Joined: 12 Nov 2005 Last Visit: 22 Mar 2020 Posts: 4574 Location: In the House of the Cosmic Frog
Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2008 6:02 am Post subject: What is it with ebay lately?
I was cruising through the RPG section on ebay and noticed that there were currently 6,382 auctions listed in the area. Last year this number was around ten to twelve thousand. Anyone have any idea why the numbers seem so much lower? Competition? New Feedback system? It seems as if the numbers have been steadily declining for awhile now. _________________ "This is cool."
Joined: 25 Jul 2007 Last Visit: 18 Jun 2017 Posts: 148 Location: Cairns, Queensland, Australia
Posted: Sat Aug 16, 2008 12:23 am Post subject:
yes its been a steady decline from christmas (much like their stock value aparently ).. they do usually run low list days etc which boost numbers, there was I saw an advert the other day where you could list multiple coppies of the same item and only pay one insertion fee, I would imagine instead of listing 1 auction with 10 of the same items you can now list them all individually and so it looks like "9" extra items on the ebay counting system.. I'm sure that this is not what they had intended to do </sarcasm>
Brette:)
edit: oh and its Gencon at the moment don't forget
Joined: 13 Feb 2008 Last Visit: 18 Sep 2008 Posts: 8 Location: Florida
Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2008 7:49 pm Post subject:
As a Ebay seller, I have a bit of a different perspective. Ebay seems to be getting out of the business of auctions by small sellers and positioning itself to compete head to head with Amazon by primarily carrying fixed priced items from large shops and vendors.
Although their listing fees have been going down, their final value fee (the cut Ebay gets out of the final value of a seller's auction) rose from 5% earlier this year to the present 8.75% and is scheduled to go to 15% mid September! Coupled with Ebay's cap on what sellers can charge shipping and the upcoming requirement that a seller must only accept payments through paypal (which Ebay owns) or Ebay's yet unreleased electronic payments processing system, both of which will cost a seller yet more fees, soon Ebay will be taking 20 to 35% of the final value of an auction! Worse, while I can not prove it, I have a strong suspicion that the big boys that are left on Ebay, while paying out far more in listing fees in absolute terms, are paying less per item in relative terms to list their stuff.
Needless to say, a lot of small sellers like myself are NOT happy about this and will probably take our business to other venues. I'll miss the eyeballs that come with listing stuff on Ebay, but not the increasingly outrageous fees.
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It isn't isolated to RPG's either...
Coupled with Ebay's cap on what sellers can charge shipping and the upcoming requirement that a seller must only accept payments through paypal (which Ebay owns) or Ebay's yet unreleased electronic payments processing system, both of which will cost a seller yet more fees, soon Ebay will be taking 20 to 35% of the final value of an auction! Worse, while I can not prove it, I have a strong suspicion that the big boys that are left on Ebay, while paying out far more in listing fees in absolute terms, are paying less per item in relative terms to list their stuff.