EBAY 3(000)G: THE NEXT GENERATION FAILS TO INSPIRE
I continue to sell stamps and related items on eBay but, unlike a lot of people, am loathe to spend more than a day a week listing items. The main reason is that I don’t want to be chained to a computer, but the other is that I don’t want to place my fate in eBay’s hands.
This trans-national, largely unfathomable giant has a lot to offer, but in many ways is its own worst enemy. Currently it is on a charm offensive to keep annoyed vendors from decamping en masse to Delcampe and other such sites, and for me this has proved to be sufficient for the time being.
While the monthly fees for a basic shop have gone up a third to £20 a month, they include 200 free listings and so my total outlay on pre-sales fees has dropped. Auction fees have been simplified, with all listings over 99p a flat 15p, so it makes more sense to list dearer items.
Furthermore, additional photos are now free, making it worthwhile to add an extra one or two to accompany my extensive descriptions. I could list more items if I only put in basic information, but my experience is that keywords in descriptions attract viewers and, generally, bidding. Without modest bidding up of prices and the odd amazing result, I could not be bothered with the whole process.
I keep detailed figures on my eBay efforts, and these are instructive. In 2013, mainly because like a giant ship the economy is gradually turning around, I have set records for five of 11 months. With most of December to come (which is not a great period for stamps and postcards as they generally are not bought as presents), the 2013 total is another record.
Amazingly, my eBay sales have gone up every year since I started in 2005, with the exception of 2008, when the economy went south. That year saw a 25 per cent drop. My 2013 total will be the first to top 2007’s.
So why do I have such mixed feelings about eBay? The main reason is that the company goes off regularly on nonsensical tangents. It is important to remember, by the way, that stamps and postcards are not a typical market, as most buyers are quite specialised and new stock cannot be manufactured.
The latest example of this is extensive pressure to offer free postage. For some reason, eBay wants vendors to include the cost of postage in the price, but this I have refused to do, in common with most other sellers in the philatelic area.
For this sin, I have lost my top-rated seller icon (which was not exactly one of my most treasured possessions but probably did help a bit) and the 10 per cent discount in final value fees. My modest postage charges are the sole reason I will probably never be granted the replacement premium service icon as I could easily offer an express shipping option, pointless though it would be.
Most items I sell are in the £5-10 range, so covering postage out of that is a major cost. Some items that I have several of I list as low as 99p in my shop, and if I added on 90p domestic postage the price would become prohibitive.
However, because like almost all vendors I combine postage fees for multiple purchases and, as stamps and postcards are light, someone can buy four or five cheap items and perhaps one or two more expensive ones and still pay a maximum of just over £1 postage for domestic transactions.
But eBay, despite its much-publicised efforts to convince sellers to try to sell more material in the rest of the world, forgets that this postage load would have to be carried by overseas buyers even though they still have to pay postage. I list a lot of material on eBay.com and more than half my sales do go overseas, chiefly to the US.
Furthermore, free postage encourages tiny purchases. To my amazement, people sometimes pay more than £2 to have a 99p items posted to them. Free postage would mean more of the unavoidable nuisance of spending more time packing an item than it is worth.
In fact I’ve had to raise some of my postage fees because eBay, infuriatingly, is taking a 10 per cent commission on them too. This it takes even on the rare occasions I hand an item over to a buyer I know at a stamp and postcard fair or club meeting.
Vendors forget this when they give less than top marks on postage rates that hardly cover expenses, let alone the time involved in the process.
In another annoying move that caused short-term disruption, eBay decided that vendors simply couldn’t set postage prices for each item but had to use one of the templates they had to create. If it had worked properly this would have been a minor annoyance, but I found the process quite abstract and the changes I made usually weren’t accepted, forcing me to start over. What’s more, one of my templates clearly states a domestic postage price of 90p but the customer only gets charged 80p. The system also means that making one small change is more effort than it’s worth.
Another example of eBay’s micro-management, despite its oft-repeated attacks on restrictions in on-line activity, is a rule that purchase prices for buy-it-now items have to be at least 30 per cent more than the basic bid price.
