Good news acording to the eBay news feed:
Zero insertion fees on qualifying auction-style listings on eBay.co.uk
From 12th March 2009, there’s no insertion fee if you’re a private seller and you list your item in an eligible category in the auction-style format with a starting price of up to 99p. Don’t forget, your first picture is also free.
If your item doesn’t sell, you don’t pay a penny. All you pay for are optional listing features and upgrades
Sounds great, but lets take a closer look.
* The free listing fee is only for those with a starting price of 99p and under, any thing else still has the same listing fee.
* The final value fee has again gone up. Instead of a sliding scale starting at 8.75% it’s now 10% up to a maximum of £40.
With a bit of a back of a fag packet (excel spreadsheet) during my lunch I’ve come up with these figures.
An item selling for £1 will now have a fee of 10p instead of 19p (9p up).
£5 will have a fee of 54p instead of 50p (4p up).
£8 will have a fee of 80p, the same as before.
£10 will have a fee of £1 instead of 98p (2p down).
£20 will have a fee of £2 instead of £1.85 (15p down).
£40 will have a fee of £4 instead of £3.25 (75p down).
£100 will have a fee of £10 instead of £6.40 (£3.60 down).
£150 will have a fee of £15 instead of £9.02 (£5.98 down).
£250 will have a fee of £25 instead of £14.27 (£11.73 down).
£400 will have a fee of £40 instead of £22.15 (£17.85 down).
£750 will have a fee of £40 instead of £34.90 (£5.10 down).
Only when an item sells for more than £1090.05 will you end being better off again. On top of this, with the forcing you to offer PayPal, eBay can take a second hit at your money.
The problem I had with it was that eBay were trying to claim that it was a bonus you didn’t pay the 10p to list (5p for CDs).
I try to sell all my stuff at a 1p/99p start with no reserve and tend to get some nice prices. Mobiles over £100, bits of hardware for more than £50. On these occasions I’m worse off.
However like you said, for those with crap, you can now keep listing them for 50p/99p until they sell without any listing fee. As someone with a draw full of old Chelsea programmes, this actually will help me out as around 25% didn’t sell first time and most ended up below the £8 mark.
So on the 12th March, I think I’ll start listing them again 🙂
I don’t think ebay are changing the rules to reduce the charges to sellers. But although you’re right that for any given auction that ends at more than GBP8 you will earn slightly less, you need to factor in the saving on the cost of multiple relistings. Before, it wasn’t worth listing low value items more than once because the second listing fee wiped out any possible profit. Now I can keep relisting 99p items until they go. I don’t know if ebay really want to be packed with 99p rubbish, but that’s what they’re going to get from me until they change the rules again.
It seems that eBay is truly becoming a kind of monster, and not the kind you find in Monsters, Inc.
I have seen a lot of comments on various sites related to online auction businesses where current or former eBay users are in an uproar over eBay’s greedy chicanery. Fortunately, there are now more and more Internet listing sites to bid on, buy and/or sell items where there are no listing fees or even final valuation fees. Will this hurt eBay in the long run? I guess that depends on one’s definition of both “hurt” and “greed”.