Here at Tamebay HQ we’ve been getting a ton of emails about eBay Free Listing Weekends, or rather the lack of them over the past few weeks.
The answer is we don’t know when the next one will be and eBay aren’t officially telling.
However we suspect that all marketing activity such as free listings promotions has been suspended following the announcement of the leaked personal data and eBay will restart them at some point in the future.
Many of those that have contacted us have surmised that now eBay give 20 free listings per month that they’ll no longer give free listings and complained that at 35p per listing they can’t afford to list items that may sell at 99p. If you’ve a lot to sell it may be worth considering a Basic eBay Shop Subscription for £19.99 per month which then gives you 100 free listings a month plus the advantage of being able to schedule for free. You can get a Basic eBay Shop if you’re a private seller.
Other than that it’s a case of selling products which justify the 35p listing fee or waiting until the next listing promotion appears.
You can check the on the eBay fees page.
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Your US cousins, ecommercebytes, are reporting up to 20,000 free listings for invited sellers on .com. These are auctions or auctions with buy it now.
And of course .com makes no distinction between types of seller.
I suspect that there may well be an offering for UK sellers within 10 days.
Yippee!!! No bad thing IMO.
Frankly I never understood why anyone would bother selling a 99p item and free listings encourage it. If its actually worth anything then you will gladly pay the listing fee.
99p merchants clutter the site trying to sell (most does not sell) the garbage from under the stairs, shed, garage, attic, etc. I also can not understand where they find the time. 99p?? Cmon…. Why bother?
If you have a box of rubbish then be sensible and give it to your local council via the big black box with wheels outside your front door!!
Thats all right but if you wait too long you will find that any or indeed all of your items sitting in Unsold have been wiped. Then you have to spend hours and hours relisting them. If ebay are waiting until all the chaos subsides the very least that they could do would be to extend the time that listings can sit in Unsold or institute some way that after being wiped they can still be retrieved without having to spend hours and hours having to relist each and every item individually.
I’d rather give an item away to charity than sell it for 99p. To me its just not worth the time or effort to sell for such a low amount.
There is another point about the 20 Free Listings per month. ebay does not seem to discriminate between the selling of 1 item on Auction or Fixed Price over 10 days with listing 5 or 10 items on Fixed Price over 30 days. So I must admit that I have been concentrating on items where I have multiples of in stock and to a certain degree it seems to work.
Let’s dispell a few myths here.
(1) I’ve worked in a Charity Shop.
I frequently donate to a Charity Shop.
And I can tell you that (although their volunteers do absolutely great work) a lot of stuff get’s dumped.
So don’t assume that the Charity Shop is an automatic repository for 99p items – they like to sell things for pounds, not pence!
(2) eBay’s free listings are (were?) a valuable contribution to recycling.
Recycling through re-use is (arguably) the preferred recycling method.
(3) Unless the item is collected, there is almost no such thing as a 99p sale.
E.g. I sell CD’s.
I convert about 2 of every 100 (99p) listings into a sale.
To save my buyer’s postage I ship without “jewel boxes”.
My true shipping cost is £0.53 + £0.60 = £1.13 (I don’t charge for packing).
Assuming I bought the CD for £0.99 and pay the 35p listing fee [using eCal] I make £0.30 on each sale while eBay make £0.83.
HOWEVER, if only 2% sell I make a LOSS of £0.35 on each non seller.
2 x £0.30 – 98 x £0.35 = minus £33.70 = my loss on every 100 paid for listings.
So well done, eBay.
By abandoning the 100 free 99p listings a month you have just made it impossible for me to sell CD’s.
What a bunch of numpties you are.
(4) I suggest that eBay look at their business like casino’s do.
The casino knows they will take a % on their “handle” (i.e the total money bet).
So they don’t essentially give a damn about the nature of the bets so long as the handle is their.
And their %’s are usually independent of the size of the bet.
eBay are actually better off.
Their % increases the smaller the sale!
Concluding (and in the absence of eBay’s costing data) they would do well to restore limited free listings – and might do even better by adopting eBid (an eBay alternative) listing policies.
“So don’t assume that the Charity Shop is an automatic repository for 99p items – they like to sell things for pounds, not pence!”
Never a truer word!
Charity shops are not very charitable when it comes to pricing.
the ordinary shopper is fair game