eBay sellers may be wondering how the Royal Mail price changes next week will affect what they’re allowed to charge for P&P.
And the answer is? We still don’t know. Despite the fact that RM actually announced these price changes in December 2010, eBay UK has still made no statement regarding any changes to postage caps (or, indeed, any statement of no change). James, eBay UK’s community manager, has blamed “technical issues” for the lack of any announcement. He did at one point suggest an announcement might be made “early [this] week”, but as it’s now Tuesday evening and the silence is still deafening, I think we’ve passed the point of “early” and are into midweek.
Do you need me to say any more on this? Didn’t think so: there’s the comment form below – have at it 😉
9 Responses
I don’t expect the cap to rise and most likely we’ll see the day when Ebay insist on free basic shipping as crafty way of extorting more fees, this is about to happen on US site.
Thus, yet one more cost to work in on top of the hefty fee rises some of us will be paying.
I imagine quite a few of us will be increasing prices, so it is the buyer who loses out.
The “technical issue” is that the cleaner has been on holiday for two weeks and there is a layer of dust on the keyboard used to make announcements and no one can use it on Health and safety grounds.
Probably!
Even the current postage caps don’t allow me to charge what it actually cost to post out first class.
6 years ago I was charging 40% more than I do now, which was the going market rate and covered postage/packing and packing material. In the last 6 years the real cost has nearly doubled. There’s only so much you can squeeze and chip away on margins of low value items before they go pop.
Yes I could use less packing, send second class, but who loses out doing that, myself and customers with broken and delayed items.
By all means have a sensible limit on P&P to stop those who gouge postage, but don’t use it to destroy good sellers. Set a decent upper limit and let market forces determin what sellers within categories actually charge.
postage price going up and royal say hide price in ebay. and then ebay will take more money of you because you put item up 10% come on ebay drop your charges a bit to keep us here. find me on p_b_doble @ hotmail dot com and ebay put second class postage on paypal so customer can have a choice of services..