This is arbitrary and nonsensical, which is a pretty good description of eBay at its worst.
This trans-national, largely unfathomable giant has a lot to offer, but in many ways is its own worst enemy. Currently it is on a charm offensive to keep annoyed vendors from decamping en masse to Delcampe and other such sites, and for me this has proved to be sufficient for the time being.
While the monthly fees for a basic shop have gone up a third to £20 a month, they include 200 free listings and so my total outlay on pre-sales fees has dropped. Auction fees have been simplified, with all listings over 99p a flat 15p, so it makes more sense to list dearer items.
Furthermore, additional photos are now free, making it worthwhile to add an extra one or two to accompany my extensive descriptions. I could list more items if I only put in basic information, but my experience is that keywords in descriptions attract viewers and, generally, bidding. Without modest bidding up of prices and the odd amazing result, I could not be bothered with the whole process.
I keep detailed figures on my eBay efforts, and these are instructive. In 2013, mainly because like a giant ship the economy is gradually turning around, I have set records for five of 11 months. With most of December to come (which is not a great period for stamps and postcards as they generally are not bought as presents), the 2013 total is another record.
Amazingly, my eBay sales have gone up every year since I started in 2005, with the exception of 2008, when the economy went south. That year saw a 25 per cent drop. My 2013 total will be the first to top 2007’s.
So why do I have such mixed feelings about eBay? The main reason is that the company goes off regularly on nonsensical tangents. It is important to remember, by the way, that stamps and postcards are not a typical market, as most buyers are quite specialised and new stock cannot be manufactured.
The latest example of this is extensive pressure to offer free postage. For some reason, eBay wants vendors to include the cost of postage in the price, but this I have refused to do, in common with most other sellers in the philatelic area.
For this sin, I have lost my top-rated seller icon (which was not exactly one of my most treasured possessions but probably did help a bit) and the 10 per cent discount in final value fees. My modest postage charges are the sole reason I will probably never be granted the replacement premium service icon as I could easily offer an express shipping option, pointless though it would be.
Most items I sell are in the £5-10 range, so covering postage out of that is a major cost. Some items that I have several of I list as low as 99p in my shop, and if I added on 90p domestic postage the price would become prohibitive.
However, because like almost all vendors I combine postage fees for multiple purchases and, as stamps and postcards are light, someone can buy four or five cheap items and perhaps one or two more expensive ones and still pay a maximum of just over £1 postage for domestic transactions.
But eBay, despite its much-publicised efforts to convince sellers to try to sell more material in the rest of the world, forgets that this postage load would have to be carried by overseas buyers even though they still have to pay postage. I list a lot of material on eBay.com and more than half my sales do go overseas, chiefly to the US.
Furthermore, free postage encourages tiny purchases. To my amazement, people sometimes pay more than £2 to have a 99p items posted to them. Free postage would mean more of the unavoidable nuisance of spending more time packing an item than it is worth.
In fact I’ve had to raise some of my postage fees because eBay, infuriatingly, is taking a 10 per cent commission on them too. This it takes even on the rare occasions I hand an item over to a buyer I know at a stamp and postcard fair or club meeting.
Vendors forget this when they give less than top marks on postage rates that hardly cover expenses, let alone the time involved in the process.
In another annoying move that caused short-term disruption, eBay decided that vendors simply couldn’t set postage prices for each item but had to use one of the templates they had to create. If it had worked properly this would have been a minor annoyance, but I found the process quite abstract and the changes I made usually weren’t accepted, forcing me to start over. What’s more, one of my templates clearly states a domestic postage price of 90p but the customer only gets charged 80p. The system also means that making one small change is more effort than it’s worth.
Another example of eBay’s micro-management, despite its oft-repeated attacks on restrictions in on-line activity, is a rule that purchase prices for buy-it-now items have to be at least 30 per cent more than the basic bid price.
This is arbitrary and nonsensical, which is a pretty good description of eBay at its worst.
posted by Chad Neighbor at
6.12.13
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