Odds & Ends & Auction Business Frank Ross on 04 Jan 2007 08:40 pm
eBay Fees Revisited
On January 3rd, eBay announced their annual fee increase. No surprise there - as mentioned in an October blog post (Link Here), eBay still has no apparent path to business growth other than raising seller fees. They can sugarcoat it all they want with talk of resetting the eBay marketplace balance and such, but that’s the way it is in 2007 just as it was in 1999. The only good news is that this time around, it’s minimal. Barring any nasty surprises as they pulled last year with the eBay store fee hike debacle, it’s an increase that we can live with.
Unless you sell in eBay motors, there are only two levels to be concerned with. The first is the insertion fee for items listed in the range of $1.00 - $9.99. They are raising that by 5 cents. Yet another reason to start your listings at 99 cents! See my earlier blog post on 99 cent listing strategies (Link Here).
The other affected level are final value fees for items in the range of $25.01 to $1,000. That is going up from 3% to 3.25%, a relatively small increase but an annoying one just the same. Hard to get around that unless you sell in extremely low end stuff or extremely high end stuff.
The complete glossed over announcement can be found on the eBay announcement page (Link Here).
Here is a challenge to you eBay: How about getting a bit creative with ways to grow your revenue? And by creative, I don’t mean thinking of different variations of raising seller fees! I can’t think of too many businesses of their size who rely on just one thing for their ‘bread and butter’. Even Google with its heavy dependence on Adwords revenue is coming up with different things to bring in more growth. Come on eBay - you can do it, I know you can!