@femmefan1946 wrote:
for one have a less than .005 percent of people search for my items on any search engine..
I think the idea is that with GTC, listings will be more likely to show up on those search engines *cough*google*cough* in their second or third rotation as GTC.
With GTC I understand that we will lose the Newly Listed boost, but retain the About To Close boost.
And of course, while the default Best Match uses ATC as a criterion, many members use ATC as their Search, or Lowest Price First, or Highest Price +Shipping.
I would agree with you where the large commercial sellers are concerned, who are listing mass-manufactured items that must compete on Google, etc. with other big (or even giant) non-eBay retailers. Yet I think you're giving eBay too much of the benefit of the doubt for being even-handed. As a small seller my experience resonates completely with what 'cumos' described -- using the 30-day listings (ending them in the a.m., then quickly relisting) as a means to draw attention within eBay itself.
Before Omniture was removed, I could track that over 80% of my listing views and page visits regularly came from prospective buyers already logged onto eBay.com or eBay.ca. Most of the rest came from my own promotional links to eBay elsewhere (e.g. my own website), not from external search engines. Frankly I think the excuse that "this will enhance visibility on Google" is a typical eBay cover story to mollify the rest of us who aren't major eBay retailers. I think the real truth is that:
(a) This will be a major visibility boost for those bigger retailers whom eBay wants to satisfy and court for their bigger sales volumes and hence bigger fee potential to eBay; and
(b) Incidentally, but not coincidentally, this will -- as many have pointed out -- increase listing fees to eBay from millions of small to medium sellers who don't have the time or staff to be vigilant about their GTC listings. In fact, as was discussed at length a few years ago on the issue of GTC vs. 30-day fees, no matter what you do, eventually the math will catch up to you and your listing fees will double at some point every now and then.
Accordingly, I find this listing change upsetting not primarily because it's a unilateral decision on eBay's part that breaks contractual understandings with its sellers/subscribers, affecting millions of small sellers' business models (bad enough), but because eBay can never seem to come clean about both the justification and the real effect of their new policies.
If they could only, for once, tell us the truth (we store owners are, after all, their paid subscribers, if not their shareholders), it might be somewhat easier to accept, even if under protest. OK, fine, you need to support your big sellers with listing changes because they are producing the most in fees for you, OK fine, it's going to cost everybody more in listing fees, OK fine, we're going to have to give up getting a boost for short-duration listings, OK fine, we're going to have to carefully monitor our GTC timings as a result. Fine, we're in business, we get it, then at least we can make an informed decision how or whether to continue, based on eBay's policy rationale.
Simply throwing this kind of restriction at us on the basis of a deceitful explanation is an insult to those sellers of good reputation who were the cornerstone of eBay's business for many years. I see this as yet another means by which eBay can rid itself, through attrition and incremental pressure, of the problematic small seller and move towards operating on a larger scale, with fewer, bigger sellers to deal with. In other words, increase listing fees while benefiting from economies of scale. You have to hand it to eBay for being clever and inventive, now if only they'd be honest with us.
This is an aside, but I imagine the next step will be changing the payment system so that we no longer have direct access to our buyer's funds, meaning -- likely -- eBay will not only be able to extract its fees automatically (rather than billing us), but also make some money on funds held "in trust", even if only briefly. On the kind of scale on which eBay operates, having many millions of dollars in final value fees held for just a few days, constantly turning over but still available, may generate a great deal of money in interest. Instant debiting of fees means more money faster, and far less trouble with billing and/or collections. No doubt eBay will also find a creative way to spin such a change as a benefit to sellers. It's clearly not.
I for one have pretty much decided I'll be closing my eBay store before my subscription comes due again in May. EBay policies and changes have reduced my potential buyers to a minimum and my fees to a maximum that is no longer sustainable.
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