eBay France have just announced that from the 28th August, Gallery pictures will no longer be priced seperately, but will be included in a revised insertion fee.
Intended “to make searching the site more visual and more intuitive”, the new fee structure is designed to reward low-start auctions: there’s a new cheapest tranche for items starting at €1,00 or less, and this will apply to auctions only, as the lowest price for BIN on eBay.fr is €1,99.
There’s also a new most expensive tranche for items priced at €250 or more. Between the two, sellers of lower priced items may find themselves 5c a listing better off, while those selling items €50 or above will see fees increase by 15c.
Here’s the new price structure in comparison to the old:
| Start Price | Current fee insertion + gallery |
New fee |
|---|---|---|
| €0,01 – €1,00 | €0,35 | €0,20 |
| €1,01 – €1,99 | €0,35 | |
| €2,00 – €9,99 | €0,45 | |
| €10,00 – €24,99 | €0,60 | €0,60 |
| €25,00 – €49,99 | €1,10 | €1,15 |
| €50,00 – €99,99 | €1,70 | €1,80 |
| €100,00 – €249,99 | €2,70 | €2,85 |
| €250 and above | €3,90 |
No doubt there will be some sellers complaining about this – after all, not everyone uses Gallery, but for the majority, and especially for buyers, this should be a great step forward. If your item doesn’t demand a Gallery photo, then why not brand your listings in search, and put your logo there instead?
At the moment, this change has been announced solely for eBay France. However, August has traditionally been a time when eBay UK fees are tweaked, so we’d expect to see some changes there over the next few weeks too.
24 Responses
Oh I *do* hope this happens in the UK…. all those gallery fees I keep paying…. gone! 🙂
I’m with the mountster.
I use gallery for everything, here’s hoping
hurray hurray hip hip hurray
viva la France
I could never quite work out why gallery has a fee
other than because they can
If eBay UK do take this idea forward it would be interesting (for me at least, and probably one or two others) how they would handle the fee situation with regards to media items where there are effectively no fee tranches.
Quick question Sue, how does this affect insertion fees for SIF listings?
Good points, Karaoke Steve: French media items also have their own fee structure. As far as today’s announcement is concerned, both these and SIF listings are unchanged. Though I would expect changes for both listing types, in order to rationalise the fee structure: it would be crazy to have Gallery fees for media, but not for anything else.
SIF listings get gallery for free but the insertion fee stays the same 🙂
Another vote for Chris’s suggestion 😀
Give us your thoughts on what you’d like to see for eBay UK’s fees in the forum.
Sue, it looks to me that the total price for insertion and gallery stay the same so now those sellers that have chosen not to use gallery just got hit with a major fee increase.
In the US, media sellers rarely if ever use Gallery for this auctions (many they do for SIF) This requirement would greatly curtail the number of media items listed in CORE.
Am I missing something in the translation. It look like non-gallery users just got hit pretty hard.
Non-gallery users did, Randy… but I have to say, I don’t know many non-gallery users. A quick glance through some UK media categories says that gallery is almost as commonly used there as it is in, say, clothing or jewellery. As I said above, for most sellers and all buyers, this is a good move. It’ll make the site much easier to use, and ultimately that’s a good thing for everyone. And I must emphasise, eBay France, like eBay UK, has a seperate fee structure for media sellers and at the moment, no change to that has been announced.
I’ll trot out my standard “why gallery is good” story: I sell some very tiny black seed beads, they’re less than 2mm in diameter, and the gallery shot of them looks pretty much like a plain black square. With gallery picture, they sell; without gallery picture, they don’t. I think if, rather than complaining about this, sellers embrace it, they may find it increases sales way beyond what it costs them if they weren’t buying gallery already.
The number of gallery-promoting CLDs that have run over the last few months, it’s fairly obvious – with 20/20 hindsight 😀 – that this was coming.
