eBay France is the latest site to announce a new fee schedule designed to “make selling on eBay less risky”. They follow the general pattern seen last week in the UK, US and Germany, moving more of the emphasis from insertion fees to final value fees, offering seperate schedules for auctions and BIN, and changing the way search works to advantage popular listings.
Auction insertion fees capped at €1
These have been simplified massively, and will be lower for almost everyone:
Opening bid | Old IF | New IF | Saving |
---|---|---|---|
0,01 EUR – 1,00 EUR | 0,20 EUR | 0,15 EUR | 25% |
1,01 EUR – 9,99 EUR | 0,35 EUR | 0,35 EUR | |
10 EUR – 24,99 EUR | 0,60 EUR | 0,55 EUR | 8.33% |
25 EUR – 49,99 EUR | 1,15 EUR | 1 EUR | 13% – 74% |
50 EUR – 99,99 EUR | 1,80 EUR | ||
100 EUR – 249,99 EUR | 2,85 EUR | ||
250 EUR and above | 3,90 EUR |
10 day auctions will have a 5c surcharge.
Buy It Now insertion fees 50c
BIN insertion fees will be 50c across the board, regardless of quantity or price. So long as your BINs were priced at €10 or more, this will be a saving for you. As with other eBay sites, for lower priced items this is a fee hike… but see below regarding multiple item sales, it’s not quite as bad as it looks.
Media categories keep their 5c IFs.
Gallery fees have been included in French insertion fees since August 2007, and this remains the case.
Final Value Fees increased
Auctions and BINs will now have different FVF schedules, and they will all be higher than they used to be:
Sale price | Old FVF | New FVF | Auction & BIN | Auctions | BIN |
---|---|---|---|
0 EUR – 50 EUR | 5,25% | 6,5% | 9% |
50 EUR – 500 EUR | 3,50% | 4,5% | 6% |
500 EUR – 1000 EUR | 3,50% | 2,5% | 3% |
1000 EUR and above | 1,50% | 2,5% | 3% |
Media items keep their 9% FVFs for sub-€50 sales. The one little glimmer of light is for media sales above €50, which will see their FVFs drop to 6% for €50-500, and 3% above that: this will obviously affect a very small percentage of the category, but I guess it’s better than nothing.
Popularity in search result sorting
Items which have sold in the preceeding seven days will be advantaged in search results. It should probably be noted here that ten days remains the longest available core BIN period on eBay France: there is no equivalent to eBay UK’s or eBay Italy’s 30 core BIN.
But this may be some glimmer of hope for sellers of lower-priced BINs who, like me, just saw all their fees jump. Listing multiple items in one listing instead of single items could be a way to keep fees down, though in my experience, multiple item listings on eBay France have a much lower sell-through rate than the same items listed singly, so this will need some more experimentation.
Compulsory business registration
eBay France already announced that business sellers would be forced to prove their registered status. Now private sellers turning over €2k or more in three consecutive months will have to register as business sellers, or have their seller accounts suspended.
A seller’s status as business or private is now displayed in eBay.fr search results.
Business seller fee promotion 1st – 31st October
The new fees come into effect on 25th September, but if you’re a business seller, don’t get too used to them, because on the 1st October, a month long promotion begins. This offers 15c insertion fees for BIN listings and 10% off FVFs for sellers with all four DSRs at 4.5 or more.
This promotion is obviously welcome, but frankly, it muddies the waters. At the busiest time of year, to have to deal with two fee changes in a month, is a joke. If it’s trying to distract sellers of lower-priced items with decent STRs from the fee hike that just happened, I can promise them it isn’t working. 😉 And if it’s some kind of experiement to discover whether professional sellers will list more with a lower fee schedule, well then why change things twice? Especially in the next four months, I’d be so happy if eBay would stop tinkering and just let me get on with selling.
One Response
I find the cap on auction fees interesting. It removes some of the incentive to list with a low start price to encourage bids if it’s capped at €1