@saustin75 wrote:So why hasn't eBay introduced a Shop Fee structure as rental like any other bricks & mortar shop business would pay, regardless of how many sales they make.
Because I suspect it would make running an eBay store unviable but for a very select few, and I believe those select few actually already get courted with special deals, fee discounts and free advertising.
If we look at the top tier store - anchor - it costs $500 a month and attrracts FVF on the lowest scale (which varies by category and - in some cases - price, anywhere from 4% to 7.5%). This store level provides unlimited fixed price listings for free, though auctions (unless in the collectables category) still cost $1.50. Any business that has an anchor store is likely to have a high volume of listings and/or turnover, so at a guess would probably pay several thousand dollars a year in FVF. This is pretty much eBay's entire business model - maximise profit from successful sales - which is why they've eliminated many of the upfront costs of listing, so they've actually gone in the opposite direction for the average seller. I would say that if they intrduced a fixed price store, or perhaps capped costs, it would be beyond the realm of possibility for the average little store.
I think I would prefer eBay's business model to rely on seller's being successful, to be honest, even though it very often doesn't feel like it, this way they have more of a vested interest in sellers making sales rather than sellers listing items, and their initiatives (not just their crazy schemes, but other more positive stuff like advertising and promotions) retain the focus on generating custom / sales, which hopefully also means the mistakes they make, and which affect their members negatively, will be felt by them a little more quickly and sharply.... In theory, anyway. 
I strongly disagree with the FVF on postage. I think it is unethical for a wide variety of reasons, and unfair that it's on whatever the buyer pays here, but only charged on the first domestic option offered in the US (so doesn't increase if a more expensive postage service is chosen by the buyer, or required as would be the case for an international sale). They make it very difficult for sellers of items with variable postage costs, and I'm bemused by the postage policies eBay have in place that effectively dictate what a seller's postage costs can be, then they take a slice of it. FVF on item price is fair because the seller dictates what they will charge and can more easily account for a percentage since items prices typically are not variable.
