In today’s eBay UK Seller Release Spring 2019 eBay set out their strategy for the year ahead but, in the most part, nothing particularly revolutionary for sellers and nothing that will cause too much immediate heart ache.
Perhaps the most important change to note is a rolling back of the eBay Product Based Shopping Experience on the seller side – eBay still want to compress listings in search and roll offers from multiple sellers into a single product listing for new buyers to eBay who prefer this format. However eBay will no longer insist that sellers match listings to the eBay Catalogue and instead place greater reliance on Item Specifics to assist them in matching listings in order to display features such as product reviews.
A change across eBay worldwide will see the end of short duration fixed price listings. In the future the only listing duration available for Buy It Now will be Good ’til Cancelled listings – today’s eBay UK Seller Release announces this change takes effect from April. Many sellers already use this format exclusively and it shouldn’t have a fee impact for those with a listing allowance and an eBay Shop and Private Sellers will have a 1,000 free listing allowance from March. eBay will largely automate the change with any listings submitted from April onwards with a shorter duration automatically launching on the site in the Good ’til Cancelled format.
A new feature will roll out to all sellers by April enabling them to send offers to potential buyers watching their listings – even if they don’t have eBay Best Offer enabled on the particular listing. (A wry smile here to all those sellers watching competitor’s listings who may start to receive offers to actually buy!)
Finally eBay announced some increases to eBay Motors fees when selling vehicles on the marketplace.
16 Responses
Simply cannot see the point of this.
Is there some of sort of economy saving in this for Ebay?
Looks like this was decided pretty quickly and rushed out – the message boards on tool providers boards show they had no warning about this either.
Does someone at Ebay sit and there and think they can’t have a seller release that doesn’t cause headaches for sellers.
Surely there’s something we can f*** up for them. I know ! Listing durations. Great idea. Make them all GTC, so they will sink to the bottom like the mud in a river.
The only saving grace is they haven’t kicked sellers in the nuts with more fee hikes.
But with promoted listings, who needs fee hikes. That’s so 2018.
Nonsence to allow best offer on all listings.
Now we have more stuff to attend to instead of concentrating on selling.
Now we will get all the idiots offering £1 for a £500 item.
God help us!
Having now had the official Ebay email, the release can be summed up thus:
Ebay’s efforts to force sellers into Shop By Product has failed.
So now it’s back to Item Specifics which will become mandatory instead, with categories dragged in at unspecified future dates.
And you will only be able to list as GTC, losing all the other fixed price formats which have been there since Ebay started.
And this will happen on April 1st. Henceforth known as Ebay Fools Day.
How appropriate.
Chris you are right…. buyers will now get bombarded with masses of stupid offers. The amount of times i have put in offers only to find that the seller rejects anything but a 50p discount or something silly on a £50 item etc. The other day i put ina sensible offer for a £180 printer…. the reply was denied, £179 offer. Sorry but if you are only going to reduce by a £1 on a £180 items then dont waste my time. plus it took a day to reply by which time i had seen a better offer elsewhere but couldn’t go for it incase they accepted this one!
best offer should have a min discount that can be offered to avoid wasting buyers time.
Hello. im new here so please bear with me, Also commenting for a friend.
The forced GTC, he has 1500 items that he lists within his free allowance on the 1st of Every Month. 30day fixed listing. He is now worried as unless he remembers to end the listing, he would get charged 1500 x listing fee on months that are 31 days,. Is that correct?
All the best
Listing GTC on the 1st of any month is not “Compulsory”. Just list around the 27th of the month, and with the continuous GTC listings you will not be double charged until around 24 months later. When you get near that, then cancel and relist around the 27th again.
Chris, I don’t think you are right there. When I had over 3000 listings, well before there was a free listing allowance I would have noticed if I was charged “twice” for listing, during those 31 day months (another £600 at least).
Anyway, how does this square when you list in dribs and drabs “every single day” over the monthly period.
Also, on my Seller Hub “recurring monthly fixed price allowance,” the start dates are the 1st of the month and the end dates are the 1st of the following month.
When I look at my “Active” listings on the right hand side, there is a “Time left” countdown. In your Scenario this countdown would always be the same for every item listed but mine spread between 1 minute and 29 days 23 hours 59 minutes, depending on when they were 1st listed
Chris, your quote:–“Example: Launch 1,500 listings with your Featured Shop today the 1st March for free, they renew on the 1st April, the 1st May and the 31st May… In May you get your 1,500 listings for free on the 1st and on the 31st you get billed additional fees for 1,500 listings costing you an additional £75.00.
Below, copy of my “Featured shop fixed price allowance”. As you will see, these are for a “FULL” month and not just a 30 day month. Shown is last 3 monthly allowances.
Featured Shop Fixed Price Monthly Allowance
Recurring Monthly Fixed Price Allowance
Start:1 Feb 2019 at 12.00am GMTEnd:1 Mar 2019 at 12.00am GMTUsed/Left:838
/ 662ebay.co.uk
Featured Shop Fixed Price Monthly Allowance
Recurring Monthly Fixed Price Allowance
Start:1 Jan 2019 at 12.00am GMTEnd:1 Feb 2019 at 12.00am GMTUsed/Left:900
/ 600ebay.co.uk
Featured Shop Fixed Price Monthly Allowance
Recurring Monthly Fixed Price Allowance
Start:1 Dec 2018 at 12.00am GMTEnd:1 Jan 2019 at 12.00am GMTUsed/Left:916
/ 584ebay.co.uk
I never use GTC as I sell collectables. I consider GTC penalises collectables as items are mostly one-offs and if an item just relists for months with no sale it will be dumped to the bottom of search. Currently I relist unsold items with a break of a couple of weeks and sometimes a change of title – I list using Auctiva. Since shifting from eBay relisting to Auctiva “new listing” I have had some relief from eBay visibility problems and increased sales. Being forced into GTC makes me wary and if I cancel hundreds of listings every month rather than let them auto relist will this trigger an algorithm to penalise my search results. Not happy!