UPDATED: 35 Cents for 30 days now live

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FEATURED POSTRichard Brewer-Hay / Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

UPDATED: 35 Cents for 30 days now live

Some of the significant changes announced on August 20, that were also covered here on Ink, went into effect at midnight last night and there are a number of additional places to access information about what these changes mean.

Dinesh Lathi, VP of Seller Experience, posted a message to the Announcement Board and there is a special discussion forum currently taking place today to help answer specific questions.

He also referenced some key upcoming dates:

Starting October 1st and through the end of the year, sellers will get a free Subtitle listing upgrade, and eligible PowerSellers will get double their Final Value Fee discounts for items sold with free shipping.

By October 5th, make sure your first domestic shipping option in your Books, Movies & DVDs, Music and Video Games listings is within the new maximum charges.

On October 20th, our paperless payments policy will begin, and checks and money orders will no longer be allowed as payment methods.

Also by late October, you’ll need to specify your handling time and return policy in your listings.

People are encouraged to call in to this week’s live broadcast of the “Ask Griff” show Thursday, September 18th from 5:00pm to 7:00pm Pacific time to ask questions and to find out more information.

UPDATED: 9/17/08

BH Express: An eBay Success Story

Cheers,
RBH
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Ann / September 16th, 2008 at 5:09 pm

If the return and handling time policy doesn’t go into effect until “late October”, why is Turbolister already requiring a Return Policy now? And when I tell it my policy is NO RETURNS, it either rejects it or changes it without my knowledge back to the most liberal return options? This has been happening for about a week. I’ve had listings go live that I put as AS-IS, NO RETURNS and later discover that TL changed them to 30 day Money Back returns with Seller paid return shipping!!!!!?

Davey / September 16th, 2008 at 8:09 pm

Besides the Turbo Lister glitch (doh! Forgot to get that ready for the new 30 day listing duration), I’m giving this new 30 day scheme a trial until my inventory runs out and I disappear from the site like so many others have before me. So far, the BIN listings are not showing up side-by-side with auctions, which still puts them at a disadvantage with the auctions if the buyer sorts by Ending Soonest (which remains the only search I use rather than Best Mash). So, it is like a cheap store of sorts for now (yech!), that buyers won’t be able to find. I believe that listing format change comes later.

My sympathies go to Dinesh Lathi as new VP of “Seller Experience,” whatever that really is anymore… Sort of like Warden of the “Death Row Experience”

Dawn / September 17th, 2008 at 7:30 am

Contrary to the information given by the pinks yesterday on the 8/20 announcements discussion board, fixed price listings are not intermingled with auction listings in Best Match searches. They are all lumped together at the very end of the search results.

Do a search for “wheelchair”. Drill down to the category “Health & Beauty/Medical, Mobility & Disability/Mobility Equipment/Wheelchairs”. There are a handful of fixed price listings on the first 7 pages, then pages 8 through 12 are all fixed price.

Richard, can you please have someone look into this?

Davey / September 17th, 2008 at 9:06 am

I concur with Dawn, regarding any search method used. This is not how we were promised it would work out. This approach puts BIN at a severe disadvantage over auctions. Gosh, can this corporation do anything the way it is supposed to be/promised? Do we have to run BINs with 7 day duration to keep them coming up regularly in the search order? Did anyone communicate the promises made down to the programmers?

Dawn / September 17th, 2008 at 9:15 am

Do we have to run BINs with 7 day duration to keep them coming up regularly in the search order?

In the search example I gave above, 7-day BINs with less than 12 hours remaining are appearing several pages after auction listings with over 9 days to go. The problem I describe does not just apply to 30-day fixed price listings; it applies to all fixed price listings. This is a major problem, and it needs to be addressed ASAP.

Dawn / September 17th, 2008 at 1:37 pm

Thanks so much, Richard.

Jay / September 17th, 2008 at 1:59 pm

RBH is on top of it!

Jeff King / September 17th, 2008 at 3:54 pm

Hi All, RBH did indeed hunt me down :)

The changes to best match have been rolling out over the last 24 hours or so. My apologies if you’ve seen inconsistent results in the last few hours. Fixed price items are now intermingled with auction listings.
I just ran the query as described above and it’s working as expected. The auction listings are mainly sorted by time ending & I do see some auction items being demoted because of low DSR scores. Fixed price items with high DSRs and recent sales are trending towards the top of the FP listings.

Thanks for the input,

Jeff King
Sr. Director, Finding

Dawn / September 17th, 2008 at 7:57 pm

Thanks for the reply, Jeff. And thanks again to Richard for helping to get clarification.

I asked my PS rep this same question earlier today, and got an answer that is a little more clear cut. Right now, most FP listings will appear on the last pages of a Best Match search, because they have had no recent sales to bump them up to the first pages. In other words, this is not a glitch, and will be the norm going forward. All new FP listings we create will remain buried on the last pages until they somehow manage to generate enough sales to warrant higher placement.

In my experience, even FP listings tend to sell on the last day. It only makes sense that this is because the last day is when they appeared on the first page of search results under the old system. Given that, I don’t understand how, under the new system, these listings are supposed to generate sales, when they are buried on page 12 where buyers can’t see them, for the entirety of their duration.

We are unable to move store inventory with sales to 30-day FP core listings. We can’t even extend the duration of current core listings to 30 days. I’m not sure how any FP listing will ever receive the exposure it needs to generate the sales required to trend towards the top of Best Match search results.

Jeff and Richard, please explain what I’m missing here, because I really don’t get this at all.

