In their Q3 Investor call, eBay’s CEO Jamie Iannone revealed some interesting insights regarding the upcoming introduction of buyer fees on eBay UK. This is particularly interesting considering Poshmark in the US introduced buyer fees and had to roll back and remove them just 21 days later when shoppers stopped shopping.
Talking about the EU and UK, Jamie says it’s a different market to the US, saying “European consumers are more motivated to list their items online when it’s free to sell even when buyer fees are introduced“. Jamie added that “UK buyers and sellers are more open to buyer fees. It’s more standard in the market“.
But what about the money, by which we mean eBay’s profits. Jamie says that eBay will initially monetize their UK C2C volume in several ways, including advertising, cross-border fees and the sell-to-buy flywheel. – that is the expectation that when buyers sell they’ll also become more committed buyers. In Q4, eBay plan to ramp their managed shipping initiative in the UK and then plan introduce a buyer-facing fee on UK’s C2C transactions during Q1 of 2025.
Managed shipping leverages eBay’s scale and expertise to create a better experience for customers while generating incremental revenue and operating income dollars. Managed shipping is currently live for C2C pre-owned apparel listing in the UK. In Q4, eBay plan to expand managed shipping horizontally on an opt-out basis, before mandating the program for eligible items listed by UK C2C sellers during Q1 of 2025. This means eBay will make a shipping margin on every C2C item sold.
eBay are also defaulting new C2C listings to offer both pickup and shipping options. They have created a new eBay local landing page and map view for optimal browsing of nearby inventory.
Talking to the changes, Jamie says that “It’s a change to the marketplace, and we want to give sellers and buyers time to adjust their processes. So that’s why we’re going to ramp up managed shipping through Q4 and Q1. And why we decided to introduce the buyer fees in the back half of Q1“.
Talking directly to investors, Jamie said that “We believe based on where buyer fees are in the UK, we have the ability to remonetize these moving those fees around”, meaning that even though they will be removing the friction to selling that upfront fees for C2C sellers presents, eBay have plenty of ways to extract fees from these sales.
Jamie also confirmed that eBay have no plans to launch free selling in the US.
