I am a stamp dealer with anchor store. I have almost 4,000 GTC listings as of today. Needless to say, this latest announcement has me very concerned about the amount of extra work that will be involved for me. You see this business is 100% of my livelihood. I am in a race against time to list all my stock in my store. If I have to spend days or weeks converting listings, that could kill my business.
I did call customer service yesterday, but of course I got routed to a call centre in the Philippines. I mean no disrespect at all - the person I spoke to was very polite, but entirely unhelpful in explaining to me how this change would work. They told me that all my existing listings would remain in USD. I now see that was not true: I have to convert them by August 1.
I looked at the tool being developed and my concern is that while the conversion of existing listings is easy, it does not automatically end the existing listings. I do not understand for the life of me why you would develop a tool that required sellers to do ANY extra work, unless you planned on compensating them in some way. It seems to me like the tool should simply convert the existing listings to CDN - not create duplicates so that I now have to go end the listings. I have no idea how I would do that without a TON of time being spent. Please explain it to me clearly because the information I read did not make that clear at all.
I know that moving to E-bay.com was outlined as an option, but on that I have two concerns:
1. When the time comes to charge sales tax, which for me is about 6 months away, it will complicate things, as I will not be able to opt out of charging tax.
2. I'm pretty sure that selling on Ebay.com constitutes doing business in the US for purposes of the IRS. Given that my business is incorporated, I do not want the complication of having to prepare both US and Canadian tax filings.
I know that the change is still a few months away. But as of now, I am uncertain as to how to proceed: do I continue to list in US and then covert everything over to .com? Do I start listing in CDN now? Will the tool be tweaked in such a way that I can have the whole thing done in a day? I can live with a day of downtime, but more than that will cost me very dearly in terms of lost productivity.
I can see a lot of anger here on this board. I read through all 15 pages of comments and I have to say that I am dismayed by the flippant and dismissive responses I have seen from E-bay brass to seller's concerns. I understand that not everybody here was polite in expressing their frustration, but the sellers have raised some excellent points about why this was not well thought out. Sometimes analyzing data can be misleading because correlation does not imply causation. In order to validly study causation, you must control for all the factors that could influence buyer choices, which is of course completely impossible. I believe that the increase in sales for sellers listing in CDN is simply because most of us do not have the time to bulk edit our listings, so when the exchange rate drops, things become a better deal for US and CDN buyers. Full stop, end of story. If all listings automatically convert everything and show the buyer's home currency as they already do, then it shouldn't make any difference what currency we use for our listings. That is, if you assume that buyers actually read this much detail.
As a buyer on E-bay (where do you think I get my stock?), I can tell you this isn't the case, I review probably upwards of 10,000 listings a week looking for items to purchase for stock. I look only at the price, the scan and the condition. I don't look at the shipping or anything else because I don't have time. Several times I've gotten stung by the GSP because the listing on my phone showed "free shipping" when it wasn't. So my belief is that over the long run this will cause me and other sellers to make less money.
What is beginning to concern me is the number of changes that E-bay is introducing by fiat. It is making the e-bay platform an unstable place in which to do business. It is very difficult to make a viable business plan and follow it when the rules are constantly being changed and the changes do not seem to be to the seller's benefit. Just because buyers want something doesn't mean that the marketplace should always give it to them. This way of thinking is unique to North America and it has resulted in a complete culture of consumer entitlement and race-to-the-bottom economics in terms of price being the only thing that matters: not quality of service, timeliness, product knowledge, and the other intangible elements that businesses used to be able to use to distinguish themselves. Things don't work this way in Europe for example. Nothing in Europe is free. Absolutely nothing -as it should be. Why should I have to offer free shipping?It is not mandatory now, but I'll bet that in another 2 or three years, it will be a requirement to selling on e-bay. That is fine if your customer spends $30 at a time. But what if he buys one thing for 99c and you have to pay 85c to ship it for free?
I really wish that this company was interested in actually sitting down and working with those of us with viable business plans and models that want to partner with E-bay to grow our businesses. But it seems like it isn't. I can't talk to anyone who has a clue, and given that I pay $500 a month in fees now, it seems like I should be able to.
