Month: April 2011

Yesterday, I got one of those scripted calls sellers get when eBay raises prices.

I was busy working on my accursed income tax reporting, and didn’t want to give them the time, but I knew the call would be reasonably short because these scripted ones don’t allow any time for me to say BUT…………so I listened.

You should start a store. You should offer free shipping. Buyers really love free shipping. If you had a store and free shipping you’d be almost back to where you were two years ago.

Twice.

Yeah. I HAD a store. They started telling me I should have a store the day after I closed it because I was utterly sick of complying with nearly incomprehensible rules about selling toy cap guns and other intrusions like multiplying my listing costs by six times and calling it a price reduction.

The Detailed Seller Ratings were going to accomplish all the goals of chasing away the bad sellers and I came through that phase pretty well, I like to think. I often get pretty good Best Match results.

Now those ratings (which translate directly into money every month) aren’t enough-The Venue is just going to end the controversy over sellers hiding part (or all) of their income basically under “and handling” (or, if you’re from England, “and p”).

In order to flourish, I am told, I should calculate my best guess at what postage would be to send my Things to the farthest points in the US for domestic shipping, and add this to my starting prices. That won’t save me fees on shipping which eBay will charge one way or another for a service they didn’t even provide, but it MIGHT save me some if buyers in the US either ask me to overnight them stuff (I have over 15000 sales at eBay probably and I have served that request exactly once), or it MIGHT save me some fees if the buyer is International.

Of course that International buyer (a third of my business) is now looking at higher starting prices, and it’s lost upon me how he or she gets enthusiastic about that.

To compensate me for this grief it is suggested: a.) I should raise my prices, and b.) I will see some lowered Final Value Fees, which vary by product, and to date, I cannot find so I can plan some stuff.

And, of course, if I follow all these instructions, I get a nice discount as a Powerseller on my Final Value Fees, but I already AM a powerseller getting the discount and that represents no change.

My real personal assessment at this point is that “they” have gone stark-raving mad.

I pride myself at developing good work-arounds. I’ll figure out these adjustments, but this time it looks like I can’t project the changes, I just have to ride through them and study them as I go. For example, another “compensation” to sellers is that they get 50 Free Listings a month (as long as they don’t own a store), at any starting price. Yes, that’s nice, but they were giving away 100 free listings a month in October, November, December and part of January. This is a reduction in that gesture.

My solution will be to run two ID’s, rather than open the store as the script recommends. Whether that will justify the additional bookwork generated by running two ID’s remains to be seen.

The one thing I will NOT be doing any time soon is slugging in another 750 Things to the endless cycle of guess-what-our-billing’s-going-to-be-this-year. All of my stuff is hand-crafted; I don’t use any third party software to do bulk listings, nor do I do big file transfers, and it’s really unfunny when the landlord comes along and says “oh, you need to add another attribute to everything that we’re not going to pay attention to for two years”. It can take me MONTHS to cycle through a typical list making the dinkiest little changes.

So, as I go about my day’s business, I now think of myself coming from here, even though my volume is in its infancy, and planning brief little campaigns at eBay and getting really good at exactly what they’ve always worked so hard there to discourage: using that platform as a signpost to my own place.