Changes to Ebay.com.au

[Andrew]

It's late and i'm tired so I could be mis-reading this announcement but this appears to be a very thinly veiled excuse for a basic rise in Ebay fees.
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/au/201107.shtml ... 7-26105705

Specifically;
26 July 2011 | 10:59AM EST

From September 2011, eBay will make a number of changes on eBay.com.au that will impact sellers, including changes to fees. In recognition of the changing Australian retail landscape, the fee changes are aimed at encouraging professional and business sellers to list more Buy It Now items in Stores. The changes will also enable eBay to better differentiate and incentivise professional, business and consumer sellers.


Why the change to pricing?
Retail in Australia is evolving rapidly with more consumers than ever before looking to purchase items online. With increased exposure to a variety of online shopping options, both locally and overseas, the format in which consumers purchase those items is dominated by fixed price. Future growth in ecommerce will primarily come from Fixed Price formats, such as Buy It Now which is already the most common way to shop on and offline and accounts for the majority of sales on eBay.com.au today.

eBay needs to continue evolving to stay ahead of the trends in ecommerce and remain a valuable marketplace for all of its sellers. To do this, eBay needs to better differentiate between professional, business and consumer sellers. The price changes outlined below are therefore designed to help encourage professional and business sellers to list items primarily in the Fixed Price, Buy It Now format using eBay Stores.

In addition, consumer sellers have asked us to reduce the upfront risk when selling on eBay.com.au by removing insertion fees. Through their higher engagement with the site, consumer sellers are among eBay’s best buyers, therefore encouraging them to sell more keeps them actively engaged and buying on the site which benefits other sellers. For consumer sellers, auctions will remain an engaging way to sell and for buyers, an exciting way to buy second hand items or items of undetermined value on eBay.com.au.



Changes to fees on eBay.com.au – from September 22


Changes to non-Store fees

Eligible sellers will be able to list up to 30 single quantity listings per month in any format with zero insertion fees (excludes Powersellers, Stores or sellers registered as a business on eBay)
Final value fees will increase from 5.25% to 7.9%, capped at $49.95 for each of the first 30 listings per month
Insertion fees remain as they are today for sellers who have exceeded the monthly 30 free insertion fee limit as well as PowerSellers, Store holders and sellers registered as a business on eBay, with no cap or sliding scale on the new final value fee of 7.9%

So for example if you previously listed a jacket say at $99 with an insertion fee of $1.50 they would now be waiving that, but if the jacket sold for $500 previously the final value fee would have been $31.50 whilst after the changes happen it will rise to $47.40, meaning an overall increase of $14.40?
Please tell me i'm missing something and surely they don't imagine we think they're doing us a favour. I can only presume that other Countries will do the same over time.

 

[dmar836]

Andrew,
Ebay USA did the same thing this year. It is true and has the effect you mentioned. Add to this that for all the charges, Ebay does NOT enforce it's rules. When they profit from every sale, whether fraudulent or not, there isn't much incentive to enforce policies. They also recently added a fee structure to fees to shipping charges to "stop" the high shipping charge scam. This does nothing to stop the high shipping scam but in the guise of discouraging it it does ensure they get a cut of any overcharges that happen.
Ebay is raising it's fees to the point that other competition will soon start. It is still the cheapest and easiest auction BUT it also fails to offer the services of other auctions. Substantiation of historical items is a big one that comes to mind.
JMO,
Dave

 

[philip.ed]

Would you be sad to see sellers steer away from eBay?

 

[Jason]

Its eBay.au's response to the brick & mortar shops strategies to win back customers who have gone online to shop eg: In-store luxury cinemas at Myer. I'm sure eBay has done their homework and figure that a very large slice of their future profits will come from online sales by medium sized businesses, and they don't want the large corporations trying to pull back sales into their real stores. Seems like they're structuring things to make it more attractive for virtual stores to sell in the manner that online shoppers want.

But it also sounds like the GFC has caught up with eBay, as it has with many businesses in Australia only quite recently, and the fee increases reflects that. But really, how much inflationary pressure can a paper company feel?

 

[asiamiles]

For a few years eBay has been targetting professional sellers, businesses, but the hefty fees and lack of security has I think made most of these see running their own websites as being a better option, leaving eBay with the job of winning back the private sellers it has increasingly alienated. With the economy as it is and eBay sales being down, there's not much incentive for people spend a lot of time and money on listing something that might not sell. The 50 free listings a month seems to be a way of luring back the individual, and by hiking up the final value fee, more than make up for the loss of listings fees.

 

[RCSignals]

It's all too much when you think eBay started as a place to sell Pez dispensers