@mjwl2006 wrote:
Notwithstanding the previous post, as a seller think about the Canadian buyer in this scenario. It's to the advantage right now for a Canadian buyer to purchase from a Canadian seller who lists in CAD and ships from inside Canada. It's so much faster to receive an order, there's no slap-in-the-face currency conversion to pay or processing fee for doing so. And that Canadian buyer supports a Canadian seller. Christmas is coming, and millions of people are shopping online out there somewhere right now. As Canadian sellers listing in CAD, this gives you a major advantage in selling to fellow Canadians. How can that be a bad thing? I don't see it.
And an item listed in CAD looks like a fire sale compared to the euro or pound right now. A weak dollar is great for export.
In my case, and I suspect many other sellers whose primary market is in the U.S., my many attempts over the past 3 or 4 years to appeal to Canadians (including listing in $Cdn for some time, and offering free shipping domestically, among other things) has had absolutely zero results. So I think the question of listing in $Cdn (or promos in $Cdn only) is a matter of knowing your market and your buyers, as well as the likelihood of success in relation to time input.
I fail to see how taking advantage of this promo would do anything for me but waste a lot of my time in having to completely re-draft listings, then re-create them again if I want to return to $US. This is my reality, not everybody's of course.
Despite eBay's insistence that it will make no difference to buyers outside Canada whether one lists in $US or $Cdn (because of the way prices are now displayed), for the reasons I pointed out in my earlier post, I disagree because there are clearly issues around doing so if a seller's main market is in the U.S.
I'm not especially put off by the fact that this promo is of no benefit to me personally. The promos that allow auctions only are of no help to me either, nor are most of the very short-run promos. Do sellers expect that every promo will be of maximum benefit to everybody?
EBay wants to encourage listing in $Cdn, so they're giving out freebies to get more people to try it. That's fine. However, I seriously question the whole underpinning of the push to listing in $Cdn, without the details to support that recommendation. As those who have read some of my posts on this subject may recall, my point has been that we will never know if eBay's statistical analysis of sales increases through listing in $Cdn is flawed or not without seeing the breakdown of the data (which we will never see).
The problem I see with this sort of blind encouragement of listing in $Cdn, without disclosure of the substantiating details of eBay's findings, is that many sellers will simply believe it, do it, and then find themselves mired down with unwanted listings that aren't selling, and wasting huge amounts of time and effort to back-track to where they were before they switched. It isn't simple or quick to move listings from one currency to another, not to mention the loss of sales in the meantime.
So my real issue with this promo is that it's another means of leading Canadian sellers down the garden path with a blindfold on, all the while telling them how good it will be at the other end. I would have no problem with eBay telling me that listing in $Cdn may be beneficial if they give me the background data to review so that I can come to my own rational decision. If I'm going to radically change my business model, I want to have a good basis for it. Saying that their study reveals that 5% to 10% of some categories will benefit is useless without knowing the details. One simple example would be to disclose the location of the buyers in that study.
We know this will never happen, so I won't be changing what I've determined has and will work for my items (listing in $US). If it means abandoning eBay.ca once they oblige us all to list in $Cdn (which I'm certain is coming), then so be it.
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