eBay are changing fees for business sellers. The bad news is that shop subscription fees, additional insertion fees and listing enhancement fees are going up. The good news is that shops will come with greater than ever allowances, which if you use them all, will mitigate the fee increase to a large extent
The new Insertion fees will be effective from the 30th of March 2017, and eBay Shop subscription fees and allowances effective from the 1st of April 2017.
No change to Final Value Fees
Let’s get the really good news out of the way – Final Value Fees are not being increased. They will stay the same for all sellers and this is probably the area of your eBay invoice where you pay the most and so no change is a relief (as it’s unlikely we’d have seen Final Value Fee reductions).
It’s also worth noting that there will be no change to to selling fees or listing upgrade fees for private sellers.
What will the increased Shop Subscription cost impact on your eBay invoice be?
There’s no way to dress up the fee increases except to say it’s not great news. However, if you’re running a business you need to be a little bit dispassionate about these things. Your eBay shop subscription should in the grand scheme of things be relatively low in comparison to your overall eBay invoice total.
To put it into perspective, when I was a full time eBay seller I was quite happily paying £50 a month for an eBay Featured Shop and never thought twice about the cost. At £69 it’s going up a bit (from £52.17) and no one likes a fee increase. However at the end of the day, if it’s the correct subscription level for you, it’s not going to make a big difference to your eBay bill compared to the large amount of final value fees you’ll be paying.
What you’re getting added in to your Shop Subscription
List more items
More inclusive fixed price listings for all eBay Shop subscribers. Basic shops will get 250 (up from 200) free fixed price listings, Featured shops will have 1,500 (up from 1,200) and Anchor shops won’t seen an increase, mainly because they already get unlimited free listings.
New ways to sell
Inclusive 7-day auction-style listings in addition to more fixed price listings. Sellers have been telling eBay that they want some free listing fees for auction-style listings included in their shop subscription so eBay have added them in. Basic shops will get 50 free auction listings, Featured shops get 300 a month and if you subscribe to an Anchor shop you’ll have 500 free auctions each month.
We know that many sellers prefer fixed price listings to keep sales velocity high, but there are plenty of sellers whose business majors on auctions so it could be time to open a shop for them. Even sellers who habitually use fixed price formats may have some distressed stock, returns or the odd job lot for which an auction is a more suitable listing format.
Listing upgrade credit
Monthly credit to spend on listing upgrades and Promote your listings (Nothing for a Basic shop, a tenner for Featured shops and £20 for Anchor Shops each month).
I know many sellers who never experiment with listing enhancements so this is an ideal opportunity to discover if they would work for your business. Ten or twenty quid isn’t going to change your world, but as you are going to get it you might as well use it, but track results to find out which products listing enhancements work for and which don’t. If you discover that a listing enhancement works for a product set, it may be worth investing in them long term if it increases sales velocity or results in higher final values for your items.
eBay packaging voucher
A voucher each month to spend on eBay-branded packaging supplies (Nothing for a Basic shop, a tenner for Featured shops and £20 for Anchor Shops each month).
The thought of a business with the scale to justify an Anchor shop worrying about £20 worth of packaging doesn’t imply that this is worth much, but seeing as you’re getting it you may as well make use of it. Free packaging is free packaging and eBay’s branded packaging certainly makes a delivery stand out.
Further reading
eBay Shop subscription fees and benefits from 1st April 2017
Which level eBay shop should I subscribe to?
eBay Optional listing upgrade fees from 30th March 2017
Full eBay announcment
74 Responses
If you use the upgrades and the free packaging it isn’t too bad, but subtitles are the most expensive line of text ever. Searchable but too expensive.
Packaging amount won’t go far tho, let us hope it means more visibility though.
could have skipped most of the article and gone with:
ebay find sellers dont want to pay for “upgrades”, so ebay’s charging EVERYONE £20 a month, EVERY month, for “upgrades” they dont want.
“new ways to sell”? oh this must be another paid ad, it’s probably laser-focused too.
may as well tell me they’re charging £20 a month for “increased cosmic good will and a general feeling of calm”. it’s tripe, dress it up as lamb all you like.
Perhaps due to the amount of sellers and competition on eBay now, paid upgrades are the way forward, I use them so the extra will be used up and offset the rise in costs.
Changing = increasing.
Predictably, Ebay has hiked its fees.
Will the site be more reliable? No.
Will Ebay policies be any fairer to sellers? No
Will sellers get their items seen consistently across Ebay worldwide? No
Will the checkout work properly? No
Will Ebay give back fvf fees on refunds made to buyers due to Ebay checkout issues? No
Will Ebay stop hiding behind Luxembourg and pay its UK taxes? No
Is it my imagination, or has the £269 anchor shop price been arrived by adding the old £217 anchor fee and the £52 featured shop fees, together?
