eBay.com have announced a pricing promotion for sellers based in the US discounting the fee paid for international visibility. The announcement says, “the International Site Visibility listing upgrade gives your items greater exposure on the UK site for a small fee. It’s a terrific opportunity to grow your potential buyer base by as much as one-third!” Usually priced up to 40c, the announcement states that the fees will be reduced to 1c between 17th and 27th of March.
Whilst the American dollar has lost some of its value recently, it is trading more strongly against sterling than it has been for some time. This, combined with the relative cheapness of US goods in any case, may well prove to be attractive to buyers. That said, higher postage costs, combined with possible import duties, are likely to offset many savings.
Also, as an eBay UK based seller pointed out to me: US sellers may well appear at the top of Best Match search results because of good DSRs when they don’t have a track record of shipping to the UK.
American sellers are getting a slice of the UK market. Last week, a PR campaign aimed at attracting UK consumer sellers to eBay coincided with eBay’s removal of low end fees for auctions started by consumer sellers.
In the hardest economic climate for many years, can we expect an ‘incentive’ for British eBay business sellers, I wonder?
