With the eBay shop fee changes due to take effect on the 1st of April, we’ve heard a number of sellers state that they’ll be closing their shop. There’s something you need to be aware of before you do this.
eBay expert, Laura Mathieson tells us that if you have GTC listings, once you close your eBay shop you won’t be able to revise them.
From the 1st of November 2016, eBay made the GTC listing format available to all business sellers. You can now list using the GTC listing format without the requirement to have an eBay shop.
There are many benefits to GTC, such as a longer item history, easier listings management and the out-of-stock option. This makes them much more attractive than short duration or 30 day listings.
The issue occurs when you create a GTC listing and then close your eBay shop. The GTC continues to run and renew every 30 days but it appears that you can no longer adjust quantities as you receive new deliveries or otherwise edit the listing. We’re not sure if this is by design or simply a bug, we suspect the later.
Laura says that if your eBay shop is reinstated within 30 days of closing, all the settings are reset and the GTC listings will once again be able to be revised, but not after that 30 day window.
If you are closing your eBay shop, you’ll either have to live with listings that you can’t edit, or end all your GTC listings and relist once your shop is closed, losing your sales history.
28/4/17 Edited to add: An update from Laura
A quick update on the situation of eBay not allowing GTC revisions if listings were created when you had a shop and have since closed it.
This issue was first raised back in March and at that time eBay commented that it was a problem and should not happen.
I’ve now heard back from eBay, who said: “The behaviour seen here is a hold out from a long ago decision in the UK made for another purpose but it is no longer relevant. Hence, we are addressing the problem and will have a change rolled out soon which will enable revision regardless of store subscription state. When we have a more specific date confirmed, I’ll report back.”
Forewarned is forearmed – there may be good reasons for closing a shop but there are risks involved, at least until eBay fixes this.
5 Responses
We are not going to close our eBay shop but we are going to downgrade to basic, we may even fiddle with the idea of opening a 2nd basic shop this will concentrate on budget lines purely sent out using eco options only and do it on price as eBay has become more of lowest price WINS than FAST shipping etc. We do not need the amount of listing on a featured shop and £69 plus seller pro sub is FAR too expensive, I thought £52 was overpriced anyway. All the so called FREEBIES was utter rubbish. 300 Auctions these will prove very time consuming and this type of customer tends to be a bit more hassle, non payment, combined post demands you name it. Plus nothing is FREE they are charging for everything.
They get enough of a cut with FVF and postal profits and they are an expensive market to sell on, with the lowest possible seller support most issues and most recently glitches
GTC are essential for us however, we have a few real winners and just constantly restock this was the only thing we were concerned about with downgrading. These Winners are on other markets and eBay is up with the Amazon prices now, it will pay to shop around for customers more than ever. Take note smaller markets now is your chance.
I work for eBay and the behavior here is NOT meant to work this way so there appears to be a problem. If people seeing this error can add a comment here with their item ID where they see this message that will help us investigate this issue.
Thank you!
Is this true on eBay.com or just on eBay UK?
Sean I can’t put client details on a public forum but will try to get the information to you. I’ve seen this on two accounts now and spent some time with CS who corroborated it.
It would be useful to know if anyone has closed a shop and NOT had this issue?
It is plain for every business seller to see that eBay is falling apart at the seams. There are so many massive programming problems on every level it’s extremely worrying. In my opinion eBay are unable to fix all the issues without closing down the site for a week or a month or more. So in the meantime what do they do to make money? They keep quiet and find other ways to please the shareholders with fee hikes dressed up as gifts or fines. If you dont see a broken shopping cart as major loss of revenue then you are crazy. So there has to be a reason they’ve been keeping quiet about it all these years. It’s because they can’t fix an ancient platform that was built badly in the first place without shutting it down for a long time. Is this why they never mention it?
Correct me if you think I’m wrong Mr Vosseller. It would be nice to get an explanation from someone at eBay towers.