Are Ebay execs really so unimaginative???
Hey guys, how much d’ya reckon we can take them for?
Let’s add the old featured price to the anchor price and charge the suckers £269.
Great idea !!!
For anyone interested. Here is which store subscription is cheapest for the number of listings you have. This excludes ebay packaging and promo vouchers.
536 listings or less for basic
537-5549 listings for featured
5500 listings for anchor
So… the Anchor shop goes from £217 to £269? And that’s nearly a 25% increase?
Is it me or is that very high?
Greedy Greedy Ebay….shame on them
I cannot believe they are actually increasing the price of a Featured shop and trying to buy you off with a few free auctions and silly enhancements which we do not want it is a RIP simple as that.
It is not worth it for us plus those ebay branded supplies are not exactly the greatest of quality we bought 3,000 D1s and there always bursting.
RMG prices rises and now this they are really just the home of Argos and Tescos now. FVF are high enough on these online marketplaces as it is. We really only have it for the international and that is getting poorer all the time and it can be hassle, we are selling more in source markets than on ebay overseas now, £25 a month to webinterpret also and their cut it is not really worth it for what you get. Boost for FBA again these people never learn. They are are far 2nd behind Amazon now and this is all they can come up with. Look at Ireland FREE shops for a year, they are just ripping of UK business sellers now. We will drop the featured shop to basic get rid of Webinterpret also and concentrate on our niche sites, not paying £70 a month to them.
Years ago we’d use auctions as ads to promote the Buy It Now listings, Auctions are always time ending soonest so will always be at the top of search before they end.
When doing auctions for this purpose years ago, I’d find the best time of the day/week from Terapeak for selling these items and get my auction to end just after this, link to my BIN item in the description and improve sales.
May have to return to the old eBay methods too now and use a few auctions.
Interesting 🙂
Someone I know has 1649 listings so they will be £1.50/month better off with this increase as the free listings has increased from 1200 to 1500 so its not all bad for everyone
It’s still a big fee hike for anchor shops and can’t agree that these supposed benefits offset it.
US Ebay allows sellers to pay their anchor shop fees annually, getting a substantial discount.
Why doesn’t Ebay UK do the same? We can only pay monthly here.
Not looking pretty on the Ebay message boards about this. Real anger there at the fee rises.
I have a featured shop so yes, I will make use of the extra 300 listings, I was using them anyway and having to pay per listing above 1,200. So, I now HAVE to pay for 300 more listings, even if I decide I don’t want to use them.
As for the rest of it, nothing in there I asked for or wanted. Money for old rope.
Wouldn’t it be a revolutionary idea for E-Bay to actually do something to encourage sellers, thereby benefitting from the fees from increased sales, rather than just keep taking from sellers and making the whole enterprise progressively less and less attractive.
Since late 2016 I have been putting my efforts into channels other than E-Bay, I don’t think I will be able to walk away from E-Bay any time soon but I do have that dream, and if one day it becomes possible, I shall be gone like a rat up a drainpipe !
To top it all, having just logged into my seller hub, I am now getting Clic Sargent adverts where my seller hub was, all the information I want to see is now shunted down off the bottom of the screen. I am TRYING TO WORK here E-Bay, and half the time, rather than assisting me with selling, you are taking up the time I could and should be spending on selling. Just provide us with a good platform to sell, and then leave it, and sellers the hell alone ! Sit back, rake in the final value fees, and go play golf.
Not a disaster for us — to be honest, most of what we pay is FVF and that’s how we like it: ebay wins when we win. We don’t mind paying a few quid for a seat at the table, but all these add-ons are only valuable if we would pay to have them. The “total value” is downright misleading — I think I probably mind having someone pulling the wool over my eyes more than the price.
Let’s take a look at those packaging supplies, for example:-
I can buy 36 rolls of ebay tape for £42.75
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Official-eBay-Branded-Parcel-Packing-Packaging-Carton-Sealing-Tape-48mm-x-66m-/182370062463
Or I can go on Amazon to the Swiftpak store and buy 36 rolls of identical white acrylic polypropylene tape (“Fragile” instead of “eBay”) for £28.02 or brown tape for £22.99
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Swiftpak-DENVA-White-Printed-FRAGILE/dp/B01IMVJNQK
eBay’s profits may be on the up, but the general global economic model is in tatters, and most everyday sellers are finding it harder and harder. A forced increase in fees (whilst PR dresses up the benefits), doesn’t help seller’s or eBay. I’ve been with eBay almost since the beginning, and some of the seller’s in a similar field to myself who have been going just as long are starting to drop like flies – quite a few have left eBay altogether.
