Are eBay losing fees?

[rocket2retro]

As you can see by looking at this discussion board, the most common/repeating topic is how much sellers sales have slowed down in recent times.

Over the past 3 years my sales have dwindled considerably. Every year, in my previous 10 years of selling, I had an increase in sales.

Despite eBay finding creative ways to add new fees on top of other fees, the fees I now pay per annum are about 60% of what they were at my peak 4 years ago. I imagine I'm not alone.

In other words the fees I now pay, due to lack of sales, are not being counteracted by eBay adding/increasing fees.

The amount less I'm now paying is considerable (in the $1000s per year).

One possibily is that eBay have known about this downturn for some time and the addition of the FVF fee on postage was an attempt to bolster their profits and stop them from declining. This might have been an effective stop-gap but surely with sellers now paying 16%-17% (my estimate based on my own sales) there can't be much room left for additional/increased fees in the future.

As FVFs seem to be the biggest revenue earner for eBay, surely they are feeling the pinch, assuming my scenario is commonplace.

I realise there are probably more sellers every year & the 'big box' companies are getting on board etc (not to mention the Chinese sellers), but I'd still be surprised if this alone would make up for the shortfall.

I'm curious as to what others might think on this matter.

[4green2000]

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@chameleon54 wrote:

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@didawaywith wrote:

Of course ebay aren't losing on fees but they could be making more money and as a business that should be their number 1 priority.

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I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately ebay seems to have lost its way and identity. The company is not sure if it is a Chinese dollar shop, a garage sale, a mega mall of brand name retailers or a crafts, antiques and collectibles market.  This lack of a clearly defined identity makes it difficult to target a particular market and buyer and results in buyers for specific items looking elsewhere.

Personally I think ebay was in its glory days 4 or 5 years ago when it encouraged millions of private sellers to sell private items and build small businesses, often selling unique items. Since moving away from this business model, ebay has struggled to remain relevant  in the face of increasing specialised online competition.  

Without having access to internal ebay business data it is hard to draw any conclusions about which way the company should go, but what it is doing now is clearly not really working for anyone.

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thumbs up on that.

[englishrosegardens]

For every seller with reduced sales this year there's probably another seller with increased sales - and those sellers are too busy selling to come to the boards complaining.  

Some categories have more listings than ever before but the number of buyers hasn't increased, so each seller gets a smaller piece of the pie.  Take jewellery, for example.  There are half a million listings under Fashion Jewellery, so a seller would have to have either a very special product or a LOT of listings to even be seen.  Yet I see some jewellery sellers constantly complaining of poor sales.  This is just one example of a category that's extremely competitive, and not everyone selling there can have good sales.  

A lot of sellers see something else that's selling well so they decide to sell it too, but if everyone else gets the same idea then the same thing will happen because the market will be over-saturated.  Also, some things just go out of fashion and sales dwindle.  Over the last few years 'collecting' has been popular, but everyone I know has filled their garages, sheds, spare rooms and everywhere else, and they've got nowhere else to put anything so they're forced to stop buying.  Also, some people realise their buying has got out of hand so they start to sell off a few things themselves, and this makes more competition for those who've been selling the same items for years.

[padi*0409]

After I'd been buying on eBay for a while, I started to toy with the idea of selling some of my collectables and rationalising my collection a bit.

However when eBay brought in the MBG and Paypal brought in their 180 day return limit (amongst other things), that plan was quickly abandoned, hence I'm certainly buying less through them and am certainly not considering selling on their platform until I see a more level playing field brought in for sellers.

So eBay, in reality, is losing out in 2 ways with me as I'm not buying nearly as much as I used to, and I'm not going to be selling through them any time soon.

I suspect other buyers are in the same boat as me and this could be part of the reason for decreased sales and/or lower prices being achieved on those items that do sell at auction.

Regarding the allegations of "throttling" it would seem to me to be counter productive to both buyers and sellers in that if I can't see an item unless I go into one of my "saved sellers" then obviously I'm not going to buy that item if it doesn't show on "followed searches".

"Catch 22"................................