It’s now April so the new eBay shop fees have kicked in and will be applied to your next eBay invoice. A Basic eBay shop will now cost £25/month, £69/month for a Featured shop and if you have an Anchor shop then your subscription fees rises to £269/month.
Much as I understand those who have complained at the price increases, if your business justifies a particular level of eBay shop the fee rise should be almost insignificant in comparison to your total eBay monthly invoice. If you’re noticing the increased cost it’s likely that you’re using an unsuitable eBay shop so check out our guidance on what level eBay shop would suit you best.
As well as a free listing allowance for auction style listings, Featured and Anchor store subscribers will be receiving vouchers for Listing Enhancements and eBay Packaging.
Regarding your £10 or £20 eBay packaging voucher… if you have a Featured or Anchor shop then a tenner or twenty quids worth of packaging isn’t going to touch the sides. I’d still use the voucher though – stock pile the packaging and pop it on an auction if you don’t use it.
More interesting is the Listing Enhancements voucher. Whilst you can certainly use this for a few subtitles it’s well worth considering trialling Promoted Listings. We know that eBay are removing all third party ads from eBay.com in the US and replacing them with Promoted Listings – that’s all the hint we need to see the direction eBay are taking.
If you bid 1%, a tenner voucher can generate £1,000 of incremental business and £20 will give £2,000. You’ll only pay for promoted listings if you get a sale so you can’t lose really. If towards the end of the month you’ve not managed to spend you full voucher, splash out on a few subtitles or Gallery Plus to use the balance up.
54 Responses
I’m going to politely take issue with the point about the price increase, Chris.
I agree that, at the lower levels, the sums are not significant, but for anchor shops another £52 per month is not insignificant.
Add in the above inflation postage prices rises and margins can be squeezed.
You can get some of this back by taking up the 500 auction quota (only applies to 7 day listings by the way), but this may not suit everybody.
It will also not be to everyone’s liking to have Ebay dictate how you sell your items, by raising prices and then offering you some of your money back if you sell in the way they want.
Compared to the horrors on Amazon, Ebay is still the better place to trade for lower / medium volumes.
But I don’t think people are wrong to complain if prices are raised beyond inflation, especially given the ropey Ebay system performance and low sales for many throughout March.
this voucher thing is pathetic unavailable to those who are most likely to need or use vouchers with a basic shop
insignificant , inadequate ,time wasting distraction to those who have
Featured shop/ Anchor shop
When you say ‘vouchers on the way’ – the eBay page says we get them on the 1st of the month. Anecdotally I’ve heard that they’re a month behind so we won’t get them until May 1st.
I’ve asked for clarification on the eBay boards but as usual trying to get an eBay staff response is like getting blood out of a stone.
Changes have been made recently to promoted listing.
Sponsored listing used to be in addition to the standard one. Not now. If you search using 6 or 7 of your words in title or by the item number, the standard listing has disappeared and only the sponsored listing shows on over 70% of my listings. The whole point of promotions is that they get more exposure – not less. So, on a best match search if your sponsored listing is not at the top of ebays rotation, now your standard listing is not shown at all so listing has less exposure than if you had not bothered to promote it. If your listing already performs well in best match, then promoting it could have a negative effect on exposure. Not just me as there are posts from other sellers on ebay business sellers and power seller community boards.
In addition, if you search for a couple of words on best match and then click UK Only in item location on the left (which I always do when I am buying) the sponsored listings all disappear – they are only visible if left at default. I live in UK, my items are in UK, I am registered with ebay.co.uk yet I am unable to promote my items to buyers using best match who wish to buy UK located items. I have asked eBay if this is a policy decision or yet another glitch and they are unable to answer. Still waiting for that elusive call back.
Once you are in the loop they will demote you unless you pay for more visibility playing you off against each other. Best to stay out of the loop in the first place. Once you are hooked & on top of search results they’ll know what it’s worth to you & charge you that amount to stay there even if your competition disappears. DONT SHOWYOUR HAND!
eBay don’t care about sellers. They only care about shareholders. They have become Top Rated Snides, making money where they shouldn’t be making money instead of pleasing their customers & fixing the pot holes all over the site.
The price increase would be a bargain if they fixed just half of what is wrong. Instead they behave like North Korea & say nothing. Not even on their own notice board.
I though I might try this, some free stuff is always welcome. However it isn’t really £10 or £20 as it appears you still have to pay post and packaging on top of the sale price!
Some nice gravy for the packaging supplier. How many featured/Anchor shops in the UK Chris?
You’re right Tony. The only thing of any use at the time I was looking was the bubble wrap which was displayed as sold out.
It’s almost as if eBay didn’t tell the seller the voucher was going out today….but that would never happen being as eBay are so organised. 😐
Yes. At the time of the voucher arriving only 6 or 7 items advertised for sale. Now 60+.
Standard eBay management ‘all the gear and no idea’ rules appear to apply.
Genuine good luck to the packaging guys.
