Coming Tuesday will be some assistance from eBay for those sellers who are forced to close their business due to the Coronavirus. It will include waiving eBay shop fees for sellers who put their shop into hard holiday mode.
In order to take advantage of the waiving eBay shop fees offer, you will need to use the out-of-stock option to hide your eBay listings or end your listings. Using normal eBay Holiday settings isn’t sufficient as if someone has bookmarked your listings they could still make a purchase. The out-of-stock option allows your Good ‘Til Cancelled listings to be hidden from search results when the quantity is 0. As soon as you increase the quantity again, the listing will reappear in searches.
To ensure you can reduce your eBay fees to zero, and to help you retain your sales history for longer, from now on eBay now keep your out-of-stock listings active for 180 consecutive days before ending them automatically. Previously this was just 90 days.
For sellers who use hard holiday settings putting all of their listings on 0 stock using the out-of-stock feature, eBay will waive shop fees for April and May. If you only put the out-of-stock feature for part of a month, if you are on hard holiday settings for at least 13 consecutive days eBay will waive 50% of your shop subs.
The page should be live on eBay at some point on Tuesday so that you can apply for the waiving eBay shop fees offer.
eBay are reminding sellers that if listings have been out-of-stock for an extended period of time, you may want to use other eBay tools and features to help kick-start sales when you restock. This might include providing recommended item specifics, using negotiation tools such as Best Offer or Offers to buyers, Multi-buy and/or Promoted Listings.
26 Responses
It’s a sensible move, that goes some way to help sellers me, who have chosen to abstain from selling non-essential items at the moment. I switched on my holiday settings a fortnight ago, so this is welcome news.
Once this awful situation is over, perhaps eBay could temporarily change their algorithm, so that those who have voluntarily chosen to remove non-essential items for the common good, might be rewarded with greater visibility for a short period, over and above those who have been determined to list non-essential items, and thus hampering the delivery of essential stuff.
Even if they don’t, for several months after the crisis ends, I will be taking a peek at sellers’ sold listings, and making damn sure that I only buy from sellers who ceased their non-essential sales for a while. I may perhaps be the only buyer to understand this crucial (and moral) distinction, but I suspect there will be many more and, with the ill feeling recorded in the press, possibly hundreds of thousands more, who have been shocked at the attitude expressed by some sellers, and may wish to exercise their ability to have a quick look at a sellers’ sales before they make a purchase.
And of course, there’s nothing to stop sellers from mentioning in their listings that they refrained from listing non-essential items for the common good, and urging potential buyers to support this sentiment with a purchase or two.
Just sayin’.
Climb down from your high horse.
Out of interest what is your Ebay shop.
I’d be interested to see it.
Is there an announcement from eBay on this?
I don’t understand why they can’t just suspend shop fees on any shop that has to close. The out of stock option just means you are very likely to carry on getting stung for the relisting fees,
Call me cynical but you only get a refund on your listing fees if you have had no stock showing over a billing cycle only. They have announced this smack bang in the middle of a billing cycle (coincidence…I don’t think so!). This means you are going to have to close your shop and show no stock until 15th May if you want refunds on the relisting fees too. Depending on how many items you have this can be quite costly if you reopen before then.
For me, it would be cheaper to close the shop and cancel the items and keep them in the unsold section and relist when reopening as my listing fees cost more than my shop fee.
This is what I was crying out for last week and loads of other sellers not just double bubble fees next month.
I just ended my eBay store 3 days ago, and have lost all that sales history of course.
If I open again they should be able to be relisted, zero out and put in holiday mode.
I would just like to preserve all my photos etc till things can get going again, which by the looks of it will be while.
Anyway genuine assistance this time and it will help getting kickstarted again.
A bear with us were working on it
Give us a week or so dont shut your shop might have been helpful
We like our fivers without creases
So much for the fee deferral service i was approved and they have still taken the funds.
To be fair
I think billing cycles
May have an influence
On when the deferring happens
I was approved for fee deferral as well and all fees have been taken today. Just had 20 minute chat line with eBay and the gist of it was “Let me share that as the previous invoice has already been generated that is the reason it has been taken complete after this the invoice generate will have the 50% of the transaction and it will be attempted for further 2 months accordingly”
I pointed out that I need help now with a large invoice and not next month when I have a smaller invoice etc, etc.
Very apologetic and will take the matter to his manger and get back to me within 48/72 hours – I can just see that happening !!
“if someone has bookmarked your listings they could still make a purchase.”
You’re way behind the times. That’s not been the case for several years. There’s a setting in holiday settings that blocks all purchases and it works.
I Think this is a vast improvement over the fee deferral option.
For those of us who are still trading and sending out items, eBay need to look at extending the delivery times, as I’am having lots of buyers complaining that orders aren’t arriving on time.
TBH only a moron would really expect items delivered in 2 days in the current climate, but there are plenty of them out there, and they have nothing better to do than complain….
ON BUY have cancelled all fees on everything.
But there you go maybe its because they are driven by greedy people who can see they are failing anyway so grabbing every last bit in their final dying act.
The good thing is as we were adding most of our ebay listings onto Amazon where currently sales are through the roof it is showing us that really now ebay is not a big part of the online world.
I am a big supporter of the fee deferral and think it a great move to help sellers keep cash in their businesses when things are so uncertain. The communications around fee deferrals haven’t been very clear to put it mildly. I thought I knew how it worked and when I read the page with the table on it, I didn’t have a clue what was going on.
eBay bills some people end of month (collects on 15th) and some people mid month (collects end of month). The eBay billing system is so monolothic that it would not have been possible for them to defer the “collections” of the mid-March fees. So those payments have just gone out. Nasty shock for some who thought they’d deferred, I’m sure.
The deferral will be part of the invoices issued today and those issued on 15th April so the next payments will be deferred to the two following. So anyone who had a bad day today is having a good day on 30th April and 150% days on 30th May and 30th June.
I personally think this is a really positive move by Ebay, a l ot of us comlained that the fee deferral wouldn’t save us much but that the shop subscriptions would make a big difference and it seems they have listened. For us our fixed costs are mainly staff premises, anchor shop fees and so this is a very useful saving for us and its a big thank you to Ebay from me.
Is this available to Hong Kong Sellers or China Mainland shipping from UK ?
We dont pay full vat because HMRC never checks ( also under declare import value)