Ebay are about dead now and Amazon will finish them off.Ebay had something Amazon didnt ,auctions.Ebay makes no use of that fact and now wants to charge 30p per auction listing to finish them off.They really are crazy.The last five years they have had one focus.Try to increase fees to cover up the fact our business is going backwards.
I dont really care as we sell 70% AMZ 24% webbie 6% Ebay now anyway,but the market needs a strong Ebay.Crazy the way they have been managed.
Just closed my Featured shop after 14 years. Price hike was the last straw.
Looking forward to a stress free life
we think ebay have confused packaging with patronising
I was already considering opening an ebay.com shop in addition to my basic UK shop, so I guess taking a featured UK shop will be just about worthwhile to me.
What is really chiselling and pathetic though in the face of big price hikes are the petty little limitations in those freebies….
Free 7 day auctions, but seemingly not 3, 5 or 10 day! Why?
No refund of additional auction listing fees (over free allowance) if an item sells, the US get this.
Monthly packaging allowance, make it quarterly like the US so we are not buggering about with little orders. As it is now I think I’ll just get a free pack of ebay tape a month and then stick it up for sale at 10% off their price as a means of spiting them.
Why not offer a discounted yearly subscription like the US.
Best of all ditch the freebies altogether and give shop subscribers access to a human being to resolve problems, rather than some unintelligible automaton, on a phone line that sounds like it has been routed via North Korea, who has no interest in resolving your problem.
I think the reason fvf fees haven’t risen is a tacit acknowledgment that things are not selling like they used to on Ebay.
Hence the need to get more money from sellers through fixed fees, i.e., things you have to pay without selling a thing – like shop fees.
It’s like the government switching from income tax to vat
It also gives Ebay no incentive to fix the problems plaguing Ebay buyers and sellers on the site, if they derive an increasing amount of income from flat fees. It no longer matters if your sales dive, they still get paid.
The only winner from these fee rises is Ebay.
Diversifying onto other platforms is crucial for any serious seller. And not just one alternative – use as many as are viable.
That way you limit the squeeze Ebay or Amazon can put on you through fees / policies / system problems.
If there’s enough of a ruckus about this from Ebayers, there might be a rethink. They’ve backtracked before.
If it’s profitable, stay, if not, leave. The *total value* thing is just corporate talk bingo BS but what do you expect from a bunch of suits.
eBay is seriously good value for money if you sell something folk want. I’m a big fan.
Hi sorry if this is a silly question
So if your item sells you pay the 10% final value fee if you have a subtitle will you pay 1£ fee each time this item sells or only every 30 days when the listing renews you get charged any “additional” listing fees ?
Thanks any help much appreciate
Kind regards
You know what? I’m fine with this. I’ve got a featured shop and from where I’m sitting my monthly invoice payment won’t go up and I get a bunch of extra stuff.
My featured shop subscription goes up by £17 and there’s 5p extra per auction but I get a) extra free listings worth double that and b) free auctions and c) some free listing upgrades and d) heavily discounted premium package to use for high-price items…and why should I be seething with rage like some of you lot again? I’m getting more or the same for less money from the numbers I’m looking at. If FVFs had gone up we’d be having a very different conversation. But they’re not. So we’re not.
I’ve found eBay CS (who have been deluged with calls today) to be helpful in recent times – I’ve had late delivery dings removed, I’ve had negs removed, I’ve had suspicious buyers dealt with. The Dublin call centre is excellent and the not-Dublin call centre also has their moments and they are trying their best.
23% increase for my Anchor shop.
The Site don’t work properly – New seller hum “Losses” Stock For You…
Wish I could Rip my customers off with a 23% increase and supply sub-standard products…
What a fecking joke,
I don’t want eBay packaging (just increases the risk of theft) or listing upgrades & I don’t use auctions.
I have a featured shop and it will be more expensive – for me around £26 per month – the monthly fee increase is nearly but not quite compensated by the 300 increase in free listings – worse off because of the 1p increase in listing fees – does not sound a lot but 5000 items at 1p is £50. The free auction listings is something I will try and use but does fit well with my business – the optional extras are next to useless.
My main gripe is the the gap between a featured shop and a anchor shop – the fee is vast – there should some scheme of transition – it will take a long time for me to list a 100000 items which in my field I could do. So in my case the limiting factor to increase my business are the listing and relisting fees – I rely heavily on the random 50000 free listings – but because they are random ( and I can understand why) I am never prepared and can only list at the most 300 items in a week – I use it for slow moving items and it is a great help.
