M2E Pro, the well-known eBay integration extension for Magento, has traditionally been provided free of charge to merchants for many years. Now from the 2nd of October you’ll have to pay for M2E Pro as it becomes a charged for service, for all but the smallest merchants.
If your 30 days total sales are less than $1,000 and your number of listings do not exceed 10,000, you can still use M2E Pro for free. Anything above those limits and you’ll pay somewhere ranging from $19.00 to $999.00 per month. Amazon FBA orders are excluded from the numbers.
NB This is a payment per M2E Pro marketplace account
Marketplace accounts are defined as eBay (all countries grouped), Amazon America (USA and Canada), Amazon Europe (all European countries grouped) and Rakuten. In other words you could be about to get up to four invoices depending how many accounts you use.
M2E Pro have said “As you may know, we have been closely working with our partner – eBay during last 4 years and have delivered best in class solution to dozens of thousands of Magento based merchants worldwide. We are very grateful to eBay for taking the lead and fully subsidizing m2e pro (eBay) during all these years. Without eBay’s support many thousands of merchants would not be able to take advantage of power of selling on multi channels“.
Reading between the lines does that mean eBay aren’t paying M2E Pro subsidies any more? Perhaps not surprising as they’re looking to unload Magento as part of eBay Enterprise.
M2E Pro were at pains to assure users that they’ll continue to work closely with eBay, and also added that to date support for Amazon has also been free. Not any longer however, if you’re an M2E Pro users you can expect to receive your first invoice in the first week of November for the October period and will need to register a payment method if you wish to continue using the solution.
If you do not provide your payment details on time and M2E aren’t able to collect fees, your M2E Pro services will be suspended.
I’m guessing that a lot of sellers will simply suck up the fees and start paying for M2E Pro. Less than three months before Christmas isn’t the time of year merchants will want to make major changes to their multichannel management and with just a month before your first invoice hits probably isn’t enough time to get an alternative system in place anyway.
Whilst unbudgeted fees aren’t welcome, our advice would be to pay up at least until the New Year when you can take the time to investigate alternatives and decide whether they make more sense for your business. Of course you may decide that M2E Pro is well worth the money and simply look on past free usage as a bit of a bonus.
5 Responses
Anyone know of any M2E alternatives?
M2e has been good for us and I would pay for this, it’s not often you get a free trial for nearly two years.
Whilst m2e has been OK for us I would not say its been perfect and seen as we are going to have to start paying for it I’d be interested to know what alternatives there are in the marketplace
I’m a smallish seller, low volumes that never exceed 5k a month.
As an UnderstandingE subscriber, I *was* planning to switch to M2E soon after Christmas, but the way they have handled this fee introduction has left me extremely wary of their business practices, and frankly, competency.
– Their fee structure page has changed substantially at least 3 times since the announcement on Friday. Clearly a result of backlash they are experiencing, but it honestly feels like they’re making it up as they go along.
– They’ve introduced the fee structure *just before Christmas*, leaving no sane seller any other sensible option than to accept it, or switch it off altogether.
– The fee structure is confusing (and as I mentioned above, ever-changing!)
– They retrospectively introduced the charge (i.e. “as of a few hours ago, we started charging you”)
Not. Impressed. At. All.
I don’t mind paying them their fees at all – I understand they’ve recently lost eBay funding, and they’re a business after all. But I won’t deal with a company with those kind of dubious business practices.
I’m a customer of another repricing service, incidentally, and have been for around a year. They’ve been perfect for my current needs, and I think I’ll stick with them for longer than I originally intended now!
m2e need to pull something special out of their hat to tempt me over now.
S.
UPDATE: They do not charge from October. They have given 60 days and still not finalized pricing
https://m2epro.com/pricing/
“M2E would like to extend public consultations and asks you to provide your feedback regarding our proposed pricing structure. Please complete the survey, which will close on Friday 9th of October. Current structure is based on the feedback from a group of merchants and system integrators but we would like to hear your opinion too.”
How many companies out there listen to their customers?
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/m2epro_fee