As you start to migrate to the new eBay Seller Hub from eBay’s TurboLister, Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro, there are a number of free features which you might end up paying for. Frankly, some of the features we’d probably recommend that you don’t use anyway but here’s what you need to be aware of:
Free SMP
Selling Manager Pro came free with an eBay Featured or Anchor shop, without these SMP costs £4.99 per month. The new eBay Seller Hub is free to use so you won’t be paying any longer, however if you’re dithering over the cost of a Featured Shop compared to a Basic eBay shop remember to knock the fiver saving for SMP out of your calculations.
eBay Listing Designer
eBay Listing Designer came for free if you listed via TurboLister or Selling Manager Pro. Without these tools it’s 30p for each and every item that uses Listing Designer.
Frankly eBay’s design offerings are awful. Don’t use them, just don’t – they are certainly not worth paying for. You’re much better off with a text only description rather than adding a border that looks like (and probably was) designed in the 1990’s.
Scheduled Listings
With SMP, you could schedule a future start time for as many listings as you liked. Once uploaded to eBay listings would wait until your chosen time before going live. This is useful if you’re uploading a ton of listings and want to space them by a few minutes so that a buyer could bid on all your items as they ended. It’s also useful so that you can do your work during the day and have listings go live so that they’ll finish in the evening at a convenient time for buyers to bid.
eBay Scheduler costs 10p per listing for business sellers. Once you end your SMP subscription you’ll need to be wary of paying those 10p’s.
You may think that scheduling listings is a bit old hat and dead in today’s world of fixed price listings. It’s worth remembering however that everyone with an eBay shop has recently got a free allocation of auction style listings – scheduled listings could be coming back into fashion.
Sales Reports Plus
Sales Reports Plus are free with any eBay shop, but otherwise you’ll be paying £3 a month for them.
We’d hope these will be dumped in favour of the new reports included in the Seller Hub, but it may be worth unsubscribing to ensure you never end up paying for them.
14 Responses
I did not manage to find a way of either adding or removing listing designer in the latest ‘sell your item’ flow. If you already used listing designer then sell similar or relist would include the ‘feature’ in the new listing but I could not remove it. What did I miss?
There could be a lot of unexpected 30p’s coming the way of some sellers, especially sellers in typical ‘long tail’ categories who may have a few thousand listings.
And is it 30p per 30days on GTC or a one off 30p?
eBay CS may not even know the answers themselves!
JD – I had to ask Ebay CS to downgrade me to the original version while I edited each listing to remove the listing designer.
They were happy to do this and quickly returned it to the new version
Hopefully one issue they will alter is the best offer. We sometimes offered best offer on some of our items. But then things change such as cost of the item the cost of Final Value Fees increase and shipping cost increases so we can no longer accept a best offer yet we cannot remove it. Which seems silly as it makes many buyers think we are wasting their time.
There should be a campaign to get back free scheduled listings. There is no basis for charging for them. Why should sellers be charged extra for having their items appear at a time that they might sell? Besides, Ebay’s system will simply collapse under the weight of sellers all trying to list items through the site at peak times. Ebay makes more money if sellers are successful, so it makes no sense to me.
It reminds me of when Ebay still charged 12p for additional photos, until the knuckleheads realised it made no sense to hit sellers in the pocket for showing ample pictures.
Have looked at bit more at the scheduled listings issue and it just gets stupider and stupider.
Anchor shops get 500 “free” auction listings with their price hiked subscription, but only a £20 monthly credit for upgrading listings.
Which means you can schedule 200 listings for free, so why not all 500 ????
Ebay is just barmy and makes no sense.
It’s just a perverse Alice In Wonderland run by swivel eyed loons.
we think scheduling has limited advantages
trillions of listings ending at 8 pm on a sunday evening or whatever the perceived best time is
makes your listing a snowflake in a blizzard
Our experience differs — we’ve run tests with scheduled and unscheduled listings and with peak/off peak timing and for our sales we think it’s better to be a snowflake in a blizzard than in a desert.
As with all things — this is probably highly category / inventory specific — so worth all sellers running these experiments themselves.
a grain of sand in a desert then ,
we feel auctions very much depend on which way the wind blows ,or whats on the telly, it all hypothetical ambiguous supposition
nothing clinical or scientific
its amazing how often a return will sell for more than the first run, or an item returned because of dislike, will delight another buyer
with the amount of snipe programs out there, scheduling is not crucial
of course the items we sell are aimed at the international market
so there’s always bidder awake or available
Sometimes it’s very difficult for me to keep track of what features you have in the UK vs. the USA, since eBay choose to release them at different times.
But I like to compare the differences, because sometimes I see things in the UK, which we don’t have in the US yet.
However on the issue of scheduled listings, I specifically started using a 3rd Party Lister 1.5 years ago, mainly so that I could schedule my listings and use my auction allotment. I also use it to schedule FP-30 listings, so they start at various times during the day.
This was one of the best decisions I ever made. It gave me more control over my daily schedule.
I will say that the majority of Seller I know in my professional selling Facebook Groups, use some type of 3P lister(s.) I’m actually using two because they offer different features I need.
SixBit seems to be the favorite, because it offers the most features and functionality. A lot of TurboLister Sellers are gradually switching to that. I doesn’t work with Macintosh though.
I have found that I sell more when I offer a combination of Auctions and FP. Since I have auctions ending every day at various times, people who “need it now!” can usually find something they like.
Also since I sell multiples, I can list them both in FP and Auction format, for more exposure (in theory … assuming your products get seen in Cassini.)
As far as templates, there are supposedly “Professional” templates available in the Seller Hub. I don’t know … not interested enough to even look at them.
As far as SM and SMP, these have now been incorporated into the Seller Hub, for those who choose to use it. But there is still a charge for SMP with the first level of store (called a Basic store in the US.) It has always been free for higher level stores.
Some additional things I like, which come with a Premium or Anchor Store (the 2nd and 3rd levels in the US.)
1. significantly lower insertion fees, once the monthly allotment is used up.
2. Ebay recently raised the Branded Shipping Supplies allotment for an Anchor Store from $75 to $150 per quarter. Very useful if you sell lots of inexpensive items.
3. eBay has given a US$25 credit to Anchor Stores subscribers + a US$30 credit to all Top Rated Sellers, to be used for Promoted Listings. But we don’t have the “Upgrade” credit, which Andy mentioned above.
There’s been a definite wind of change on Ebay this year.
Taking away lots of things sellers have taken for granted, whilst giving back some of them in a restricted way, often with extra fees attached.
Not to mention the fees rises across the board – the latest seller release had no good news in it for sellers at all, from what I can see.
Lot of posts on these boards about how e-commerce is changing, but Ebay stubbornly flatlines, when others are powering ahead.
The future is bright, but it’s not Ebay.
As eBay research says that customers want free returns and eBay listened all we need to do is set up a slush fund to bribe their research department to ask sellers if we would like free listings and free final value fees. Now that they’ll listen no matter how stupid the question is, the future is bright.