So ebay have increased their fees by nearly 25% when inflation is around 1.8% showing a total lack of respect for the sellers.
The dealbreaker for me with a featured shop is 300 free auctions that we’ll probably have to start at 99p. I’ll bet you can’t start them at £9.99 so no use to anyone who doesnt use auctions. I have already put 3,000 listings into hibernation waiting for a 50,000 free listings day which is long overdue. I’m not paying 5p per listing for 3,000 items. eBay have priced me out of listing old stock that I can sell on my website. In the USA they have made achieving TRS status/Higher visibility 5% harder but offer the choice of advertising to get more visibility. Their business model is to make money out of sellers poor performance. They don’t want great sellers. They aim to make money selling visibility & stealing 10% of out postage.
If you dont believe me read this & remember that what happens stateside crosses the water soon after.
– The Top Rated Plus final value fee discount will change from 20% to 10% on qualifying listings on May 1, 2017. (eBay is also raising the bar for becoming TRS: The tracking requirement to qualify for Top Rated Seller status will increase from 90% to 95% on June 20, 2017.)
– Final value fees for sellers who do not meet eBay’s minimum performance standards will increase by 4 percentage points on items sold on or after May 1, 2017
eBay is removing product listing ads that take shoppers off of the eBay platform. eBay will replace those ads with Promoted Listings – in other words, pay to play. However, eBay currently restricts the program to multi-quantity items in certain categories, and only eBay Store owners can participate.
Like many changes, it will not suit all people, I currently have 240 items in my shop, so the increased selling limits will help, but I then pay more when I go over that amount.
Amazon v Ebay
Amazon charge £30 per month and also take 18% sale fees
January my total sales value was 45% on Ebay / 55% Amazon
Total Fees I paid were 35% Ebay / 65% Amazon
I am glad that Ebay did not increase the cost of the final sale fee.
Also Amazon seem to think they are entitled to about 15% even if you have to give a refund, you lose, they win.
Customer support on them both is about the same, useless! Although contacting Ebay in Dublin does get you a better response.
But we have to live with it or do something else, we don’t have that much choice at the minute.
I could go and spend £3,000 on Google Adword / FB advertising or other but what would that bring in?
this packaging thing is unbelievable we do ebay a favour[at our expense part from a miserable £20] by giving their brand exposure, then they big it up as if they are doing us the favour
The dealbreaker for me with a featured shop is 300 free auctions that we’ll probably have to start at 99p. I’ll bet you can’t start them at £9.99 so no use to anyone who doesnt use auctions. I have already put 3,000 listings into hibernation waiting for a 50,000 free listings day which is long overdue. I’m not paying 5p per listing for 3,000 items. eBay have priced me out of listing old stock that I can sell on my website. In the USA they have made achieving TRS status/Higher visibility 5% harder but offer the choice of advertising to get more visibility. Their business model is to make money out of sellers poor performance. They don’t want great sellers. They aim to make money selling visibility & stealing 10% of out postage.
If you dont believe me read this & remember that what happens stateside crosses the water soon after.
– The Top Rated Plus final value fee discount will change from 20% to 10% on qualifying listings on May 1, 2017. (eBay is also raising the bar for becoming TRS: The tracking requirement to qualify for Top Rated Seller status will increase from 90% to 95% on June 20, 2017.)
– Final value fees for sellers who do not meet eBay’s minimum performance standards will increase by 4 percentage points on items sold on or after May 1, 2017
eBay is removing product listing ads that take shoppers off of the eBay platform. eBay will replace those ads with Promoted Listings – in other words, pay to play. However, eBay currently restricts the program to multi-quantity items in certain categories, and only eBay Store owners can participate.
I think removing adverts that take shoppers away from Ebay is a good thing and something that has niggled me
To be a Top Rated Plus seller takes a lot of work and effort. And now the thanks we get is a final value fee change from 20% to a mere 10%? You’ve got to be kidding me – that’s an outrageous fee differential. I’d prefer to have a definite $30 credit as opposed to the quarterly proposal now on the books. I’ve often thought it was time after 14 years on Ebay to through in the towel. This modification of the fee schedule is an incentive for me to retire from Ebay and I guess for the first time I’m giving it serious thought.
Do some of these changes affect only the US? UK final value fees discount has been 10%, not 20% for some time now.
