50,000 free auctions to the end of March on eBay.com

Well as a moderate auction seller without a store this one kind of wrecks my months selling. When they run a sale like this it pushes down the prices that items net and well I will have to list some things by the end of the month but I am going to let the first couple of weeks slide at least.

I see what they are doing with this. They are going to be giving free pictures for all in May and this is going to remove any reason for a lot of people to have ebay stores unless they list a lot of fixed price things.

I know I sell exclusively with auction+buy it now so there are only two reasons why one would get a store. One: you sell enough items that are enough over $50 per sale that the second tranche actually comes into play in a big way… Two: You sell enough volume that the small difference in end percentage over-rides the listing fees and monthly fee you would incur. Even so the amount of difference would be very small in this case.

The only time it is different is when they run something like this month-long promotion. Personally I would have liked them to throw the non-store people a bone, BUT I can really see why (they want people to get new stores which will actually cost them starting May vs what they would have paid).

2 Responses

Gary says:

8 March 2012 at 9:32 am

Clearly ebay UK don’t feel a need to be so generous with their offers. And the USA do not suffer from the politics of business v. private sellers.

Really though it is about time ebay UK came up with some interesting and exclusive “business only” offers for UK business sellers to at least provide something as compensation for their fee increase. And maybe to encourage more “business privates” to become honest sellers.

And something that does not require work to existing listings in the way of adding data to and then removing data from prior to incurring monthly charges.
Richard says:

11 March 2012 at 5:05 pm

Well as a moderate auction seller without a store this one kind of wrecks my months selling. When they run a sale like this it pushes down the prices that items net and well I will have to list some things by the end of the month but I am going to let the first couple of weeks slide at least.

I see what they are doing with this. They are going to be giving free pictures for all in May and this is going to remove any reason for a lot of people to have ebay stores unless they list a lot of fixed price things.

I know I sell exclusively with auction+buy it now so there are only two reasons why one would get a store. One: you sell enough items that are enough over $50 per sale that the second tranche actually comes into play in a big way… Two: You sell enough volume that the small difference in end percentage over-rides the listing fees and monthly fee you would incur. Even so the amount of difference would be very small in this case.

The only time it is different is when they run something like this month-long promotion. Personally I would have liked them to throw the non-store people a bone, BUT I can really see why (they want people to get new stores which will actually cost them starting May vs what they would have paid).