Sue, I agree that it will help the buyer experience but their should be a discount in the total fee rather than a requirement that forces sellers to change.
At Glacier Bay DVD, we never used Gallery and it did not affect sales. Had I used Gallery, it would have doubled my already outrages fees to eBay. Maybe this is my media myopic view but if this requirement makes its way across the pond to the US and is required in the Media category MovieMarz and other media sellers will throw a fit.
Hmm. Sellers don’t change unless eBay holds a gun to their head. Sometimes not even then.
I’m kinda in two minds about media sellers. They do bring masses of traffic to the site, but they already have their own special little fee structure just for them, and I think it’s absolutely ridiculous to hold the rest of the membership to ransom because “MovieMarz will throw a fit”. Let em. There comes a time when a company is too big for eBay: Glacier Bay reached that point (sadly, before you had a website to go to), and if MovieMarz has too, let em go.
Tell me what you really think! I’ll play Devils Advocate. If everybody already uses Gallery what is the point of the change. I got a translation of the French announcement and it looks like they are going to put off any changes to Media until Dec.
In the US we do not have a separate price structure for Media, every category pays the same price.
What this will do is move Media out of Core and into SIF which I have no problem with (because I don’t sell anymore)
And lays the groundwork for a SIF fee increase by making Gallery a requirement there as well. If they wanted to improve the buyer experience they would have made Gallery free a long time ago. This is a veiled attempt at a fee increase.
Tell me what you really think!
You know I will 😀 (Funny, Scot Wingo said that exact same phrase to me at Live… you’d think I had a big mouth or something :O)
This is a veiled attempt at a fee increase.
No. For certain sellers, it’s a fee increase. For other sellers (me) it’s a fee decrease. Overall, it’s a fee restructuring, and it’s hardly veiled when it’s there on the AB for all to see.
And I think it’s really not productive at the moment to speculate what *might* be done in the US: the fee structures as you say are totally different, and we all know that eBay like to run their little experiments in Europe before they risk offending the sellers they really care about. The fact that this has been done on eBay France before even eBay UK says to me that they are playing it very, very carefully indeed. (After all, there are only about a dozen sellers on eBay France, and four of them are me :-D)
(After all, there are only about a dozen sellers on eBay France, and four of them are me 😀 )
Sue, I’m a blogger, its my duty to speculate and head off any thinking along these lines for the US. I do agree for those who already use Gallery this is great and for the site as a whole it will make things nicer for buyers and I’m glad it will help your biz. As a rule I don’t like being required to do anything.
Randy forget about costs – eBay will continue to change the fee structure as and when they please…
Think about the overall buyer experience and it’s a no brainer to have gallery on everything 🙂
Randy, just coz it’s pointless to speculate, doesn’t mean I think we shouldn’t do it 😉
Ok, you two win. I’m taking my media centric views and going home :):0
With my schoolboy French (I just realised it was nearly
twenty years since I was at school), I read the announcement as saying “media” fees will not change but will now include FREE gallery. Can someone clarify?
Steve, you’re absolutely right – I don’t know how I missed that bit! Oh well, I’m sure that will make the media sellers happy 😀
With the latest seller survey questions –
Do you want lower insertion fees?
Do you want lower FVF?
Do you want lower feature fees?
could ebay be heading for a fixed fee, free gallery and 9-12% FVF structure?
eBay.fr are obviously trying to get their sell through rates up as a gallery image has the biggest effect on STR.
Here is the response I received from eBay France, Spokesperson Esther Ohayon:
“Books and Music categories benefit from a specific pricing in France, at 0.05 euro insertion fees and 9% final value fees for fixed price and auction, and at 0.01 euro insertion fees and 12% final value fees for store format. The new pricing starting Aug 28 will include gallery at no additional cost.
Store format – for all applicable categories – will also include gallery at no additional cost.”
So Sue and the rest of my Tamebay friends I bow to your opinion of the move. I think it is a great deal. 🙂