@tweetie4620092009 wrote:
Marked the calendar for 31 May 2016. Remove all eBay listings and shift sales to another platform.
Some time last year, eBay.ca made CAD the default currency (this appears to reverted to USD recently).
All of our listings are in USD. So when we re/listed an item, the currency automatically changed to CAD from USD. Because we did not catch the change, we went ahead and listed in USD, as all of our online business is inUSD.
Some of our high-priced items immediately sold in CAD, which resulted in significant losses due to the exchange rate being close to 1.30 at the time. Thanks for that eBay!
One of the reasons why US customers (who make up 75% of our sales--the rest is a split between domestic and overseas), avoid buying in foreign currencies is that the US price changes on a daily basis. This makes it difficult for buyers to judge the value of an item, and compare it to the same item offered by a US seller. This is compounded by the fact that shipping rates will likewise appear to change daily.
The reason that most Canadian sellers prefer to list in USD is obvious. The US accounts for the bulk of our sales, and we would be idiots not to cater to our largest customer base by providing "stable" pricing in USD.
We don't care what the real rationale for the change is. It doesn't matter. If eBay.ca goes ahead with the change to CAD, we will find another place to hang our sign.
Your experience with eBay's recent fiddling with currency defaults was exactly mine. I lost money on several important sales because they were automatically relisted in $Cdn, when I thought I was relisting in my usual $US.
I completely agree with your other comments as well. For a seller whose buyer base is primarily in the U.S. (and especially if you have mainly US competitors), it makes absolutely no sense to list in any currency that will fluctuate as against the US dollar.
But I'm even more cynical about the banning of $US listings on .ca. EBay is grubbing for extra income wherever it can find it. What better way to make extra money than to create an exodus of Canadian sellers onto eBay.com?
Why? Because most of us will no longer be able to offer free domestic shipping (which on .com means to the United States) and thus avoid FVFs on shipping elsewhere. For those of us who sell primarily to the States, being able to reduce FVFs on shipping was a significant cost savings, particularly for a smaller seller. It was a cornerstone of my business model on .ca. But it simply won't work on .com. What Cdn seller can afford to offer free shipping to the U.S. unless they are selling items of high value?
Consider this: for every Cdn seller who migrates listings to .com and is unable to offer free 'domestic' shipping (i.e. to the U.S.) on .com, eBay will make 9% to 10% on the shipping cost of every item sold, that it would not be making if that Cdn seller were listing on .ca and offering free domestic shipping.
How many thousands of dollars a day does this represent for eBay? If only 3,000 individual sales are made per day by newly-migrated Cdn sellers listing on .com (assuming a minimum $1.00 in fees per sale on shipping, i.e. shipping charge to the U.S. of about $10 to $12), that represents over $1million extra per year for eBay. Add to this the increased monthly store fees and voilà! New money.
EBay is now even openly encouraging Cdn sellers to move over to .com to solve problems that eBay has created -- namely the cart dysfunction, and now the banning of $US listings on .ca. Just check the FAQs on the Spring Seller Update if you don't believe it. They are even offering a helpful migration tool to ease us along -- how kind of them. I find this not only disingenuous but downright reprehensible. Still, I have to say it's the only explanation that makes sense and that is typical of eBay.
This is an ingenious business scheme when you really look at it, and may also explain why no effort has ever been made to fix the "cart disconnect" problem between .com and .ca. EBay must surely know that a large portion of Cdn sellers rely on U.S. sales. If the "cart disconnect" didn't drive us en masse to .com, maybe forced $Cdn listing will.
I don't buy the argument that restricting listing to one currency only is in line with other international sites. EBay Canada has had dual currency listing available for years, and has been structured that way. Changing back to a single currency must be costing eBay money in programming time, so they must believe the return will be worth it if more Cdn sellers move over to .com. I also don't buy the whole line about "surveys", "studies" and "focus groups" showing that listing in $Cdn is better for us. Without actually sharing the data or sampling information with sellers, that claim is simply worthless, a cheap trick meant to sooth the anger of Cdn sellers who know they are losing a valuable feature (ability to list in $US).
Like many Cdn sellers, I feel I have no choice but to migrate my listings to .com in order to continue to list in $US and have any chance of surviving on eBay. This will continually cost me more in FVFs on shipping, sometimes quite a bit more, for example when I ship a valuable, rather large and heavy item to the U.S. But 95% of my buyers are in the U.S., so eBay will be extracting a little more of my already slim profits from me and many other Cdn sellers in order to satisfy the insatiable demands of their shareholders.
Wouldn't it have been better (and more lucrative for eBay in the longer run) to leave things alone on this site for a year and let sellers actually build up their businesses, rather than wasting their time and effort trying to comply with eBay's ever-shifting landscape and creating obvious roadblocks to their success?
I'm more disgusted with eBay right now than I can ever remember being.
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