Dawn / September 18th, 2008 at 7:04 am

It’s me, again. I’m more confused than ever now. I just repeated the wheelchair search, and clicked on some of the fixed price listing that appear among the auctions on the first few pages of Best Match search. There are quite a few on pages 2 and 3 that have had no sales. Am I allowed to post item numbers here? It would be great if I could find out why these listings are advantaged, even though they have had no recent sales.

Davey / September 18th, 2008 at 6:50 pm

Dawn, at least have some enjoyment that you can find anything at all. The extremely poor site reliability that has become an eBay trademark is showing its ugly head now over at Paypal, where MultiOrder Shipping has taken a header yet again, so we can’t fulfill orders except manually. That does wonders for our DSRs, of course.

It would be so refreshing for the changes to stop long enough for ebay to get their basic site actually working reliably for at least a week. I’ve never had this problem but once ever on The River.

Patricia1 / September 18th, 2008 at 7:05 pm

Reading everyone’s posts here, think I’m content to simply watch and see what’s going to happen with this new way of listing. I’m in no hurry to list anything on Ebay right now.

Dawn / September 18th, 2008 at 7:50 pm

Davey, I know what you mean. But, at least you have orders to fill. We used to average 40-50 sales per day on eBay. When they changed search to only show 10 similar items per seller per page, that dropped to 20-30 per day. With our items now buried on page 12 of search results, we had 4 sales yesterday. Count ‘em, 4. Today, we got lucky with a repeat customer and had 6. This is with us doing nothing differently.

Yes, Amazon is in a class by itself. I can’t even imagine having the problems over there we experience with eBay and PayPal. I’m just thankful we sell there, as well as on our own website. If we had all our eggs in the eBay basket, I’d be wondering how I was going to feed my children in a few months.

Davey / September 19th, 2008 at 10:30 am

Dawn, I’ll save RBH the use of his editor tool, and not say what I think about how eBay/Paypal is being managed. I can’t believe, simply can’t fathom, that eBay has the cajones to demand 4.3′s from the sellers while offering the equivalent of 0.1 DSR service to its users while demanding draconian fee increases. Site reliability is the poorest here of any commerce on the web. This business will not survive–I just wish it wasn’t eating its young in the process.

o.c.d.collectibles / September 21st, 2008 at 5:45 pm

so what was the final value fee ‘percentage’ changed to again? I forgot..(and for a non power seller..). If you use a sales figure to illustrate the fees in total, vs. the fees for a regular 7 day auction listing, lets say for $40, the average selling price of an item on ebay, how much do you save with this new method? If you list 10 items that sell for $40 in one month, what kind of fees would that be, including fees for paypal?

Ed / September 22nd, 2008 at 3:47 am

Hi Richard

Thanks for covering the announced changes, but were you aware of some of the UNANNOUNCED changes on the other side of the pond?

eBay UK has, according to PowerSeller Support, removed all support by email and telephone, and all eligibility for the FVF discounts, from UK-Registered Sellers resident outside of the UK.

I blogged about it in full here today – http://www.buildaskill.com/blog/2008/09/22/uk-withdraws-support-for-expatriates-overseas-sellers/

This withdrawal of service stands without official announcement from the UK site, or announcement/discussion in the UK forums (public or PowerSeller) and has been confirmed also by one of my readers – in fact it was they that tipped me off on Friday, and I then checked with Dublin.

Is this official policy, PS Support playing silly beggars, or something certain sellers are being subjected to due to persons unknown with the UK offices?

Would be great if you could follow this up.

Davey / September 22nd, 2008 at 6:02 pm

Oo what was the final value fee ‘percentage’ changed to again?

@OCD

It is 12 percent for most categories, on top of a 35 cent listing that is good for up to 30 days. Some categories (media?) have a 15 percent FVF, while Electronics is 8 percent. Media is listing for 5 cents for up to 30 days, through at least the holidays.

Overall, it is a system that rewards low sellthru, or thowing all the junk you can online (further burying existing sellers’ listings in search) with low risk. For sellers like myself who structure their auctions for high STR, the changes amount to an additional 20 percent fee jack, on top of the 60 percent fee jack at the beginning of the year that I experienced (total fees to ebay versus units sold). I’m “delighted” and expanding in venues outside of eBay as rapidly as I can. Thankfully I have few competitors in my categories.

MsFish213 / September 23rd, 2008 at 10:50 am

It doesnt matter how many listing specials or reduced insertion fee deals Ebay runs….until they get their act together, make the site operate smoothly and glitch free, STR’s are going to be low. DSR calculations are way off again, making item exposure in search off, making less sales for the sellers, WHEN buyers can find what they are looking for! Sellers are paying for nothing-no exposure, no sales. Seriously, who ARE the programmers who work for Ebay?

Patricia1 / September 23rd, 2008 at 1:03 pm

I have to agree with msfish – there seems to be either no traffic or buyers simply cannot find what they want….either way the few items I put up are languishing with very few hits and no bids. Sorry Ebay, I am not rich enough to flush my cash down a dry well. If you want my business you need to stop playing these games and do some work FOR sellers instead of AGAINST them!

Davey / September 23rd, 2008 at 8:15 pm

Good grief, I see the DSR glitchmonster is flashing its head again. We just got over Paypal’s 3-day Multi Order Shipping outage, which was of the usual eBay type (denial, silence, and then announcement that things are working again after the thing is fixed)! Sure would be nice to have management put site reliability up above number 30 on their priority list.

When outages either affect a seller’s ability to sell or provide good service to buyers, something is definitely wrong at the top of the management chain. And again, eBay does not do the right thing for affected sellers when they do screw up.

Broken record…

mindelec / September 25th, 2008 at 12:54 am

it’s too bad that EVERY time i try to move items from my store to fixed price i get “your items specifics have changed” and can’t do it. if it weren’t for that i might give FP30 more of a try during the .05 media sale.