Full FeedeBay lowers fees to salvage waning growth
Hoping to recover from its sluggish growth and support low-cost sellers, online auction giant eBay will implement a new pricing structure and tighter seller standards effective February 20, 2008 in the U.S.
One of the notable changes is the cutback on the cost of listing new items by 25% for auction bidding and 50% for fixed price markets. Moreover, the company will also award sales incentives and priority search ranking for “sellers that describe items accurately, ship on time, and ship at a fair price”. Some business analysts believe this scheme could aid in winning back sellers of items valued below $25.
Together with this new pricing scheme is a stricter selling standard to ward off any mediocre and abusive selling practices such as higher shipping fees and inaccurate product descriptions. In effect, sellers with low satisfaction ratings will not get any preferential treatment in terms of search ranking.
Although the U.S. sellers will test the waters, eBay will in time cascade these changes worldwide.
Read [Reuters]
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Think you’d better look more closely at the eBay rate reductions. Not all sellers benefit form the reduced listing fees, while the new final value fees were raised. He suspended the ability of sellers to post negative feedback for sellers. You also need to look into the allegations that eBay artificially inflated listing numbers during the recent boycott. This involved over a million bogus listings.
In Mr. Donohue’s efforts to grow the business, he’s managed to single-handedly splinter the base. Excellent, long time sellers are leaving in droves. You might want to look at sell through data, rather than listing volume. eBay is in big trouble.
on March 3, 2008 at 05:18 PM - LINK