eBay Belgium today becomes the second eBay site this week to announce fee changes valid from 28th August:
- Items with a start price €2,00 – €9,99 have their insertion fee reduced by 5c to 15c.
- Gallery fee for the €0,01- €1,99 tranche reduced to 10c.
- Insertion fees for items starting at €200 or more are increased to €3,00.
- FVFs on items over €50 are increased: fees are being raised 0.5% on the €50-€1000 and over €1000 tranches to 4% and 2% respectively. FVFs for items under €50 are unchanged.
This is another move by eBay towards a lower insertion fee, higher final value fee pricing model, just as we’ve seen with UK media categories. The Belgians are quite open about their thinking here: “we hope to encourage sellers to list their items for sale with a low start price, which helps to improve their chances of success in attracting more bidders from the start of the auction”. With eBay’s continued emphasis on getting sellers back to listing on core rather than in shops, I think we can expect to see more of this on other eBay sites in the future.
7 Responses
no need to encourage me
its the way I have done things for years, though I must say with less and less success
We cannot make the business work with a low start model. If the buyer isn’t there that week for the item you have listed, 99p will not work…
Mark
For instance, last week we had a figure on auction for £149.99.
No buyer, so put it on Bin this week for £159.99 and someone bought it straight out.
He had found it while surfing Ebay and it replaced one he had broken years ago.
Now if I had listed it at 99p start, I would probably have sold it to a dealer for about £60.00.
So we are not convinced by the low start model at all 🙂
Mark
Me neither, Mark – at the other end of the scale from you, if I put beads on a 99p start auction, I will sell them for 99p. I might sell a whole stack more from my shop at the BIN price I really want – but I don’t think that’s how eBay think this ought to work. 🙂
I list to sell I dont list and hope
for some lower price items I now start them at 4.99 or even 9.99 rather than .99 because they go for 99p more times than is comfortable lol
ditto
I allocate around 1% of listings that should sell for more than a couple of quid, to be thrown in at 99p between CLDs, across the year.
For CLDs, I will rejig product attributes to reduce their worth so they can sell at 99p and cover cost, or even make a profit (e.g. smaller packs of herbs and spices instead of bulk catering packs is a simplified example).
Some items we just can’t do it
We list at what it’s worth (and we will accept) unless the item has obvious collectibility that can vary the worth according to who wants it.