eBay France “will extend” special offer BIN pricing
February 28, 2009
A spokesman for eBay France has said that lower insertion fees on BINs for business sellers will continue beyond the end of March. The offer, which sees the normal 50c insertion fee cut to 15c, began in October, was extended to the end of last year, and then again to the 31st March.
A thread on the French PowerSeller board calling for the promotion to be extended has currently more than 19,000 posts. “Pink” Yannis said on 23rd February that the lower rate would continue and that an official announcement would be made within a few days; however, nothing official has yet been forthcoming.
At the risk of being sent to sit in the naughty corner forever, I will say that the way eBay France are handling this is nothing short of farce. A “special offer” that runs for five months has stopped being a special offer: it’s pricing sellers are now counting on. And yet eBay leave the sword of a 233% price rise dangling over our heads. We need some certainty: not of course that prices will never change, but that this “special” rate might be in place for the foreseeable future. It needs to stop being a special offer, and start being a price offered to business sellers, full stop.
And (I’ll say it again) eBay need to have a more effective way of communicating changes and promotional deals than Pink posts on message boards and randomly shown banners in My eBay. eBay France has forced its business sellers to prove that they are businesses: it’s about time they started treating us like business people too.
eBay France extends BIN fee promotion
October 27, 2008
eBay France has announced that the promotional pricing it has been running in October is to be extended to the end of the year. Buy It Now listings will have an insertion fee of 15c, regardless of start price or quantity listed. In addition, sellers with all four DSR scores at 4.5 or higher will save 10% on their final value fees. The promotion is for business sellers only, and remains in effect until 31st December 2008. Fees for auction-style listings remain on the normal tariff announced in August.
eBay France include popularity in Best Match
October 3, 2008
eBay France have announced that popularity is to be included as a factor when calculating Best Match scores for Buy It Now items. Popularity is the number of items sold from a multiple item listing over the preceding seven days; the score remains valid for seven days after the end of a listing. Listings which have sold more individual items will be advantaged in Best Match search sorting (the default on eBay.fr) above those which have sold fewer.
eBay give some advice for sellers to take advantage of this:
- sellers should list single multiple-item listings instead of running many listings just for one item
- sellers should relist sold items within seven days to take advantage of their established popularity
- sellers should use longer listings – 10 days – to gain greater visibility for their item
- sellers listing auctions needn’t make any change: their listings will continue to be sorted by ending soonest
It’s good to see this change announced openly, and in detail: other eBay sites could certainly learn something from eBay.fr here. But even more than on eBay UK, I think this goes against buyer psychology on eBay France: I’ve done some fairly extensive testing of multiple listings versus single item listings, and my own experience is:
- single item listings are more likely to sell than not
- two items listed together have about an even chance of selling one of them
- more than two items are unlikely to sell anything.
French buyers, in comparison to their British counterparts, really do lack a sense of urgency: I had an email this morning regarding an item I sold in June, asking if I had another one. So I really don’t want to start telling buyers I have plenty of stock of anything: I want them to think I only have one and if they don’t buy it now, they’re going to miss out. Hammering home the scarcity message really seems to be the way forward on eBay.fr. I’ll be using the seven day relist window as much as I can, but I’ll also be running some tests to see if eBay’s multiple item listing suggestion really does work. Can they overturn more than a decade’s worth of buyer psychology in one little site change? It’ll be interesting to find out.*
* or it would be, if half my income wasn’t riding on it
eBay France announces new fee tariff
August 26, 2008
eBay France is the latest site to announce a new fee schedule designed to “make selling on eBay less risky”. They follow the general pattern seen last week in the UK, US and Germany, moving more of the emphasis from insertion fees to final value fees, offering seperate schedules for auctions and BIN, and changing the way search works to advantage popular listings.
Auction insertion fees capped at €1
These have been simplified massively, and will be lower for almost everyone:
| Opening bid | Old IF | New IF | Saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0,01 EUR – 1,00 EUR | 0,20 EUR | 0,15 EUR | 25% |
| 1,01 EUR – 9,99 EUR | 0,35 EUR | 0,35 EUR | |
| 10 EUR – 24,99 EUR | 0,60 EUR | 0,55 EUR | 8.33% |
| 25 EUR – 49,99 EUR | 1,15 EUR | 1 EUR | 13% – 74% |
| 50 EUR – 99,99 EUR | 1,80 EUR | ||
| 100 EUR – 249,99 EUR | 2,85 EUR | ||
| 250 EUR and above | 3,90 EUR |
10 day auctions will have a 5c surcharge.
