@purplemon18 wrote:
Damn it. I never thought about it that way before. Probably becuase many of my items are on the lower scales. Now I have something else to be irritated by. It makes no difference whatsoever to ebay what catagory an item is in, it's not like they are warehousing the products or anything.
From eBay's perspective, I'm guessing it was meant as a subtle way of encouraging higher-quality listings, and / or reducing the volume of lower quality ones in those particular categories.
This sort of becomes more evident when you look at which categories are given lower FVF than the standard rate - i.e. tech items, like iPhones etc, eBay really wants those items on the site, they always mention them when they spam around for sellers to list their Christmas gifts and the like. Conversely, they don't really need more fashion items, jewellery, books etc here, so if they charge a higher fee, they can kind of passively reduce and curate listings in those categories.
That's the theory, anyway. I suspect in practice it didn't quite have that kind of impact, it just made more people more resentful. 
(the smiley is because I include myself in the resentful camp, but I shuffle on regardless).
