Dear eBay, I'm writing this in the most polite & sincere way possible. As a seller on your site, I feel an obligation to inform you very briefly about this serious issue that may affect the future of your Corporation. Thank you for taking the time to read the entire message.
Politely saying, you guys really gouge the sellers these days. I am & I’m sure there are others, extremely disappointed in eBay as a seller. eBay should not charge insertion fees for auction or fixed price. I & probably more than half your sellers only post items because it’s free insertion. It’s bad enough for the seller your ''final value fee'' takes 10% (unless you pay for store starting at 16$/month) & 10% on shipping collected, excluding PayPal's fee. You’re taking 10% of the money that's going to the courier. The seller loses even more. If the seller uses Paypal shipping they should be refunded the final value fee that represents the cost of the shipping label. Your whole site is completely flawed towards the seller especially the small business seller. The Seller is the life blood of your whole business. I understand you are a corporation driven by profit margins, but if you make it impossible for the seller to make a marginal profit on your site than nobody will use it & will go to your competitor, given that more & more people are becoming aware of other competitors in your industry. You have to offer something to the sellers that your competitor's don't offer. For example: Ali Baba or any other PayPal Payment site offers the sellers just the 2.9% and 30 cents instead of paying insertion fees, 10% final value fees. Even worse there are sites in which Your PayPal isn’t the payment system, like Amazon( Your main competitor, which charges almost what your charging if you include insertion fees & if you’re not a store or top rated seller because the volume of sales is not large enough due to not enough listing space without being charged). If you scrapped all insertion fees except in eBay Motors & Real Estate, you will get more people who will want to list mainstream items on your site. Also mainly, offer sellers that have closed their accounts or are going to close their accounts due to fee related disputes over insertion fees, a 4% final value fees, unless is a store 3% for 3 months, except real estate and motors.
I can understand if you let too many people list for free than you get a bunch of **bleep** nobody wants sitting on your server & wasting space on your hard drives with pictures. So what you do is offer to sellers, free insertion fees in which each user can designate by option their first 150 item(s) listed per month free insertion (those item(s) can re-list itself 4 times for a 7 day auction or once for 30 days or til cancelled, self-re-newing as free each month until cancelled), but any other method of listing outside those parameters or over the 150 designated items the seller must pay the 30 cents already in place, unless a store, same free listing rules but each store package offers small increments more of this feature. For example: Basic you can give 250 free listings & each superior package offers 250 more listings then the previous with the biggest package offering unlimited. Listing options such as international visibility, Bold Title & Subtitle the fees should stand as is. International visibility should be offered free, but for only 5 items per month (sold or unsold) but cannot be a part of the 150 designated free listings. eBay final value fees should be lowered to 8% maximum, but if you can do what was said above that would be a start & would definitely keep me & I’m very positive, millions of others around the world with eBay & PayPal.
I understand if this were to be implemented effective in 2015, this may affect your profit margin in the coming year. But seller volume will rise when they find out that eBay is offering sellers not to have to pay if you want to sell in small volume or larger. Considering some items don’t sell as well as others, there needs to be some compromise on your end if you want sellers to stay with eBay, because Amazon & Ali Baba are looking pretty good with Google wallet & apple starting competition with PayPal. I like eBay & PayPal. I’d rather you guys but right now it’s not looking good. People like me who sell on eBay, Amazon, etc can just learn in 8 hours how to start their own site & do free social media marketing & avoid paying for posting on eBay & just use PayPal or Google wallet has a payment system.
Also to improve the catalog of items & hire some more people to just look at the catalog of items from A-Z and fill in the blanks & look at items that have sold on eBay but that are not in the catalog, by analyzing titles of items.
I really hope you guys read this & don’t just delete it. Pass it up the line in hope my opinion can shed a little light on how most your sellers are struggling paying the final value fee on the grand total of an item & that insertion fees are just sucking everything out of us. Extra features like Subtitle or Bold is completely understandable for fees, but just to list an item should be free & just because it doesn’t sell doesn’t mean we should have to pay for it again.
I really hope somebody in the administration can read this & see that it’s a great idea that might in the long run keep you above your competitors.
Thank You for Your time & consideration in this matter.
