eBay Motors’ price changes bad news for small business

August 14, 2008

Last night, eBay announced some major changes to pricing for North American Motors’ sites. The restructuring continues eBay’s current trend towards ’success-based fees’, moving more of the fee burden onto final value fees and away from insertion and other up-front fees. The changes are effective from September 2, 2008.

There’s great news for private sellers who might list just a couple of vehicles a year: on .com Motors, the first four listings in a 12 month period have no insertion fees at all, a saving of $40 per listing. The catch - and you knew there’d be a catch - is that the Successful Listing Fee (Motors’ fixed-price equivalent of FVFs) will increase from $50 to $125 (or $100 for motorcycles). Still, you’ll only have to pay this if you’ve sold your car, so it reduces the risk of listing on eBay Motors to pretty much nil.

Once you’ve sold four vehicles in a year, insertion fees are $20 and SLFs $100 ($15 and $80 respectively for motorcycles): the total fees payable on a sold vehicle thus increase from $90 to $120. I’d suggest that if you’re a business, you’re probably keeping a pretty close eye on your sell-through rate; you won’t want to pay $40 a time to list something that won’t sell, and you’ll list accordingly. So this new “you’re better off when you don’t sell your car” fee structure is going to hurt. Of course, the really huge dealerships like GM’s network have already negotiated their own fee structures with eBay, so the people who are really going to be squeezed are the small dealerships, who’ve just seen their fees jump by something like 33%.

If you think that’s bad, spare a thought for the poor Canadians: they’ve got the same new fee structure, but their old fee structure was much nicer. Insertion fees were only CA$4.25, so even for the four “free” listings, that’s an increase of $70.75 per sold vehicle.

Generally, I support eBay’s trend towards putting more of their fee onto sold items, and less upfront. But I can’t help feeling this hasn’t got the balance right. It seems rather to reward not selling your vehicle, because that’s where the big money savings are - and surely that can’t be what eBay want?

For the sake of clarity, these changes apply only to Motors’ sales on eBay.com and eBay.ca, and no announcement has been made for eBay UK or any other eBay site.

Written by Sue Bailey · Filed Under Site Changes, eBay.ca, eBay.com | 11 Comments 

Best match “Item Location” factor enabled on eBay Canada

July 17, 2008

eBay Canada have revealed that some new technology has been added into Best Match known as Item Location factor.

Up until now Best Match has promoted items listed on eBay Canada which means items listed by Canadian sellers on other sites were disadvantaged in comparison. eBay have added in the ability to give higher priority in search for all items listed by Canadian sellers regardless of which site they are listed on.

Best Match will continue to take other factors into account such as price, shipping cost, DSRs and listing ending time. Higher priority will be given to domestic items in search on eBay Canada, but now that will include items listed by Canadian sellers on other eBay sites.

Best Match is still undergoing testing, and eBay Canada will be adding in the Item Location criteria which should see Canadian sellers listing overseas get greater visibility. This is one to watch on all eBay sites in the future if you list on eBay sites other than your home site.

Written by Chris Dawson · Filed Under Site Changes, eBay.ca | 3 Comments 



random banner from the TameBay Directory