eBay have updated their User Agreement to reflect the Good til’ cancelled GTC change for fixed price listing renewals coming in on the 1st of July.
When eBay ended the availability of short duration listings (1, 3, 5, 7, 10 and 30 days) and moved to Good til’ cancelled format only, a number of sellers complained that they could get double billed in a month. In particular if you listed your entire free allowance on the 1st of a month they would renew on the 31st and you’d be billed for the second set of listings. To avoid double billing (or billing when sellers stick within their free shop allowance) eBay are changing to a monthly billing cycle for fixed price listings as of the 1st of July.
Starting from 1 July 2019, eBay will migrate all existing Good ‘Til Cancelled listings to the new schedule meaning that no seller will ever be double billed Good ‘Til Cancelled Listings fees in a month from that date on.
- If the initial listing start date was on the 1st to 28th of a month, it will now always renew on the same day.
- If the initial listing start date was the 29th, 30th or 31st of a month, the exact duration will be adjusted in shorter months, but move back to the original day in all longer months.
eBay User Agreement Language GTC Change
“From 1 July 2019, your fixed-price listings will renew automatically once per calendar month until the quantities sell out or until you cancel the listing. The exact day of the month that the renewal takes place depends on the initial listing start date”
– eBay User Agreement
7 Responses
Personally I do not like this Good Till Cancelled set up on fixed price listings. As a small seller with often random items it does not work for me as items often end up pages and pages down the order never to be seen again. I am sure it is the same for some business sellers. You certainly loose the casual browser who gives up after looking at a few pages and I then rely on a range of very precise and very broad search terms / words to snag viewers. Also the longer items are on, the more competition they face from other sellers and also from price undercutting etc. I now just use Auction style (5 or 7 days) with best offer, though it is taking a while for buyers to understand they can make an offer on an auction style listing……..invariably i get a bid…..when they could have made an offer and possibly had the item sooner if their offer was acceptable. I don’t know who decides all this stuff at eBay, who is too scared to speak up in the meeting and object, but they never ask me ;o)
eBay has done a few things that work strongly in eBay’s favor by eliminating fixed-duration listings and implementing an evergreen GTC autorenewal.
1/ MOST IMPORTANTLY: Evergreen GTC has eliminated any ‘slack’ or idle time between seller item relisting, thus increasing listing fees and eBay’s GMV ‘inventory’.
Thus, all fixed-price listings now generate revenue at all times for eBay (without days or weeks not being active listings sitting idle not producing revenue for eBay).
2/ Forced GTC also increases the listing aging spectrum Best Match can factor in against sales velocity.
If any given listing starts at a neutral baseline when freshly listed, as sales accumulate against that listing (for multi-qty or multi-variation) it’s “good”, and fewer sales the listing yields is “bad”, *relatively speaking over time.
Now Best Match time-span aging variable has been widened from 30 days to infinity; instead of only 30 days of data to factor sales velocity of a given listing for Best Match purposes, in the future eBay will be able to factor all the way back to the original listing date (which could be months or years).
Whether the listing has 1 sale or tens of thousands, this time aging metric will now have a much longer runway in whatever way it may be factored into eBay’s Best Match calculus (oversimplifying, as a ratio of sales per-month, for example).
3/ GTC autorenewal also of course opens up the door for eBay to implement more fees at some point in the future. (eg. for listings that don’t chalk-up sales by X months) as a ‘fine’ for every time a renewed GTC doesn’t have a sale as a CTA penalty for the seller to reduce the price or do something else with the listing.
4/ Lastly, the infinite sales velocity spectrum is also important to eBay’s Promoted Listings strategy. As Wenig boasted on the Q1 earnings call:
“In terms of promoted listings, it’s still very early. If you look at analogs to eBay other marketplaces that have rolled out products that are similar, our penetration and monetization rate are still in the early stage of scaling and we know that because as great as it is that we’ve had 800,000 sellers promote listings that means that there are tens of millions that have not yet.” – Devin Wenig (eBay Q1 2019 Earnings Call)
With infinite aging GTC, the remedy to seller complaints of “slow sales” from eBay is certain to be “try promoted listings” (anecdotally, there are already many instances of sellers reporting this when speaking to eBay reps).
Totally agree with Dave. I am selling classic car parts that I have accumulated in over 40 years of classic car ownership.Most of my fixed price listings sell within a few days of being listed. If GTC listings are not brought back to top of listings when renewed they are unlikely to ever be seen or to sell. When I am searching for parts for my own cars ,which I do daily, I only look at items newly listed since the last time I looked and I would hazard a guess that that is what most regular classic car parts buyers do.
Unless ebay change the way renewed GTC listings show then I will be listing more auction items or will cancel my Fixed price listings a couple of days before they are due to renew and then just relist a few of them where there have been several watchers.
As a smaller seller GTC is harder to keep track of my inventory. I dislike it immensely.
Might as well focus on my own site. I go to eBay for ease and less headaches. I tried promoted listings and it didn’t really make a difference. I tried auctions – no better.