Buy It Now insertion fees 50c
BIN insertion fees will be 50c across the board, regardless of quantity or price. So long as your BINs were priced at €10 or more, this will be a saving for you. As with other eBay sites, for lower priced items this is a fee hike… but see below regarding multiple item sales, it’s not quite as bad as it looks.
Media categories keep their 5c IFs.
Gallery fees have been included in French insertion fees since August 2007, and this remains the case.
Final Value Fees increased
Auctions and BINs will now have different FVF schedules, and they will all be higher than they used to be:
| Sale price | Old FVF | New FVF | Auction & BIN | Auctions | BIN |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 EUR – 50 EUR | 5,25% | 6,5% | 9% |
| 50 EUR – 500 EUR | 3,50% | 4,5% | 6% |
| 500 EUR – 1000 EUR | 3,50% | 2,5% | 3% |
| 1000 EUR and above | 1,50% | 2,5% | 3% |
Media items keep their 9% FVFs for sub-€50 sales. The one little glimmer of light is for media sales above €50, which will see their FVFs drop to 6% for €50-500, and 3% above that: this will obviously affect a very small percentage of the category, but I guess it’s better than nothing.
Popularity in search result sorting
Items which have sold in the preceeding seven days will be advantaged in search results. It should probably be noted here that ten days remains the longest available core BIN period on eBay France: there is no equivalent to eBay UK’s or eBay Italy’s 30 core BIN.
But this may be some glimmer of hope for sellers of lower-priced BINs who, like me, just saw all their fees jump. Listing multiple items in one listing instead of single items could be a way to keep fees down, though in my experience, multiple item listings on eBay France have a much lower sell-through rate than the same items listed singly, so this will need some more experimentation.
Compulsory business registration
eBay France already announced that business sellers would be forced to prove their registered status. Now private sellers turning over €2k or more in three consecutive months will have to register as business sellers, or have their seller accounts suspended.
A seller’s status as business or private is now displayed in eBay.fr search results.
Business seller fee promotion 1st – 31st October
The new fees come into effect on 25th September, but if you’re a business seller, don’t get too used to them, because on the 1st October, a month long promotion begins. This offers 15c insertion fees for BIN listings and 10% off FVFs for sellers with all four DSRs at 4.5 or more.
This promotion is obviously welcome, but frankly, it muddies the waters. At the busiest time of year, to have to deal with two fee changes in a month, is a joke. If it’s trying to distract sellers of lower-priced items with decent STRs from the fee hike that just happened, I can promise them it isn’t working. 
And if it’s some kind of experiement to discover whether professional sellers will list more with a lower fee schedule, well then why change things twice? Especially in the next four months, I’d be so happy if eBay would stop tinkering and just let me get on with selling.
eBay France bring in proper business registration
August 11, 2008
eBay France have announced today that business sellers on the site will need to prove that they are officially registered as businesses. eBay are checking the information on sellers’ accounts against that held by the Registre du Commerce et des Sociétés, with which all companies and sole traders should already be registered.
Those whom eBay can link with their official registration need do nothing more. Those who can’t be matched will need to supply an official registration document plus a copy of their national ID card or passport, and then complete telephone verification with eBay Support. Registration will have to be completed by 30th October, or within 30 days of eBay notifying sellers that proof of status is required, whichever is sooner. Business sellers who do not complete the verification process will not be permitted to sell on eBay.fr after 30th October. From 6th October, new business sellers on eBay.fr will have to complete the verification process before being allowed to list items for sale.
To the best of my knowledge, eBay France are the first site to check all business sellers for proper registration. It’s perhaps easier here than it might be in some other countries because the necessary information is already in the public arena, but I think we can expect to see other eBay sites following France’s example in the not to distant future.
I would love to be able unreservedly to praise eBay France for taking this unprecedented step in cleaning up the site and ensuring their sellers are legal. In theory, I do that. But in practice, it all feels rather hit and miss: the overall time-scale, just ten weeks, seems short to complete everyone’s registration, and the lack of any more detailed up-front plan (”if we haven’t notified you we’ve found you by such-and-such date, then we need you to send your information in…”) leaves me as a seller feeling extremely insecure. I’ll let you know what happens.
eBay France category changes
June 5, 2008
Anyone selling on eBay France needs to cast an eye over this month’s category changes. An awful lot of small subcategories have been done away with, presumably being unnecessary now we have item specifics. There are some fairly big changes in Video Games & Consoles, and also some minor changes in other categories.
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