With some jiggling around with promotional / related items I’ve paid £1.28 for 125 jiffy envelopes in various sizes. A good incentive when they arrive to clear out my old DVD’s and PS3 games.
Dam you Paddy. You beat me.
Something that gets overlooked with Anchor shops, is that they are often used by sellers of collectables. You need a large inventory to cater for that and the sales, compared with more mainstream sectors, are not as strong. Commonly, such stores sell less than 5% of inventory each month, sometimes a lot less from what I’ve seen.
We turn over roughly twice the vat threshold in collectables, as a tidy little business and the anchor shop’s unlimited shop listings is essential for us.
The packaging voucher is of no use to us either – they don’t offer anything small enough to package our items!
Compared to .com, where they only get 10,000 free listings for Anchor status, we are still in a better position on UK Ebay.
But there is a concern that Ebay is losing sight of the myriad small businesses trading in coins, stamps, postcards, badges and buttons etc etc.
These make up a big proportion of Ebay’s business and there is nowhere else for them to go, apart from a bespoke website.
So the point Chris made about turning over tens of thousands a month for an anchor shop is not always the case.
I received the voucher code for packaging materials, followed the link to a rather underwhelming selection of materials. Most of the items on there are of no use to me, so I ended up spending it on poly mailers which I will be giving away to a family member who also sells on E-Bay to tup up her income.
The £10 voucher expires on the 30th April, so I cannot save them up. Accordingly, given the materials I need are cheaper on Amazon anyway, I will be spending my £10 voucher each month on whatever I can get, and then giving it away to said family member. Might as well have someone get the benefit of it, rather than letting it lapse and having E-Bay trouser that as well.
I cannot quite work out why, but there is something about splashing E-Bay all over my parcels which makes me uncomfortable. I would much rather promote my other channels, and that isn’t going to involve any mention of E-Bay anywhere. I also have the feeling, perhaps incorrectly, that its better to have only the absolute necessary on the outside of a parcel for security reasons.
So, in short, feeling a bit underwhelmed by the packaging voucher, it isn’t any benefit to my business at all.
With respect Alan, you seem to have a blinkered view of E-Bay, every single time you write anything its unfailingly pro E-Bay, that is hardly objective now is it.
The packaging voucher is not free, they just put the price of the shop subscriptions up to pay for it.
E-Bay get a percentage of every sale, prices increase broadly in line with inflation, so E-Bay will earn more in £/$ every year just because of that. So again, this recent change is a price increase.
As for E-Bay investing, I am not in the concierge programme, but would be delighted to join. Thus far (approx 4 years on E-Bay) I don’t feel like I have seen material benefits from ‘investment’, whatever it is claimed to be. E-Bay don’t pay for the advertising on TV or anywhere else Alan, sellers pay for it, just like we pay for everything else E-Bay do or don’t do.
I don’t view E-Bay as a partner because I am but a small seller in the grand scheme of E-Bay, and who knows, they may one day decide they no longer want me, and that could be for absolutely no fault of mine. They are not some sort of benevolent fund interested in looking after individual sellers, they are a large blue chip company with shareholders to satisfy who will squash any of us like a bug if they want to, and there will be nothing that can be done about it. Having ones nuts permanently in a vice is not a ‘partnership’, its an unhealthy relationship.
As a result, and in order to diversify and protect my business, I am investing in the other channels I have and not E-Bay. If that makes me stupid as you suggest, then so be it.
So Alan, if you don’t mind having your nuts in the E-Bay vice, good for you. I will continue to use E-Bay to the extent I need to, and nothing more, I don’t owe them anything, I pay for what I use. If they do something positive, I will happily say so, but I do not owe them the benefit of the doubt.
You can put your head back in the oven now…..
Alan how much are ebay paying you to defend them on here ? I’m sorry but i’m with Andy, I fall in to the category that Andy describes above. I have 25,000 + unique items listed at present, each year I turn over approximately a third of them via ebay. I take issue with the statement that the voucher is free, its not, neither are the listing upgrade credits or the “free” auction listings we pay for them with the increased fees. Its like saying postage and packing is free, it’s not, its simply included in the price. They are cynical attempt by ebay to mitigate what I consider to be a quote hefty fee increase.
Firstly the packaging supplied by this company is over priced, I can but the same products of the same quality and quantities for a lot less than they are selling them for and without the ebay branding and therefor use them for the other sites I sell on, as for the marketing opportunity you describe how printing the name on an over priced envelope can be seen as good opertunity, who is going to see it? As far as I can see the only exposure they are going to get is the person post office counter and the postman, wow all those extra customers, how am I gong to cope ? As for the 500 “free” auction listings, I don’t want or need 500 free auction listings, I can’t remember the last time I ran an auction, so they will go unused ok they are fine for any business that does but I would guess that the majority of anchor shops are all buy it now. I have never used any of the listing upgrades available, and I don’t think I ever will. I haven’t ever needed to so far. Ok they may increase my sales if I had but in that case why make them chargeable in the first place, surely its in ebays and our own interests to increase our sales, ebay should be doing everything they can to increase our sales and therefore their sales as a result.
