When will we get free pictures in the UK?

eBay.com got free pictures in the eBay US Spring Seller Release and it’s just been announced that our friends down under on eBay Australia will also be getting 12 pictures with Zoom and Enlarge for free on all of their listings.

In the UK however with the exception of a few categories, we get the first gallery picture for free but we’re still paying for additional pictures on listings at the rate of 31p per image.

With the recent emphasis from eBay of having all the relevant listing information at the top of the page (longer titles, Item condition, shipping information etc) why aren’t they encouraging sellers to have more and better images? This is especially important with 10% of all sales taking place on mobile devices – if you’ve ever looked at a listing on eBay’s mobile platform or with a smartphone app you’ll know that pictures are everything.

Zoom and enlarge are great features but if sellers only have one image in gallery and continue to use the listing description area to host additional images then the mobile shopping experience is impaired.

Let’s hope that in the next seller release eBay do the sensible thing and give European sellers all 12 gallery images for free. Sure it’ll impact their revenues significantly, but we already have the all time highest eBay fees in the UK.

I remember a time at eBay University where total fees were discussed and the general consensus was that under 10% of turnover was reasonable but sellers should be aiming to get their total fees down to 7% or 8%, and this was at the time a fixed price 10 day listing had a £2.00 insertion fee! Today on eBay most categories carry a 10% final value fee so there’s simply no way to reduce fees.

12 Free gallery images would be a reasonable way for eBay UK to improve the buying experience. Although it’ll hit their profits most professional sellers never use more than a single gallery image anyway and it would encourage these sellers to add more images to their listings.