And Heeerrreee We Go Folks - eBay’s Stating Maximum Shipping Fees
Hi gang,
How do these phrases hit you?
“The best laid plans…”
“The road to hell is….”
“With great power comes…”
So, over the weekend, eBay’s German site announced that they will be dictating the maximum amount that a seller can charge for shipping in several categories. For those of you familiar with how eBay operates, they don’t roll changes to the big sites before they roll changes and test them on the little sites.
I’ve been waiting for this to come for a long time, actually. I think eBay’s biggest beef with sellers is Shipping & Handling charges - they focus a lot of the issues with the buying experience around S&H - 2 of the 4 DSR ratings now concern shipping, for example.
Here are the pressure points of this idea for the average Joe Seller on the site:
1. For some categories, if the S&H limit is too low, the seller will have to raise price. That will be fine for some sellers, but not others. What about the poor .01 NR seller for example? They are just going to plain lose.
2. In the cases where you have to raise prices, be aware that eBay will now take more from you in fees. eBay charges fees (for now) based on the sales price and not the shipping fee, so if you have to charge less for shipping and more for the item = eBay gets more.
3. If eBay states maximum shipping, why on Earth would they continue to base 50% of your DSR’s on Shipping? Makes no sense.
I’m pretty convinced that max shipping charges are headed our way to the .com site, and probably this year. I think it’s just another phase in the great “Let’s Make eBay A Fixed Price Site by 2009″ initiative.
What do you guys think?
Kevin
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:59 am
Kevin,
Thanks for the heads up! I am an eBay powerseller too, and that is what I’m actually doing full time right now to pay the bills.
I think all the recent changes eBay is making are sad attempts at regaining some of the lost revenues they’ve suffered because Amazon is taking a lot of their market share.
Moves like this really hurt the eBay sellers though. I used to really like eBay. Since they’ve started pulling little moves like this though I’ve begun to hope and pray that someone else with a lot of clout comes along and starts their own auction site. Google!?!
Feedback changes and Shipping changes = BAD.
http://textrapolate.com/
June 10th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Yep, we all know its coming, so I just want ebay to finally let us know when, so we can plan our lives/businesses accordingly.
At the least, many ebay commodity sellers will finally be able to determine if ebay is viable at all anymore.
For example, right now, many media sellers can look at Amazon with their longtime fixed shipping/handling prices and decide it there is any hope at all in competing with volume sellers like caimen, hastings, movie mars….most can’t or won’t because the costco business model is getting played out over there…you can only scale so much from the distributors and dhl….
Personally, I chose to see the Buy.com deal as the writing on the wall for myself on ebay…if not for now, I need to be ready for 2010, so I’m getting my resume updated!
Keep up the great posts!
Mark