eBay is to level the playing field by removing final value fee volume discounts. Announced to sellers via email today, this effectively raises fees for high volume sellers with the 4% and 8% discounts being ended. The news comes outside the normal eBay Seller Release flow with the last eBay Business Updated landed just a week ago – you can read other news that may impact your business here.
Sellers who turned over more than £25,000 a month could access a 4% discount and sellers turning over more than £200,000 a month received 8% discount on their final value fees. These discounts will end on the 20th of March 2022.
We want to share some news with you about an update to fees which will affect some sellers.
– eBay
From 20 March 2022, business sellers will no longer be eligible for final value fee volume discounts. This will only affect you if your total sales volume has been at least £25,000 in the previous three months.
This change will take effect for all sales from that date onwards, regardless of when the item was listed, relisted or renewed.
You can get more information about business seller fees here.
Thank you for selling with eBay.
Sellers who didn’t have the high volume to benefit from the fees might see this as a levelling of the playing field, but sellers over the higher level will be dismayed at an effective fee increase of 8.7%. This impacts eBay top business sellers with the highest turnovers.
One side impact is that sellers who were slightly below the £25,000 or £200,000 levels will now no longer have the incentive to increase their sales to access the next level of discounts. There was previously a big incentive to up sell through rates to break the discount barrier and have the discount applied to all sales but this has now been removed.
If you operated at high volume then it’s not a great news day for you. If your sales were below £25,000 a month, then there is no impact at all to you barring the removal of the incentive to grow your sales to access the discounts.
17 Responses
Is there anybody left on Ebay who makes those numbers lol
eBay is to “level the playing field” by removing final value fee volume discounts:
-This is horrible precedent to set, where the Managed Payment fees could be raised so abruptly, without any assigned reason. This is not really good enough. Alas in just over 30 days a this magnitude of fee increase comes in.
-Leveling by making everyone competing with a hand tied behind their back, whilst draining more margins from the sellers – is a very disingenuous way to “level the playing field”.
-With almost every other transaction provider, you get a better rate the more revenue you do. This seems very greedy & disincentive you from adding more inventory to eBay, instead build website/other channels.
-They needed this to get buy in from larger sellers to get onto Manged Payment, now that we’re on-boarded, they get rid of the bridge from behind us.
Would suggest having a chat with your customer service, to make your view known.
ebay fees going up and up all the time, want extra money from advertising. Threat of higher fees if you are not at certain standard due to seller metrics when buyers click not as described.
Maybe with all the extra money they will become more professional in the way they handle returns and cases or do away with service metrics.
If service metrics are that important to the buyer experience like ebay claim, why not show customers the percentage of items delivered on time to buyers and let them decide if that is acceptable or not that a seller has x percentage success rate for delivered on time or has cancelled x amount of orders.
Or even crazier idea maybe they will be able to afford a team to start clamping down on all the private sellers who run a business and do little to help the site when it comes to buyer confidence.
Start supporting sellers a little more instead of everything being about punishment on the site. We get enough of a kicking from buyers and don’t need it from ebay as well.
You cant trust Ebay. Anyone who thought you could run a stable business on Ebay, just got shot in the foot,
What a load of rubbish. Levelling the playing field…Why shouldn’t sellers who already give Ebay 10s of thousands a pounds a month get some sort of discount? All Ebay seem to do is try and bleed sellers dry for less and less in return. Promoted listings now are almost mandatory to get any sales, so are effectively a fee increase, and they have this new awful pay per click thing as well. You can give Ebay 100% of the sales in fees. Does Ebay not understand we are working for ourselves not just to enrich Ebay. What a joke!
Oh wow, this is disgraceful and just a simple way for eBay to make extra revenue. I read tamebay comments regularly and think its the same people with the same moaning – but with this one and some of the updates recently I am starting to think they are right. Managed payments will save you money – it doesn’t, but I don’t mind it – although my paypal turnover is now much lower so fees are a little higher. They keep changing the item specific requirements and half of those requirements are not applicable to products – because I know my products better than eBay.
Now after working hard the extra discount is being removed that kept eBay at an okay price – eBay will now be more expensive than Amazon I believe for what we sell and over the last year Amazon sales have grown 3 times faster than eBay.
Milking sellers for every last penny will mean we stop working hard to grow eBay and instead look at alternative ways to drive customers to our own sites or even dare I say it – Amazon. That is a scary thought.
eBay is a dying platform and we’ll reduce our advertising spend to take into account the increase in fees.
They seem to be squeezing more and more fees out of sellers without offering any benefit.
If anyone is unhappy then just vote with your feet. If it’s no longer viable to sell on the platform then simply leave. We moved our core business from eBay months ago and are now far happier and far more profitable.
Fees will continue to rise you can count on that. It’s just when the profitability breakpoint arrives that will decide what move you make next.
Just read the comments on the Facebook eBay adverts to realise just how far the platform has fallen. Hardly surprising to read comments of “rip-off fees” and even to me some hate filled vitriol against the platform is breathtaking.
Just another desperate attempt by Ebay to continue you showing an upward trend in profits. Anyone with half a business brain fully understands volume discounts for customers is the way to grow a business and loyalty and pay their wages. With some of the lowest retail values on any Platform taking a few more % out of sellers margins may just be the tipping point that will see Ebay really lose its market share. Whoever thought this latest move was a good idea should be sacked and must have the business acumen of an armchair I am staggered.
eBay’s UK demise began with the appointment of Rob, who in his own words, was going to improve eBay for the sellers. Well that worked out well didn’t it! Rob is off to pastures new and eBay is dead on its feet. We have basically pulled away from this toxic platform as they don’t support the sellers and the sales had completely died.
Having run this through our eBay fees calculation spreadsheet, this is going to hit us very, very hard.
It’s been on my mind for a while now, but I think we’re going to leave the platform and invest the money in our website and marketing instead.
I’m afraid I do think as others have said, that it’s a dying and irrelevant platform and we cannot go on being squeezed and squeezed like we are at the moment.
I’ve told eBay ‘concierge’ this, and I’m awaiting their response.
I notice Argos have left eBay, a friend pointed out their eBay shop page now says ‘As of January 2022, Argos no longer sells via eBay’.
I wonder if this is related? That’s a big loss for eBay.
They left because they are shit
I always saw these discounts as a bonus. I actively tried to put prices up to not trash my market and smaller sellers. My business was focused on winning buyers based on service. Most of the time we were not the cheapest, but we had a larger market share of individual skus, so this worked. Any extra margin, I recycled with more stock investment. This announcement will affect sellers who use the discount to push prices down – and these sellers will no doubt be the ones concerned.
Tbh ebay is cheap compared to other marketplaces, and even my own Webstore, when one factors in hosting, development, Google ads etc.