ebaY's Fee Increase
16 Jan 2001
Effective Wednesday, 31 January 2001, ebaY is increasing insertion fees and adding a charge to the 10-day listing option. Final value fees, other feature fees and insertion fees for vehicles, eBay Premier and Real Estate remain unchanged.
Here are the old and new price schedules for insertion fees.
Opening Value or Reserve Price: $0.01 - $9.99
Current Insertion Fee: $0.25
New Insertion Fee: $0.30
Opening Value or Reserve Price: $10.00 - $24.99
Current Insertion Fee: $0.50
New Insertion Fee: $0.55
Opening Value or Reserve Price: $25.00 - $49.99
Current Insertion Fee: $1.00
New Insertion Fee: $1.10
Opening Value or Reserve Price: $50.00 -$199.99
Current Insertion Fee: $2.00
New Insertion Fee: $2.20
Opening Value or Reserve Price: $200 and up
Current Insertion Fee: $2.00
New Insertion Fee: $3.30
ebaY will now charge a ten-cent ($0.10) fee for the 10-day listing option. The three-day, five-day and seven-day auctions will not have an additional fee.
TAG thinks this increase is not justified. ebaY continues to have persistent ongoing problems that they have not fixed, and persistence and ongoing reliability problems. Until ALL past problems are resoved we do not feel ebaY can justify or is entitled to this, or any increase. We are not currently getting what we pay for, and they now want us to pay more for it.
ebaY currently takes up to 36 hours for an item to index in Title and Description search. Until that indexing happens, your item does not show up when buyers search, therefore you are paying for that 36 hours and receiving no value. The reason to list a 10 day auction was to make up for this lost time on the front end, a loss due to ebaY's failure to provide the service you are paying for. They are now going to charge sellers for ebaY's failure to perform.
There have been many reports on the OAI/OTI boards about the increase in deadbeat bidders. When ebaY charges a listing fee and a seller has a bidder who does not follow through, ebaY does NOT refund the listing fee, only the final value fee. ebaY should refund listing fees or allow a free relist on auctions that end up with deadbeats. If ebaY wanted to cure this deadbeat problem, they would charge the listing fees to the deadbeat buyer.
ebaY currently has an up time of approximately 90%. This is an unacceptable level in an industry whose STANDARD is 99%.
The only relatively fair way that ebaY could increase fees without our severe censure, would be an increased final value fee. Since this fee directly ties ebaYs success to their sellers success, it would motivate ebaY to find more ways for their sellers to succeed. If ebaY really cared about the ability of its sellers to thrive, they would not have added these regressive and destructive fees. ebaY could have also offered a 12 or 14 day auction option for an additional fee, rather than adding a fee for its own incompetence that force sellers into using 10 day auctions just to achieve 5 to 7 days of exposure.
