FeeBay has jumped the shark

The BBQ Pit
1

…and they don’t even seem to realise it yet.

In April, Ebay Stores were taken out of the general site search. (Up until that time, I was making 1-3 sales on average a day. After that, the number plummeted to more like 8 a month.) The items were still there, but with stores out of the general search, you had to know to click the checkbox for ‘Store Inventory’ on the left side of the screen. I imagine most people never noticed that little box, and many may have missed out on buying things they wanted, because they couldn’t find them.

On July 19th, Bill Cobb announced (to sellers, not to buyers) that in order to ‘Reset the Balance of the Marketplace’, Ebay will be raising the fees AND final value fee on Store items, with the intent of pushing people back to the auction format (which many had abandoned previously as too expensive). Further, they have stated they will ‘advantage all other products’ over store products, IOW, store items will be as good as invisible. Millions of items, and buyers can’t find them. You may want IT, but chances are, even if IT is there, you won’t find IT. Go, Ebay.

Now store owners are paying for…what? The chance to have their items listed invisibly? Store owners are closing their stores in droves. Big, big droves. Many of them also use the auction format, but they are not using it either, in protest, if they haven’t simply opened their own websites elsewhere, or gone to another auction site.

To mollify folks after the initial burst of outrage, Bill and Meg held a ‘Town Hall Meeting’. I didn’t attend. People who did said they were laughing and jolly up on the stage, but avoided answering any difficult questions, like how a 250% increase in fees (which some sellers report after running the numbers themselves) is really only 6%, and what about China? In other words, it was a total PR spin show, but only served to make sellers angrier.

Some store owners have listed ‘Fee Hike’ auctions in protest, or to alert their buyers that they are closing shop soon. These auctions, despite offering legitimate items for sale, are being pulled as fast as Ebay can find them, even if the words ‘fee hike’ are buried in the item description. This auction has not been pulled. I suspect Ebay knows it’s screwed either way: if they pull it early, Beavis will just go public that much sooner; if they don’t, he’ll go public later.

Meanwhile, sellers in China can list in stores and at auction for free. China is the biggest source of counterfeit clothing, purses and software on Ebay, yet Ebay does not remove these auctions (even if reported) because “they’re just a venue.”.

And oh yeah: they’re still trying to sell American sellers on opening stores. But they’re not telling them about the fee hike coming up in less than 2 weeks, nor that the items in stores will be effectively invisible.

I’d love to know who’s making some of these decisions at Ebay. And I’d like to know what they’re being paid to make them.

Ebay stock was down yesterday to a low of $23.66 ($23.63 today as I write this).

I wish there was another site with even half the traffic, because I’d go there in a heartbeat.

I forgot: this is the Pit. Here’s my ObSwearword: Fuck.

2

Is that what happened . . . ?

A few weeks ago, I was looking around ebay for a daybed, and found one, from a store, that I liked. The listing was literally minutes from expiring, and I needed to talk to my husband about the purchase first, but I saw that the seller (who, BTW, had tons of positive feedback, so presumably had been around for awhile) had indicated “9 available” and that only one bed had been purchased.

No problem, I thought. I’ll run it past the hubby and if he’s OK with it, I’ll just wait until the seller re-lists the remaining eight beds and then buy one.

Did I mention that was weeks ago?

I kept checking back at the store, and noticed that the seller’s listings in general were dwindling . . . and dwindling . . .

. . . and now the store is gone.

And now I think I know why.

But that doesn’t get me my daybed. :frowning:

3

Perhaps, if you know the name of the seller, the seller may still be on Ebay. If they are, you can find them using the advanced search function, and mail them to ask if they would put such a daybed with ‘buy it now’. If not, they may have retained their Ebay name and moved elsewhere - right now, it looks like sellers are going to Wagglepop, Hibidder, OnlineAuctions, IOffer, eCrater, Bidville, Overstock, Yahoo, and Googlebase, with WP and OLA being two of the larger ones. Or just search on Google for that username and daybed?

I’ve moved items to a couple of other sites, but it’s a slow, tedious process, and it doesn’t seem like much is moving. :frowning:

4

Wow. Maybe that’s behind what’s going on with my favorite eBay store, owned by two Aussies located in India. Apparently they’ve gotten enough feedback from customers that they’re thinking about staying open somehow. One of the owners told me via e-mail, “We don’t want to give the business away but right now we don’t see we have any alternative, may tell you the saga one day!”

eBay, what a bunch of ratfuckers.

5

That does explain some poor search results I’ve seen lately. I never noticed the box to check for stores.

This policy makes no sense on the surface, but I’m guessing it does to eBay. After all, until another site gets the traffic that eBay does. they will do anything to generate more money.

What other sites are out there? I’d be happy to support the other sites, but everytime I go to Yahoo auctions (for example), pickings are mighty slim. Which is why I always find myself back on the dreaded eBay.

Thanks for the thread. I probably would have never noticed this without your posting.

