers after a sale, in an attempt to curb harvesting for Spam purposes.
•  UK announced it was changing how SELLER ACCOUNT BALANCES and calculations are shown, this followed closely announcements on several other sites.

All these announcements come hot on the heels of a flood of announcements, during the last week, regarding all sorts of functional and cosmetic changes to how eBay are going to treat or do business with their buyers and sellers.  In no particular order, they included  -

•  eBay Gift Cards launched in the USA with a major marketing program.
•  Finally, eBay saw the light and announced Skype buttons would be allowed on all listings in all categories on the UK and USA sites.
•  USA announced a November competition for Stores Sellers with $2,500 prizes up for grabs, which looks miserly next to Canada’s $50,000 competition.
•  Hong Kong announced the Beta of their site in both English and Chinese, obviously hoping to pick up some international buyers for their manufacturing and exporting sellers.
•  Both UK & USA made announcements regarding re-introducing TRANS-ATLANTIC VISIBILITY in certain categories, subject to sellers meeting certain criteria, which discussions on eBay forums, backed up by comments by UK staff, prove to not be getting applied evenly on both sides of the pond .
•  UK then promptly announced that the trans-Atlantic visibility will not apply to CLD listings, nor to listings inserted between 10am the day before, until 10am the day after a CLD.
•  Meanwhile, almost every site has been announcing changes to the sign-in pages, and Canada announced the launch of a new shipping calculator, which will surely add to the global problems of the bug-ridden eBay checkout’s, combined shipping calculations?.

So, there’s lots of changes going on at eBay around the world, and the general impression is one of trying to improve the safety reputation of the sites, whilst further fragmenting the “global marketplace” that is continually touted in eBay marketing and PR.

There is also an increasing appearance of desperation to maintain volume of listings and the GMV of sold items.  This of course, is perceptual, and should only be thought about with long experience and knowledge of what has been happening on eBay over the last few years.  After 20 months of punitive measures seen as anti-seller / pro-buyer policies (always denied by eBay) the swathe of fee reductions (albeit only for limited promotion periods) brings some welcome relief to the long-suffering sellers. 

The changes and promotions do not change the basic position that eBay has milked and squeezed their paying customers to the point of causing a mass exodus to other venues, whilst trying to set itself up as a replacement for the government agencies that should be regulating consumer protections, and ignoring eBay’s own liability to the people who buy services from them. 

They do, however, show there is a glimmering of recognition that the sellers are no longer happy to use eBay, and that eBay is haemmorhaging the experienced and knowledgable long-term business sellers, who, no longer available to help the newbies, have moved off to their own sites, and other venues such as Amazon and eBid.  Such contractions of user-base knowledge must be having a punishing effect on eBay’s notoriously sluggish Customer Support, especially when coupled with the wholesale banning of many sellers from the eBay Community forums - newbies now have to rely on other newbies for help and advice, much of which is incorrect or misguided.

It would seem that, following eBay’s withdrawal from China,  they are living under the Chinese curse of “living in interesting times”.  Or, have they been preparing for the flotation of alibaba.com, which launched on the stock exchange on 5th November, and doubled it’s market value in the first 24 hours .  It is now China’s largest dot com by stock value, and now eBay’s largest business to business+consumer, online-marketplace competitor.  No doubt now being a public company, it will not be long before it expands dramatically in eBay’s core market regions, and that level of competition may also explain what is becoming a general reduction of eBay prices, by proxy of promotion days.

Ed

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