eBay Germany Seller Release:
New fixed portion of sales fee

We’ve read the eBay seller releases for many countries around the world and you may have already seen our coverage of the eBay UK and eBay.com seller releases.

Many of eBay’s other sites are following a similar pattern with the introduction of Shop by Product page, new seller insight and promotional tools, announcing the end of eBay Shop Design and some fee tweaks. Germany saw one interesting change which we’ve not spotted on any other country sites.

New fixed portion of sales fee

Sellers on eBay will be only too familiar with Final Value Fees that they pay to eBay every month. For most sellers this will male up the bulk of your eBay invoice.

Germany have just introduced a new fixed portion of sales fee – in addition to the regular percentage fee levied by eBay for a successful sale, Germans will pay a new €0.05 per sold item fee. eBay have given no explanation of why this fee will be charged.

This new five cents per sold item is going to add up over the course of a year and will be especially punitive to sellers of low value items. High volume sellers will naturally see the biggest impact and low volume sellers of high value items will still pay, but as an overall percentage of fees will be least affected.

Will eBay roll this model out in other countries?

We keep a close eye on what’s going on around the world and eBay have a habit of testing in one country and then, if successful, rolling out innovations around the world. We wouldn’t exactly call an additional fixed portion of sales fee an innovation, but this is one to watch.

It’s not an entirely alien concept to eBay, they did after all own PayPal for around 13 years and PayPal have always applied a percentage plus a fixed fee for transactions. It’s an interesting way to raise revenues however unwelcome it may be to sellers.

Count the number of sales that take place on eBay and while five cents doesn’t sound a lot, that’s an enormous amount of additional revenue for the marketplace. Let’s hope it doesn’t spread to eBay UK and other sites around the world.