6

I’m almost glad to read some grumbling about this change in fee structure. At least I’m not alone in my discontent

eBay had already almost completely priced sellers with lower priced items that required detailed listings (vintage collectibles, so no “one size fits all descriptions”) such as myself out of the auction block. Anyone else remember when eBay billed itself as the world’s largest garage sale? Oh, those halcyon days of yore. I had canceled my eBay store for a while because I couldn’t keep up with traffic. I was just about to restart it when the announcement came out. Now, there’s no chance I’ll bother, and am increasingly selling my items through other venues. As the stores have declined, I find myself buying less and less too.

Here’s a link to the “Resetting the Balance of the eBay Marketplace” announcement.

7

Oops, missed the link in the OP. Grrr… Too little sleep from trying to take full advantage of Ebay’s half-price listing day!

8

There are a couple of ways to get to store items, but this is not obvious (by design, apparently):

I have a clickable Public Service Announcement graphic on all my auctions, to educate people on how to search Ebay Stores (not MY ebay store, although that’d be nice too, but ALL ebay stores). After all, knowledge is power.

I didn’t make the screenshot graphic, that was made by somebody on one of the vintage goods boards, but it’s the best I’ve seen.

I’ll probably still close my store when the fee hike actually takes effect, unless I simply pare it down to bare bones. I can’t afford to pay $35 a month for absolutely nothing. :frowning:

9

Constipated Mathmatician, you asked a question. The question was,

10

Yeah yeah. :rolleyes: Everytime eBay raises it’s fees by even a penny “droves” of sellers threaten to quit or complain eBay is forcing them into going out of business. Yet, oddly, they almost always remain, and eBay thrives. Point is- eBay is an auction site, and I -as a buyer- didn’t like getting "droves’ of listings that weren’t auctions or even anything more than an offer to sell me a product at retail after adding outrageous Shipping and HANDLING fees. :dubious: Finally, eBay listened to the buyers, instead of just the sellers (well, OK, the auction sellers were also complaining too).

And, before you go attacking eBay, how about the thousands of sellers who daily scam eBay (anf their buyers) out of it’s fees by inflating the postage fees to include their “time and effort” not to mention “their gas, car depreciation,” and the super-Slurpee they bought while taking the package to the Post Office? :wally

11

Ah, maybe that’s why the Commie store from London I was looking for stuff from has disappeared.

12

An eBay gripe that isn’t related but isn’t worth its own thread:

Have you noticed that placing a minus sign in front of a search term no longer removes listings containing that term from the results? Instead, it does the opposite by including only results containing the term. I have to scroll through the entire Vintage Computer listings instead of only those listings that are not for Commodore, Amiga, or Atari. (Yes, I know about the different catagories I can scroll through but because of duplications and poor catagorizations that takes even longer.)

13

They have stores? They don’t distribute production evenly to the proletariat? Sounds counter-revolutionary to me. :dubious:

14

Reminds me of this quote from the Economist, about the recent G8 summit in St. Petersburg (emphasis added). I love that magazine…

  • chuckle *
15

Stores are still listed in category searches, though.

16

I would LIKE to see Ebay actually do something about the penny sales, with $35-500 shipping costs. I would LIKE to see them do something about all the damn cheap counterfeit purses and clothes. They claim they can’t do this because mumble mumble they wouldn’t know a counterfeit purse if it danced across their noses in spike heel shoes, but there are VERY knowledgeable people in the Ebay community who could, for that matter, be headhunted/hired to provide this very service. Or they could approach the companies whose items are counterfeited, and ask for a person to be assigned to this role - it would benefit everybody involved.

As it is, it appears very much as if they like receiving their listing and FV fees too much to risk losing the sales of hundreds of thousands of dollars of income from items it’s a federal crime to sell.

17

Correction: any search that is narrow enough will return the first 30 matching items from all stores’ inventory below the actions.

18

Aren’t penny sales with astronomical shipping intended to get around eBay’s fees as well as to sucker in the unwary? Without caring about people who don’t pay attention to shipping (unlike people like me, who expect to pay more for shipping than for the product because we aren’t paying shit for 20YO computer hardware that weighs a ton) wouldn’t eBay be interested in stopping people from gaming the system?

19

  1. Report them. If the “fee avoidance” is that clear, they’ll close them.

  2. Report them.

20

So EBay raised their fees, which is essentially the same as a supplier raising ther price of raw materials, or the rent going up on your storefront, or the price of gasoline going up if you have a delivery aspect or whatever.

If folks need to leave Ebay for financial reasons (meaning that they find it better to go someplace cheaper with a a fraction of the traffic) cool, do it and complain about it. Making a business is not always easy. If folks are leaving as some sort of protest of the increased fees, that is gets little symapthy from me. And all I can say is that it is the latter impression that I get a lot of the time, “How dare they raise fees!” as if rasing fees is some sort of moral outrage. It isn’t.