@phorum_junkie* wrote:
I have been selling on ebay for many years and with free listings and free re lists it is cheaper than it has ever been. I for one don't want to go back to the days when you paid for every listing if it sold or not, even at juar 50c a time that was a lot of money. Also you used to get no free listings included in a store subscription, it may have cost only 5c a but rolling things over month after month soon added up. I pay less in fvfs now than I used to pay in fvfs plus listing fees.
If you can find anywhere else you can list as cheaply where your items can be seen Australia wide or all over the world if you want and actually get buyers please tell me about it.
I have memories of times gone by, too....
A few years ago, I'd pay 50c to list an item, sell it for $20.00 with $6.00 postage, so would pay around $1.10 in FVF = $1.60 total. That was back in the days where my sell-through rate was always over 80% every time I listed items, but usually 95-100%, and most regular posters here dreaded the free listing promotions.
Today, that same listing and sale price would cost 0 insertion and $2.57 FVF (or $4.07 if no free listings were available). I can't compare sell-through rates because my business model is completely different, but if people who sell similarly to these examples now have anything more than a 30% sell-through rate on their listings, they're paying more to list / sell the same (or lower) value items. (If they have less than a 30% sell-through rate, they're paying about the same, but have a significantly lower turnover and handing a higher percentage of it over to eBay).
That's without a store in either scenario, and $6.00 postage is unrealistic for a parcel now. A 50c saving, in all reality, does nothing to negate the higher FVF unless you're selling items <$5.00, including or with free postage.
It just gets worse if you compare the fees paid on items in excess of $75, and even more so those that are selling items in excess of $1000 (due to the sliding scale no longer being in place, and then the increase on the FVF cap from $50 to $250). Little changes (like free listings) that come in after big ones can make it seem like things are a bit better, but I started out as a casual seller, then migrated to a store (2011, so the store has seen a few fee restructures as well), in the same categories as yourself, and I am most definitely paying more to sell the same value.