I remember a few years ago when ebay cut our final value fee discount, in my case from 20% to 10% under the guise that the 10% would be spent on marketing, well I am yet to see one of my items on an ebay advert so in theory we are already paying for it.
My fees are going up by a considerable amount more that the recent fee hike, with the loss of turbo lister I will have to look at a 3rd party company to provide a listing and uploading solution, I know how bad turbo lister was, I have used it daily for the past 5 years, but I have learnt to make it work for me and it does what I need it to. Now I am looking at paying £150 per month for an alternative due to the amount of stock I hold. So for me its around a £2400 increase per year.
My sales on ebay are stagnant, I have sold roughly a 1/3 of my stock each year for the past 5 years, meanwhile my sales on the other sites are up around 20 – 30 % this year alone, and I get virtually none of the item not received claims I do from ebay, in fact 1 in the last two years, compared to 1 or 2 a month from ebay. Plus the monthly listing fees are a fifth of what I pay ebay, with the final value roughly the same as ebays. So its a no brainier for me, I will leave my stock on ebay and suck up the extra fees in the meantime but all my new stock will go on the other site, I will run my ebay shop down to the point where it becomes unprofitable and then close it. The money I save from ebay fees I can spend on my own custom built site.
Ordered 3 products. 1 finally arrived today but it was the wrong product with somebody else’s name on.
Has anyone got the “listing enhancements” vouchers yet, if so how do ebay let us know ? – I got the packing one via email, but no word on the listing enhancements !
I agree with everything that Jamie D has said.
He makes points that many sellers of non-standard items will echo.
He’s also right to milk Ebay and hive off his business to a website or other independent platform.
As for Alan Paterson (or whatever your real name is), why don’t you actually READ the posts on here, before firing off your crass and frankly rude responses?
we have listings on ebay where we have outsold our competitor 3x on said day and have continued to follow this trend however they are above us in best match and have been for a said amount of time.
any new threads on this algorithm and how it has now been infected with sponsored searches?
Voucher (packaging) is a chocolate tea pot… eBays partner that supplies the packaging has limited stock and shockingly bad feedback for a eBay partner…
OK time to say something. I used to also post online and got the same “treatment” that Alan Paterson is getting above.
@ Alan. You don’t know me but I know you. We met at the last of the Ebay Uni in the SECC in Glasgow back in 2008.
I do realise that you are the eternal optimist for ebay – I remember when I met you in 2008 you were complaining / campaigning that attendees were encouraging each other to purchase off their own web sites rather than Ebay. I took your point at the time as this was circumvention of Ebay fees and I know that from that experience you like to defend Ebay. I don’t know if you remember me. I got you to sign your manual. Anyway, you were under fire then too. Are you a masachist and enjoy being a target.?
You are wasting your time. Ebay are big enough to look after themselves and they don’t need you preaching on their behalf. It is a complete waste of time and energy and the very reason I don’t post anymore.
You are not a voice in the wilderness as was said above and I have been reading all your posts on here along with the replies. are you on a personal crusade? It sounds like it lol. why are you bothering?
Ignore the idiots that are stomping Ebay into the ground. you won’t get anywhere. it is futile. I know you are trying to help (its all about attitude) but really you are not doing any good and you will just become a dartboard as I did.
Look at how some sellers are reacting to free vouchers – how do you think they are going to respond to being told their attitude needs a paradigm shift? At least I think thats what you are getting at. Subscription fees are going up by a few £ and you would think the sky was falling.
I had to agree that some of the posts you wrote did come across as a bit too direct / rude but I get your frustration.
My advice is to stop. You will not succeed and you will simply annoy people and put up your blood pressure. It IS funny that Ebay get so much hatred. This discussion started about free vouchers and fees. Ebay will continue to move in their direction regardless of what you do or say.
Some of the sellers above have written positive posts on other threads while some ARE consistently negative.
I don’t agree that posts like this will put new sellers off. Really? Thats a bit far fetched.
As for sellers who do consistently trash Ebay – someone has moved their cheese and it keeps getting moved. Don’t even try and help them find it – they will always believe it is ebay who is hiding the cheese. Or in other words some people just like to wallow in their own negativity and blame others.
I think its funny that this thread started talking about free vouchers and the quite modest shop fee increase. I am just happy they did not increase seller fees.
been on ebay for longer then most, made a great living from them
though ebay are far from perfect with many faults,
which wont be corrected unless highlighted and criticised,
if ebay were not quite so patronising treating hardened long time sellers like nieve pensioners, they may not get so much criticism
Amen to Northumbrian.
Alan, you are getting criticised because rather than posting a reasoned alternative position for people to read and think about, you launched into a blizzard of insults. When you insult people, its hardly surprising that it isn’t received very well.
Secondly, everyone is entitled to their opinion, not just you, and if you don’t agree with what others are saying, so what, its no skin off of your nose is it.
Whatever….