Philipp Justus has just announced a month long cheap listing promotion for eBay.com. The promotion is duplicated on eBay Canada and runs from August 29th to September 30th.
The promotion which is based on the last eBay.com cheap listing day waives listing fees for items with a start price under $10.00. For items over $10.00 insertion fees are discounted by 25%.
This promotion has to be a precursor to all eBay sites world wide having gallery included in the basic listing price, a move which ebay France has already made. Gallery pictures are such an important enhancement to eBay search that some third party tools such as the MyEBayFox plugin for the Firefox browser show gallery pictures even if the seller didn’t pay for them.
Justus states that buyers benefit from a richer shopping experience with gallery pictures and can shop in a more visually appealing way. This being the case just why do eBay allow listings without gallery pictures? eBay is all about buyers and anything not designed to give the best buyer experience possible just isn’t good enough.
Competitors such as Amazon have gallery pictures as default, it’s time eBay followed suit.
17 Responses
It’s very interesting that it’s buy Gallery and get the insertion fee free rather than the other way around – suggests that sellers aren’t quite so easily convinced about the benefits.
Also I think we should clarify that this applies to all sellers on .com and .ca, and that includes UK-registered people (seen that question on a few message boards already this morning!!).
“…. Gallery pictures are such an important enhancement to eBay search …”
The considerable changes that are coming to ebay over the next few months will make it all but essential that gallery is included if the seller is to expect any success. The new search system is a large part of the drive but almost everything else that ebay is working on seems also to be much more image dependant. The off site tools like eBay ToGo and the facebook widget, the vista and google sidebar widgets, the iPhone widget are all image based. The new MyEbay (in beta) , new saved search and saved seller features, the new ‘window shopping’ item browser, all make heavier use of images than before.
I welcome the changes and gallery fee reductions BUT for those who don’t currently use gallery (low margin / low price items) but who wish to remain active on eBay this almost certainly represents a fee increase.
….. Gallery should be compulsory and FREE
That would be ideal but I can’t see it happening. Gallery should be included in the basic listing fee even if that means a small increase as per France
Yes, I’d settle for the French approach… Without it I’d be facing a 25% increase in listing costs.
Small increase in FR? Effectively they just added their existing insertion+gallery fees together to get the new insertion fees. Slight break on the sub 10 tiers, but made up for that with a real increase on the higher ones.
Whilst what allotment says makes sense, does no-one else feel eBay are getting “retention-desperation”?
Whilst UK arrogantly ploughs on with the “no problem here” mantra, dot com figures and incentives are starting to display a certain realisation that there may be troubled waters ahead. OK so things might be buoyed up by Skype and PayPal right now, and the exodus of sellers may be willing to port both of them to their new ecommerce sites, but eBay must by now have medium term (at least) vision of where all these p’d off, banned, veroed, discussion board sanctioned etc etc etc sellers are going to leave the non-global global marketplace in the next few years?
I’m no longer allowed in the eBay discussion boards (and still want a fee discount because of service level reduction) but I’ll bet there are loads of people on them expounding similar thoughts to mine above.
PayPal should also not be complacent with the very recent announcement of the team up between Alliance & Leicester and Payzone (www.payzone.com) for UK offline payments for websites (www.payoffline.com). It’ll impact them somewhat and demonstrates the innovation and growing competition to break their market dominance.
To some extent the way they operate also demonstrates both buyers’ worries about using their cards online, and sellers’ indignance at PayPal’s chargeback bullying – go read the info for yourselves.
Gaz
Whoops
The payzone URL should be – http://www.payzone.co.uk
(not dot com)
Seems they’re also being used by a lot of UK local councils and similar level organisations.
And payoffline.com are running a free introductory period for a limited time. Their fees are comparable to PayPal as 20p per transaction plus a tiered 3% to 1.25% depending on volume.
Gaz
Toby: a “real increase” = maximum 15c (and that’s on an item you’re selling for €100 or more, and if you weren’t already paying for Gallery). I don’t think this is a serious increase AT ALL, and ought to be more than compensated by creating a site that’s better for buyers to use.
For those that see no need for gallery, thats .15 extra PLUS the gallery fee extra. If they do the same relative change on .com (.fr had quite a bit lower insertion fee to begin with), it will be quite expensive. Of course thats an extra per listing, not per sale with most of us needing several listings per sale.
What kind of benefit it is depends on the nature of the item. if I search for a dvd and get a list of 30 of the same dvds, its irrelevant if the 30 identical items that I know what they look like all have a little picture or not.
Toby, media must be dealt with separately. Just as it is on FR eBay aren’t going to make changes that don’t benefit them but this is one change that benefits the majority of sellers.
My guess is on .com that Media Sellers will not use Gallery and if eBay want to have gallery on the entire site they will have to make it worth the Media Sellers while.
I think it’s curious that ebay have targeted Collectibles (who need gallery but at the low price/margin end of the market just can’t afford to use it ) and then Media where, as Toby mentions, gallery does little to diffentiate products. Each of those categories are low gallery users simply because the fee structure fails to reflect the norms of those markets.
Gallery needs to be there by default for the categories that need it. It should be built into the basic listing fee for the given category. Item rather than generic images are best for some items, vice verce for others.
I don’t want them to change N. America to Uk style -9% FVF- for media either (I suspect they will), which would be a large increase for those of us with high sale rates.
Its not just media where gallery is useless. When Xmas comes along and there is 3,000 new in box tickle me elmos or whatever in search there isn’t any advantage to gallery.
If i was listing on .fr without gallery before at 100 euro it was 2.50, now its 2.85 for .35 extra (the old gallery fee plus the extra .15 added). if I have a 1 in 3 sale rate, thats an extra 1.05 per sale, or 1.05% of the gross gone in fees.
I personally average about 10% iof the gross in total ebay/paypal fees (not including the massive currency converting Canadians do at 2.5%), so that would increase my fees 10%.
The other point to make about Gallery is how much new finding systems – eBay To Go, the new search results pages and so on – rely on it. eBay sure as hell won’t be promoting listings that just have the little blue camera icon beside them. They want a site that looks vibrant and exciting, and if sellers won’t voluntarily be part of that, eBay are going to force them into it. Sellers who can’t afford the extra fees on your current pricing structure would be well advised to restructure things to allow for compulsory Gallery because it is coming in one form or another, whether sellers like it or not.
Randy is correct, if the take up in any category is low then ebay will (eventually) respond with restructured fees for that group.
In my category area, every item is different, and a low start or very low final value based gallery option is highly desirable. I’ll welcome it when it arrives.
For the media categories it’s really hard to see how a search result with numerous identical product images will make eBay a site that looks vibrant and exciting. There’s a risk that the buyer will find it tedious.
eBay very much needs to change and I welcome their dramatic attempts this year. I just hope they get it right.