Is your eBay account Below Standard? If so you need to be aware that eBay are starting to surcharge sellers who’s account is below standard adding an additional 4% to the final value fees.
For sake of clarification, this is an additional 4% of the final value fee, so if in the category you trade in your normal final value fees are 8% then they will increase to 12% fees – that’s an increase of 50% to your eBay invoice.
“For sellers whose level is Below Standard, there will be an additional 4 percentage points fee on the standard final value fees at the time the item sells. For example, a final value fee would increase from 8% to 12%.
In some cases we cap final value fees depending on the category and if a seller has a Shop subscription. However, this additional 4 percentage points fee is not subject to category caps and will be applied to the total item price, including postage.
Above Standard and eBay Top-rated Sellers will not be affected by this change.”
– eBay
What to do if your eBay account is Below Standard
If you are adjudged to be Below Standard by eBay, there are only two courses of action open to you.
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Trade out of the situation
Option 1 is to trade until your account is restored to standard. In the mean time your listings are likely to be demoted to the bottom of search results, you won’t be able to have a Featured or Anchor shop and you’ll face a significant increase on your eBay fees for sales that you do get.
The problem with this is that due to the listing visibility sanctions your sales are likely to be lower than normal making it difficult to increase sales and improve your metrics.
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Take a holiday
The second option available to you is to put your eBay account on a self imposed holiday. At some point in the future the transactions that put you below standard will drop off your eBay metrics and your account will be rehabilitated.
This doesn’t mean you won’t be able to sell on eBay, you simply use your other eBay Business account which all sellers should have considered and have ticking over for just such an emergency. If you don’t already have a second eBay account you may be stymied by listing restrictions on a new or dormant account.
It’s important to note, we are not suggesting that if you receive a suspension or outright ban from eBay that you try to avoid it by opening a new account. Generally however, listing restrictions based on performance only relate to the account they are imposed on, not to all the eBay accounts that you may manage.
eBay surcharges, additional fees or fines (however you wish to term them) are punitive and they’re meant to be. It means that eBay consider that you’re failing to provide the service that they deem buyers want and expect in 2018. You may think that eBay standards are too onerous and unfair for sellers, we wrote about this lately. The problem is that if you want to trade on their marketplace then you have to follow their policies and meet their standards.
Has your account fallen below standard and have eBay imposed their 4% fines? Let us know in comments below.
9 Responses
Well this could effect anyone. Take out cancelling transactions for being out of stock and not dealing with cases that is in your “control”.
Late Delivery defects is not. It is our only concern as we don’t control delivery times, and eBay do not even manage the late delivery defects properly “pretty incompetent in fact”.
Their own system does not even make sense, it has to do with Dispatch times and should even include NON tracked items, if you can “prove you have dispatched on time” they should be removing the defects. We cannot control actual delivery times.
Even when items are tracked they STILL do not always remove them, every defect we have 0.92% right now is for Late Delivery and every item we can prove what time we dispatched by simply going into click and drop. It is a farce and getting them removed is a long time consuming exercise.
Worst happens we would take option two, we have a zombie eBay business account we could use. Am lucky also as I have 3 addresses if required if they decided to cross reference accounts. Also I think we would close before we got to below standard anyway, would not pay them for the treatment.
The biggest problem is that when your account goes Below Standard, your rankings are getting so bad that you barely make a sale. This means that it’s almost impossible to improve your rankings as your listings are simply not showing up in first page results anymore.
You can of course list lots of cheap items, below retail value as £0.99 auctions but sometimes it can take hundreds of sales to improve your seller status. It can be done but it’s not easy and it’s not cheap.
Not sure what’s the idea behind this additional 4% punishment when you can barely make any sales with Below Standard account. eBay should maybe offer some kind of system where person can just start over from scratch (it would have to be limited of course so that it’s not used by scammers etc.)
ebay has been a wonderful platform for sellers and the sellers fees are fair. They should be doing all they can to incentviise their employees (aka sellers)who work so hard for them
Yeah ebay have also handily removed the option for sellers to see what ratings buyers have given them. Therefore if you fall below this non transparent standard for selling they can charge you another 4% on top of their already about 10-13%.
Sellers cannot protect themselves by banning or even seeing which ratings buyers are giving them!
How can this even be legal? “well charge you an extra 4% for falling below our standards, but we are going to remove the tool so you can’t see which buyers are leaving you unfair low DSR’s so you can block them.”
I don’t need to mention how this extra charge could be manipulated by Ebay to give them more revenue, an absolute disgrace.
no ones forced to use ebay?
Absolute rip off Ebay, i am 60 years old and my son used to manage my ebay account before he went abroad, now they are loading me with an extra 4% on all sales as i have not been able to manage my account, I phoned them to be told that my ratings were down because i had taken items off saying they were out of stock, do they expect me to only sell to ebay customers? i have taken them off because people have bought them when they have come to my unit or from Spock or local adverts.
I am seriously looking at cancelling ebay. They also charge me £20 a month for a shop and then penalize me for using it, their suggestion was that i spend 1 hour a week going through my ratings and performances. I have enough trouble listing an item.
Ebay are trying to control every seller, We should all put our shops on holiday for a week see how they would like that.