eBay are turning to new ways to make money which don’t involve rinsing sellers for more fees in the form of final value fees. However they are looking to extract more money from sellers in other ways with the primary methods being the new eBay Payments program which is now in beta as well as eBay Advertising.
eBay Payments will bring fees from PayPal to eBay and may offer small savings to sellers but will boost eBay’s bottom line. We have no visibility on what Adyen will be charging eBay, but we do know that eBay will be taking a cut in the middle and with millions of daily sales the revenues to eBay will be significant.
eBay Advertising is where the real money is however and takes two forms – advertising from third parties and advertising in the form of eBay Promoted Listings from eBay sellers.
eBay are moving all their advertising inhouse starting with the adverts purchased manually and in the future we expect to see all programatic advertising (bulk buying in an automated way by bidding) to also become an inhouse function for eBay.
We have already seen eBay heavily pushing eBay Promoted listings on sellers and indeed Promoted listings can buy you visibility in places where your listings normally wouldn’t even appear – for instance on eBay.com you can buy visibility in the Accepted Offers Tab even if your listings doesn’t have a Best Offer enabled on it.
eBay tell us that, based on data from May through June, 2016 for 40,000 listings that had sales before they were promoted and had promoted listing sales after they were promoted, visibility on the site is boosted by as much as 30%. That’s a massive increase in visibility and gives sellers an increased chance of a sale – don’t forget you only pay the eBay Promoted Listings fee when you get a sale.
eBay.com have already rolled out an eBay Promoted Listings Lite version of the program for private sellers using the quick listing tool. You can add the feature to Fixed Price listings although they must be priced around eBay price guidance and below standard sellers are blocked from promoting their listings.
eBay Promoted Listings Lite sets a fixed fee for you and currently there are no tracking metrics on how successful the promotion is, you’ll only be able to see when you get a sale although eBay say that they aim to build tracking for future versions.
Will you pay eBay more in fees in the future?
eBay sellers will undoubtedly be paying more in the future – eBay Payments will ensure that eBay get a greater cut of every sale on the site and even those sellers who offer alternative payment methods currently will end up being forced to direct payemnts through Adyen in the future. Don’t think that because you offer credit or debit card payments now that you’ll still be using your own merchant account once eBay Payments roll out.
eBay will also be pushing promoted listings and sellers who don’t avail themselves of the feature will find it increasingly difficult to launch new products onto the marketplace and get visibility. Of course there are options for some such as using eBay Deals to buy instant eBay Best Match ranking based on recent sales, but if you have a product and are hoping to get to the top of search results it will be made considerably more difficult if you don’t pay for promotion.
Third parties who advertise on eBay will also end up giving a greater cut of their budget directly to eBay as they ditch the ad agencies and bring all eBay Advertising inhouse. This is a good thing from the seller perspective as the greater eBay’s revenues that don’t come from selling fees less pressure their is to raise seller fees to satisfy investor’s returns.
11 Responses
Ebay are a FC. They are very much or were one thing and have seen how well another thing are doing so are trying to become the other thing forgetting that the other company are better at being the other thing and by trying to be the other thing they stop being the thing they actually were good at. Now they’re going to be nothing.
Do I invest in my own websites and paid for product placement and online advertising or do I shovel more money down the useless black hole that is eBay given that their so called marketplace is royally broken in so many ways.
We will only use eBay as an advertising adjunct – no more no less – and not as a primary sales platform.
You do not need an MBA to work out where you should be placing your effort and money.
Been saying for ages that Ebay’s strategy for growth is to take more off sellers. They have no strategy for growing sales, so can only keep shareholders happy by taking more off those who sell with them.
The only sensible option is to push your independent website, using each Ebay sale to drive sales there.
If you only sell on Ebay, your business will be seriously at risk from these greedy clueless b****rds .
You will be paying for their failures through higher final value fees, higher shop subscriptions and eventually higher payment fees too. If it moves on Ebay, they’re gonna hike the fees.
I think you should have a web site as a back up plan and always try and grow business on there as well as eBay / Amazon. All markets only have one interest and that is their own business, you stop selling on eBay another seller takes your place, the sale still goes ahead, they still make money.
Pay to play…..Am afraid it is just fleecing us all with more fees through the back door.
Put simply they have run out of ideas. Regressive backwards draconian defects system is just playing into Amazon’s hands AGAIN like they did last time back in 14/15.
It is a shame, but greed rules, and the current eBay powers are all about greed and short term thinking.
On the other hand this is WHEN sellers need to get out there and say enough is enough and get behind other markets, plus other markets need to get behind the sellers.
Hopefully Weing and his Cronies will be out soon, anyone can see they are bringing nothing to the party.
Be careful paying Ebay money
I paid them thousands over six years and went out my way to protect my top rated seller account
My feedback was immaculate but following a review of my account they closed it and banned me from selling.
I lost my business
Having been self employed for years I’m really struggling to get back into full time employment. I feel like I’ve wasted so many years on eBay where I could have built a career where I’d now be able to provide for my family.
@tyler
True I haven’t lost my business, I still have my cabinet and website but for my business Ebay is where the market is.
I do list on Facebook Instagram etc but rarely sell there. (Amazon isn’t suitable)
Being a top rated account I was selling a lot of high end watches on commission for other dealers so I lost that element of the business
Of course there is more to it, I was selling a Chinese brand of watches which the Richmont group took exception to.. which you might think is fair enough but this restriction came six months after I had ceased selling those products and in spite of many high end sales of Rolex/Breitling/omega watches so I feel it is harsh.
They still let me buy on the site so I’ve got some bargains for my watch cabinet at least !
So we pay ebay say an extra £50 a month and get say an extra £1k in sales in a month.
What exactly is the downside?
Sure yes by all means have your own website. Will you be spending less on marketing your own site each month than you pay in ebay fees? Will your sales on your own site be higher than ebay sales?
Can take some time to get that well known.
I recall a time when we were only small group of people queuing to get on a flight having NOT paid for speedy boarding, now I notice a lot fewer people “paying” and the normal que is 3/4x the length . The good thing is, you all get on the flight
Unfortunately, this will not be the same:
“sellers who don’t avail themselves of the feature will find it increasingly difficult to launch new products onto the marketplace and get visibility”
With the current Promoted Listings system they use. those that pay more, a bigger percentage of their sales, get the highest rankings.
If you don’t opt into the promotion your listings will not be seen, so no sales, so yes just a backdoor way of getting more money out of sellers, I would feel they were being more honest if they just put up the fees.
Makes sense now why they are hiding the banners for special offers. They would rather you use the promote your listings and the extra percentage.
Got an email the other day offering a call back to go through my current promoted listings. Basically told to consider paying more even though the current percentage is above the recommended with very few sales.
Ran a test on a special offer with max 80% off over 200 items, go and check to see what is displayed. Still no banners at the top or strike through pricing. Yet big companies like Superdry get all of this.