Swings and roundabouts for me, almost all my selling is used goods, all items unique. I’ve two shops which will both have 1800 listing, one there already, the other within 3 months, and a 3rd with hopefully 600 by April – so hard to get there though with individual used items, every listing has individual photos and descriptions – but the changes suit my business model just fine. Price of enhancements has put me off, so something to try, and a few extra envelopes – well, gift horse etc. My listing are mainly bin but I also do auctions on 2 shops, though 7 days is not ideal, better than 13p a time though.
I have niggles about ebay, but on the whole excellent, CS in Dublin faultless – even removed my first neg on nearly 6000 feedback, which was unexpected but nice. Hate the DSR side of things, but have redone my postage to suit the system.
Nothing better out there for the used items market.
a potential unintended consequence of ebay branded packaging is extra customs scrutiny and charges
It’s worth mentioning that if you sell overseas and you allow Webinterept to translate your listings, you probably would need an Anchor Shop. You need to factor in for every UK listing you have, they may multiply it by something like 15 to sell on other countries marketplaces. You could end up unwittingly having to pay for a lot of listing fees.
I’ll be using the reasonably priced “Wonderlister” to take advantage of the free USA & German listings they are offering. eBay still has not managed to work out a way for us to migrate our inventory to .com or .de so this tool is essential if you just want to list your old stock on 50,000 free listings day or take advantage of the free overseas listings. https://www.wonderlister.com/pricing
Has anyone managed to find out if the free 7 day auctions they are offering have to start at 99p or not?
Re selling through EBay, this month will be my last one, I’ve had enough of their Fees (especially on Postage costs) so I’ll be looking at alternatives.
A measly 50 more fixed priced listings a month for Basic? Should at least have doubled, if not 500/month – The sub costs almost a third of Featured, so why not give a proportional amount of listings. (Those 50 auctions add little, save stock clearance).
If most revenue comes from FVF, then why not encourage sellers to list more. Rather than trying to be petty and make 9p (now 15p) for extra listings; give them for free, allow sellers to grow their their business and take the 8,9,10% FVF on greater sales!!
It’s all very well saying the monthly sub should be a relatively small part of your final invoice and that, by using their calculations new/old, if offers better value, but that jump up to £25 is still a kick in the teeth – the site is full of bugs, layout inconsistency, adverts trying to take people off-site (incl. to direct competitors) and as for the now accepted as ‘normal’ FVF incl. postage costs …..
They know full well that for certain types of sellers Amazon is not an option, striking out on your own can cost at least as much (before you even get the traffic) and Etsy/Catawiki/Etc have never reached the critical mass needed to compete.
We are, in short, hooked!
Can anyone tell me the cost to list an item on good till gone,
With no shop after the shop fees have gone up,
I am a business seller,
Thanks.
Every year I find it harder to understand eBay, years ago I used to trade via a Basic Shop but switched to Private Seller status when they started moving goal-posts. I’m a small seller within a specialised market so that’s acceptable and eBay’s war with Amazon doesn’t effect me. I sell on Etsy and Catawiki rather well too, issue with former is getting noticed, issue with latter is the high postage costs to/from Europe.
However for this year I was thinking of returning to a Basic Shop . . not now . . I refuse to be treated like a mushroom! How on earth giving the less than acceptable “seller experience” eBay dish out can they justify these enormous price hikes? Yes, enormous, because an increase should be expressed as the addition to the original and not the lesser amount many are quoting . . so these then are the TRUE figures :
Basic Shop up from £17.38 to £25.00 . . . 44% increase!
Extra listings up from 9p to 15p . . . 70% increase!!!
. . . but Auction listing fees that I would still have to pay? 26p up to 30p . . . only a 15% increase!?! The “free auction listings” I would never use given that my account still gets “free 100 listings per month” and the “bonus” of packaging? I recycle.
So . . how much do I intend to put my prices up for 2017 then? I don’t, nor do I see others wishing to either, we all know that is a slippery slope . . .
. . . seems eBay doesn’t. Yet.
I sell 200/300 items by auction every couple of months or so. It takes me ages to photograph my stuff and load them on the computer. A lot of my stuff goes for 99p. These fees for listing are going up from 9p per listing to 30p! This is a disgusting increase. Doesn’t make it worth my while which is a real shame as I used to enjoy selling on ebay. After all the fees are taken out I will get about 35p for every 99p auction! Don’t even get me started on the postage fees!
Costs going up as the website functionality goes down? It’s close to unusable for me on the desktop. Lags, delays, freezes, the works.
It is incredible that a 1% rise in NIC receives such stern condemnation everywhere but Tamebay reacts to large percentage Ebay increases with almost blase regard.
I look forward to Alan Paterson telling me how Ebay is marvellous and justifies the rise…