We’ve had a couple of readers contact us over the weekend who have been hit with invoices for the 12 “free” gallery images available on listings from August the 1st.
Don’t revise your existing listings before the 1st of September
One seller that contacted us followed eBay’s headline advice “Additional pictures now free for all sellers, From 1 August, you’ll be able to upload up to 12 pictures to each of your listings free of charge“. There was no warning in his channel management software as he revised his existing listings and he now has a £300 bill for additional images.
It’s not particularly clear in the Seller Release (and hidden away in the FAQ), but eBay say “You’ll need to relist your item or renew your listing to take advantage of the new free pictures. Good ‘Til Cancelled listings will receive the new reduced picture fees on renewal”.
In other words if you simply add images to your existing listings then you’ll be charged for them. You only get “free” images when you relist or renew your Good Til Cancelled or 30 day listings – you need to end and relist them or renew them to qualify.
The issue appears to be the billing period, if your listing was billed prior to the 1st of August the old fee structure still applies to them as far as Gallery images are concerned. It’s only once they renew that the new fees with the 12 free gallery images apply.
By all means update images on old listings one by one as they renew, but to be safe we’d advise holding off bulk revising old listing until September as by then they’ll all have renewed and in the mean time only adding more than one gallery image to newly created listings.
10 Responses
I was almost caught out, but luckily I was using TL and saw the fees before uploading.
But that clause was very well hidden wasn’t it?
eBay have actually lost fees from me because of this. My main category has had 12 free photos for ages, I was adding existing listings with more than one photo to a 2nd category where they had been charged before.
Another stealth income by ebay. Very clever for a quick cash boost.
I was the seller who racked up nearly £300 of fees.
To be honest I’m not convinced that they’ve done it on purpose, its just a classic example of someone writing instructions, not bearing in mind that the person reading it doesn’t know the in’s and out’s of it like they do.
We’ll get it refunded either way but its just another job which eats up a bit more time, and it gets frustrating after a while!
Luckily I had a play first, otherwise I may have tried adding at least 4 extra images to around 5500 listings.
(sharp intake of breath).
Just in case anyone tries using file exchange to add extra images from your own server, it doesn;t work and will only allow 1 image to be used.
This has been confirmed by Ebay.
The only way it can be done is programatically – API etc or by manually adding each one.
Sad that EKM can do it and Amazon does it via csv etc.
Looking at ebay boards this has been the same for years.
One other problem we have experienced for over a year is that when we revise by file exchange to adjust the gallery image, ebay updates the link to our server BUT doesn’t update the image. To update the image properly, so that it shows to customers I have to manually revise and confirm the URL link and then it works. Again ebay are aware BUT their response
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RE: Re: SR# 1-9422487357 SR# 1-12035148002
Hello Simon,
Thank you for getting back to us with regard to visibility and correct images of your items.
Simon, I’ve looked into your account and can confirm that our technical team is aware of this and are working hard to fix it.
Unfortunately, finding a solution will take a little more time. Thanks again for your patience and understanding as we resolve this.
I trust this information is helpful. Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.
Kind regards,
Alan Armstrong
eBay Customer Support
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I have to create my own script that manually has to revise every listing to get around this problem UNTIL they fix it.
Quite a lot if people have reported this problem the sad thing is eBay haven’t put out much of a warning.
Ebay seem to be always conveniently putting their fingers into the cookie jar.
ebays had its day they ruined it after whitman left.
Theres no growth to be had here, only extra profits from doing stuff like this.
Just another example of eBay and their piss poor management of just about everything.
I do not miss the ‘sales’ channel one bit.
HAHA – This is really phathetic. eBay could just simply give 12 images to everyone regardless of how they list/relist/auto relist/GTC/etc/etc… but instead they include a catch to impose charges on the unwary – knowing full well that no matter how many spot the charges and complain (and then get refunded), there will still be loads who don’t complain and eBay will therefore make loads of extra revenue by this sly “back door” charge.
Yet again eBay are slipping in a way to charge more whilst pretending to give something for nothing.
The stuff I read on TameBay makes me realise that most sellers take much for granted and then pay later for it.
eBay give nothing for free – don’t people ever learn?